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Teaching Creationism As Science Now Banned In Britain's Schools
sandbagger sends this news from io9:
In what's being heralded as a secular triumph, the U.K. government has banned the teaching of creationism as science in all existing and future academies and free schools. The new clauses, which arrived with very little fanfare last week, state that the "requirement for every academy and free school to provide a broad and balanced curriculum in any case prevents the teaching of creationism as evidence based theory in any academy or free school." So, if an academy or free school teaches creationism as scientifically valid, it's breaking the funding agreement to provide a "broad and balanced curriculum." ... In addition to the new clauses, the UK government clarified the meaning of creationism, reminding everyone that it's a minority view even within the Church of England and the Catholic Church.
Because sometimes, just sometimes, we actually have a brain.
A beautiful victory for intelligence (as opposed to intelligent design (TM)(R)(C))
INB4 endless butthurt from Cretinists, er, Creationists.
In addition to the new clauses, the UK government clarified the meaning of creationism, reminding everyone that it's a minority view even within the Church of England and the Catholic Church.
I suppose by creationism, they mean the idea that all animals were created at once, rather than simply the idea that God created animals?
I mean, teach "creationism" in schools? Really.....
no, I don't have a sig
While atheists and even atheism itself was generally frowned upon I have to say as the first Muslim and non-pink person to attend - I was very glad to have gone there and grown.
Despite what people may think the teaching there is some of the best in the UK and even with the deep and sincere commitment to faith you have an equally deep and sincere commitment to scientific enquiry and truth. We were never taught creationism, and any school or teacher considering it would have been politely but firmly shown the door.
I guess the thinking was us kids would need our wits about us out here to survive.
There is not one creationism. To treat it as a monolith is false.
Old-earth creationists are given short shrift in this approach - an approach that is not about being anti-religious. Atheism is not the same thing as pro-Scientific.
Questions of the super-natural are, by definition, outside of the scope of proper science. Science is about the natural.
Personally, I'm Eastern Orthodox Atheist.
But I'm not religious about it. :)
Britain Rules Teaching Children Known Falsehoods In Science Class For Religious Reasons Now Deemed Inappropriate
Good. Honestly, though, this isn't a huge deal for Britain. Almost every developed country has this policy either formally or de-facto.
If this came out of the US, though, holy balls it would be big. The US seems to be the only country where a sizable body of Christians are allowed to lie for Jesus to impressionable children, or worse, genuinely believe creationist excrement and are still permitted to use their authority to teach it to others.
Check out my sci-fi book "Lacuna" at http://goo.gl/MVxX8
Forcing government-run schools, or the private schools needing government's license to continue to exist, is easy. But that is not good enough.
Now a way must be found to prevent parents from poisoning the young minds with things, the government considers incorrect.
This is harder — and may involve asking pupils to report their parents' attempts to teach them wrong things to the government, who may then have to talk to the offenders and, in the particularly hard cases, take their children into protective custody.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
To all creationists, before you sound off, I have one simple question for you:
What peer reviewed evidence do you have to support the existence of a god ?
Until you can answer that question, your ideas have no place in science class.
If education is done right, with teachers and schools that care to really develops a childs mind, then the kids learn the difference between science and religion, what it means for a scientific theory to be credible and widely held, how to evaluate scientific evidence, and what questions that religion attempts to answer that science at least, at this point, can not. They also can go through all the current scientific evidence for and against evolution, creationism, and other theories. Kids learn how to identify their own values and make their own decisions on what to beleve. It isn't hard and parents should be responsible for ensuring their kids find the best schools and teachers, and ensuring that religion and science are both addressed properly in the classroom.
Politicians interjecting themselves into what subjects teachers are allowed to introduce in the classroom and how such subjects must be discussed does _nothing_ to produce an educated population. It is nothing more than blowing at windmills to gain votes on whatever educational topic is popular for the day. The farther education decisions get removed from the parent, the more students become trained to become regurgitators of approved politically correct information rather than becoming adults with adapative minds capable of of grasping subtle connections and knowing truth from falsehood.
And NOT in a science class
It is not a scientific theory, there is no significant evidence supporting any of it's many hypothesis, and should NOT be taught as science.
However, if you want to include it as a part of a history or comparative religion class (since catholics don't have a monopoly on creationism) then I don't have a problem with it. Just keep it out of the science class. It's NOT science.
With just one little comma...
"Teaching Creationism, As Science Now Banned In Britain's Schools"
Very surprising to hear from UK government where the government actually is insisting on truth. The same day UK government cheekily explains that total surveillance is absolutely legal. I wish somebody could explain and reconcile these extremities, those instances where UK Government is randomly making pro-humanity and anti-humanity moves.
This is a major step forwards in logical thought and scientific teaching, now if the US / Canada could follow.
Can we please have one topic about the UK that doesn't require me to sift through hundreds of comments from people from the US who have no idea how our system works but will gladly jump at the chance to complain how theirs is broken? Just once, I'd like to read about something that affects my country and be able to find comments made by people who are likewise involved.
Last sentence should read: "which they are not (and they know it too...)".
So you want the government to mandate and enforce behaviors. Much like the Taliban and other muslim governments do? You must realize that once a government enforces personal behaviors, its a matter of time until someone determines that a belief YOU have is unacceptable.
Schools teaching evidence based science is one thing, forcing parents into your personal pattern of behavior because that is what YOU think is right is so far out of the bounds of our constitution that i am amazed any advanced western intellect would conceive of it.
That assumes that you are an advanced western intelligence. That is obviously arguable.
Now a way must be found to prevent parents from poisoning the young minds with things the vast majority of the scientific community considers incorrect.
That's better, just a minor correction.
There's no reason to outlaw parents from teaching their children mythology as if it were commonly accepted fact, just like they did not outlaw schools from doing so. The school would just lose its government funding. I'm not sure if there would be a similar kind of incentive to get parents to also refrain from spouting mythology and legend as though it were fact, but if so it would certainly help promote the raising of a generation of free thinkers. Requiring schools to stick to actual facts is a decent start though, hopefully it spreads.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
No need to specify individual hypotheses in order to get science right - simply demand that the hypothesis be falsifiable.
This demand neatly excludes creationism, intelligent design, anthropogenic global warming, homeopathy and astrology, while allowing evolution, astronomy, physics, vaccination and chemistry.
Not all ideas are scientific ones - and the way we tell them apart is to look for the necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement.
This only seems to have become a problem since the academies and free-schools bullcrap allowed a bunch of 'Muslim charities' to run schools.
Evolution is falsifiable - find a modern rabbit fossil in the Precambrian.
Just because you can't setup a laboratory experiment for something *doesn't* mean you can't test it.
Does advanced western intelligence include the ability to detect sarcasm?
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Your unbelievable. And why should I take your belief system (whatever it may be, God not) and use it to teach my kids. The government, or you have no business forcing me to teach my kids anything. And you certainly don't have more authority than the parents. There are many other things besides where we came from. Without introducing anything else, I would argue that you have no scientific foundation for imposing any laws or way of live on someone. What scientific law gives the government or you any authority of me more my children!?
"super-natural" is a buzzword - the real criteria for science is falsifiability.
http://www.stephenjaygould.org...
No form of "creationism" I've ever been presented with has had a necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement, but I'm welcome to hear one if you think you have one.
As long as nobody stops me from teaching Lord of the Rings as history.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Man-made global warming should be a hard requirement in all schools and they should teach it in many classes. Teach about the spread of the idea and contrarian view in religious studies. Teach about correlation and causation and significance in mathematics. Teach about deconstructing conflicting texts to determine your own viewpoint in language classes. Teach about the climate of the earth, it's types of measurements over the course of history and the influences (or not) of various events based on verifiable evidence in science. Maybe if this happened then we wouldn't have so many sheep willing to accept the rantings of those they are most exposed to as fact.
Science is not consensus, but non-experts would do well to heed scientific consensus, as it's likely to take them closer to the truth. Not always, but it's the best we've got.
Its the thin edge of the wedge. Pretty soon they will ban other things too. If dummy parents want to pay & send their kids to schools that teach trash, then let them. Otherwise you are in 1984. Its been a long wait, but it actually looks like its coming.
Who will tattle? The students?
Finally, someone with the strength and will to power to come out and say what must be done in order to bring about our glorious new age of perfect government-approved science and PROGRESS! Are we holding any rallies soon? Where can we sign up? Also, I have an incinerator-making company in need of construction contracts, and some remote campsite locations for sale. Who's with us?
Cloudiot: A person who does not see offsite storage as a way to lose control over access to his or her own data.
Not a creationist here, but a Christian with an actual scientific degree from a respected university.
What peer reviewed evidence do you have to support the non-existence of a god ?
Until you can answer that question, teaching my children that there is no god has no place in science class.
(Leave religion and philosophy to theologians and philosophers - the scientific method can be applied to most anything else, thanks.)
Actually, the best we've got is the scientific method, which democratizes knowledge by insisting that instead of simply *asserting* something, authorities must present a necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis.
Experts may be necessary to construct these hypotheses, or even collect the data necessary to test them, but non-experts would do well to insist on the scientific method rather than a vote of a group of people in lab coats.
Feynman said it best, "Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts."
He was kidding, Amicus. You're creeping me out.
Cloudiot: A person who does not see offsite storage as a way to lose control over access to his or her own data.
UK = England + Scotland + Wales + Northern Ireland. The central government only controls education policy for England, not for the rest of the UK. State-funded schools in Scotland and Wales were never permitted to teach creationism. I don't know the situation in Northern Ireland but it may be different.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
Science, at its most basic, requires falsifiability.
The "God" question (or the "which God" question), is not subject to falsifiability, and therefore, clearly doesn't belong in a science class. If that question should come up, it should be clearly answered with "gods are not falsifiable, so they don't belong in science class - ask a theologian or philosopher".
Now if by denying a 7 day creation period for the planet in science class, we're implicitly denying the existence of God, and your kids pick up on that, I'm not terribly sympathetic. Science may not speak to whether or not God exists, but it has no responsibility to avoid contradicting any particular mythology with the scientific method.
Um, no. The relentless path of universal entropy doesn't exclude localized reversals of entropy. When you create waste heat while building your lego house, you're creating localized order, but still, entropy is increasing in the universe as a whole.
Perspective. Get some.
Cite one.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
It's hard to detect sarcasm when speaking of this nature about Brittan. The government there already places surveillance cameras in private homes.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
http://www.infowars.com/uk-gov...
Now I know someone will say but those are slanted and biased sites. Yes they are and they are somewhat polar opposite in their slants so it should mean the story is true. However, for the crazy still needing more, it appears the local governments don't want left out of the fun filled craze.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new...
You found a modern rabbit fossil in the Precambrian? Pics, or it didn't happen.
Oh, and "the fossil was obviously disturbed and moved to a different strata in the earth" is a *valid* explanation.
I know he's kidding, he was using hyperbole to suggest that this is government overreach. I don't think it is.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Actually, the best we've got is the scientific method
Not for normal people who have no time to go around designing their own experiments or constantly reading about others' findings.
but non-experts would do well to insist on the scientific method rather than a vote of a group of people in lab coats.
Yes, and when there is scientific consensus, it's a good bet that the scientific method was used.
I know he's kidding, he was using hyperbole to suggest that this is government overreach. I don't think it is.
Even creepier. Also, I consulted every site on the Internet and a consortium of literature professors, and they told me you don't know what "hyperbole" means. You may have been looking for "satire".
Cloudiot: A person who does not see offsite storage as a way to lose control over access to his or her own data.
If you won't hear it from a qualified Engineer, then perhaps a 'trashy' magazine like SciAm can walk you through it slowly? http://www.scientificamerican....
Also, I consulted every site on the Internet and a consortium of literature professors, and they told me you don't know what "hyperbole" means. You may have been looking for "satire".
The funny thing about that is that I looked up the definition of hyperbole less than 30 minutes before I wrote that because I didn't want to use it incorrectly somewhere else. Maybe it was just on my mind. I'm pretty sure that's irony.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
You are correct. Life on earth can't get more complex over time, because that would require energy and the sun doesn't exist.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
"government, or you have no business forcing me to teach my kids anything" well if you live in the uk Im afraid the Government does Your a SUBJECT not a citizen.
