Without a source for the rates you quote, how do I know that you aren't making these numbers up? In this world of made up facts and subjective reality, we really don't need another unsupported list. And while you're at it, what about Taiwan? What about Japan? What about Korea? Where are they on your unattributed list?
BP built the initial chamber that was lowered onto the well from scratch. And it failed, because it was an experiment. They built the top hat system from scratch, and it failed because it was an experiment. They have tried numerous methods to fix this gusher and they have failed. Finally we are starting to see a more robust system being put in place. But even this system was almost certainly built from scratch.
My point is that coming up with the processes to fix a gushing well from scratch while the oil is flowing is not a good approach. There should have been in place devices and systems to deal with such a disaster. They should have been designed, built and ready, before the disaster. Given the repeated failure of their initial attempts, it seems very likely that they did not devote significant thought (BEFORE THE EXPLOSION) to what would happen if their blowout preventer failed in such a disastrous fashion. That is unforgivable.
Oh, and in my original post, I specifically used the phrase "...before they started drilling..." in the first sentence. The next phrase "... BP didn't devote any significant resources..." is clearly referring to the same "before explosion" period. I even put "before" in italics.
it's also an outright lie to say BP haven't invested significant resources in dealing with the blowout. they have spent over 3 billion and deployed 22,000 people to try contain the spill, and they are still up for billions more. i'm not sure what circles you travel in but i'd consider billions of dollars significant.
Straw man much? I didn't say that BP hadn't invested any money in fixing this. I said that BP hadn't invested significant resources BEFORE the blowout.
having emergency tankers "ready" at the dock (whatever that is supposed to be) is a useless idea. whats the tanker supposed to do after it arrives? not to mention that it'll take days for a tanker to get there at best anyway.
What I actually said/meant was that there should be tankers AND equipment to straddle a broken pipe, the same type of equipment that they have just finished building and installing. My point is that this shouldn't be trial and error. As a condition of drilling, they should have already invested in recovery methods before they begin. As for your comment about it taking days for the emergency tankers to arrive, oil has been gushing for 3 months! Even if the tankers were docked in Europe, it would only take a couple of weeks or so at full steam to arrive at the gulf. That is significantly less than 3 months.
Your post doesn't make sense, and you will forgive me if I write you off as a corporate drone.
Large corporations are profit generating machines. That's it. They don't try to do good (for its own sake). They don't try to do evil (for its own sake). Everything they do is based on the (perceived) impact on the bottom line, usually over time periods of less than 5 years. Any ascribing of emotion to them, be it positive or negative is based on illusion. For this reason, it is necessary to have a democratic government act as the ultimate policeman, in order to make sure the large corporations act in the public interest.
Any success that BP may or may not have in this endeavor does not change the fact that they should have had methods to cap a blowout ready before they started drilling. The fact that this well has been gushing for months is simply unacceptable. The keystone cops spectacle of Top-Hat, Hot-Tap, Junk Shot (tm) is strong evidence that BP didn't devote any significant resources to dealing with a deep water blowout. Strong regulation of these rogue corporations is needed. They should not be able to drill without having capping equipment and emergency tankers ready at dock.
If binaural beats are supposed to exist only in the brain, why, when I play back the files linked to on wikipedia do I hear the beat fluctuation when I listen to only one of my earphones at a time? Is VLC mixing the left and right tracks and not telling me? Is it happening on my mac? Or is the file not a real beats file?
As I understand it, this is an area in the Pacific Ocean where floating plastic bits accumulate due to ocean currents. In this area, the amount of plastic per unit area of ocean is far higher than in the rest of the ocean. However, the density the plastic bits is not remotely island like. You would likely not be able to see it from satellite photos. The best way to see it would be to sail there. and then to drag a fine screen behind the boat. When you pull in the screen, you would find quite a few little bits of plastic, some larger pieces, and more importantly you would find small fish that would have ingested pieces of plastic. These plastic bits would likely poison the small fish before it can grow larger.
