Slashdot Mirror
Australia Cuts 110 Climate Scientist Jobs: "The Science is Settled."
An anonymous reader writes: With an ax rather than a scalpel, Australia's federal science agency last week chopped off its climate research arm in a decision that has stunned scientists and left employees dispirited. Why? Because the science is settled, there is no need for more basic research, the government says. No doubt many will experience a case of schadenfreude as they see those who have long claimed "the science is settled" face the inevitable and logical consequence of that stance.
Sure, we know the answer is "The world is getting hotter and it's all our fault" - but there are still a heck of a lot of questions that need to be answered. "How Fast?" and "Will the extra CO2 help crops or weeds grow faster?" and "What can we do about it?" and "Will such-and-such course of action have enough effect to avoid such-and-such consequences?"
We need those guys even more than we did before the original question was answered.
www.sjbaker.org
Obviously we know what has to be done. That money will be better spent doing it than flogging a dead horse.
He got into power, they explained that Australia could not meet the CO2 targets, so he would be labelled a failure, so he loosened CO2 targets to be the same as his predecessor, and now is removing the measuring of CO2 emissions and atmospheric CO2.
So now he's not a failure, he's a success! Well at least nobody can scientifically show his failure!
He's a slimey politicians, but they all are.
[Trump/Palin 2016 make America grate again!]
Errr...you mean the U.S. government that recently signed on to the latest climate protocol by the U.N. The government headed by Obama who has been warning about global climate warming? Is that the government you are thinking about? Stop watching TV, it is bad for you.
I'm surprised that /. would like to the definition of schadenfreude. It seems like every slashdotter is WELL acquainted with that principle.
Which has more power: the hammer, or the anvil?
Anyone that tells you the science is settled is not a scientist.... they are a politician wanting to shutdown inquiry on an issue and install dogma in its place.
Science is not dogma, and if someone who is a scientist tells you that "The science is settled"; that is really just their personal opinion on the topic, And it should be taken to assume that the research results they produce might be accidentally (or maliciously) biased to reflect results consistent to the bit of science they would claim to be "settled".
Which is why I test gravity every day by jumping off of the Empire State Building.
At a certain point you have to get off the shitter and act on the information you have. Sitting around while you go from 99.99% certainty to 99.999% certainty is inefficient.
The Turnbull government would have pulled the plug on Newton's silly academic musings and set him up to slave away at the mint.
Yes, I know you're not supposed to read the article. You find out all sorts of interesting things like the fact that noone was actually fired, they were re-assigned to other stuff. You also find out why some of the stuff they were doing was interesting.
But the thing that caught my attention with shades of "we have to pass the bill before we know what it does" was that one of the reasons given not to transfer the people was that they were needed to figure out what the recent climate agreement actually meant.
So apparently the climate agreement was so badly expressed that the several people who were not transferred away from basic climate research are not sufficient to figure out what it actually meant?
Didn't Kerry block the language change that would have made it require anything?
Sorry, "smoking leads to lung disease" isn't dismissable as religion, and simply denying it isn't 'skepticism'. The current crop of oil-company-shill climate denialists are no different than the tobacco company liars of a generation ago.
No one in climate science is interested in answering those questions. It's all "X is caused by global climate change", where X can be literally anything,
If you read what actual climate scientists say, and not the hype in the press, they in fact don't say "It's all "X is caused by global climate change", where X can be literally anything," Over and over, they say things like, no particular storm can be attributed to global warming-- it's a long term global effect. Over and over and over. But the press likes disaster stories. They'll keep looking until they can find a way to write the story that makes it a disaster story, and bury the "other scientists caution that there's not enough data to attribute X to climate change" on page 2.
with pictures of polar bears in the background.
I've read a lot of papers by climate scientists, and never seen one with "pictures of polar bears in the background." I think I can safely say that if what you're reading has pictures of polar bears in the background, you're reading the popular press, and not a scientific paper. Even the paper (one paper-- count it, one) that talked about dead polar bears in the arctic didn't have pictures of polar bears in the background.
...Turnbull’s government has also emphasized science that can be easily commercialized...
It seems to me that climate scientists would be a key part of any strategies, techniques, and technologies that are developed to either counteract or accommodate global warming. Future work in this area will be heavily commercialized, just as wind and solar power and electric vehicles are commercialized today. Sounds like Turnbull is thumbing his nose at a big economic opportunity. Not to mention that, in some sense, he seems to be selling out his fellow human beings for a bit of short-term political capital. Way to make your country's economy more durable, Mr. Turnbull!
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
Once again ignorance has decreed that all that needs to be known is already known, in a field. New knowledge must be heresy in that case. This is so stupid.
"Do you want fries with that?"
Suddenly global warming is the least of their problems....
If it's settled that human-emitted carbon is warming up our climate that might mean fewer jobs for climatologists, but it will mean a lot more jobs for reactor builders and people who can assemble and pilot supertanker loads of iron dust.
Proof is for mathematics and liquor. The fact that you don't know that shows you know fuck all about science.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Science is based in SKEPTICISM and PROOF.
That's true... but what I've noticed is that far too often, the people who call themselves climate skeptics aren't skeptical at all; they are absolutely credulous-- to anything they hear that denies the reality of global warming. Garbage articles that could be debunked in two minutes of thinking get picked up and passed along with notes of "see? it's all a HOAX!"
One-sided skepticism isn't skepticism at all. Skepticism doesn't consist of "I don't care what you say, I won't believe it, but I'll believe anything the other guys say, no matter how goofy." If you want to say you're a skeptic: be equally skeptical of both sides.
Real science doesn't consist of repeated skepticism, in fact; that goes nowhere. Real science consists of getting better data and improving understanding.
It's a turn of phrase in this case, but we know that man's emissions cause some aspect of the climate change we're seeing.
"Some aspect" where the exact amount is undefined.
Oh, and the total amount of warming we'll see is undefined.
Oh, and the amount of warming that is harmful is undefined.
Oh, and the benefits to the world from a warmer climate are undefined.
Oh, and the mechanism that triggers an ice age is undefined.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
With no "climate scientists", when every single prediction from the models come out wrong again, who will go back, adjust the models, and then retro-predict real life?
Seems the lessons of history must be learned over and over. Mixing up politics and science, religion and science or even politics and religion is generally always a bad idea. How soon we forget and each subsequent generation repeats the same mistakes..
Well, at least we know what to expect..
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
So I guess there's no reason to spend any more money on microbiology or antibiotics research.
Bah, I feel like stirring up some nutty X-Files level conspiracy shizzle...
Why would you do this? You're reassigning the scientists, not firing them. It's not about costs.