The queen through parliment owns you and there are still lots of statute on the boxes to this effect.
Infinity is mathematical travesty, a house of cards. you moron. Where is your scientific method for that? And you have the gall to use your religious belief in infinity as a proof.
What a dumbass.
Nope. You can find plenty of examples by doing your own research, I'm not doing it for you. It won't take long, a simple Google search for "out of place" fossils. When you look at results you will find plenty of examples that are either discounted, "explained" away, or outright covered up.
And, you, as most other ardent Darwinian's won't give half a thought to the bigger picture and happily swallow the "explanation" knowing full well it doesn't make sense.
You were offered a chance to present evidence and refused. You lose the argument.
The fuck are you talking about?
There are no exceptions to entropy.
My wall socket also creates energy from nothing if I disregard the whole power distribution net it's connected to.
A post which is signed, but posted as Anonymous Coward, is worth nothing.
This response isn't to the GP, it's to anyone who might read the above and nod along.
There are no "arbitrary system boundaries between the earth and the sun". In truth, between neutrinos and other such space weirdness, there are no truly, perfectly closed systems. But we use the term in every day engineering, physics and chemistry discussions because it is useful. We accept that there are no perfectly spherical frictionless cows, but seemingly ludicrous simplifications like that are made every day.
We use them because they are useful. Not because they are the literal representation of what we are trying to model, but because they allow scientists, physicists, and engineers to make predictions. For example: I predict a perfectly spherical ball on a perfectly flat plane will roll in the direction of that plane's tilt, even if that tilt is infinitesimally small, or remain motionless if that plane is perfectly perpendicular to the sole source of gravametric pull.
Of course, we do not have a perfect sphere, nor a perfectly flat plane, nor a region of space completely devoid of any and all gravity except one source. This doesn't mean that rough spheres on roughly flat planes on Earth will not roll if we tilt that plane a bit.
The model is not perfect -- with a small enough tilt, and enough imperfections in the ball, it might well roll a different way for a time or not move at all -- but this allows us to make predictions.
So. The Earth, although commonly assumed to be a closed system (makes sense, right?) is really not. It's bombarded by radiation of all times, meteor impacts, it passes through the tails of comets and stellar gasses and neutrinos and all manner of things. If you drive out to the countryside the Earth at night might seem quiet and alone, but in reality the Earth is drafty. We eject atmospheric material, matter, energy, and all manner of things into the universe and it regularly bombards us with stuff in return.
The Earth is not a closed system. Evolution completely obeys the laws of physics; insects used to be huge, back when the planet had much more oxygen and could support such life. As the planet's atmosphere changed, creatures grew smaller as -- you guessed it -- the big ones died out, and the little ones survived to pass on their genes. The littler, the more chance of surviving, so insects shrank and shrank until being being smaller presented problems and the size stabilized.
There was no way evolution could conquer this lack of oxygen. Instead, the creatures merely adapted to survive in their new environment. This part's the most important: they didn't change the laws of physics to survive, they changed themselves instead.
That is the most important piece of the puzzle. The laws of physics aren't something that are a problem for evolution; in fact, they're critical to its success.
Side note: Biologists, as a whole, aren't interested in creating new species. That's not their job. Neither is the creation of a device that heals itself, reproduces, or feeds itself in death. Biologists, in general, study things and attempt to know. There are practical implementations of this knowledge, but the quest to create life from nothing is not, in a broad sense, one of them.
Check out my sci-fi book "Lacuna" at http://goo.gl/MVxX8
Creationism is, of course, utter nonsense. But what is currently the mandatory teaching of evolution and banning of creationism may well turn into the mandatory teaching of creationism in the future; or the mandatory teaching of racism, Marxism and other harmful ideologies that used to pretend to have a rational, scientific basis.
School curricula should be primarily determined at the local level, by parents. They shouldn't be determined by central governments and majority vote.
Engineers understand Creation, because: 1) that's what they do; and 2) they study the formal laws of physics that govern the process of creation. Biologists pat animals, and study their shit, but they don't have a clue how to make any animals, otherwise they would. Now the 2nd law of thermodynamics says: "All natural systems (e.g. nature) progresses from a state of order (creations) to a state of chaos (puddle of mud)". In other words, shit doesn't magically build itself, any more than it falls upwards. By exploiting a basic human weakness (we can't comprehend 100 years, a 1000 degrees, or a million dollars), Evolution essentially states that in a million, billion, trillion years, shit will fall uphill; but the laws of physics says: no it won't! It says: Engineers (intellegent designers) build stuff, using money (energy), intelligence (order), and perserverance. It says: 99.99% of all species become extinct this century, and yes, we were expecting that. We call it "the way of all things" These laws point to the fact that the world as we know it is slowly but surely crapping out. Sure, you can draw some arbitrary system boundaries between the earth and the sun, to try to prove something relatively meaningless, but apart from some viruses and bacteria that were designed to mutate (in order to destroy stuff better), nothing is going to evolve, ever. Sorry, the laws of physics are all about crushing your hopes and dreams. Let me leave you with a quote from Darwin: "In the near future, the civilised races of humans will destroy the savage races" That's pretty much the crux of it - a psuedo-scientific justification for killing the lower species of humans (and it turns out that the Chinese are the master race, according to their military thinkers). Essentially, Engineers and Physics are such pussies, they were totally overrun by some nutbag faith-based doctrine - this time it was Athiesm - nice one guys. FYI - the creator reckons that all mankind are created in his image, that his spirit (breath, word, life) dwells in them, and therefore we are all fundamentally equal, and even our gender-based differences will dissappear in the next life. Oh yeah, and you're accountable to him, and 'defective' units go in the trashcan. Ps. Can any of you genius's make a working device that can: 1) heal itself; 2) reproduce; 3) feed people in death (join the circle of life). Its not like you don't have a million working examples to pick from (yeah that number is decreasing, not increasing, so better get cracking).
Jeremy Connell (BE, BSc) Mike Connell Ministries
I expect the mandatory teaching of global warming, and down the road, Ingsoc in UK schools will be next.
Oh please! There are thousands of things in climate science that are falsifiable. It's going to take falsifying more than a few of them to discredit AGW. I suggest you get started.
This came out of a row in Britain over an investigation into schools in Birmingham. Unlike the US situation, what brought this about was a charge that Muslims were trying to take over schools in Birmingham and alter the lessons to support Islamic Ideals. The term you can search on to find this is Trojan Horse Investigation, along with Birmingham.
For example: http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-eng...
For a more sensationalist view, we have the Daily Fail: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new...
One of (many) things charged was teaching creationism. Others were teaching in sex ed that wives weren't allowed to "say no" and must submit to their husbands.
How much of this is true depends on who you ask and, no surprise, it's quite a controversy.
But, to put it in context, this came up in response to charges of Islamic influence. Apparently any Christian state funded schools teaching creationism didn't raise this level of concern.
That's because every such example ever presented by "young Earth" "anti-evolutionary" creationists is either bogus because it is not a fossil, or bogus because it isn't actually in situ (originally deposited in the host rocks rather than modern stuff caved in a mine or cave), or bogus because there is a mundane geological explanation. There's nothing legitimate to cover up.
A classic example are the "human" footprints alongside dinosaur footprints in Cretaceous rocks in the Paluxy River, Texas. Some of them are modern carvings, some of them are simply oddly-shaped dinosaur footprints (the dinosaur was crouching when making them, which makes them more elongated than normal). Cover up? There are plenty of papers published about them. They're interesting tracks. They just aren't human tracks.
All the other examples are equally invalid for a variety of different reasons. Feel free to cite one that supposedly isn't.
Then there's the fact that a specific "order in accordance with Darwinian doctrine" is kind of irrelevant. The "order" is determined by the succession of fossils in the rocks. The order was figured out in the early 1800s before Darwin even proposed evolutionary theory as an explanation. The observed order is independent of whether evolutionary theory is correct or not. So, negate biological evolution all you like. The order would still be there as a basic geological observation.
Well you escalated that quickly. I'm an atheist but damn dude, you're talking thought crime levels of stuff here and I'm not liberal enough to go for that!
Pick one. I'm quite capable of googling for the details. Or maybe I already know about it. But I don't know of any that aren't ridiculously and obviously bogus. Maybe you do.
:) That is funny. The reason I was calling your take on Mi's post "creepy" is because I think the notion of an ordained state-run party of scientists and their opinions is scary, even if they are large enough to make up a "vast majority". It sounds like some kind of whitecoat Spanish Inquisition.
Cloudiot: A person who does not see offsite storage as a way to lose control over access to his or her own data.
No I won't take anthropomorphic climate change as an example, and you trying to assert it isn't science is no different than a creationist claiming evolution is a religion.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Then you can demonstrate one such statute.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Your moral courage and intellectual rigour are an inspiration to us all.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Yes there is. There are literally thousands of published papers in this field.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
LOL, brings up links from creationscience.com and infidels.org. And one from wikipedia that states "...The fossil was a photoshop fraud and the story a hoax."
A bunch of academies in the North east were sponsored by one of Tony Blair's dodgy businessmen mates to teach Creationism. It just goes to show how easy it is to pervert education.
Generally, the argument goes like this: We expect parents (and others) to avoid harming children. Teaching children utter bullshit can (easily and rightfully) be construed as harm. You only get to keep your authority, whatever access you had to children, as long as society sees you as not harming them. Get it now?
Children are not some resource for your private amusement. They are human beings, and they deserve better than being fed bullshit.
Climate science is very complex so while it is in principle falsifiable in practice it is difficult if not impossible to come up with a relatively simple practical test that would falsify it in a short period of time. In the long run if the temperature/energy content of the Earth's geosystems doesn't continue to increase that would falsify AGW. Here is a blog post on the subject that contains a list of 10 things that could falsify AGW. But I expect you will reject it for some reason or another.
England != UK. This is the Dept of Education for England not Scotland, or Wales, or Northern Ireland - all of which are UK yet, strangely, they are not England.
I see: the Glenn Beck tactic. Well let me ask you this: How do we know you didn't rape and murder a young girl with Glenn Beck in 1979? I'm not saying you did, but I see that you're not denying it. Why aren't you bringing evidence of your innocence?
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
There was a discussion a while back that concluded that if we had no real knowledge of a dog or the many breads there are and only the fossil record to go by, we would have named a good portion of them as separate animals.
But there was this guy, I don't know his name because he now never existed but before he never existed, he lived in an area that was swept out to sea by a tidal wave. The tidal wave took his birth records, his marriage license, all the family photos, his home, and anything else that could have identified him or proved he existed out to sea. So just like the Rabbit Fossil that doesn't exist in the Precambrian, all we know is that there is no record of him. That guy is dead now, he died after he never existed but from a heart attack- not the tidal wave (tsunami) but he was working on a fishing boat at the time and fell overboard after clenching his chest yelling for help, he was having a heart attack. His body has not been found.
Some say that he never existed before we saw him and he was created at that point in time, but we know that cannot be true because we can falsify his existence due to the lack of evidence of it.
What makes me always amazed about USA: in some respect it is a highly developed country, its science and technology researches are often on a bleeding edge. Yet, at the same time, with all this crap like creationism, televangelists, in general attitude about religion, about sex, and so forth, it is SOOOOO provincial.
Is it okay to teach that it's *NOT* scientifically valid?
Because that's still teaching it.... it's just admitting up front that it depends upon a scientifically untestable premise.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
It's hard to detect sarcasm when speaking of this nature about Brittan. The government there already places surveillance cameras in private homes.
you spelled guvmint wrong
No, you can't.
And you can't produce any because there aren't any.
I'm sorry, but that's just utterly idiotic. Dogs exist as a species because of human interaction with their lupine ancestors, and later selective breeding in a human-controlled environment.
What makes it totally juvenile is that you cite your "discussion" as evidence of this as if it were fact, where it's more likely simply a small group of people providing wild speculation on a topic that they may even have been trying to push in a direction. How many of them were actual practicing paleontologists? How many had degrees in anatomy? How many were even vets? How many of these people were authorities that may actually be able to provide criticism of the assumptions in the "discussion?"
Regardless of the specifics, your pro-religious bias is obvious once one views your posts through-out this particular forum.