Honestly, I find the proposal impractical, and I am not sure of its seriousness or veracity. It sounds fishy. They say there are 4 million tonnes of plastic in the area (which seems reasonable). But then they propose to make an island the size of the big island of Hawaii. No details are given to show they have actually thought seriously about this. What would keep it in place (hmmmm...the current might keep it there)? What would keep it structurally intact? What about hurricanes? Honestly, if they are going to propose something like this, they should give more evidence they have thought about it.
When he jumped, he wasn't even sure he was falling to the earth or just floating around.
Interesting observation. Doing this would be very odd. There would be one large difference between before jumping and after: I think he would have felt full gravity/normal force when sitting on the platform, and once he jumped he would have felt weightless. In the rarefied atmosphere, jumping would feel a lot like being in orbit.
Here is a music video by Boards of Canada, in which they show the original footage of Joseph Kittinger jumping from 102,800 ft. Much of the last part of the video is from something else, but the first part is real. It really is haunting to see him push off of the balloon platform.
Again, you aren't making any argument. You are merely claiming that someone else has arguments, but you aren't even stating them. You reproduce a few slogans and buzzwords..."myth-based", "...science into religion...", "sycophants", "That is real science." etc. However, your post really amounts to nothing. Unless you are capable of producing proper, coherent arguments, with premises that support a conclusion, then you are only emulating the religious behavior that you accuse your opponents of displaying.
Ahhh, but now you show the weakness in McIntyre's methods, namely that by referring to keywords instead of arguments, it invites the casual reader to "fill in the blanks" with whatever their pre-conceived notions are. And by the snide tone that McIntyre uses, you are invited to fill in those blanks with something nefarious. Here, for the purposes of this post, you have filled in the blanks with something that sounds at first more reasonable.
The "hide the decline" and "divergence problem" issues are this: A method was developed to use tree ring data as a proxy for past temperatures for which we have no measured temperature records. The "decline" or "divergence problem" is that the method proved to be unreliable when used to "measure" temperatures in the present - the real temperature record went one way, and the tree ring data went another way.
However, I suspect you are guilty of omitting important issues from the discussion, specifically the existence of other types of temperature proxies, and their correlation with each other. Those who reconstruct pre-instrumental temperatures use numerous different methods, including corals, lake sediments, ocean sediments, ice core records, tree-rings, to name but a few. If those temperature proxies correlated to each other quite tightly for, say a thousand years, and then one of them, say the tree-ring proxy, suddenly diverged from the other proxies and from the instrumental temperatures, it would be reasonable to assume that something peculiarly recent was messing with the tree-rings.
The decline in the tree-ring proxy temperatures is no secret in the scientific community. Indeed there have been a number of papers that hypothesize reasons for the recent divergence of tree-ring proxy temperatures. A cursory search on scholar.google.com will support this assertion. And to quote the CCE report, "We find that divergence is well acknowledged in the literature, including CRU papers."
I've read Climate Audit. Here is a recent snippet on the "hiding the decline" meme: (http://climateaudit.org/2010/07/06/muir-russell-what-ill-be-looking-for/)
Another obvious battleground issue. I don’t see how this field can rise above paleophrenology if they are not prepared to renounce such strategems as the “trick to hide the decline” or adopt Gavin Schmidt’s view that deleting adverse data is a “good
way” to deal with a problem. It isn’t.
Penn State took the position that deleting adverse data was “legitimate”, airily referring to non-existent authorities on the matter. However, the Oxburgh panel couldn’t abase themselves quite so low and did not agree
that the trick was a good way to deal with the divergence problem, finding instead that it was “regrettable” that IPCC and others have “sometimes” “neglected to highlight” this issue (evading the obvious fact that the deletion of inconvenient data by CRU authors and their close Climategate correspondents was intentional).
Given the opposite findings of Oxburgh and Penn State on the legitimacy of the trick to hide the decline (one finding it “regrettable”and the other “legitimate”), it will be interesting to see how Muir Russell splits the difference. I wouldn’t be surprised if they find a way of avoiding the matter altogether, saying it falls into someone else’s remit.