So basically, those in ultimate power, the ones pulling the strings, expect things to get much much worse, far far quicker than even the science to date has suggested.
In order to keep control, to keep the status quo as long as possible, they have decided that it is too risky to risk the science getting more accurate results that would expose the real situation. That might risk profits!
So they've cut the climate change funding completely. This isn't head-in-sand ostrich politics, this is happening for a real reason, and that's to cover up a worse reality than even the current state of climate science suggests.
Everyone knows there is more to learn, more accurate models to build, more precise future situations to demonstrate, , so the only reason to transfer these people away from those roles is to stop people from learning what that is.
All the propaganda outlets assure me that Gore-Bull Warming is all a conspiracy to keep those evul scientists rolling in dough. Well, all they have to do is start working for the other side.
Ooh, moderator points! Five more idjits go to Minus One Hell!
Delendae sunt RIAA, MPAA et Windoze
Gravity, from our understanding of Newton's laws, we now know Newton was wrong (technically) but close enough (approximately correct). We know this because Einstein's models are more accurate (and yet .. still not correct). The problem with science is that it evolves as we gain understanding. AGW has so many different variables in it, that it is bound to be wrong, and we can't even tell how wrong it is.
This is why people use terms like "consensus" instead of "proven", because quite frankly it is still hypothesis and not even a very good one.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
A much easier test is to look up every-time you drop something.
Momento Mori
Very well said.
Momento Mori
This may test the conspiracy theory that scientists lie or exaggerate to get more government funding. Let's call it the Handout Bias Theory (HBT).
If you get fired when you "prove" it, then proofs should now stop. Scientists would come to nebulous conclusions so as to keep their jobs, under HBT. "We need more research & funding to really know..."
However, the conspiratorial types are likely to replace one conspiracy with another when evidence goes against the original. I don't know what they'll dream up yet to replace HBT, but conspiracies can wild-card explanations almost as well as Creationism: "God did it that way because he simply wanted do." Maybe they'll claim scientists want to shut down operations to hide their dirty deeds now that The Patriots are on to them.
Table-ized A.I.
And, since we know Mars and Venus are also getting warmer, it must be the Martian's fault.
Well, given that we don't know that Mars and Venus are getting warmer we don't have to look for causes for that nonexistent warming.
How much of the change is likely to be caused by which of the several known factors, and potentially unknown factors?
If there are unknown factors causing the warming then there are also unknown factors causing cooling that happens to exactly balance the unknown factors causing warming, since the observed warming fits pretty damn well the known factors that can cause warming. Or maybe we should just use Occam's razor?
What is the long-term temperature trend, based on long-term actual data (as opposed to COUGH corrections COUGH made up on the spot and added to the data).
The long term temperature trend is slightly cooled the corrections that are carefully considered. You might like to see a doctor about that nasty cough.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Asking a rhetoric question since everyone knows the answer.
"If the weather science is settled, why then, are weather scientists still unable to predict weather than my coin throwing each morning?"
You loose Australia...
With the economy slowing down following on from the Chinese, in their major export earner, New Zealanders packing their bags back home and Brits choosing less to travel, someone has to pay the price in any effort to lift things up in the country... manufacturing and mining have to take centre stage once again... scientists pay the price.. same old politics
Well lived, well enjoyed
Australians can spell "axe" properly.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Old R. Feynman joke.
'Quantum mechanics says there is a chance it will fall up, When it does, I don't want to miss it.'
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I'll start acting like it's a crisis when the people who say it's a crisis start acting like it's a crisis.
So, when did Canada's former Prime Minister Stephen Harper move to Australia?
All models are wrong. Some are useful. All climate models are wrong, particularly since this is really complicated stuff we don't understand as much as we'd like, but we can make some predictions fairly reliably and have confidence that they'll happen more or less as we predict.
There is no such thing as proven science. The best we can get is science sufficiently solid that the overwhelming consensus of involved scientists would be astonishment if it were to break, and we've had that happen before. If we speak of settled science (which is relative, not absolute), we speak of science that has a pretty much universal consensus.
AGW is a theory, not a hypothesis. It's not only a collection of observations, but has explanatory power and ties into other well-established science. Like any other scientific theory, it's got holes and almost certainly has some wrong assumptions. We know that the planetary surface is warming up, and we know that we're causing a lot of that, and therefore AGW is happening. We're fuzzy on a lot of details.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I agree, but we need more than that - climate engineers who can figure out how to modify the system to prevent the worst effects. I think it's great that among the general population the narrative is to reduce emissions and environmental destruction, but nothing about the nature of humans convinces me that we won't eventually end up having to use engineered solutions to the problem.
Just look at the US elections. Every four years I see a bunch of politicians turn up in some coal town and spout on about how clean coal is the future. The mindset in these places is so hard to change, made especially so by the fud spread by vested interests. Given the rise of solar and electric, it might be possible to wean rich westerners off fossil fuels over a 30-50 year period, but I can't see how we will convince developing countries to do the same, especially when the price for fuels falls through the floor.
What really scares me is if a nation that starts suffering the effects of climate change first, gets desperate and takes matters into their own hands. It doesn't take many aerosols pumped into the atmosphere to potentially cause a lot of effects on the planet, and if we don't know what those effects are it could be a massive disaster in a very short time frame.
"Die Schadenfreude wird Dir im Hals stecken bleiben."
Schadenfreude will get back at you.
Is a term deeming the people that experience "Schadenfreude" to be susceptible for the upcomming or imminent threat to experience also a same of a kind situation from the opposite side.
Because people that experience "Schadenfreude" tend not to concentrate on their own problems.
(Example: A car driver laughs about the owner of a broken luxury car, and does not concentrate on the car driving in front of him, where the driver does same thing plus braking to get a better view. Result tail bump and the "Schadenfreude" got back at you.)
In this case it's climate scientists have worked out that the climate is anthropologically influenced on a large scale.
But that influence is what we experience just right now and not what could happen in the future, these predictions with their various scenarios are essential to at least have an idea for example where settling could be dangerous or economically unfeasable.
All prediction on the future also need to take into account a changing behaviour and energy production landscape.
And this is how Schadenfreude has the tendency to get stuck in your throat and choke on you if you enjoy it for too long.
Politics, dogma, and money have replaced science in this field. When people start spouting "the science is settled" and getting misty while considering how to criminalize "deniers," you really do need to stop research. Otherwise, new data and models might reveal, "Oops! Never mind! We're gonna be fine after all, folks!" thus threatening the elites' power and money train.
And those climate models have been created and are available as software. It's now just a question of applying them.