Meanwhile, the remainder of your post is essentially one giant (poorly written) strawman argument.
Give it up, dude. We're not going to be persuaded by your irrationality and pleadings to a higher power.
Now the 2nd law of thermodynamics says: "All natural systems (e.g. nature) progresses from a state of order (creations) to a state of chaos (puddle of mud)".
In other words, shit doesn't magically build itself, any more than it falls upwards.
No, the progression is necessarily from order toward entropy within a closed system. So, I suggest you look up at noon tomorrow, and ask yourself "yo, dipshit, is the earth actually a closed system, or is it possible that it gets a massive input of energy from some mysterious source???"
Yes, the whole system is progressing from order toward entropy as the sun burns. But the earth is getting that energy input and thus, temporarily, increasing order in the localized portion of the system. So I don't give a fuck how many engineering degrees you actually have, your post was still utterly ignorant idiotic drivel.
Energy is like money, in the sense that you also need an Engineer to make stuff with it, otherwise you would just be making garbage.
Speaking of garbage...
That is the 2nd Law, and it conflicts directly with Evolution.
No, it does not. As the whole fucking universe decays, shit happens in various localities.
Darwin = White Supremacist. Man != God
Jeremy Connel = fucking dipshit moron
You lose the argument.
What does that even mean?
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Most would say that 'creationism' is the belief that a divine entity created the universe. That is definitely not a minority opinion in the Catholic Church, the Church of England, or among Christians in general. All that anyone can say, based on our present knowledege, is that the universe had a finite beginning at a time in the distant past ...and arose (or was was 'created')...from nothing. Neither 'science' nor 'Christianity' nor 'creationism' can prove any sort of causality between the beginning of the universe and anything else. It is not doing students any favors to keep them in the dark about any of that. Certainly it is impossible to legitimately 'teach' students that there is any sort of scientific proof that a divine entity did NOT create the universe.
Was it really so hard?
The LHC didn't exist in the 18th century so if the Higgs boson were proposed in the 18th century would not have been practically falsifiable, but it was still falsifiable in principle
Actually that is not quite correct. The notion of a Higgs boson is not falsifiable in principle. All you need to do is say that it has a higher mass than you can reach with your accelerator. At some point this mass will be so large that your higgs can no longer explain the things that it was invented to solve but that is NOT the same as saying that there is no fundamental scalar Higgs field out there - all it says is that if such a field exists it would no longer be able to explain why fundamental particles have mass.
Least you think that this is a purely hypothetical argument this is the exact situation we have at the moment with a theory called Supersymmetry. So far we have seen no hint of this symmetry but it is arguably the best explanation we have as to why the Higgs has such a low mass. However if after the next run of the LHC we still see no hint of it then it is likely that, if it exists at all, it is probably at too high an energy to explain why the Higgs is so light and so nature likely solves this problem a different way. This is usually when theories get dropped - not because they have been proven wrong but because they have been shown not to solve the problem they were invented for.
It's a universal rule. It applies to the universe.
It simply does not insist that entropy be equally distributed - that's not a random or rare exception, that's a *feature*.
Just because you ask for the scientific method to be followed, doesn't mean you need to design the experiment.
That being said, you should be constantly reading if you want to learn :)
Prove it. Quote me any peer reviewed paper that states a necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement for AGW. You *bet* that it's true, but I'll bet that you're wrong :)
C'mon riverat, you know the drill :)
Yes, you can have dozens of *necessary* falsification criteria. But you need enough to be *sufficient* to exclude the null hypothesis and lead a logical argument to your favored hypothesis as the only explanation.
The fact that you *admit* that your so-called "falsification criteria" can be observed, and *still* not discredit AGW is an implicit admission that AGW is not falsifiable :)
The criteria is falsifiability.
To be scientific, one needs a necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement:
1) a list of observations *excluded* by your hypothesis;
2) the logical argument that the lack of those observations excludes the null hypothesis and leads us only to believe your conclusion.
Thus far, none of the AGW folks here on /. have made a dent in either 1 or 2 :)
Quote any necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement of AGW from any paper you wish. /crickets :)
I agree it's complex. Feel free to come up with a complex set of excluded observations, and a complex argument linking those exclusions to the disproof of the null hypothesis :)
As for your blog post cite, none of those 10 criteria exclude the null.
And all of your evidence turns out to be hoaxes or creationist propaganda.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Riddle me this , Batman.
"by looking for the necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement."
well, here are 6.
1) Visible Light strikes the earth. Falsifiable and tested.
2) When Visible light strike something, IR is generated. Falsifiable and tested.
3) CO2 is invisible to visible light. Falsifiable and tested.
4) CO2 absorbs energy from IR. Falsifiable and tested.
5) The amount of CO2 in the air exceeds what can be absorbed.Falsifiable and tested.
6) The Amount of CO2 in the air is rising due to human output.Falsifiable and tested.
So, where is the energy going? If it isn't cause the total energy trapps ot go up(heat) going up because of the excess CO2, it must be going somewhere. Well, where?
I look forward to you well tested and falsifiable paper that win you the noble prize for completely changing how we understand fundamental science.
You sir, are a fucking idiot. AGW is a solid science. As solid as chemistry.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
When you get right down to it there is no "Theory of Global Warming". What there is is a theory of how our climate system works in concert with the rest of Earth's geophysical systems and external influences such as the Sun. It's similar to evolution in that it's a large complex system with a lot of moving parts. What we know about the climate system leads us to understand that the presence of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are a major factor in thermodynamically elevated temperatures on the Earth. Fourier discovered that in 1824 when he understood that thermodynamically the Earth was warmer than solar radiation alone could account for. Tyndall quantified the radiative properties of various gases including greenhouse gases in the 1850's. When you significantly change the level of the 2nd most significant greenhouse gas you would expect the climate to change (especially when the level of the most significant greenhouse gas is totally driven by feedback).
I suppose your null hypothesis is that the change is caused by natural factors. But even when natural variation occurs there is a physical mechanism behind those changes. It's not just magic. We've studied those natural factors (the Sun, volcanoes, orbital cycles, etc.) and alone or in combination they aren't enough to account for the increase in temperatures that's occurred over the past century. So for you to be right there must be some natural factor that we're totally clueless about. Given that we've studied the energy balance of the Earth and the numbers add up it seems unlikely that such an unknown factor exists. So while the null hypothesis (that I presume you are using) can't be absolutely disproven the weight of evidence leans hard away from it. Scientists say they're at least 95% sure. That's good enough for me.
Finally an english speaking country that isn't suffering from christian insanity.
Now the 2nd law of thermodynamics says: "All natural systems (e.g. nature) progresses from a state of order (creations) to a state of chaos (puddle of mud)".
When your assumption is wrong, all of your argument is bullshit, so I'll ignore everything after this because it is a flat out lie.
The 2nd law of thermodynamics actually states that the entropy in an isolated system never decreases.
Keyword being "isolated system". You can absolutely decrease entropy within parts of a system. In fact, life is pretty much a system for reducing entropy locally. But here's the catch: Life requires energy input from the outside. Sunlight for plants, food for animals, to put it simply. That's just a fancy term for entropy exchange. Life can exist because the entropy reduction it accomplishes is paid for by decreasing entropy elsewhere. Breaking down your food accomplishes that for you.
So, please fix your understanding of entropy and then try again. Your argument is false because you ignore an important part of the law. That's like leaving out parts of the bible and concluding that "you shall murder your neighbor" is part of the 10 commandments. Uh... yeah... those words are in there, in that order, but there are some other words in there are well which kind of change the overal meaning.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
fix:
Life can exist because the entropy reduction it accomplishes is paid for by increasing entropy elsewhere.
sorry.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Jeremy Connell != intelligent.
Anthropogenic, not anthropomorphic.
Anthropomorphic climate change would be a man who follows you around with a hosepipe and a heat lamp.
Okay, I admit it. I did rape and murder a young girl with Glenn Beck in 1979. It was the best rape I ever did.
It depends on the referent of "ACC".
Just in passing, Anthropomorphic climate change is a malapropism.
Anthropogenic climate change is a term. As many terms are. it may be used to refer either to a particular theory of science, or to an imperative which is essentially religious zealotry. The phenomenon of ACC, and in particular ACC caused by CO2 contributed by human activity to the atmosphere, which is specifically what all the fuss is about, is supported by substantial scientific evidence. Let's skip the point that there is also some scientific avidence that refutes it. Let's waive that.
However, the zealotry is about the imperative of taking drastic action and spending vast amounts of treasure to ameliorate the ACC. The problem with the zealots is that they jump to the need for action without connecting the dots to lead to the necessity for, practicality of, and efficacy of, that action. They have not the slightest interest in connecting the dots, because it is a lot of work, and because connecting the dots might lead to an invalidation of their religiously-held imperative.
Some of the dots are:
* What is the quantitative extent and timing of the ACC if it runs its course? There exists much disagreement.
* What would the outcome be? Not just "OMG change bad", but what are the favorable and unfavorable points specifically?
* In short, what would the cost in treasure, human lives, and quality of life be if it runs its course?
* What exactly is the proposed strategy of amelioration?
* In comparison, what would the cost in treasure, human lives, and quality of life be if the proposed strategy of amelioration is adopted?
You won't find much discussion in those terms. Without belaboring all of the myriad of points which suggest themselves, just consider the truism. Making energy scarcer and more expensive has a cost in treasure, human lives, and quality of life.
Note: if you see yourself as having a genuine interest in exploring ACC, not one of the ACC religious zealots, then none of this can be taken as insulting you in any way. But if you deny that ACC zealotry exists in great preponderance and must be denied seizing the future hostage, then we do have a fundamental difference. If, on the other hand, you contend that anti-ACC zealotry also exists, I think we have a point of agreement.
Agreed. There is the specious hypothesis that humans control the global climate through the emissions of CO2, but it's hardly worth calling a "theory" :)
Agreed. Obviously before humanity, all climate drivers were non-anthropogenic. The addition of humanity obviously does not make those drivers disappear, so the null hypothesis is that modern climate variation is driven by the same non-anthropogenic drivers as previously caused climate variation.
Slight correction - we've studied *some* natural factors, and the fact that alone or in combination they don't account for observed temperature increases does *not* mean we can appeal to ignorance and insist that there are no other natural factors or interactions occurring, and that we must now believe humans are to blame.
If anyone is telling you they fully understand all the natural factors of climate variation and how they interact, they're lying to you.
Odd...how is it that as time has gone on, the amount of CO2 absorbed *increases*?
http://theresilientearth.com/?...
It's almost like the planet actually dynamically adapts to changes :)
Given the apparently dynamic nature of CO2 sinks, which have been responding to increased CO2 sources much like a chemical buffer neutralizes acids and bases, can you agree that it's possible that CO2 levels are in fact, driven by other factors, and that they adapt to perturbations such as human CO2 emissions?
So, now that you've had your falsification criteria observed, are you now willing to give up your central conceit? :)
You sir, have cleverly argued yourself into a failed hypothesis :)
AGW is about as solid as estimating the results of a chemical reaction in an uncontrolled environment where you know only some of the reactants involved.
What you give implies a warming trend, but trying to account for everything which affects surface temperature to the point where you can give a meaningful number leads to error bars which include both deep freeze and boiling water (although I admittedly recalculated those over ten years ago, I am not aware of any major developments which would warrant redoing that.)
I understand it is the best we can currently do, but our best does not yield an answer most people would consider meaningful.
An honest answer would be something like "What we know implies a warming trend, but we are incapable of putting a number to it at this time." Claiming the kind of certainty the IPCC does is very dishonest, which annoys me enough to be willing to argue it.
And to answer your question:
The energy goes back to space, but this is delayed more than it normally would be if it is absorbed by a CO2 molecule.
The energy absorbed by a CO2 molecule will be emitted as a photon after an average of about ten microseconds (collision rate and therefore pressure will affect this.) The wavelength of the photon depends upon temperature, but due to the very limited absorption spectrum of CO2 it is unlikely to be absorbed by another CO2 molecule. H2O is however far more likely to absorb the photon, and we have a lot more of it in the atmosphere. The potential problem comes about from the interaction of both CO2 and H2O (a very small increase from CO2 amplifying a much larger effect from H2O.)