The above quote displays very clearly the modus operandi of Steve McIntyre at Climate Audit. Specifically the strategy is to sound like you have the truth, to sound like you have a valid argument, without actually giving it, or at least without stating it clearly and logically. In the Climate Audit universe, it is good enough to sound like you have the truth. Perception is everything. The strategy is not unlike a magician's deliberate misdirection; in the practice of magic and illusion the most important skill is to understand how your audience forms their perceptions, what queues they use to decide what is true. When you know this, you can manipulate it; you can distract the audience, make them miss the real trick, and thus convince them that you can do something that is actually impossible.
In the case of the above posting, McIntyre focusses on a very brief excerpt from the stolen email, which says something to the effect of "using a trick to hide the decline". He repeats this phrase, refers to it repeatedly. But notice how he does not elaborate on the subtext, the background of the email. Notice how he doesn't give any real scientific argument. He merely refers to the surface meaning of "trick to hide the decline", inferring something nefarious, a conspiracy to hide a decline in temperatures, something to trick us. The surface meaning is enough for him. His lack of elaboration is a form of misdirection.
A bit of research and logic will lead you to the conclusion that the "trick" to "hide the decline" was a logically valid was scientifically valid IF the purpose of the research paper was to give a proper reconstruction of historical temperatures. The temperature reconstruction in question was using samplings of tree-rings to reconstruct temperatures before the existence of instrumental temperature readings. Within the tree-rings are certain chemical signatures that correlate closely with atmospheric temperatures. However, during the 1960's and onward the signals from the tree-rings diverge from temperature readings made using instruments such as thermometers. The tree-rings signals seem to show a decline in temperatures, while the thermometers show an increase during the 1960's and onward. Since the instrumental temperature readings are taken to be a more reliable method of measuring temperatures, the instrumental readings were substituted into the temperature reconstruction to "hide the decline". Honestly, what is the better indicator of temperature? A few tree ring measurements, o
Both soccer and markets are determined largely by micro-decisions that human beings make. And many of those decisions are not rational, but instead are based upon emotion. In market behavior, you could argue that humans have specific material needs, and humans make rational decisions to meet those needs. But this ignores the fact that many of our purchasing decisions are made for reasons that we do not fully comprehend. Why do we like a particular type of music? Why do we like particular brands? Why do we want buy goods that are popular, just because they are popular? These decisions are fundamentally emotional, and are not easily predictable at a specific level. Similarly in soccer, mood plays a role. The tide of the battle turns one way or another. Confidence is gained and lost for intangible reasons. And the results of games is determined largely confidence.
If stock markets and soccer are governed by such chaotic factors as human emotions, how can they ever truly be predictable. I would argue that to make predictions about such things, one would have to have the god-like ability to track the brain activity of all of the participants in the system. And right now we barely understand the most rudimentary parts of our minds. Thus I would argue that there is a fundamental limit to the certainty of the types of predictions made by, for example Wall Street quants. I think the recent housing market crash bears this out. Despite our hubris, human beings are not gods.
Logic is the foundation of our civilization. Logic is our way of making sense of the world. Logic allows us to build planes, trains and buildings. And the basis of logic is a well formed argument. Your surprise that I would dare to deconstruct your argument is telling. It is symptomatic of a civilization that is letting go of the tools of reason and logic that have made us great and powerful. One of the hallmark transitions in the decline and fall of the Roman Empire was a slow and steady abandonment of reason. That ended in the Dark Ages, a time of economic, social and political collapse. For one thousand years, European civilization stagnated in superstition and fear. Not a single large domed structure was built during this thousand year period. The Romans forgot how to do it.
Your should be ashamed of your flippant disregard for reason and logic. You are a citizen of a democracy. It is your duty as a voter to be rational and logical.
Hmmmmmm...I'm feeding the trolls. The denial-bots are at work on Slashdot today. Oh well here goes.
...but they have been an increase in CO2 after a period of increased warming, not the other way around. Of course, it makes since that it can happen, there is just no evidence that it ever has.
You seem to state this as if you and/or your favorite GW denier was the first to notice this, and as if it went unnoticed by those who spend their lives analyzing this data. This is called an implicit straw man argument, implying that your opponents hold an erroneous opinion which they don't actually hold, and then using this distortion to defeat them.