The global climate models are there, and are getting pretty well validated-- although you do know that the error bars are still plus or minus fifty percent, right? But the more you want fine-grained data, though, the more you're still going to need to do a lot more work.
"Overall, things are getting slightly warmer at a pace we know to within a factor of two"-- that's something we know. "Australia is getting hotter"-- that's slightly harder to say with certainty: Australia is not the world. "These detailed results will be the result"-- that's getting very hard to predict.
The devil is in the details.
So tell me, what do yuo consider science?
Taking data, analyzing data, making models, verifying models, refining models, taking more data, taking more data.
All the stuff that climate scientists actually do, and climate deniers don't.
" I'd also suggest that if you really want to find out what's going on, follow the money. There's lots and lots of grant money out there for people in that field, but only if their results match what the politicians need to push their agendas."
I really find astounding this argument appears once and again. It's like... hippies hold all the money, not the big oil corps.
I imagine in the seventies was more or less the same: health problems with tobacco? It's an hoax. Just follow the money. There's lots and lots of grant money out there for people in that field, but only if their results match what the politicians need to push their agendas.
The money and therefore, if any, the politicians being bought is in the side of the oil corps.
I guess Robin Williams will be having a spot about this on his radio show this week. It's a pretty good show from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and can be found at http://www.abc.net.au/radionat....
Actually, smoking leading to lung disease is a religion. A small portion of life lpng smokers will ever get lung disease but a large portion of people with lung disease smoked and signs point to unique qualities associated with lung diseases caused by smoking.
There are even sets of people and genetic markers identified that will not show negative effects of smoking at all in the lungs.
http://www.independent.co.uk/l...
The fact is, the ice caps are Mars are indeed melting. Look at the data yourself. You're entitled to your own opinion about what we should do about that, if anything, but the fact is each time we send a probe to Mars, the ice caps there are smaller. The principal investigator for the Mars Orbiter Camera, Michael Malin, says the martian polar ice cap is shrinking at "a prodigious rate." You can look for yourself and compare the pictures even from 1999-2005; it's visibly noticeable even in that short time frame.
We also know that Jupiter, Titan, and Pluto are warming.
So again, the question is "how much of the long-term trend on earth is attributable to the same causes that are occurring throughout the rest of the solar system?" the best estimate I know of is "probably about 30%, but maybe half that, maybe twice that."
Settled science: Energy is supplied to our planet from the sun. The entire planet loses energy to space. Our atmosphere dictates the rate at which this energy is lost.
Yep.
Not Settled Science: What is the rate at which this energy is lost,
That's extremely well known.
and what is the quantitative change to this rate when CO2 concentration is increased or decreased.
Error bars on that are currently a factor of plus or minus fifty percent.
Not Settled Science: What are all the effects, good and bad, that an increase of CO2 in our atmosphere will have.
Right. That is a much harder question than global average temperature, and the more detail you want, the more this question needs work.
Not Settled Science: Increased CO2 and a warmer atmosphere are a bad thing and should be prevented.
"bad" tends to be a judgement call-- you could call this an engineering trade-off, but it's not really a science question. And "should" is a social (which is to say, political) decision, not science at all.
If I'm getting warmer because of a fever, and the chicken breast in my oven is also getting warmer, they must be related or neither is really getting warmer. CHECKMATE AL GORE!
Delete your account you stupid fuck.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Just like government power over people leads to mass murders and genocides. The big government fanboys are like tobacco company executives telling people to smoke more and more, even today. (Not every smoker died from smoking, after all. Not everyone who experiences big government will get massacred or oppressed. But to make an omelet, you have to break a few eggs.)
Most skeptics couldn't tell good science from bad science if their life depended on it, they're just borderline conspiracy theorists who has decided that the establishment or mainstream media are pushing an agenda with cherry-picked data, flawed models and spurious reasoning to give a false, but plausible impression. And because they've found some whack jobs contradicting it they think they're part of a small elite who haven't bought into the lies. They're just as much sheep as the sheep they despise, just going in the opposite direction of the herd.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Preach it. Those astrophysicists who are going on about the Earth being round and orbiting around the Sun need to be put in their place.
You are welcome on my lawn.
What, exactly, do you think would cause the other planets to warm, and not have the same effect on earth?
> Delete your account you stupid fuck.
I certainly understand that it can be quite uncomfortable, once you've picked a team and become a fan, to have clear, indisputable facts get in the way of your team's political puffery; you've invested some significant self-esteem into the idea that Al Gore was telling you the truth. Unfortunately, facts are what they are.
If -something- is warming the other planets, is there any reason earth should be special and be unaffected? Or is it more likely that earth, just like the rest of the solar system, is affected too, and a politician exaggerated the human-caused portion for -gasp- political purposes.
I kind of feel for you, for what you'll likely go through soon, because I think you're too smart to be a lemming to Gore and now Hilary. I don't think they'll keep you fooled for much longer, because you're not stupid. That will be painful, though, coming to accept that just as Santa Claus doesn't exist, Gore and Clinton are just another pair of wealthy politicians, who say whatever polls well with the masses.
And, since we know Mars and Venus are also getting warmer, ...
Oh please, cite the data that shows Mars and Venus are getting warmer. All I ever hear is the claim without any data to back it up.
Let's assume that the claim is true, we've studied the problem sufficiently to the point that we understand the problem and therefore our need for people to work on climate models and so forth is diminished. Let's also assume that while we can do away with some climate studies we cannot end it completely since we will need to monitor progress and guide policy.
So, what should we do? It seems that many of the people in positions of power talk a lot about doing an "all of the above" approach. This means doing anything and everything that can possibly reduce our carbon output. We've seen PSAs telling us to turn off the lights in rooms we aren't using and to turn off the tap while brushing our teeth. We've seen government subsidies for solar panels, windmills, corn ethanol, and electric cars. What's missing here? IMHO, we've got government support for every tactic to fight global warming except the one that has the best chance to reduce our carbon output with the least cost and smallest impact on our daily lives.
That solution is nuclear power.
Any politician that claims that the government needs to fund this and support that and ignores nuclear power is not serious about the problem. This tends to lead me to think that global warming is not the problem that they claim. It also doesn't help that they'll chide me for driving my light truck while they fly in jet planes all over the world. They have a meeting of the world powers on how to combat our carbon output, flying all these people there to meet, and all they've agreed to do is meet again in five years to talk about it some more.
I thought global warming was the greatest threat this nation, and this planet, has ever faced. Yet these people don't seem to be acting like it is.