The reason increasing CO2 has a noticeable effect is due to its small concentration in the atmosphere, as it will not yet absorb the wavelengths it can to extinction.
As concentration increases it becomes "less bad" to increase it further. It should be kept in mind that increasing CO2 concentration will give a logarithmic falloff in absorbed energy. If you increase the concentration of a gas by 1000x, you will get about a 7x increase in absorbed energy.
In short:
We probably will see some warming, but are very unlikely to see a runaway greenhouse effect. A potential future problem which bears some watching is being pitched as a doomsday scenario, and I would consider this is a good example of the phrase "making a mountain out of a molehill."
I'm a signature virus. Please copy me to your signature so I can replicate.
"The government there already places surveillance cameras in private homes."
Or to put it another way the government has not placed any surveillance cameras in private homes as described in those articles
When you get right down to it there is no "Theory of Global Warming".
Agreed. There is the specious hypothesis that humans control the global climate through the emissions of CO2, but it's hardly worth calling a "theory" :)
How conveniently you ignore the rest of what I wrote in that paragraph.
Slight correction - we've studied *some* natural factors, ...
You say "*some* natural factors" but you offer nothing about what those other things we're not factoring in are. You're just assuming they exist without any evidence that they do exist. You're assuming scientists are so stupid they're missing something significant in a field that's been studied for nearly 200 years and intensely studied since the 1950's*. You're going to have to do better than that if you want to get any scientific traction. Provide some scientifically valid evidence for some unknown factor(s). Otherwise it's just magical thinking that has no place in science.
*I'm not saying we know everything there is to know about climate but if we were missing something as big as what would be required to be a natural cause of the current change it would be observed in data that doesn't match what our current theory predicts. But the data does fit current theory within the uncertainty ranges. It's highly unlikely that is an accident.
I work in an English academy school - things have changed since you went to school, I think. Religious Education lessons cover all the major religions. Last week I was observing an RE lesson and saw a Jewish 13-year old display an impressive knowledge of Sikhism.
There may be some conservative Church of England-run and Islamic schools were religion teaching is worse, but in most schools in England (I have no idea about Wales or Scotland) religion classes are very inclusive. Only atheism tends to draw the short stick; but that may improve with the amount of attention it gets in the media.
Quit repeating yourself, it's dull.
AGW could be falsified in a number of different ways, but why don't you disengage your oral-rectal interface and actually learn something about atmospheric science. You can't just bitch about a theory you don't like, you have to account for the observations it explains in some other manner.
There's a lot of good information that can be found on this site, and ScienceOfDoom has a pretty good (with some exceptions) eight-part series on why CO2 is an issue. Finally, you could actually read the IPCC reports. Understand that we're working from 200 years of observations, and that the properties of CO2 are extremely well known. We know very specifically what wavelengths of radiation it absorbs under various conditions. We can also measure this in the atmosphere directly. It is completely inarguable that a higher partial pressure of carbon dioxide will result in heat retention through absorption of outgoing long-wave radiation. However, if you wanted to try to disprove that, you could start postulating magic fairy dust, or a conspiracy of scientists. Those would be easiest. Next best bet would be that CO2 doesn't behave the way it is measured to behave both in the lab and via satellite. It could be that it only absorbs OLR when someone is looking. Lastly you could accept that CO2 does cause warming but find some other phenomenon which would offset this, and may I say good luck on that one. I am sure that you know enough to know that getting rid of excess heat in space is a problem; we have that problem on a planetary scale.
The AGW theory is the result of, as said, about 200 years of observations. But if you wanted to stick your fingers into the wounds, then head to the Arctic; it's melting like gangbusters. We are rapidly heading towards a future where large icefields will not exist. However, do note that while the fundamentals of CO2-related forcing in the matter of climate change are not in doubt, the effects of a more energetic atmosphere are difficult to predict. It's not an intractable problem, and it's relatively easy to get a ballpark estimate by modeling the atmosphere as a column of air, which is why we're talking about single-digit changes in global temperature per doubling of CO2 as opposed to an order of magnitude more or less.
You have a cognitive bias which is leading you to ignore or reject observations. If you accept the evidence for relativity, or quantum physics, or evolution, or plate tectonics, or the germ theory of disease, or stellar evolution, then you should either accept the scientific basis for AGW or find a better argument. Proceed from the evidence to your hypothesis and not the other way around. If you do not know the evidence, then you are unqualified to discuss it.
Anon for moderation.
Actually, it *is* the UK Department of Education. While education in Scotland is governed by the Scottish government, in Wales by the Welsh and in Northern Ireland by the Northern Irish, it is the U.K. government that sets education policy for England; for the simple reason that there is no such thing as a government for England.
I can't blame Americans or other foreigners for not getting this, hardly anyone in this country does.
"even within the Church of England and the Catholic Church"
Ah, that "even" gives you away! You were actually ignorant enough to think that those two institutions were likely to be creationists? How many other things do you comment on with zero knowledge of the subject?
Evolution is falsifiable - find a modern rabbit fossil in the Precambrian.
There were plenty of those before the devil absconded with them in order to turn the weak of faith into evolutionists.
That one was easy.
What people don't get is that the purpose of science classes is not to teach truth or falsehoods or beliefs. It is to teach the scientific method, a way of figuring out how the world works. Not who created it and when. Science has shown us a world with a history of billions of years. But it does not tell us who created that history, and when. A book can be new and tell a story of a thousand years ago. The world is a story book of billions of years, and so far we have not found continuity errors. Which makes it worth exploring and figuring out its rules and background. Which is the job of science. Thinking about its author is orthogonal to that.
Saying "I figured out that the author is God so I won't even bother opening the book" is laziness and does not belong into school.
Yes because what matters is what is written on a piece of paper and not how things work in practice. The worlds republics and constitutional monarchies both have issues, but I will take a paper thin veneer of feudalism the UK has, something which would vanish the second someone actually tried to apply it, to the corporatist state the US has become with massive legalised bribery.
Yawn.... please either engage the points or go cry somewhere else. Yes one of the particpants works in the field, the other wss a noted Atheist who runs around trying to debunk creationism.
But the larger point that you seemed to fully skirt was thst your inability to find something does not mean it never existed nor does it mean the opposite. It only means you cannot find something therefore is not a means of falsifying anything.
While it would prove troubling if a rabbit fosil was found in the precambrian, it would not falsify evolution. It would only mean it needed explained.
What a bizarre argument. You confirm every single point of the case proving AGW, and you counter by citing that atmospheric CO2 only goes up half as fast as we dump CO2 into the atmosphere. This is something that has been long known and factored in by scientists. As long as atmospheric CO2 is going up then you're concurring that the AGW case has been established, and you're merely pointing out that in a fictional world without natural CO2 sinks the CO2 increase would have been twice as fast, a fictional world that would have had faster and more severe warming.
Basically you're saying the effect is real and proven, but it's only half as big as I imagine it could have been, therefore it doesn't exist? Huh?
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That's the verifiable and tested part.
However, if you look at the IPCC and other political organizations, you also have:
7) Positive and negative feedback loops. Some of these are known, others we are more fuzzy on. At least one of the negative feedback loops is suspected to be strong enough to turn global warmin into an ice age. The uncertainty of this alone is enough to put any predictions into the "worthless" category.
8) The interactions of these, including the interactions between the known and the unknown feedback loops.
9) A model of the above.
10) A lot of numbers that plug into this model. These numbers are futzed around until you can use the data from 1900 to 2000 as input, and get the climate from 2001 to 2013 as output.With any non-trivial count of numbers in the model, there are multiple way to get the same results. Some of these results will put AGW at perhaps 0.01 percent, others at 99.99%.
11) Deliberate exaggerations meant to get politicans to take actions. Politicians tend to ignore problems until they see dead bodies, so if the scientists gave the politicians the numbers they find most likely, nothing is going to happen until some coastal city is swallowed by the sea. And no, Katrina does not count as swallowed by the sea. Not that we se a lot of change anyway, while new carbon taxes are invented, they keep giving permissions to drill for more oil (even over here in windmill-exporting Denmark).
Some of us have no problem with 1-6, but at the same time don't find the end result from step 11 very convincing. Unfortunately a lot of AGW proponents see things very black and white, and thus put us in with the people who believe that $deity will not allow global warming to happen. That is, by forcing us into that category, they are making the "deniers" group bigger than it would need to be.
Personally, I think:
- That anything that comes out of the IPCC is a trustworthy as the words "weapons of mass destruction" coming from GWB.
- That we need to cut down on coal, oil and gas. Not just for global warming, but also because I don't think we should keep giving money to people like Saudis (oil) and Putin (gas).
- I want an electric car, but we need a different solution than batteries. Currently, hydrogen looks like the best solution.
- Too much CO2 is bad, but CO2 is not a pollutant. It is the building block of all plant life. Other things are a lot more scary, and all the talk about CO2 is moving focus away from these.
- The things that are being done are the wrong things. Taxes never solved anything except the need for more money for politicians to waste. And handing out permits to drill for even more oil is definitely the wrong thing to do.
- Living in a cold-ish country, global waming doesn't really seem that scary. I'm a lot more worried about a new ice age - unfortunately, that can both happen with and without global warming. Historically, we should be up for a new ice age, starting (slowly) right about now. Global warming may help against this. But global warming can also cause an ice age, by stopping the "arctic deep water pump" from pumping cold water towads the equator, which then returns as warm water. Some of this warm water flows by the Danish coast, and is what causes Denmark to be only cold-ish, rather than very cold. So, global warming may be bad, but no global warming may be just as bad.
Jeremy Connell == nutjob
the creationists are right, even partially so.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
I checked your link. Most of the pages in fact explain that there *aren't* any "out of place fossils". The closest was a page so blindly-stupid as to think an overthrust creates out of place fossils, and about two lpages that bafflingly think that a newly found slightly earlier ancestor, or a later descendant, is somehow "out of place". Not one single example of a rabbit in the Precambrian, or any other remotely out of place fossil. An out of place fossil has to be an evolutionary descendant (like rabbits) appearing before an ancestor (like dinosaurs). You didn't present a single one, your link didn't present a single example.
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"Agreed. Obviously before humanity, all climate drivers were non-anthropogenic. The addition of humanity obviously does not make those drivers disappear, so the null hypothesis is that modern climate variation is driven by the same non-anthropogenic drivers as previously caused climate variation."
This is a straw man argument. It's not simply a case of climate changing that is the problem being studied, it's the rate of change that is of concern to cause study. Yes the climate has always changed, no we don't have any record of it changing as fast as it is without there being some clear and apparent factor (such as a massive volcanic eruption).
You really shouldn't be wasting people's time by discussing this topic with them when you don't even understand what the basic underlying phenomenon being studied is.
"If anyone is telling you they fully understand all the natural factors of climate variation and how they interact, they're lying to you."
Yet that's exactly what you've done. By claiming that human caused CO2 emissions are most definitely not the overriding factor in causing climate change you must be definition know what it is, because if you don't, then you cannot possibly rule out human made CO2 emissions. You've done exactly that though, so please, the world awaits, tell us what the overriding cause of climate change is and provide us all your evidence, it's the only possible conclusion one can reach based on what you've said.
Unless of course, you're lying to us and should never have made such a silly claim as you did that humans as a factor in climate change via CO2 is a false hypothesis.
I think I know which one I'll place my bet on - that you're the very type of liar that you're trying to deflect others away as passing off your personal opinion as scientific fact when it's anything but.
Try swearing in as a Magistrate or lots of various other offices of the state and note you Have to Pledge your oath to the monarch DIRECTLY and not parliment\ the state directly.
When they restored the monarchy with Charles the II they pretty much went back to the divine right of kings to rule, It was only the fact the following kings were so bad at managing money they needed parliment.
A lot of those powers for the crown are still on the books, as has been said if they would ever be used is another story but until you change them the fact of the mater is the monarchs govenernment still has the right to tell your business.
This is a very controversial thing, which is why it was slipped out so secretly. It's not really about creationism, which has no purchase in Britain. It's about power. This is why it is being heralded, not as a victory for science - I am a scientist myself - but for "secularism".
Because now the militant godbothering atheist has a tool with which to harass church schools.