Well, the people who study this full time are fully aware that over the last few hundred thousand years the start of ice ages precedes a fall in carbon dioxide levels. They believe that something else, likely fluctuations in the Earth's orbit around the sun, initiated ice ages, causing a cooling effect. This initial cooling then caused the carbon dioxide levels to drop, likely due to ocean effects, which caused even more cooling. The cycle feeds upon itself until the Earth enters a new ice age. Likewise, warming after an ice age is thought to be strengthened significantly by increased carbon dioxide levels.
The difference is that now WE are causing an increase in carbon dioxide levels. Carbon dioxide, that in previous ice ages was an amplifier of change instead of the root cause, IS NOW THE ROOT CAUSE OF THE WARMING.
There is no way you can make the claim that every possible cause for warming except human produced greenhouse gasses have been eliminated. In fact, this is the essence of the real debate. We simply do not have the level of understanding of climate change that you seem to think we do.
You are exhibiting here a type of fallacy known as argument from ignorance. Basically, instead of addressing the known factors that regulate the temperature, namely greenhouse gasses, orbital fluctuations, volcanic eruptions, asteroid impacts, and solar variations to name a few, you invent some unknown factor that we are supposed to know nothing about. You then implicitly ascribe the majority of climate variations to this unknown factor. Since you have not specified that factor, you are basically immune from criticism. I cannot show this factor is or is not a true cause of climate variations because I have no idea what it is. In essence, you are saying that because we do not know everything (or almost everything) about the climate, we know next to nothing about it. And since all human knowledge is incomplete, this would doom humanity to know nothing about the world forever.
Firstly, I'm not writing an encyclopedia here, but merely providing my opionions and thoughts, which you are welcome to either agree with, or disagree with.
Well, if you are not going to be rigorous in your knowledge and in your logic, then your opinion is just noise. It amounts to nothing. Worse than nothing in fact. Because if you are convinced that your opinion has weight when in fact it is as substantial as dust, and if you are a voter in a democracy, and if there are enough of you, then our democracy will make increasingly bad decisions, based on insubstantial and illogical "knowledge", that has little or no relationship to objective reality.
The fact that I am not sitting under 2 km of ice suggests to me that the ice has been melting for quite some time already. The fact that ice continues to melt, knowing that history, does not seem that abnormal.
Your statement carries an implicit assumption the current melting of ice has been part of a consistent trend over the last ten thousand years or so. What you do not acknowledge is the possibility that most of the melting happened very quickly, over a few centuries, and that after a couple of thousand years, the majority of the ice had melted. You do not acknowledge the possibility that over the past few millennia, the amount of ice in the world has been relatively stable. And besides that, you have not given any reputable source or evidence for what you say, so we might as well be debating how many angels fit on the head of a pin.
Personally, I believe that with a claim that has as much impact as global warming, the amount of proof that must be presented has to be very strong, and I don't believe that the evidence for human caused global warming has that level of conclusiveness.
The above quote gives away your lack of logical skill and your serious lack of understanding of the scientific process and of what science actually is. You speak of proof, but in science, hypotheses are only either refuted or supported. If a particular hypothesis has survived many attempts at refutation, it becomes highly probable that it is true. We may prove an hypothesis wrong, but we cannot prove it to be true. All scientific reasoning is at its heart inductive, and thus based upon probabilities. It is not certain that the sun will rise tomorrow. It is only highly probable.
The fact that you have not bothered to consider the logic of what you speak of properly causes me to doubt that you actually care about the truth of what you write. It is a symptom of someone who treats facts and arguments like pieces of clothing that they can put on or take off at their whim. Such a person treats truth as if it is relative. There are no facts, only opinions in such a worldview, and so it is acceptable to think or believe anything that makes you feel comfortable about the way you live.
The earth has been getting warmer for thousands of years. Right now, where I am sitting, there used to be 2KM of ice. That ice is clearly gone now. That glacier has melted. Our current glaciers are just continuing to melt.
Your reasoning is flawed, and is based on an ignorance of the scientifically determined factors that affect the climate. If I may summarize the structure of your argument: The climate has changed in the past. Humans have not always existed. Therefore, humans cannot be causing climate change now.