I'm not convinced that global warming is a problem based only on the actions of the people with the ability to have the greatest effect on the carbon our modern society produces. If these people were convinced on the problem we faced then we'd see them talking about nuclear power. If they cannot bring themselves to bring up nuclear power as part of the "all the above" strategy to fight global warming then I can only conclude that they fear losing votes more than they fear the end of civilization. A true believer would not be concerned about the next election, they'd be concerned about the next century.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
...and leon's getting LLarrrrrgerrrrrrrr..(jumps away)
Blah Blah tl;dr and those pushing the fucking Climate Change agenda have their own motives, specifically to redistribute wealth globally. This has nothing to do about saving the planet it has everything to do with money.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
By reducing the number of people hitching a ride on the gravy train. Heh
But the press likes disaster stories.
Yes they do and in general the popular press is REALLY bad at science reporting. I've had a few direct interactions with science reporters for our local paper and holy cow they were a bunch of idiots. They mostly have NO training in the scientific method, their knowledge of technology and science is severely lacking, and they ask incredibly stupid questions and misunderstand the answers. Worse they often come in with an agenda about what they are going to report about and will twist any facts you give them to suit their narrative. The only exceptions I've run into is if you get one of the reporters for a big paper like the New York Times or (obviously) one of the actual science journals. But that's rare. Local TV news are the worst of them all. Bunch of borderline retarded talking heads them...
I used to work at a tech center where we had all sorts of cool machines. Lasers, rapid prototyping, CAE, engine dynos, virtual reality, etc. Very cool stuff and visually interesting too. So they wanted to take pictures which is great. One of these idiots points at the wall where he sees a bunch of blinking lights and asks what that machine does because he thinks it would be a cool picture. We gently mentioned that, ahem... our air conditioning control panel was about the least interesting thing in the building. The guy didn't even have the brains to act embarrassed.
Since the science is settled, now we can look to see the Australian government start slashing spending on fossil fuels, getting rid of bureaucracies and governmental subsidies that enable and support the mining, production, distribution, and sale of fossil fuels and taxing the fossil fuels industry to death. It is a glorious day in Australia, unless of course they plan on ignoring the settled aspect of the science for all but the fired scientists and continue on with business as usual.
One can't help but wonder with so many questions still remaining in climate science as to how hot, how fast, where and who will be first to affected, by how much, etc., whether this is just a shameless ploy to limit the visibility these scientists and the science they pursue so that business as usual can simply continue without adverse publicity. Then again, perhaps it's just an effort to make sure that Australian science lags behind that of other nations and to encourage their best scientists to leave for positions abroad.
Well said.
Oblig. Winston Churchill quote, "A bigot is someone who can't change his mind and won't change the subject"
Damn! Why didn't anyone ever tell me that global warming *cough, cough* "CLIMATE CHANGE" was going to cause the collapse of the USA Federal government? For years I've been focused on making environmentally responsible lifestyle choices. Now you tell me that all of my time and effort has only served to prop up the government? That seriously ruins my day.
Well, better to learn late than never. Guess I'm going to the grocery store and buying a bunch of food that has been imported from far, far away (mmmm, bananas & coconut). Next, I'm going home and cranking my thermostats up from 50F to 75F and covering up my solar panels. This weekend I'll go looking for a full sized pickup truck and start planning my first overseas vacation in 15 years.
I was sort of the fence before, but now I am 100% convinced that global warming *cough* "CLIMATE CHANGE" is a complete hoax.
"and smallest impact on our daily lives"
Yeah, I'm sure the folks living next to Fukushima and Chernobyl all feel the same way. I say scrap fission power that has no future because of the costs of the screwups (both in lives and in currency) and put any subsidies for nuclear into research into fusion power. It looks as if the Chinese, at least, have the sense enough to take this approach. In the meantime tax fossil fuels to death and use the money to implement alternative energy solutions (solar, wind, tidal), which are far more cost effective and far less politically destabilizing when total costs are considered.
Climate change is partially cyclical and partially influenced by human action. How much is which? It's unknown. We've only been observing it for 50 years or less. We've already made changes. Cleaner cars, factories, etc. How much has this helped? We don't know yet. Don't we need the answers on this to judge our progress?
Here's some information from NASA. (Nasa.gov link below.) Many people are rightfully concerned about measuring the polar ice caps on earth. When reductions were measured in the north* that was considered major evidence of global warming. Here NASA talks about the same thing happening at a much faster rate on Mars. NASA measured the reduction at 3 meters per Mars year.
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/galle...
Again, because I think peoples passions make it hard for them to actually pay attention to what they read: this solar-system-wide phenomenon seems to account for perhaps 30% of the warming on earth, not all of it. You can still feel good about recycling paper bags.
* on the other hand, 30% MORE ice at the south pole means nothing at all, some say. Pay attention only to the one that supports your team's politics. ;)
I thought that was more of a convenient frame of reference that makes things easier. The sun does not actually go around the sun, it's just more convenient to assume that the earth orbits the sun.
On a deaths per joule comparison nuclear power wins over them all by a large margin. Do you think that people don't fall from windmills and rooftop solar panels? People die.
Also, people in Fukushima got more radiation by flying from the area than if they stayed. Chernobyl was barely a first generation reactor, it didn't have modern safety features like a containment dome. The answer to this problem is not to stop building nuclear power plants but to build more so that we can afford to decommission power plants like those at Fukushima.
Japan shut down all their nuclear power plants for a while but were forced to restart them. This is because without nuclear power they had to resort to dirty, unsafe, and expensive coal. Wind, solar, and tidal power would cost us more in money and lives then even building more Chernobyl type power plants.
Thankfully we don't have to build another Chernobyl, Fukushima, or Three Mile Island to keep the lights on. We can build fourth generation nuclear power, reactors that are safer, cheaper, and more reliable than even the already very safe, cheap, and reliable first and second generation reactors that caused us so much panic.
At a minimum we should at least have some government funded research in nuclear power like we have government funded research in wind, solar, and tidal. We have much to learn on nuclear power, and claiming we cannot harness that power safely is like claiming we should not invest in Tesla motors because the Model T and Pinto were unsafe. A modern nuclear reactor would not be built like those at Fukushima.
We can build much better nuclear power plants but we've held ourselves back because of failures of completely unrelated designs. Failures that, BTW, involved very little cost in lives and cleanup when compared to the alternatives.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
I agree. That's why I find it extremely worrysome that the 1% now holds over third of all economic power in the US, wields it unelected and answering to nobody, and is getting more powerful by the moment. Do you have any specific ideas on how to adress this threat before it extinguishes the last remnants of freedom?
Indeed. The for-profit industrial prison system holds more victims than any country in the world. Even Comrade Stalin and his gulags have been superceded.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
If this is enough for you to say Economics is a science, then it is the softest science of all. Parapsychology (and I'm absolutely serious about this), is based more on data and scientific rigor than economics. Psychology is many times more rigorous than Economics. Fucking Gender Studies is more rigorous and data-based than Economics.