Just imagine it: Some child asks Mr Jones in science class in some primary school full of 8 year olds whether God made the world. Jones gives a diplomatic answer. Little Johnny goes home and tells his parents. The next thing Jones hears is that he is now on a disciplinary charge for "teaching Creationism".
This is the intention. This is the design purpose of the law; to permit malicious local atheists to harass church schools.
And why do people even want to teach Creationism? Because of all the atheists who did trolling tours of the bible belt sneering, "Science proves your religion is a lie! Har har!"
No society is well served by making ideologically-based denunciations possible. No society is well-served by trying to prevent members of the world's largest religion - which created our society - from running schools and teaching in them.
It's a horrible piece of news. The gloating by the nastier sort of atheists - who would scream blue murder in an instant if treated similarly - tells us what's going on.
The real story in UK schools is that Moslems are trying to hijack the schools in order to indoctrinate suicide bombers. So the government rushes into action and passes a law ... against the Christians. It's appalling.
Can't we all just get along?
I thought this whole creationism thing was strictly a Pig AmeriKKKan problem!
Oh joy, an "engineer" who doesn't have the faintest clue what the fuck the 2nd law of thermodynamics says, and doesn't seem to have much grasp of anything else in science either. I sure as hell hope you don't "engineer" anything safety-critical.
Now the 2nd law of thermodynamics says: "All natural systems (e.g. nature) progresses from a state of order (creations) to a state of chaos (puddle of mud)".
Riiiiiight.... that's what it says..... which also means snow is impossible because chaotic water molecules in the air cannot self-organize into beautiful complex highly ordered snowflakes.
Jeremy Connell Ministries: Snow, it doesn't exist.
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Did you actually read the posts you linked to?
Take it up with Bernoulli if you're into shooting messengers. My original post seeks to dumb it down for you 'savage races' (as Darwin would put it). If the Laws of Physics don't fit with your narrow world view, then why not jump off a building and flap your arms like a goose? Evolved any interesting new animals lately? Extincted many? And you conclude what!
Engineers understand Creation, because: 1) that's what they do; and 2) they study the formal laws of physics that govern the process of creation. Biologists pat animals, and study their shit, but they don't have a clue how to make any animals, otherwise they would. Now the 2nd law of thermodynamics says: "All natural systems (e.g. nature) progresses from a state of order (creations) to a state of chaos (puddle of mud)". In other words, shit doesn't magically build itself, any more than it falls upwards. By exploiting a basic human weakness (we can't comprehend 100 years, a 1000 degrees, or a million dollars), Evolution essentially states that in a million, billion, trillion years, shit will fall uphill; but the laws of physics says: no it won't! It says: Engineers (intellegent designers) build stuff, using money (energy), intelligence (order), and perserverance. It says: 99.99% of all species become extinct this century, and yes, we were expecting that. We call it "the way of all things" These laws point to the fact that the world as we know it is slowly but surely crapping out. Sure, you can draw some arbitrary system boundaries between the earth and the sun, to try to prove something relatively meaningless, but apart from some viruses and bacteria that were designed to mutate (in order to destroy stuff better), nothing is going to evolve, ever. Sorry, the laws of physics are all about crushing your hopes and dreams. Let me leave you with a quote from Darwin: "In the near future, the civilised races of humans will destroy the savage races" That's pretty much the crux of it - a psuedo-scientific justification for killing the lower species of humans (and it turns out that the Chinese are the master race, according to their military thinkers). Essentially, Engineers and Physics are such pussies, they were totally overrun by some nutbag faith-based doctrine - this time it was Athiesm - nice one guys. FYI - the creator reckons that all mankind are created in his image, that his spirit (breath, word, life) dwells in them, and therefore we are all fundamentally equal, and even our gender-based differences will dissappear in the next life. Oh yeah, and you're accountable to him, and 'defective' units go in the trashcan. Ps. Can any of you genius's make a working device that can: 1) heal itself; 2) reproduce; 3) feed people in death (join the circle of life). Its not like you don't have a million working examples to pick from (yeah that number is decreasing, not increasing, so better get cracking).
Jeremy Connell (BE, BSc) Mike Connell Ministries
Throw rocks at a house, and you get a mutation - a difference that might even be an improvement. But if you throw rocks for a million years, are you going to get a skyscraper, with water/electricity/internet, comfortable furniture, and a nice fountain by the entrance? Really? Are you sure that wouldn't require an Engineer, as well as just lots of energy and stuff? And you so sure about that, you think we should ban a classroom discussion of the 2nd Law? What branch of Science did you say you were from?
C'mon, you can do better. That's at best a 2/10 on the troll scale.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
"[A]ny doctrine or theory which holds that natural biological processes cannot account for the history, diversity, and complexity of life on earth and therefore rejects the scientific theory of evolution. The parties acknowledge that creationism, in this sense, is rejected by most mainstream churches and religious traditions, including the major providers of state funded schools such as the [Anglican] [Catholic] Churches, as well as the scientific community. It does not accord with the scientific consensus or the very large body of established scientific evidence; nor does it accurately and consistently employ the scientific method, and as such it should not be presented to pupils at the Academy as a scientific theory."
The issue is what balance between the bounds of science, religion, and the state.
The state has an interest in advancing science and promoting harmony.
Doing so may also be advancing a particular religious belief system.
History shows that the state choosing a belief system leads to problems.
(I think because when it comes to belief systems, with humans, there is never one.)
Creation is a theory supported by faith. (and some say a bit of physical evidence as well)
Evolution is a theory supported by physical observational evidence. (and probably also the faith of some scientists)
There are many religious belief systems which bring many different creation stories.
Science brings us basically one (evolving) story.
With a literal interpretation of the creation story, these theories are in conflict.
Which says a thinking person has to choose, or find a way to reconcile them.
Personally, I think there there are two creation questions.
The big Creation question is who who created God, or what setup the conditions for the big bang.
The little creation question is what happened after this.
For the little c, religion offers many belief systems with conflicting stories.
I contend that science offers the only consistent story.
For the big C, science provides little help.
The best answer we have is that it, he, or she just was.
One has to take this on faith. (Perhaps a faith that some things are just unknowable.)
I contend that this is pretty much how all the religious creation stories start.
For a public school, there are great teaching opportunities here
1) The scientific method and the difference between observation and faith as confirming evidence.
2) The idea that science can not provide all the answers and that some things are a matter of faith.
It's not clear how best to divide this issues between a science and philosophy classes,
but I'd like to think in this day and time, the whole story should be taught.
The mean temperature of the Earth has been rising for three centuries due to CO2 emissions. A testable hypothesis that has been demonstrated to be valid.
Any other brain dead Koch-funded quotes you want to feed into this? Let's be blunt, you know fuck all about science.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
You asked for citations, he produced some. If you want an intellectually honest debate the burden is now on you to show why those citations are inaccurate. You're not allowed to simply assert "lies and more lies!" unless you want to grant him the same tactic to dismiss your arguments. Point to the creationist.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
That's an assertion, not a testable hypothesis. It's like saying "The mean temperature of the Earth has been rising for three centuries due to self esteem."
Further, significant CO2 emissions didn't really kick up until 1950...do you blame humans for the 200+ years prior when emissions were insignificant, but temperatures still rose at a similar rate to the modern era? :)
Here's your requirement:
1) a list of observations that are *excluded* by your hypothesis;
2) a logical argument that without those observations, the only remaining possibility is your favored hypothesis (rather than the null).
Good hunting!
Of course not - I don't have the hubris to assume I know every single natural factor or how they interact with each other.
We can assume these things exist because a) we know climate changed before humanity, and b) the advent of humanity cannot logically have eliminated those non-anthropogenic drivers.
It's called the null hypothesis :)
You can note the "pause" in statistically significant warming during a period of ever increasing CO2 here:
http://moyhu.blogspot.com.au/p...
The current predictions don't match observations. There must be something we don't understand at work. Q.E.D. :)
You fail to understand the argument - the fact that the CO2 sinks are behaving in a manner that seems reactive to our actions means that there is an interdependency - it's not like a tub drain that can only remove 1L/hour, it's an ever changing drain that shows changes in size.
Now, the question is this - what are the drivers of those changes in size? You seem to think that there is a magical relationship of "the drain will open half as fast as any additional forcing" - but then why didn't the drain react that way to the gigatons of CO2 emitted from natural sources? How does it discern between CO2 emitted from a butterfly and CO2 emitted from a gasoline engine? :)
More likely is this - the global average CO2 level is in fact a moderated value, moderated by some set of parameters, that will react much like a buffer solution to move towards a set pH. That is to say, if you were to *reduce* CO2 emissions, the uptake of these additional sinks would *also* reduce by some amount to get back to the set point. As it so happens, it looks like the set point is moving along in a certain direction - so there may very well be an underlying secular trend unrelated to individual sources of CO2.
Basically I'm saying that the observations we've seen with CO2 uptake are contrary to the flat, independent source expectations of the cult of AGW.
Even with the inherent limitations of proxy data, we've got plenty of records of climate changing as fast as it has during the modern observational period.
Your premise is mistaken, leading you to a mistaken conclusion.
I'm more careful than that - the claim is that AGW has no necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement, and therefore is not science. You're trying to make an argument from ignorance, insisting that AGW must be true if we don't know definitively that it's false.
For playing the science game, you require:
1) a list of observations that are *excluded* by your hypothesis;
2) a logical argument that without those observations, the only remaining possibility is your favored hypothesis (rather than the null).
Until you can get that far, you're simply hand waving.
As opposed to the US, where folks who ought to be living in some third-world country, where they could be where they want, in the forefront of the 14th Century, instead of the US are running rampant, including over our political system.
mark
In general I agree, but when it comes to science I'm a little more relaxed about that, assuming that they stick to actual science without politicizing it. If they adhere to generally accepted scientific knowledge, and they design in a way to change the regulations as scientific consensus changes, then I like the idea. If they try to set anything in stone then I wouldn't be a fan, one of the best things about science is that our understanding can and does change all the time. When Einstein showed evidence that general relativity was correct, scientists around the world looked at Newton and his 200 year old ideas and had to acknowledge that he was not entirely correct. That must have been very humbling for a lot of people, including Einstein, but I love the fact that scientific theories can get torn down with little ceremony when someone discovers something new. One of the things that I dislike most about politics is that people are lauded for their unchanging attitudes, "sticking to their guns" or whatever, and derided for changing their mind, or "flip-flopping". It's ridiculous. So I'd like to see government take science a little more seriously, and politicians should feel free to change their views without fear of being ridiculed for it. The US especially needs that shift in attitude. Human-caused climate change is a great example, more and more data is coming out but people refuse to publicly acknowledge it or else get labeled in a negative way.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Next thing you know, they'll outlaw the teaching of hubris. I thought that within the scientific method one could only disprove rival hypotheses regarding controllably repeatable phenomena. It would seem to me that the creation of the universe, or for that matter the origin of species, even for the unestimably gifted evolutionists, would be out-of-bounds for strict sense scientific mthod science. I would be careful as well to not use the term "evidence based" as a substitute for the more rigorous specifications of scientific method science. Extrapolating forward or backward in time is anyone's prerogative, mind you, but use of the word "science" should be carefully scoped in any discussion. Thank you and I'll take my beatings off-line.
Even with the inherent limitations of proxy data, we've got plenty of records of climate changing as fast as it has during the modern observational period.
As much as? Certainly yes. As fast? Citation, please. Because what seems to have climatologists frightened about global warning, isn't that the net effect is going to be 1 or 2 or 4 degrees C increase, it's that it's going to happen in less than 100 years - and they all seems to say that such a rate is unprecedented.
Some observations that would be excluded by the AGW hypothesis?
- Decrease in global average temperature
- Decrease in weather event intensity and frequency
- Cooling of the world's oceans
- Decrease in the amount of CO2 in ppm observed in the atmosphere
For playing the science game, you require:
1) a list of observations that are *excluded* by your hypothesis;
2) a logical argument that without those observations, the only remaining possibility is your favored hypothesis (rather than the null).
You don't need any such 'logical argument' to accept a hypothesis as an evidence-backed theory. Such a requirement would have stopped physics cold at the observation of the duality of light. All you need are the observations you make. A good theorist will also consider alternative interpretations of those observations, and explain how they may be relevant or discounted; then go and study them against further observations. Science doesn't just stop.