The implicit reasoning is flawed because overemphasizes some causes of past warming, namely orbital fluctuations and asteroid collisions with the Earth, while underemphasizing the past role of greenhouse gas concentrations in causing the Earth to warm. The fact that other things have influenced the climate in the past does not mean that human produced greenhouse gasses cannot cause warming today. And if the climate is currently warming, and we can (and have) eliminated other possible causes for that change, then human produced greenhouse gasses are the most likely cause of our current warming.
This fallacious reasoning can be quite effective, since many in the public have lost their habit of logical analysis. The fact that this posting has been modded to 5, interesting is testament to this.
Does this not indicate that corporations such as BP, when under the gun will result to Orwellian bending of reality to serve their interests. I must admit I am disturbed by the recent comments by the BP CEO that minimize the environmental impacts of the spill.
Their apparent strategy:
Understate the amount of oil erupting from the well.
Apply dispersants so much of the oil stays underwater.
Implement a PR strategy to deny the impact of the invisible underwater oil.
As long as Flash and its cousins Flex and Shockwave remain the simplest tools for producing drop-dead gorgeous Websites, they'll keep their place on the Internet
I don't know about gorgeous, but I've seen lots of drop-dead websites. As in websites that cause my browser to "drop dead" and my CPU fan to whir like it is about to fly away.
If you want to make corporations pay attention regarding flagrantly negligent behavior, how about threatening to take the damages directly out of shareholder equity. After all, when you buy shares, you already assume a fairly large amount of risk. If shareholders can be held liable for damages done by their company, I suspect corporate behavior would change markedly. The liability would be limited to the amount of equity owned. In an extreme case, perhaps where a corporation has blatantly flaunted the law, the shareholders or owners could have all of their equity liquidated, and sold to other buyers. Call it the corporate death penalty.
After all, if corporations are "people", why shouldn't they be held to the same level of responsibility as people? Why shouldn't they have penalties similar to those which we the people must live with? The idea of a corporate death penalty would likely have a huge effect, even if it is never used. Corporations would be far less likely to cut corners on safety. BP would have had to factor into its bottom line the costs of say drilling another relief well at the same time as the current well. They would be less likely to risk using an inferior method of cementing the casing. They would have had proven methods of capping such blowouts in place before they started drilling.
You aren't going to have to shut off your heating and electrical devices to reduce your consumption of energy. It will take years to happen, and it will begin with you making accumulating changes to what you buy and how you use energy. Eventually when your current car wears out, you will buy a new one. Instead of buying a Tahoe, you will buy the most efficient car that suits your needs. Eventually you will save up enough money to insulate your home more effectively. When your washing machine wears out you will choose to buy one with an extremely fast spin cycle, so that the dryer requires less energy. Perhaps when you sell your house next, you will choose to buy a home closer to were you work, perhaps something smaller, and maybe even a condo. And voila, you have reduced your energy consumption by 50% over ten to twenty years.
Slashdot Mirror
Without a source for the rates you quote, how do I know that you aren't making these numbers up? In this world of made up facts and subjective reality, we really don't need another unsupported list. And while you're at it, what about Taiwan? What about Japan? What about Korea? Where are they on your unattributed list?
BP built the initial chamber that was lowered onto the well from scratch. And it failed, because it was an experiment. They built the top hat system from scratch, and it failed because it was an experiment. They have tried numerous methods to fix this gusher and they have failed. Finally we are starting to see a more robust system being put in place. But even this system was almost certainly built from scratch.
My point is that coming up with the processes to fix a gushing well from scratch while the oil is flowing is not a good approach. There should have been in place devices and systems to deal with such a disaster. They should have been designed, built and ready, before the disaster. Given the repeated failure of their initial attempts, it seems very likely that they did not devote significant thought (BEFORE THE EXPLOSION) to what would happen if their blowout preventer failed in such a disastrous fashion. That is unforgivable.
Oh, and in my original post, I specifically used the phrase "...before they started drilling..." in the first sentence. The next phrase "... BP didn't devote any significant resources..." is clearly referring to the same "before explosion" period. I even put "before" in italics.
it's also an outright lie to say BP haven't invested significant resources in dealing with the blowout. they have spent over 3 billion and deployed 22,000 people to try contain the spill, and they are still up for billions more. i'm not sure what circles you travel in but i'd consider billions of dollars significant.