I am probably the only Slashdot user who has actually taken a course from Milton Friedman. My views on the pseudoscience of Economics is based on 30 years experience having economists as colleagues, friends, neighbors and lunchmates. I have played in a weekly poker game with economists. I lived next door to a Nobel-nominated economist for years back in Chicago. I watched Superbowl XLI with him and had to explain what it means to arbitrage a point spread that has moved 10 points.
Plus, if you read any Economics articles, you will find that their math is very unimpressive, and even suspect.
You are welcome on my lawn.
"No doubt many will experience a case of schadenfreude as they see those who have long claimed "the science is settled" face the inevitable and logical consequence of that stance." ????
Neither logical nor inevitable.
The part that's settled is that its happening and at human hands.
That doesn't mean you can just stop taking measurements, refining models, or continuing basic research.
Stupid summary is stupid.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Based on experiments (with gas in tubes and lights shining through them), a doubling of CO2 will result in a ~0.9 degree increase. This is not controversial, and even skeptical climatologists accept it. It's also not very scary.
The reason some climatologists predict a 6-12 degree warming is because of feedbacks (warming melts ice leaving dark earth behind, and dark earth absorbs more heat, etc). These feedbacks are significantly more controversial, but also more scary.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
http://davidappell.blogspot.no...
So, defendant Anonymous, are you familiar with the term "cherry picking?". Why don't you tell the court what you understand the the phrase "cherry picking" to mean?
Defendant Anonymous, do you turn to the internet for information about climate change? You do? Since you know what cherry picking is and you have already described yourself as highly engaged with the topic of climate change, did you ever consider the possiblity that this statistic was itself cherry picking? Did you actively seek out disconfrirmatory evidence for this statistic?
Defendant Anonymous, I refer you to your posting on Slashdot Mar 2012 where you directly accused a poster of cherry picking his statistic. So you were well aware not only of the concept fo cherry picking but that cherry picking was used in the climate change debate....
Defandant Anonymous, I present to you a graph posted by a fellow poster WoofyGoofy in rebuttal to a comment you made describing "no climate change in nearly 19 years", do you recognize that graph? Would you say that that graph describes an instance of cherry picking? Speka up Defandant Anonymous.
Defendant Anonymous, were you aware of what people said the consequences of global warming would be upon hundreds of millions of people, if it were true? Speak up so the court can hear you Defendant Anonymous. Yes you were? And yet, you continued to post statements as facts , statements which a reasonably prudent person who did not possess a wanton disregard for the truth, would have rejected as likely falsehods. Isn't that right Defendant Anonymous? By your own measure, the statements you made were most likely false, weren't they Defendant Anonymous?
Ladies nad Gentlemen of the jury, we have here nothing more than the very description of the law under which Defendant Anonymous has been charged- Gross Negligence and a Depraved Indifference For Human Welfare With Special Circumstances.
Ladies and Gentlement of the jury, Defendant Anonymous and millions more just like him are precisely and individually culpable for the destrcutive falsehoods they either knew or should have known they were spreading through the years 1990-2020. These were years in which the Great Climate Crisis still could have been averted save for the actions of Defendant Anonymous and his ilk, actions which displayed a Depraved Indifference to Human Welfare. Actions which they knew or shoudl have known would contribute to the millions of deaths and political upheavals we see nightly on the news. ladies and Gentlemen of the jury, the Supreme Court in 2025 had already found that each citizen, individually has and always has had an implicit, unshirkable obligation to be honest and to act in good conscience in their utterances and writings when the fate of other human beings rests in the balance of those utternaces, no matter how small a part their individual utterances and writings may have played in the ultimate fate of those fellow humans. That same ruling found that each individual can be charged with the totality of the crime to which they contributed, and that theories of so called "proportional guilt" serve only to thwart a justice which must not be thwarted.
What we have before us here in the public postings of Defendant Anonymous is nothing less than a criminal act of the highest order, Because of Defendant Anonymous, and others soon to be tried, the Earth is where it is and there is no going back.
Ladies and Gentleman of the jury, I submit that there is one verdict which wil serve justice, a verdict of guilty on the charge before you. Defendant Anonymous knowingly and with malice aforethought made utterances and wrote statements which he himself knew or should have known were likely false. Bring back a verdict fo guilty, and may God have mercy on his soul.
Except that "verifying models" step. None of the climate models are making better predictions than the null hypothesis,
About all I can say to that is "sorry, but you are wrong.".
or for that matter than the "lgw blindly asserting it's getting colder" model. Global temperatures have been remarkably steady for the past 19 years or so,
Sorry, but you are wrong. Here is the data from four groups on three different continents: http://www.giss.nasa.gov/resea... temperatures have not been "remarkably steady for the past 19 years or so" - they have been rising. and while that's within the error bars for most of these models, it's better predicted by the null hypothesis, and within the error bars if you take any of these models and put a "-" in front on their predicted temperature change. So, yeah, the negative of the models predicts as well as the models right now.
Not an argument that they're all wrong, but an argument that there's no reason to think any particular one is right, either. The "science" part is ongoing, but hasn't verified any of the models.
We know that the planetary surface is warming up, and we know that we're causing a lot of that
How do we know?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The "Government" didn't sign it. Obama did.
Without enabling legislation or ratification as a treaty, it's fancy toilet paper from a legal point of view.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Know what the real difference betwen people like me and people like you is? In my worst imaginings, I give you a trial. In your best actions, you mass-murder hundreds of millions of innocent people and , thanks to the amount of Koch Libertarian crack you've shoved up your fucking nose over the years, in your life long role as a fool for billionaires' greed and indifference to human life, you aid and abet the worst crime any group of humans has ever inflicted on humanity and call it "Fweedom".
Just to be fair, 99.9991% of Slashdot posters are NOT climate scientists. They simple cut and paste talking points from their favorite websites that support their personal view.
There is never a Climate Science "debate" on Slashdot. It's a bunch of amateurs tossing around bits and pieces of what they largely don't understand, calling each other names. Useless.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
> Actually, smoking leading to lung disease is a religion
Oh bullshit. And there's a small percentage of people who have natural immunity to HIV turning into AIDS but it's not "religion" to suggest the unprotected sex with HIV+ people is almost certainly going to shorten your lifespan.
For the VAST majority of people smoking is an activity that leads to a great increase in the possibility of lung cancer. Period.
And you literally have no idea what that means.
Sure, cut research. And then watch as your other budgets literally burn in massive fires.
Morons.