That being said, we do have the facts of a) the proven greenhouse capacity of CO2, b) the proven product of hydrocarbon combustion being CO2 and H2O, c) the proven fact that we have been removing trillions of tons of hydrocarbons from the ground and have been burning them for over 100 years, and d) the recorded evidence so far of the change in climate. These add up to a rather logical argument that hey, maybe all that resulting CO2 is Doing Something(tm) to our climate.
Now, if you have an alternative hypothesis that you can affirmatively state, please do.
you think we should ban a classroom discussion of the 2nd Law?
I think it should be MANDATORY to teach the 2nd law of thermodynamics in any physics education. I wish your teachers had been more clear on it. Your notion of the 2nd law is clearly flawed or incomplete, as it would prohibit the natural formation of highly ordered snowflakes from chaotic water vapor, as well as prohibiting countless other common physical processes.
The 2nd law of thermodynamics says that the total entropy of a closed system tends to increase, with overwhelming probability. It does not apply to any system subject to a flow of energy an outside source. It not prohibit one location or object in a system from increasing in order while other objects/locations in that system have an equal or larger increase in disorder.
The earth is receiving energy from the sun. The enormous entropy increase within the sun easily "pays for" the ongoing creation of order and complexity here on earth. So long as the sun shines, that energy flow can and does fuel natural self-organizing physical processes. You can see this in snowflake formation, the self-organization of hurricanes, the development of an individual organism, as well as the genetic evolution of a population. There is no violation of the 2nd law here. The sun's energy input pays for, fuels, these self-organizing natural processes.
What branch of Science did you say you were from?
Computer science, with an active interest in physics and science in general. Computer science deals extensively with Information Theory, the ways that information can measured, processed, transformed, and CREATED. Evolution is not merely a "theory", it is an applied science. Evolutionary Algorithms is a field of computer science where complex, ordered, useful, problem-solving information is CREATED by replication with mutation and natural selection of "digital-DNA". I have personally witnessed the fact that evolution can and does create complex useful new information. It is an applied science put to active use in one way or another by a majority Fortune 500 companies. It is quite common for evolution to create designs better than the best "Intelligent Designs" by human engineers. One particular case comes to mind of one team that applied evolution to jet engine design, which evolved an engine more fuel efficient than any human engineer had ever been able to achieve. And there is at least one company solely dedicated to filing patents on valuable innovations generated via evolution.
Here is a grossly oversimplified illustration. Roll one hundred dice. The chances of them all coming up 6 is effectively zero. Now apply evolution. Take that random result and REPLICATE it, and lets apply one MUTATION re-rolling one random die. Now SELECT (keep) the set with the higher total, and kill (discard) the set with the lower or equal total. After approximately 3000 replication-selection steps you will have a perfect set of all 6's.
This process works even when you do not have a pre-determined target. All it requires to work is that you have some means of measuring which set of DNA is "better" or "worse" than another. Evolution will generate whatever information is required to satisfy the selection criteria.
But as I said, that was a grossly oversimplified example. Evolution's power to generate information is exponentially increased when there is a population with sexual reproduction (genetic recombination). This has been mathematically proven by the Schemata Theorem (J. Holland 1975). I won't attempt to explain it here, but a Google search on schemata theorem turns up 122,000 results. It is a seminal paper, widely cited by subsequent scientific work in mathematics and computer science and biological evolution. It mathematically proves a major principal whereby population evolution is almost infinitely more powerful than the trivial dice example I gave above.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
The #1 sink of CO2 is the world's oceans. No other sink comes even close. It's been accounted for, and we know they are acidifying.
http://wattsupwiththat.files.w...
Professor Richard Lindzen likes to play a game with his audiences. He shows the following slide, and explains that one of the panels represents the global warming over the 52-year period 1895-1946, and the other represents the warming over the 52-year period 1957-2008. He explains that both graphs are to the same scale and invites his audience to guess which is the earlier period and which is the later.
All good, necessary factors - however, you've got two that are arguably already observed:
1) decrease in weather event intensity and frequency
This has actually been observed, although one could make the argument that reduction in the gradient between the poles and the tropics, caused by asymmetric global warming, would generate this result.
2) Decrease in global average temperature
More specifically, it's not just a *decrease* that should be excluded, but the *lack of statistically significant increase*.
You can play with the real data here: http://moyhu.blogspot.com.au/p...
You'll note that on every global dataset there, during periods of ever increasing CO2, we've had statistically insignificant warming for upwards of 16-21 years.
No it wouldn't have - the duality of light hypothesis has quite *specific* exclusions and a quite *specific* argument why the lack of those exclusions means that light must behave as both a particle and a wave.
While abductive reasoning is certainly a good place to *start* speculation in science, once you've chosen your horse, the requirements of falsifiability are non negotiable. You require:
1) a list of observations that are *excluded* by your hypothesis;
2) a logical argument that without those observations, the only remaining possibility is your favored hypothesis (rather than the null).
So far, you've started on #1 (arguably refuting yourself by noting falsification criteria we've already observed), but you're nowhere near meeting your affirmative burden against the null hypothesis.
How do you account for the variability in the CO2 sinking ability of the oceans? Why did it increase the rate of sink as our emissions went up?
What moderates the set-point in question? What is the controlling factor that determines the response of ocean sinking, that has made it increase in response to other CO2 source increases?
Would it increase the rate of sink in response to other emissions from non-anthropogenic sources? If not, how does it tell the difference between CO2 from automobiles and CO2 from non-anthropogenic sources?
Of course not - I don't have the hubris to assume I know every single natural factor or how they interact with each other.
We can assume these things exist because a) we know climate changed before humanity, and b) the advent of humanity cannot logically have eliminated those non-anthropogenic drivers.
Yet you have the hubris to assume that scientists are missing something big enough to cause the current change we are seeing without distorting the observational data enough make it obvious they are missing something that big. That's a pretty big assumption.
Scientist of course know that climate has changed in the past and that those non-anthropogenic drivers are still operating. They have never said that they aren't. They include them in their models. They can't effectively study climate without including them.
The current predictions don't match observations. There must be something we don't understand at work. Q.E.D. :)
In your link you conveniently choose the RSS temperature record cherry picking the one among several that most closely fits your narrative. I think you need to justify what you think makes it more valid than the others.
Current observations are within the uncertainty range of model projections so you can't say they don't match. The length of time of the "pause" is not long enough to be statistically significant yet. Here is a statistical analysis that shows it isn't long enough. The model results that get presented to the public are combinations of many model runs that smooth out the variability of individual model runs but some of the individual runs do show "pauses" like the current period. The current "pause" is unsurprising to scientists.
Do we really need to go again, through the fine examples of what that venerable "vast majority of the scientific community" once considered incorrect — but does not any more?
The reasons are (or would be) the same as banning schools from doing it. If you ban one without another, you are leaving a "dangerous loophole" — and all that.
Distinction without (or with little) difference. With taxes as high as they are in today's Western world, loss of government funding by an enterprise currently receiving it mean certain bankruptcy.
But this a good — if unexpected — point. Nobody wants taxpayers' monies spent on unscientific matters taught as science. But whether a particular thing is, indeed, unscientific, remains a matter of opinion. Though we seem to have the opinion in this case, do you and I feel confident enough to force our opinion on other people's children? I do not...
Which all boils down to the fact, that taxes should not be spent on education — tempting though it may be, it leads to this sort of oppression, where the government taxes everybody, but spends the taxes as only some deem correct.
Hence the Libertarianism...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I didn't see sarcasm. This is exactly the kind of this the current administration in the US wants. An entire party wants to control the way people think. Everything from the ridicule of religion to the islamic "religion of peace" rhetoric, to the "what difference does it make" coverup of governmental incompetence, to the "illegals are the future of the nation" bs. Thought control, behavior control. Its what the entire left is about.
Ever head of Lysenko? The greater the share of research, that is funded by the governments (as opposite to private entities), the easier it is to portray one's scientific opponents as not merely stupid, but as "enemies of the people" and "saboteurs".
And that share does need to reach 100% (as it was in the USSR), for "politicizing" to begin. Heck, the climate science is a fine example already — while actual climatologists are still discussing, there are already calls to arrest "climate change deniers"... Still feeling relaxed?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I love how Feynman put it, "science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts" :)
Play around with the link and choose any other temperature set. Make sure to click the radio button "trend plus significance". Look at all the greyed out areas past the 13 year diagonal. Unfortunately the link doesn't seem to include parameters chosen and just goes to the default...
http://moyhu.blogspot.com.au/p...
That's quite a bold statement :)
Do we really need to go again, through the fine examples of what that venerable "vast majority of the scientific community" once considered incorrect — but does not any more?
We can if you want, that's one of my favorite things about science actually - new evidence comes along, and suddenly the universe is not the same as it once was. Changing ideas is a central concept of the scientific method, that's the beauty of it. I wish I could say the same thing for politicians or religions, with politics people like to talk about how little their positions change, and the entire point of many religions is that every law is sacred and unchangeable.
But whether a particular thing is, indeed, unscientific, remains a matter of opinion. Though we seem to have the opinion in this case, do you and I feel confident enough to force our opinion on other people's children? I do not...
It really is about having enough confidence, so the question becomes what is the acceptable level of confidence. Should the scientific community have a consensus of 60% to teach something as fact? 75%? 90%? 95%? 99%? I don't know what the answer to that is, but I imagine that scientific consensus concerning creationism is pretty high.
Which all boils down to the fact, that taxes should not be spent on education
That's something I don't agree with. On that quiz I score high as a libertarian, but I believe that wealthy governments have a duty to provide education and healthcare for everyone who wants it. I consider healthcare and education in the same bucket as roads and firemen when it comes to things that a wealthy government should provide. Not that the US is necessarily doing either of those correctly, but that's what I believe.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Pollen has been found in Precambrian metamorphic rock of the Roraima formation (Nature 210(5033):292–294) and elsewhere.
Fossil footprints found in Poland, dated at 400 million years -- 18 million years before the earliest Tiktaalik fossils (http://www.livescience.com/6004-legged-creature-footprints-force-evolution-rethink.html)
We know that all living things change over time due to environmental pressures and DNA mutation, yet we have 150+ million-year old "living fossils" such as the coelacanth and Wollemi pine. So we call it "evolutionary stasis", which means non-changing change.
And Biochemists tell us that the physical properties of proteins like collagen preclude any trace lasting longer than 3 million years under ideal conditions, yet Dr. Mary Schweitzer has found those and other proteins as well as soft tissues in dinosaur fossils dated over 68 million years old (Bone, 17 October 2012). So we tell the Biochemists they are wrong about the physical characteristics of molecules because what we found doesn't fit our paradigm!
The theory of evolution never falters under these blows, it only reshapes and incorporates the conflicting evidence. No, we may never question *whether* it happened, but only minor details of *how* it happened. Why? Because this is not about objectively examining evidence and coming to a conclusion, it's about examining evidence, applying the foundational assumptions of our worldview to the data, then working the conclusions in a way that they reinforce that worldview.
Because really, the only other possibility leads us to a Creator who just might demand an account for our lives.
"I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents." - James Madison
Governments have no wealth of their own — their source of income is the taxes collected from their constituents. At gun-point, I might add... Spending those taxes on what even some of the taxpayers consider wrong — whether it is certain teachings or abortions — is oppressive.
Now, wealthy people, who think everybody is entitled to this and that are free to pay for it on their own. But forcing others to participate in whatever program you deem wonderful is tyranny...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
There go the British. The Queen and the Crown should step in and mandate that all Brits get a primary education in religion, as part of their heritage. Britain has a long history in the Protestant religion that goes back over 500 years.
When I said wealthy governments I was referring to governments of wealthy nations. And I do believe that governments have a duty to provide essential infrastructure to their people. I consider education and healthcare to be essential infrastructure in an advanced civilization.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Still feeling relaxed?
I sure am. No one is going to get arrested for thinking that humans don't cause climate change. But if someone is launching a campaign to spread that idea, even though they know that the contrary is true, and they are trying to deceive the public in order to enrich themselves (like tobacco companies), then they do deserve to be charged with a crime and ordered to reimburse their victims. But no one cares if someone just doesn't believe that people can cause climate change.