Straw man much? I didn't say that BP hadn't invested any money in fixing this. I said that BP hadn't invested significant resources BEFORE the blowout.
having emergency tankers "ready" at the dock (whatever that is supposed to be) is a useless idea. whats the tanker supposed to do after it arrives? not to mention that it'll take days for a tanker to get there at best anyway.
What I actually said/meant was that there should be tankers AND equipment to straddle a broken pipe, the same type of equipment that they have just finished building and installing. My point is that this shouldn't be trial and error. As a condition of drilling, they should have already invested in recovery methods before they begin. As for your comment about it taking days for the emergency tankers to arrive, oil has been gushing for 3 months! Even if the tankers were docked in Europe, it would only take a couple of weeks or so at full steam to arrive at the gulf. That is significantly less than 3 months.
Your post doesn't make sense, and you will forgive me if I write you off as a corporate drone.
Large corporations are profit generating machines. That's it. They don't try to do good (for its own sake). They don't try to do evil (for its own sake). Everything they do is based on the (perceived) impact on the bottom line, usually over time periods of less than 5 years. Any ascribing of emotion to them, be it positive or negative is based on illusion. For this reason, it is necessary to have a democratic government act as the ultimate policeman, in order to make sure the large corporations act in the public interest.
Any success that BP may or may not have in this endeavor does not change the fact that they should have had methods to cap a blowout ready before they started drilling. The fact that this well has been gushing for months is simply unacceptable. The keystone cops spectacle of Top-Hat, Hot-Tap, Junk Shot (tm) is strong evidence that BP didn't devote any significant resources to dealing with a deep water blowout. Strong regulation of these rogue corporations is needed. They should not be able to drill without having capping equipment and emergency tankers ready at dock.
If binaural beats are supposed to exist only in the brain, why, when I play back the files linked to on wikipedia do I hear the beat fluctuation when I listen to only one of my earphones at a time? Is VLC mixing the left and right tracks and not telling me? Is it happening on my mac? Or is the file not a real beats file?
As I understand it, this is an area in the Pacific Ocean where floating plastic bits accumulate due to ocean currents. In this area, the amount of plastic per unit area of ocean is far higher than in the rest of the ocean. However, the density the plastic bits is not remotely island like. You would likely not be able to see it from satellite photos. The best way to see it would be to sail there. and then to drag a fine screen behind the boat. When you pull in the screen, you would find quite a few little bits of plastic, some larger pieces, and more importantly you would find small fish that would have ingested pieces of plastic. These plastic bits would likely poison the small fish before it can grow larger.
Honestly, I find the proposal impractical, and I am not sure of its seriousness or veracity. It sounds fishy. They say there are 4 million tonnes of plastic in the area (which seems reasonable). But then they propose to make an island the size of the big island of Hawaii. No details are given to show they have actually thought seriously about this. What would keep it in place (hmmmm...the current might keep it there)? What would keep it structurally intact? What about hurricanes? Honestly, if they are going to propose something like this, they should give more evidence they have thought about it.
When he jumped, he wasn't even sure he was falling to the earth or just floating around.
Interesting observation. Doing this would be very odd. There would be one large difference between before jumping and after: I think he would have felt full gravity/normal force when sitting on the platform, and once he jumped he would have felt weightless. In the rarefied atmosphere, jumping would feel a lot like being in orbit.
Here is a music video by Boards of Canada, in which they show the original footage of Joseph Kittinger jumping from 102,800 ft. Much of the last part of the video is from something else, but the first part is real. It really is haunting to see him push off of the balloon platform.
Again, you aren't making any argument. You are merely claiming that someone else has arguments, but you aren't even stating them. You reproduce a few slogans and buzzwords..."myth-based", "...science into religion...", "sycophants", "That is real science." etc. However, your post really amounts to nothing. Unless you are capable of producing proper, coherent arguments, with premises that support a conclusion, then you are only emulating the religious behavior that you accuse your opponents of displaying.