Stop exporting coal. There's your answer, Australia.
Fossil fuels are dead. Fini. Over.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
https://deepclimate.org/
You know you're lying. Just admit it. Just admit that you'd rather billions of people die than you have to admit that you're a bitch boy for billionaires, a fool and the sort of low information braying self and other destructive jackass you like to proclaim others to be Admit you'd rather destroy the entire world than be shown to be wrong, because you're , you know ego-dysfunctional, weak and basically a sociopathic predator with onlya loosely-defined grip on reality, basically, you're a subhuman piece of shit.
Just , you know, admit it. You'll feel better.
Obviously this has nothing to do with climate change science - it's an excuse for the government to justify the massive budget cuts they've forced on the CSIRO, an excuse the CSIRO are happily repeating as they know everyone will be outraged.
the people who say the things you just said are the ones who don't truly understand science.
if I have a giant mountain of proof for A on one hand, then before I will replace A with B, B needs to come up with an even bigger mountain of proof.
is it possible that we will at some point overturn evolution, gravity,global warming, or any other long held theories?
yes.
is it at all likely?
no.
its 'possible' in the sense that winning the powerball is possible.
its an extremely low probability event, and it it only gets lower the more we dig into these topics.
are they 100% settled?
no. but they are 99.999999% settled.
there is no serious evidence against these theories, every new bit of research instead only serves to further cement them.
which I why they are "settled" and no one seriously questions them other than cranks and those who don't actually understand science.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
It would help if any of the climate models demonstrated some degree of predictive ability. The difference between model projections and reality have grown to ridiculous proportions.
Let's look at that. The very first numerical greenhouse effect model was Manabe and Wetherald 1967-- That's the classic, the model from which pretty much all current climate models stem. Since the paper was submitted in 1966, that's 50 years ago-- definitely long enough to see how well the prediction worked. They predicted that the climate sensitivity to CO2 (assuming constant relative humidity) was 2.3C. Comparing that to the actual carbon dioxide, for the rise from 320 ppm to 400 ppm (here) using the Arrhenius relation, we get 0.74C for the temperature rise from 1966 to 2015. The measured temperature rise (here) is 0.7C, with the error bars in the figure 0.1C.
Looks like not merely a good prediction, but an outstandingly accurate prediction.
For comparison, the current IPCC 5th Assessment report estimate of sensitivity is that it is the range 1.5C to 4.5C with "high confidence", so Manabe and Wetherald's value of 2.3 is still is the range of current estimates.
Did no one else accept your manifesto for publication? Apparently it's meds-free day on /. again.
"Global warming":"Climate change"::"Comcast":"Xfinity" and for exactly the same reason.
That's true... but what I've noticed is that far too often, the people who call themselves climate skeptics aren't skeptical at all; they are absolutely credulous-- to anything they hear that denies the reality of global warming. Garbage articles that could be debunked in two minutes of thinking get picked up and passed along with notes of "see? it's all a HOAX!"
Most people who are worried about climate change are absolutely credulous-- the read garbage articles that could be debunked in two minutes of thinking and they pass it along.
The "garbage" article that pretty much all the climate scientists refer doubters to is this one: http://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/... Which part of this do you think can be "debunked in two minutes of thinking"?
You can tell that most people aren't looking at the science because of how cleanly opinion is divided along political lines. I'll bet I can guess which political side you favor, too.
OK. In American politics, my side is that I hate pretty much all the politicians. If there's a side that's pro-nuke, pro-solar, pro-space, pro-technology, and pro liberty in general, that's my side.
So... we should fix our ecology, then fuck it right up again?
I mean, ok, it works for the economy, too, but... I kinda like this planet, ya know?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The people saying "global warming" are all paid to say "global warming" to get/keep Government funding, so that government can dictate to everyone (except rich n powerful) that we need to give up every technology that makes the world run.
The fact is, ever number has been fudged to get the results they are wanting, to prove what they need to prove, to keep getting funding to support something that has no basis except "consensus"
When every major prediction has failed, the the consensus cannot be right. I remember all those predictions of "worse hurricanes" followed by "almost no hurricanes", and "Polar Ice caps disappearing" only to have "polar Ice caps expanding (which is now the new "proof" of global warming), on down the line.
not to mention the Greening of Africa, when it was supposed to be getting drier and more desert like: http://news.nationalgeographic...
The problem isn't Global warming, it is that EVERYTHING is blamed on it. Ice growing or shrinking .. GLOBAL WARMING, more snow GLOBAL WARMING, more rain and greening in Africa GLOBAL WARMING!
In fact, global warming may in fact be good for the planet, even if it isn't good for Humans. ;)
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
"Because the science is settled, there is no need for more basic research, the government says." Before enjoying your schedenfraude, realise that this has been organized by political forces who think 'climate change is crap' and have dismantled as many government agencies with responsibilities in this area as they can. Justifying these cuts with 'the science is settled' is disingenuous to a comic extreme.
The CSIRO well retain the same number of staff and scientists, they are simply culling one department and expanding others.
The oceans and atmospheric global warming department is only getting cut by 35 and will retain over 300 employees. They are cutting jobs that were focused on research for "awareness" of global warming and "psychological study" (often about of deniers etc.).
The cut jobs are being replaced them with field jobs. For example they are massively increasing the number of scientists at Antarctic research stations and other fields science stations. They are also increasing tech research into green technology and other mitigation techniques.
The howling from universities is because many departments have used "awareness" as an excuse for existence for a long time, and many of the people in global warming departments don't do anything involving measuring, forecasting, or mitigating warning. Rather they ate involved in purely awareness activities and other social sciences about the public perception of warming.
It isn't until you get to the last paragraph that TFA finally gives you the underlying cause of this astonishingly shortsighted and imminently disastrous decision:
“Climate science becomes secondary to business; business comes first
So there you have it. The ability to make money trumps EVERYTHING. Kind of answers the question of why we never see aliens. If all intelligent species tend towards a capitalist society, they all end up committing environmental suicide.
*** *** You're just jealous 'cause the voices talk to me... ***
That solution is nuclear power.
Any politician that claims that the government needs to fund this and support that and ignores nuclear power is not serious about the problem. This tends to lead me to think that global warming is not the problem that they claim.
Barack Obama (October 2007, before becoming president): ”It is unlikely that we can meet our aggressive climate goals if we eliminate nuclear power from the table.“
(2009, after becoming president): "We must harness the power of nuclear energy on behalf of our efforts to combat climate change.” (citation)
James Hansen (probably the most famous of the climate activists), 2013:
"We call on your organization to support the development and deployment of safer nuclear power systems as a practical means of addressing the climate change problem... in the real world there is no credible path to climate stabilization that does not include a substantial role for nuclear power." (citation)
There's lots and lots of grant money out there for people in that field, but only if their results match what the politicians need to push their agendas.