The greater the share of research, that is funded by the governments
I'm not necessarily advocating that governments should fund and engage in research, just that they should seek out the consensus of the private scientific community when deciding matters of policy. There might not be a consensus on the issues they're deciding, but seeking out that consensus would be much better than what we have now, where they seek out the people with the largest checkbook and then decide policy based on what that person wants.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Temperature, partial pressure, interacting surface area influence sinking ability. Increase in sink is due to increase in partial pressure.
Again, temperature, partial pressure, and interacting surface area - there is also a maximum amount that oceans can absorb, but we won't be hitting that. The controlling factor is the partial pressure increasing due to proportional increase in amount of CO2 gas in the atmosphere.
Of course, the sink doesn't care about the source of the CO2 currently in the atmosphere, wether it is part of the carbon cycle, or introduced by volcanism or human combustion of hydrocarbons. I do hope you're not suggesting that of those introducing new CO2, human emissions are not significant, because we know they are .
http://wattsupwiththat.files.w...
Professor Richard Lindzen likes to play a game with his audiences. He shows the following slide, and explains that one of the panels represents the global warming over the 52-year period 1895-1946, and the other represents the warming over the 52-year period 1957-2008. He explains that both graphs are to the same scale and invites his audience to guess which is the earlier period and which is the later.
How do you account for the variability in the CO2 sinking ability of the oceans? Why did it increase the rate of sink as our emissions went up?
What moderates the set-point in question? What is the controlling factor that determines the response of ocean sinking, that has made it increase in response to other CO2 source increases?
Would it increase the rate of sink in response to other emissions from non-anthropogenic sources? If not, how does it tell the difference between CO2 from automobiles and CO2 from non-anthropogenic sources?
I assume you have answers to these questions, yourself. I certainly hope you're not asking in the hopes of finding a straw man argument to make against a layman's understanding of climate.
sep church/state was always about preventing "you have to do this, follow this God, believe these things", it was a puritanical reaction to the pope+king connection.
that's it.
everything is butthurt atheists bending the notion to their whims. doesn't really bother me that much, but that's what it is
Energy is like money, in the sense that you also need an Engineer to make stuff with it, otherwise you would just be making garbage.
Energy differences are making things possible in this world, just like money differences are. Energy, like money is useless unless it is being spent.
Darwin = White Supremacist. Man != God.
Most people were supremacists in the 19th century, white, black or yellow. At least most people can agree that we and they exist nevertheless. The same can't be said about the concept or even the word "god."
Creationism must be so feared that we the common folk should not be allowed to consider or even know an alternate theory exist, even with representation from all the scientific fields, and evidence. What are they trying to hide from you?
What they don't tell you is you and your children are being force fed the Gov't religion because they will use this new world view to change and promote new laws that may previously been considered unethical.
Really, believing in a loving God is so dangerous they have to try to eliminate it from the culture in any form, and prevent you from hearing anything positive about it.
They have a right to believe what they want to, but they want to control what you believe also. There went your freedom, and it barely made a noise....
They are threatened by it, but do you know why?
catholic church pope was in tight with the imperial rulers enforcing obedience to the catholic church.
the level of truth bending you people will go through to smear history into your own farcical concoctions is exactly why the religious folk hate you.
just. be. cool. about it all. there really aren't that many westboro baptists around. if you stop applying pressure they won't have anything to get all angry over...
and then they grow up to be greedy little fuckers willing to do whatever it takes to get ahead, including trashing society, their workforce, the economy, etc.
anyone ever worked for shitheads like this?
at least the Godfearing believe you have value and shouldn't be shit on.
genetic code does nothing but deform and get dirty. how am I supposed to believe it somehow mutated into a giraffe blood valve in its neck that shunts blood flow when he bends down? i mean that just takes faith. God would be impressed
There are so many Americans who have no idea how to decipher valid science from junk science. They listen to celebrities anecdotal evidence and then hook their children up for chelation treatments to cure various maladies. God is not part of science. I believe there may be a God but I don't see how it fits into science curriculum.
You assume wrong - I have questions, not answers. The issue here is that you believe that there are no more questions to be entertained :)
1) pollen isn't a rabbit
2) no reason why a footprint can't be mistakenly dated by the material the footprint was made in
3) "living fossils" are perfectly allowed in natural selection - nothing insists that an organism must be selected against on any time frame
4) cite the biochemist you believe says we cannot detect collagen remnants in fossil remains
None of your citations are "blows" - you misunderstand evolution, the theory of natural selection, and the concept of falsifiability.
But good try!
Thank you. Temperature therefore drives CO2 levels. You've now got the right causality, where before you didn't :)
CO2 emissions pre-1950 were insignificant. Yes, we were burning coal for almost a century by then, but by any rational measure, the real significant CO2 emissions started post 1950.
If the quantity of CO2 emissions matter, we should've seen the 1895-1946 periods with *LESS* warming than the 1957-2008 period. Instead, they're indistinguishable - AGW looks like plain old NGW :)
Science of course is always subject to revision pending new information. But at the same time to assume that there is something missing when there is no actual evidence that something is missing is not useful. Find some actual evidence for that missing factor then I'll start listening.
I did play around with the moyhu link but since it only goes back to 1990 it still doesn't cover enough time to be sure there is significance. Did you read my link to the Uncertain-T post?
The current "pause" is unsurprising to scientists.
That's quite a bold statement :)
Climate scientists are well aware of the vagaries of natural variation and understand that over a period of a decade or two they can override the underlying climate signal. They don't expect temperatures in the short term to rise in lock step with rises in CO2.
The reason "pause" is shown in quotes is that it really hasn't been a pause at all. The only thing that makes it look like a pause at all is the extraordinary El Nino year of 1998. The Argo floats show that the oceans (where over 90% of the warming goes) continue to warm. The only thing that's slowed down a bit is the rise in surface temperatures. I don't expect that to last much longer (but who knows at this point).
That's nonsense. The temperature of water impacts the solubility of CO2. Not the air. You obviously don't know shit about this.
GCM divergence from observations isn't actual evidence?
The link allows you to choose "trend+significance" on any data set you wish. Any greyed out areas in that mode represent periods of time of statistically insignificant change. It clearly shows large periods of time with statistically insignificant change.
Isn't it possible that over a period of three decades or four they can override an individual climate forcing? Or five decades or six? Or seven decades or eight?
Climate scientists don't have nearly enough knowledge about the interconnected nature of climate drivers to model them with any sort of accuracy.
Perhaps I should call it The Pause :)
Again, look at the moyhu link again - there are statistically significant pauses even when you don't use 1998.
I posted a very long, clear, polite point about your whole 2nd Law of Thermodynamics claim no more than two jumps away, and you didn't even respond to it, but instead continued to post crap like this.
I wonder how many others have similarly tried to point out the flaws in your argument for you to just continue to use them verbatim elsewhere.
Check out my sci-fi book "Lacuna" at http://goo.gl/MVxX8
Don't be coy. If you have an argument, eludicate it.
Thank you. The temperature of water therefore drives CO2 levels. Now you've got the right causality, where before you didn't :)
My argument isn't about my knowledge, it's about your ignorance.
Your assumption is that in order to refute your knowledge, I must have something to replace it with. This simply isn't the case. Much like the trial system in the US, there is an asymmetry in the burden of proof here - I can hold you to strict scrutiny without offering an alternative besides the null.
WTF do Giraffes have to do with the second law of thermodynamics. That is what we were discussing.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
This is false. Even pre 1900, we were approaching 1Gt of CO2/year, 4 times that of what worldwide volcanism puts out yearly.
Clearly, you aren't interested in making your point. Have fun.
Again, nonsense. Factor in gas exchange. You have CO2 coming immediately out of a tailpipe that doesn't get absorbed (at about 50%) for a year by the ocean, and it's acting as a greenhouse gas the whole time.
It is not the case that the oceans are a source of rising CO2. They remain a net sink of the gas.
You're still missing the forest for the trees - if our sinks change their rate based on some moderating factor (say, in this case, the temperature of the oceans), then with a well-mixed gas like CO2, the factor controlling the atmospheric concentration is the moderating factor.
This works much like a buffer solution, neutralizing both bases and acids -> in theory, if humanity was a *sink* of CO2, and robbed it from the atmosphere through some industrial process, the much larger buffer in the ocean would *emit* CO2 because of temperature and partial pressure. The key factor here is that the actual CO2 level in the atmosphere is in fact, not simply a summation of independent sources and sinks, but moderated by large buffers that can be sources *or* sinks, as the case may require.
Insignificant, especially compared to the 8.5Gt of CO2/year we had in the 90s.
Look at the graph:
http://theresilientearth.com/?...
If you truly believe that CO2 emissions drive temperature, you have to believe that it is impossible for pre-1950 temperature increases to be as dramatic as post-1950 changes.
The data say otherwise :)
No, again, that's nonsense, because a) solubility of CO2 increases as temperature drops, b) the gas exchange rate works both ways, and thus by the time you got to the point that the ocean was a net contributor of CO2 to the atmosphere, somewhere very near 0 ppm, you'd have a snowball earth. Even polar oceans absorb CO2. You can't get there from here - the ocean is a sink of CO2 in virtually any scenario that is within shouting distance of an inhabitable earth.
Temperature does not moderate CO2 - CO2 is the moderator of temperature in the atmosphere. CO2 is what keeps global average temperatures above freezing. We know this from the physical properties of CO2.
GCM divergence from observations isn't actual evidence?
Not as long as they're still within the uncertainty ranges of the model projections and as long as the projections use a scenario (the current lingo is RCP for Representative Concentration Pathway) to drive their modeling that's relatively close to what really happened. Ideally it would be good to rerun the climate models after the fact with the real world observations fed into them to see how skillful they really are but when it takes several weeks of time on a supercomputer and a lot of work by scientists to do that it's not really very practical. I've seen it done with a few smaller, simpler models and their output gets closer to observations when you do that.
The link allows you to choose "trend+significance" on any data set you wish. Any greyed out areas in that mode represent periods of time of statistically insignificant change. It clearly shows large periods of time with statistically insignificant change.
By "greyed out" you mean where the colors are faded as compared to the simple trend graph, right? No matter which dataset you choose clearly as you move toward the lower left corner of the triangle graph (IOW longer time periods for the trend) there is greater significance.
Isn't it possible that over a period of three decades or four they can override an individual climate forcing? Or five decades or six? Or seven decades or eight?
The further out you go the less likely that is to be true. Given the magnitude of known causes of natural variation* climatology says 3 decades is enough and I'll accept that until someone shows otherwise.
*Excluding consideration of rare events like a supervolcano eruption or an asteroid striking the Earth and excluding the things that operate on millennial time scales such as Milankovitch Cycles and changes to the morphology of the planet.
Climate scientists don't have nearly enough knowledge about the interconnected nature of climate drivers to model them with any sort of accuracy.
Sez you. Care to back that up with some real evidence?
Again, look at the moyhu link again - there are statistically significant pauses even when you don't use 1998.
Again as you move toward longer time periods for the trend the statistical significance increases.
Only on the elementary and secondary education level does the US stink. Once kids get free from their ignorant parents into a freer academic sphere, does the US education system mature.
"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." - Voltaire
I think every model output graph should include uncertainty ranges. Frankly, seeing the wild amounts of uncertainty there, both with model averages, and between models, would be very informative to viewers.
Actually, the longer periods of time are in the lower right corner -> the lower left corner is 1989-1990. The lower right corner is 1989-2014. The upper right corner is 2013-2014.
Every time you see a grey patch to the right and down from a diagonal line, it's beating that length of time. On the right hand side of the graph you'll see 1, 7, 13, 19, and 25 diagonals to help guide you.
I'm doubtful that we've got even a smidgen of understanding of all the causes of natural variation, or the interdependencies between these drivers. Even identifying a few very big drivers, given a chaotic climate, where digits far, far, far to the right of the decimal place can become significant, you can't assert useful predictions from there. Frankly, it is very likely that climate is a non-computable problem.