Ahhh, but now you show the weakness in McIntyre's methods, namely that by referring to keywords instead of arguments, it invites the casual reader to "fill in the blanks" with whatever their pre-conceived notions are. And by the snide tone that McIntyre uses, you are invited to fill in those blanks with something nefarious. Here, for the purposes of this post, you have filled in the blanks with something that sounds at first more reasonable.
The "hide the decline" and "divergence problem" issues are this: A method was developed to use tree ring data as a proxy for past temperatures for which we have no measured temperature records. The "decline" or "divergence problem" is that the method proved to be unreliable when used to "measure" temperatures in the present - the real temperature record went one way, and the tree ring data went another way.
However, I suspect you are guilty of omitting important issues from the discussion, specifically the existence of other types of temperature proxies, and their correlation with each other. Those who reconstruct pre-instrumental temperatures use numerous different methods, including corals, lake sediments, ocean sediments, ice core records, tree-rings, to name but a few. If those temperature proxies correlated to each other quite tightly for, say a thousand years, and then one of them, say the tree-ring proxy, suddenly diverged from the other proxies and from the instrumental temperatures, it would be reasonable to assume that something peculiarly recent was messing with the tree-rings.
The decline in the tree-ring proxy temperatures is no secret in the scientific community. Indeed there have been a number of papers that hypothesize reasons for the recent divergence of tree-ring proxy temperatures. A cursory search on scholar.google.com will support this assertion. And to quote the CCE report, "We find that divergence is well acknowledged in the literature, including CRU papers."
I've read Climate Audit. Here is a recent snippet on the "hiding the decline" meme: (http://climateaudit.org/2010/07/06/muir-russell-what-ill-be-looking-for/)
Another obvious battleground issue. I don’t see how this field can rise above paleophrenology if they are not prepared to renounce such strategems as the “trick to hide the decline” or adopt Gavin Schmidt’s view that deleting adverse data is a “good way” to deal with a problem. It isn’t.
Penn State took the position that deleting adverse data was “legitimate”, airily referring to non-existent authorities on the matter. However, the Oxburgh panel couldn’t abase themselves quite so low and did not agree that the trick was a good way to deal with the divergence problem, finding instead that it was “regrettable” that IPCC and others have “sometimes” “neglected to highlight” this issue (evading the obvious fact that the deletion of inconvenient data by CRU authors and their close Climategate correspondents was intentional).
Given the opposite findings of Oxburgh and Penn State on the legitimacy of the trick to hide the decline (one finding it “regrettable”and the other “legitimate”), it will be interesting to see how Muir Russell splits the difference. I wouldn’t be surprised if they find a way of avoiding the matter altogether, saying it falls into someone else’s remit.
The above quote displays very clearly the modus operandi of Steve McIntyre at Climate Audit. Specifically the strategy is to sound like you have the truth, to sound like you have a valid argument, without actually giving it, or at least without stating it clearly and logically. In the Climate Audit universe, it is good enough to sound like you have the truth. Perception is everything. The strategy is not unlike a magician's deliberate misdirection; in the practice of magic and illusion the most important skill is to understand how your audience forms their perceptions, what queues they use to decide what is true. When you know this, you can manipulate it; you can distract the audience, make them miss the real trick, and thus convince them that you can do something that is actually impossible.
In the case of the above posting, McIntyre focusses on a very brief excerpt from the stolen email, which says something to the effect of "using a trick to hide the decline". He repeats this phrase, refers to it repeatedly. But notice how he does not elaborate on the subtext, the background of the email. Notice how he doesn't give any real scientific argument. He merely refers to the surface meaning of "trick to hide the decline", inferring something nefarious, a conspiracy to hide a decline in temperatures, something to trick us. The surface meaning is enough for him. His lack of elaboration is a form of misdirection.