I see this claim again and again. Why hasn't someone actually done the work to determine how true it is? Information about most grants from the federal government are available. Someone needs to analyze them and show how skewed the grant process is (or not as I suspect they'd find).
I'm guessing you don't actually know any real economists.
I suppose you don't consider Friedrich Hayek as a real economist, even though he got the nobel. Because, you may have noticed many of his bold predictions are now revealed for what they were: a political agenda and not actual science.
Video of some good progressive thrash music
Cartesian doubt
The probability of less that 25 million people coming up with anything so good or so bad that it has a significant impact on the lives of the other +7.1 billion is small.
So leave them to deal with their financial problems as they see fit and worry about what the rest of humanity is, or isn't doing because the actions of those vast masses will be far more influential.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://www.treasury.gov.au/Pub...
Warmer Days and Longer Lives
A) How much of the change is likely to be caused by which of the several known factors, and potentially unknown factors?
You will never find out with the present crew of Climatologists, everybody wants a mention in the big game, an IPCC Assessment Report, and the IPCC's mission is to access anthropologically caused global change through CO2 release anything else is outside their purview.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
You may be right. However, I'm not thinking about how the conditions on the grant are worded, I'm thinking of how they're interpreted. As an example, a grant to study long-term trends in the global climate is nice and even-handed, but if it's never awarded to anybody expressing a contrarian opinion (Please note: this is a made-up example.) the effect is to fund scientists who accept AGW while making it hard for others to test their ideas. I'm not saying that it is happening, but we all know that most politicians are more interested in things that fit their idea of how the world works than in finding out if it does or doesn't.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
If the science is solid, then if a new set of scientists look at the same inquiry in the future, they'll come up with the same results. I mean, Galois theory is valid despite Galois getting killed in a political duel. If the theory can be rediscovered by people not mentored (and thus biased) by the original discovers, it will have that much more scientific footing.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Look it up.
Only about 20% of smokers develop lung disease. Over 80% of people with lung disease are thought to have gotten it from smoking.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11...
Your lack of knowledge does not make my comment idiotic.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11...
I suggest you read all of it before replying.
How about instead of hypothesizing that climate scientists are conspiring to make a pause in warming disappear you actually do the science to show that their adjustments were unjustified.
It hasn't been until the last few decades that temperature stations have actually taken the needs of climate science in to account. Before that Time of Observation has changed, new instruments were introduced, urban heat islands have built up around temperature stations or they were moved to a new location. In measuring ocean surface temperatures the methods have changed from throwing a wooden bucket overboard to a canvas bucket to the intake pipes of ships to the current ARGO buoys. All of those changes have to be accounted for and corrected to get a relatively accurate contiguous record.
In the same vein the TV weatherman is not a climate scientist, in many cases they are not even a meteorologist, and some of them are women!
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Why would I give you my data when you are only going to try and find something wrong with it? - Phil Jones.
The "garbage" article that pretty much all the climate scientists refer doubters to is this one:
And you haven't read it. You're like every other moron that thinks they know something but is really just following the crowd. Good job.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Too stupid to have understood the basics of this science when it was realized 30-odd years ago.
Too stupid to have acknowledged the scientific consensus til it (and fires, droughts, cyclones) was hitting them over the head.
Too stupid to manage their own government science program, believing there was only one simple question, and it's answered already.
Dumb. Dumber. Dumbest. Are these the only choices we can elect?
Why is that exactly?
Why is above average intelligence and knowledge with a tinge of reality-bias not a prized attribute when we select our national leadership?
Do we follow some principle of not wanting to elect someone smarter than ourselves because, who knows what they might get up to that would just go right over my head? Instead, we seem to be way more comfortable electing "Joe nice bloke down the pub. Solid handshake on 'im.". What gives?
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
and all about the politics.
This is just another salvo in our current (right wing) government's attacks on science and environment in this country. It's hard to fathom why, existing projects were doing great research and delivering profitable discoveries.
Over past two years there have been massive cuts across the technology sector, including:
- $300 million cut to Sustainable Research Excellence at universities
- $115 million cut to CSIRO
- $75 million cut to Australian Research Council
- $107 million cut to Cooperative Research Centres
- $8 million cut to Australian Institute of Marine Science
- $28 million cut to Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation
- $16 million cut to Geoscience Australia
- $120 million cut to Defence Science and Technology
Over 1400 jobs have been lost at the CSIRO (the guys who invented the main technologies behind WiFi), and to add insult to injury we didnt even have a Science Minister in our government cabinet for several years there.
And on the environment:
- abolished the carbon tax
- wound back renewable energy targets
- abolished the Climate Commission
- attempted to abolish the Clean Energy Finance Corporation and the Renewable Energy Agency, and recently prevented them investing in mainstream wind / solar
- defunded the environmental defenders office
Meanwhile, they repealed a mining tax and wanted to drop the company tax rate. They also wanted to sink $244 million into a non-secular school chaplain program, but the high court ruled it was invalid.
You can see where this is going yeah?
That's interesting, thanks.
FACT: Reading a thermometer is not 'theory". It is a Reading, producing a Fact (a piece of Data).
Scientists have made such temperature Readings millions of times, over many, many years (more like 10E5 years). Plot that data and it is still not a "theory" – just the display of a Collection of Facts.
Observing the Plots requires no "theory", either. Anyone can see that the surface of the Earth has been getting hotter, exponentially. We're still in the realm of Facts here.
THEORY: A set of well-Tested Predictive Models, based on Facts. This Results from extensive Testing and Refinement of Predictive Models. Test them enough times (like, kazillions), and a general consensus will eventually emerge that the Theory, despite its "being just a theory", has withstood vigorous Tests and Experiments intended to Challenge it, for a long time. Yes, there is Uncertainty, but by this stage, that Uncertainty (or "disagreement among scientists", as the Press like to call it), is generally around the 99.99999999999% Confidence Level. So certain that it's generally accepted as Fact. (But scientists never shut the door completely. Ever. To avoid re-repeating Tests with known outcomes – boring! – we accept strong Theories as Fact, and explore new things that build on the Known.)
QUESTION: Are humans Causing Global Warming?
Yes.
I refer you to any book on Thermodynamics – the Collection of Theories concerning thermal phenomena (like closed-systems, steady-states, and so on). There have been many completely different approaches and/or starting points variously taken, and they've all ended up in extremely close agreement (see above). (To us, it's fact within any conditions we will ever encounter. Theoretical physicists dream-up exotic situations where things can vary, or we observe extreme conditions like black holes merging, but I'm not planning a trip to visit one.)