Asking me to prove a negative? :) Are you honestly asserting that climate scientists understand the minutiae of all the possible interactions between climate drivers? :)
Which means, as the ocean temperature dropped, it would sink even more CO2. In the event that humans didn't exist, a drop in ocean temperature would lower global CO2 levels.
Similarly, as the ocean temperature increases, it would source even more CO2. In the event that humans didn't exist, an increase in ocean temperature would increase global CO2 levels.
So, here we have the ocean temperature determining the level of CO2 left remaining in the atmosphere. It can buffer, much like a chemical buffer solution, any conceivable amount of human emissions, and any residual is an artifact of the trend in ocean temperature, not the trend in emissions. Q.E.D.
What about the physical properties of H2O? Isn't that a greenhouse gas too?
Do you think that H2O has nothing to do with the misnamed "greenhouse effect"?
Actually, the longer periods of time are in the lower right corner -> the lower left corner is 1989-1990. The lower right corner is 1989-2014. The upper right corner is 2013-2014.
You're right. I never have been very good with the right/left thing.
I think every model output graph should include uncertainty ranges. Frankly, seeing the wild amounts of uncertainty there, both with model averages, and between models, would be very informative to viewers.
Many of the ones I see do. For instance Figure 12.5 on page 1054 of the IPCC AR5 WG1 [PDF] report on long term climate change does.
Every time you see a grey patch to the right and down from a diagonal line, it's beating that length of time. On the right hand side of the graph you'll see 1, 7, 13, 19, and 25 diagonals to help guide you.
It's not the color that denotes significance, it's the relative saturation of the color compared to the trend only graph. Flip between the two and you'll see what I'm talking about.
I'm doubtful that we've got even a smidgen of understanding of all the causes of natural variation, or the interdependencies between these drivers. Even identifying a few very big drivers, given a chaotic climate, where digits far, far, far to the right of the decimal place can become significant, you can't assert useful predictions from there. Frankly, it is very likely that climate is a non-computable problem.
Again sez you. You're making big assumptions with no evidence to back them up. What qualifies you to make that judgement better than a scientist working in the field?
Asking me to prove a negative? :) Are you honestly asserting that climate scientists understand the minutiae of all the possible interactions between climate drivers? :)
The minutiae is called minutiae for a reason. In any complex system there are things that have large effect on down to things that just tweak those larger effects but don't make for a significant difference in the final outcome. For your supposition to work your mystery effect(s) would have to be one of the larger ones. Anything that large would cause the observations to not match the projections in a systematic way.
Well, apparently, I've got rational thought processes that I can exercise :) But if you want to hear from someone in a lab coat, you could do worse than Curry: http://judithcurry.com/2010/09...
You misunderstand the nature of chaotic systems. http://www.math.cornell.edu/~l...
"One day, Lorenz tried to recreate an interesting weather pattern, one he had seen previously, by re-entering the values the computer had previously calculated and reported. However, when he ran the program again, his results were different from the initial run. Lorenz suspected a bug, but after checking the two plots, however, he realized his "error": on his previous computer printout, the one he had used to enter the initial conditions into the computer for the second trial run, the figures were printed with three significant digits. In the program, all values were calculated to six significant digits. Lorenz had assumed that the difference, only one part in a thousand, would be inconsequential. However, due to the recursive nature of the equations, little errors would first cause tiny errors, which would then affect the resulting next calculation a bit more, which would affect the output of the next run even more. The final result of a long string of recursive calculations would lead to a weather pattern totally different from the expected values."
By their nature, chaotic systems result in significant differences based on very very small differences in initial conditions.
You might not believe this, but it is quite possible that climate is a non-computable problem because of its chaotic nature.
"Even with the inherent limitations of proxy data, we've got plenty of records of climate changing as fast as it has during the modern observational period."
No we don't, stop lying, your premise is false, you're just digging yourself a deeper hole as a denialist zealot.
"I'm more careful than that - the claim is that AGW has no necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement, and therefore is not science. You're trying to make an argument from ignorance, insisting that AGW must be true if we don't know definitively that it's false."
No you're not, you're stating something is absolutely false, even when there's still a possibility it could be true. Science doesn't always deal in absolutes, and this has to be more the case as we deal with ever more complex systems (nature isn't simple) that's why we have confidence levels that are oft quoted.
If you restrict science to that which can only be proven with absolute certainty then we might as well drop back to the stone ages. Your argument is that unless something is 100% true, then it's false, which is a complete nonsense. You're arguing that it's rational that if something can only be shown to be likely true with 99.99%, or even 99%, or even 80% confidence, that it's better to believe it's false because it's still not 100%.
Apparently you can't see how stupid that makes you look and intend to insist on continuing to prefer the idea that it's better to place your bet on the 5% option than the 95% option. I hope you don't ever considering gambling because it'll absolutely ruin you.
Well, there are a few minorities like the streng gereformeerde but these are frowned upon and considered even more asocial as radical muslims are.
And no way they teach their crap even at their own schools: Schools here in the EU have to include a series of matters in their curriculums and here in Holland failure to do do means that the schools are closed. Even failure to reach the standards means that schools can be closed. That we have already seen with the closure of a bunch of Islamic schools a few years ago and the possible closing of a group of evangelic schools right now because of not meeting a minimum of quality requirements.
There was some hype in the UK as these creation-nuts gathered some media attention, but that was actually not the type of attention they would have wanted, specially knowing the British character.
Europe is unfortunately (for these creat-ins) not ripe for Evangelization yet. Better prepared people tried it already (the Vatican started a re-evangelization campaign a few years ago with no visible results).
-- 29A the number of the Beast
Actually I think that the enlightenment is a critical part of scientific history and I also believe that the history of a particular subject should not be extracted into a separate disconnected class. Science (or any subject for that matter) is much easier to comprehend if you know it's history. It's one thing to know the speed of light, it's an entirely different thing know how we know that fact. Science does not operate in a social vacuum, so why do we all defer to religious sensitivities and act like it does?
Really, why do we pander to them? - To paraphrase someone else I heard; If I claim Elvis is my God, a stack of pancakes is his body, a jug of maple syrup is his blood, then breakfast is my holy sacrament. The difference between that activity and what a Catholic does with crackers and wine is virtually nil. The reaction from society to the two activities are virtually polar opposites.
And like it or not, Science is a philosophy class, Newton was never called a scientist by his contemporaries, he was a "Natural Philosopher". Ignoring the creation myth and hoping it goes away is what people have been doing for the last 500yrs, what makes you think it will work now? I'm firmly in the Sagan/Tyson camp and have been for at least half a century, I refuse to conform to the religious stereotype of an Atheist/scientists. Demonstrate to kids that Science is the only philosophy that has ever informed us about the real world. Don't pretend religion doesn't exist, get the kids to do an experiment that tests the scientific claims of other philosophies. For example, treat Genesis as a serious hypothesis for how the world works and let the kids pull it apart themselves.
Once the kids are scientifically literate and have been formally "indoctrinated" with the simply philosophy behind the unrivaled utility of Science (ie: first year HS), then you can send 'em to a philosophy class to learn how politicians and priests think (or don't, as the case may be).
"Forget the kids, fix the adults and the kids will be fine". - N dG Tyson.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
You are again, mistaken:
http://wattsupwiththat.files.w...
Professor Richard Lindzen likes to play a game with his audiences. He shows the following slide, and explains that one of the panels represents the global warming over the 52-year period 1895-1946, and the other represents the warming over the 52-year period 1957-2008. He explains that both graphs are to the same scale and invites his audience to guess which is the earlier period and which is the later.
No, that's not my argument at all. I'm asserting that unless something is falsifiable, and has a necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement, it isn't scientific. Even non-scientific things can be true, like love, and beauty.
For playing the science game, you require:
1) a list of observations that are *excluded* by your hypothesis;
2) a logical argument that without those observations, the only remaining possibility is your favored hypothesis (rather than the null).
If you'd rather simply deny the scientific method, and make bets rather than think rationally, feel free :)
In reading thru the comments, I was amazed about the false things associated with Christian.
For example, racism was brought up many times.
There is no support for racism in the Bible. A person's skin color, eye color, or hair color is not an issue. We are all humans and our actions or God's actions did not have any bearing on race.
Where do you see race enforced and encouraged is in evolution. It defines and promotes the idea that races exists and one must be better than another. See hitler and similar evolutionists.
You also see it from groups that claim to be christian, but they must ignore large sections of the Bible, and embrace evolution teachings about race.
But if you actually look in the Bible, you find we are all just human, that should all be treated the same.
I looked at many of the supposed verses that are reported to support racism, but when you look at the actual text, and the context, you see that it is actually against racism.
So there are many posers that claim they are christian, but do not represent what the Bible says.
They claim may weird things and are designed to control, but do not come from a clear understanding of the Bible.
The claims that racism is promoted by christian beliefs is not true.
Yet many ignore that evolution promotes and encourages racism is supported by Darwin and all his followers.
Many of the other things used to put down Christians are not even Christian related.
This is one thing that some people don't like but is Christian.
Jesus Christ the Creator, came and died on the Cross for our sins, that man, if he is willing to admit he is a sinner, and needs a Savior, can agree with God, ask for God's forgiveness, and ask to be saved (save from Hell and to Heaven)
This process is referred to as adoption, citizenship, redeemed, to name a few.
Any human can accept Jesus Christ's forgiveness.
Now if you hate that then you are actually hating something that is Christian.
Many of the other things that are attributed to Christians may not be true either.
I think I can do better than Judith Curry too. Comment on “Climate Science and the Uncertainty Monster” J. A. Curry and P. J. Webster [PDF] published in the American Meteorological Society Journal, December 2011.
I think you misunderstand the differences in chaos in climate and chaos in weather. Climate describes the boundaries of weather. It contains all of the chaos of weather. Here is a post on the subject.
Imagine a pot of boiling water. A weather forecast is like the attempt to predict where the next bubble is going to rise (physically this is an initial value problem). A climate statement would be that the average temperature of the boiling water is 100C at normal pressure, while it is only 90C at 2,500 meters altitude in the mountains, due to the lower pressure (that is a boundary value problem).
Well, now you've got to make the argument that Gabriele HeGerl is better than Judith Curry :)
So, weather is chaotic, and climate contains the chaos of weather so climate is chaotic...so you admit that indeed, it may be possible that climate is a non computable problem!
Wow. Terrible analogy.
The temperature of boiling water at normal pressure is 100C. There's nothing average about it - it's a literal, physical constant.
Asserting that climate statements are about literal, physical constants, ignores the variation in climate completely, and misapplies the science thoroughly. Heck, even within the IPCC reports, climate sensitivity to CO2 not only has error ranges, but it's calculation has changed over time - nothing like the static, repeatable, confirmed, and exact boiling point of water at 2,500m.
Someone who so blatantly misunderstands data cannot in any way be called a scientist. Given that you failed in your argument right at the start I think it's at the point where it's clear you're at a dead end now.
What's the misunderstanding? You were wrong about pre-1950 climate changing as much as post-1950 climate.
Are you simply not willing to admit it, and therefore declare yourself the winner of the argument? :)
I suppose a lot of theists do that as well when you challenge their God :)
I'm just saying I'm not willing to debate with someone who stoops to the level of misrepresenting data. If you have to do that it's obvious you're not interested in an honest argument but are just a zealot with a one track mind who can't accept science, objectivity, and rationality. There's no logic to your arbitrary pre-1950/post-1950 divide, that's neither the start or the end of the industrial revolution, it's just an arbitrary point you've selected because you're attempting to take things out of context because that's the only way you can make the argument work in your favour. You can't argue based on the long term trends that aren't arbitrary because they do not fit your predetermined world view.
Trying to argue with a zealot like yourself who isn't interested in fact but merely their own twisted denialist fantasy is a waste of time.
Showing you data that contradicts your assertions isn't misrepresenting data.
Yes, there is - the data shows human CO2 emissions pre-1950 as *tiny* compared to human CO2 emissions post-1950. This is a *fact*.
http://www.epa.gov/climatechan...
Before 1950, we were under 5000 teragrams. Post 1950, we increased by 5x that amount, hitting 25000 teragrams around 2000.
If you believe CO2 emissions from humans have an effect, you should be able to see it comparing pre-1950 data to post-1950, period.