SO WHY KEEP TESTING AND REFINING MODELS?
And what is this "disagreement" among Climate Scientists?
ANSWER: We cannot see into the future. Better models will help us deal with the issues of Climate Changes induced by the overall heating of the Earth's surface.
SIMPLER ANSWER: We don't know whether we're all doomed by 2050 AD, or by 2300 AD. :-)
PS — To anyone still on that "only a theory" hobby-horse, I have a brick and a ladder for you. Please use them to test the "only a theory" status of Gravity, and have your mortician get back to me.
Yes, the Mars orbiter from 2005 has data and photos of the same areas as the 1999 data. The principal investigator for the Mars Orbiter Camera, Michael Malin, says the martian polar ice cap is shrinking at "a prodigious rate."
I've gotta run, but I'm sure you want have too much trouble finding tabular data if you want, NASA has a Mars section on their site. Also, various people arguing global warming have cherry-picked data points and argue about them, but I prefer NASA.
As I've mentioned earlier in this thread, it seems like whatever is affecting the other planets (the sun) would probably explain about 30% of the warning on the earth. That's a really rough estimate it could be 15% or 60%; we can reasonably say it's significant, but not the sole cause.
Add in what we know about C02 and the two probably explain the observed trends pretty well. Of course the C02 data varies wildly, with "highly respected" organizations estimating global C02 by measuring it ON A VOLCANO that's spewing tons of C02, but anyway we know C02 has an effect, and we know there's an effect that's more than just on earth.
Okay, so you're explanation is that all of the other planets have big forest forest fires over the last few decades. Okay.
Or are you saying that the rest of the planets (and their moons) have volcanoes, which cause them to warm up? Which do you think best fits the data?
Do you have any citations for any of your claims excepting Pluto? All my Google Foo can come with is simple comparisons of weather mistaken for climate except Pluto where it is summer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Mars is of course getting a lot of attention lately, so the Mars section on NASA.gov is pretty good. Most of it in the Mars is pretty straight, without arguing about global warming, adding adjustments to make the data fit the model or whatever.
I'm sure you can find your way around mars.jpl.nasa.gov, but here's one page to start with. Many people are rightfully concerned about measuring the polar ice caps on earth. When reductions were measured in the north* that was considered major evidence of global warming. Here NASA talks about the same thing happening at a much faster rate on Mars. NASA measured the reduction at 3 meters per Mars year.
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/galle...
Note again I'm not saying this effect accounts for ALL or even MOST of the warming on earth. It seems to account for between 15%-60% of it, probably close to 30%. The majority is very likely carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide, with deforestation being a problem we should keep in mind.
* Some say we should ignore the 30% INCREASE in polar ice on the south pole. Polar ice only matters when it fits your campaign pitch, perhaps.
The "garbage" article that pretty much all the climate scientists refer doubters to is this one: http://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/...
And you haven't read it. You're like every other moron that thinks they know something but is really just following the crowd. Good job.
I notice that, although you claimed you could debunk it in two minutes... you didn't.
Game over.
Look up what that means before you say it again. Are you using the "random Al Gore quote machine"? You picked a rather irrelevant quote. Hint - weather systems are SMALLER than solar systems.
I just ripped on your other reply to me (GP to this one), so I should say this post is thoughtful. Thanks.
Lots of mass murders and genocide has happened without government involvement. History of the Americas is full of it, starting with Columbus's third voyage, driven by having to pay back the investors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
sock puppeting yourself and modding down dissent doesn't make you right either.
your name is still appropriate.
and smoking DOES increase the risk of lung disease.
that isn't a religion but established fact.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
1. you said the "garbage articles" passed along by people who "worry about climate change" could be debunked in "two minutes of thinking."
2. I posted a link to the source that people who pay attention to climate science most commonly reference: this one, http://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/...
3. you did not debunk it. You didn't debunk any part of it. You didn't even try to debunk it.
4. Instead, you moved to an ad hominem argument. Nice try. I have, in fact, read it, but you can now change to a "yeah? prove it!" argument, which effectively changes the subject and nicely covers up the fact that you failed.
5. You said you could debunk it in "two minutes of thinking," but in fact, it has real facts, real data, and actual critical thinking. You can't debunk it-- not in "two minutes," not at all: you're afraid to even read it.
You failed. Game over.
Polar Ice Caps: http://www.forbes.com/sites/ja...
Hurricane Lull: http://www.livescience.com/507...
Greening of Africa: http://news.nationalgeographic...
These are "facts", and the "speculation" from the "Global Warming" nuts is also clearly documented. Here are a few good articles on exaggerated claims that never panned out:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/201...
http://www.thenewamerican.com/...
http://dailycaller.com/2014/03...
Please go ahead and make excuses as to why nearly 97% of all Global Warming Projections are wrong : http://www.westernjournalism.c...
Or perhaps you'll simply parrot someone else who doesn't actually know anything, or continue to believe "consensus = Science"
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
I am an entrepreneur with engineering and music background.
Of course that I want my business to flourish, who not? However I am clever enough to understand that without a continuous development in basic science we won't have future enterprises.
The sad on this is that it is not the first time in modern history that this type of decisions destroy innovative companies (worst in government area). It is simple, you can't create richness from the air, it is important to create the basement for that.
Could be possible that all politicians and government officials around the world need to have some history courses? At least for not to repeat the obvious mistakes.
Lol.. i don't have enough free time to sock puppet accounts and mod people.
Yes, smoking increases your risk of lung disease hugely. But that is not what was said and not what I was disputing.
I know the people who nominated him.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Because, you may have noticed many of his bold predictions are now revealed for what they were: a political agenda and not actual science.
Even if they aligned pretty well with political agendas, that doesn't by itself make them false. Keynesianism aligns well with political agendas. Marxism aligns well with political agendas. Climate change aligns well. Climate denialism aligns well. Anything in science can align or misalign well.
So, what did those predictions come to? Did they hit? Or did they miss? That's the only question that matters.
By the way: von Mises predicted 70 years in advance the results of the Russian economic planification experiment. His predictions aligned with libertarian political agendas. They came right all the same. If anything, that (and Hayek's) suggest libertarian political agendas have something more to them.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
I see this as the inevitable consequence of political science becoming more acceptable in climate study than, well, science. When lemming-like behavior is all that remains among climate scientists because all of the dissenting views have either been fired, unfunded or shunned into silence, you get a gestalt of sameness. Science is the messy pursuit of all theories in the effort to explain observed data. No mess, no science - no science, no scientists..
Organization? You must be joking..