A bit of research and logic will lead you to the conclusion that the "trick" to "hide the decline" was a logically valid was scientifically valid IF the purpose of the research paper was to give a proper reconstruction of historical temperatures. The temperature reconstruction in question was using samplings of tree-rings to reconstruct temperatures before the existence of instrumental temperature readings. Within the tree-rings are certain chemical signatures that correlate closely with atmospheric temperatures. However, during the 1960's and onward the signals from the tree-rings diverge from temperature readings made using instruments such as thermometers. The tree-rings signals seem to show a decline in temperatures, while the thermometers show an increase during the 1960's and onward. Since the instrumental temperature readings are taken to be a more reliable method of measuring temperatures, the instrumental readings were substituted into the temperature reconstruction to "hide the decline". Honestly, what is the better indicator of temperature? A few tree ring measurements, o
Both soccer and markets are determined largely by micro-decisions that human beings make. And many of those decisions are not rational, but instead are based upon emotion. In market behavior, you could argue that humans have specific material needs, and humans make rational decisions to meet those needs. But this ignores the fact that many of our purchasing decisions are made for reasons that we do not fully comprehend. Why do we like a particular type of music? Why do we like particular brands? Why do we want buy goods that are popular, just because they are popular? These decisions are fundamentally emotional, and are not easily predictable at a specific level. Similarly in soccer, mood plays a role. The tide of the battle turns one way or another. Confidence is gained and lost for intangible reasons. And the results of games is determined largely confidence.
If stock markets and soccer are governed by such chaotic factors as human emotions, how can they ever truly be predictable. I would argue that to make predictions about such things, one would have to have the god-like ability to track the brain activity of all of the participants in the system. And right now we barely understand the most rudimentary parts of our minds. Thus I would argue that there is a fundamental limit to the certainty of the types of predictions made by, for example Wall Street quants. I think the recent housing market crash bears this out. Despite our hubris, human beings are not gods.
Logic is the foundation of our civilization. Logic is our way of making sense of the world. Logic allows us to build planes, trains and buildings. And the basis of logic is a well formed argument. Your surprise that I would dare to deconstruct your argument is telling. It is symptomatic of a civilization that is letting go of the tools of reason and logic that have made us great and powerful. One of the hallmark transitions in the decline and fall of the Roman Empire was a slow and steady abandonment of reason. That ended in the Dark Ages, a time of economic, social and political collapse. For one thousand years, European civilization stagnated in superstition and fear. Not a single large domed structure was built during this thousand year period. The Romans forgot how to do it.
Your should be ashamed of your flippant disregard for reason and logic. You are a citizen of a democracy. It is your duty as a voter to be rational and logical.
...but they have been an increase in CO2 after a period of increased warming, not the other way around. Of course, it makes since that it can happen, there is just no evidence that it ever has.
You seem to state this as if you and/or your favorite GW denier was the first to notice this, and as if it went unnoticed by those who spend their lives analyzing this data. This is called an implicit straw man argument, implying that your opponents hold an erroneous opinion which they don't actually hold, and then using this distortion to defeat them.
Well, the people who study this full time are fully aware that over the last few hundred thousand years the start of ice ages precedes a fall in carbon dioxide levels. They believe that something else, likely fluctuations in the Earth's orbit around the sun, initiated ice ages, causing a cooling effect. This initial cooling then caused the carbon dioxide levels to drop, likely due to ocean effects, which caused even more cooling. The cycle feeds upon itself until the Earth enters a new ice age. Likewise, warming after an ice age is thought to be strengthened significantly by increased carbon dioxide levels.
The difference is that now WE are causing an increase in carbon dioxide levels. Carbon dioxide, that in previous ice ages was an amplifier of change instead of the root cause, IS NOW THE ROOT CAUSE OF THE WARMING.
There is no way you can make the claim that every possible cause for warming except human produced greenhouse gasses have been eliminated. In fact, this is the essence of the real debate. We simply do not have the level of understanding of climate change that you seem to think we do.
You are exhibiting here a type of fallacy known as argument from ignorance. Basically, instead of addressing the known factors that regulate the temperature, namely greenhouse gasses, orbital fluctuations, volcanic eruptions, asteroid impacts, and solar variations to name a few, you invent some unknown factor that we are supposed to know nothing about. You then implicitly ascribe the majority of climate variations to this unknown factor. Since you have not specified that factor, you are basically immune from criticism. I cannot show this factor is or is not a true cause of climate variations because I have no idea what it is. In essence, you are saying that because we do not know everything (or almost everything) about the climate, we know next to nothing about it. And since all human knowledge is incomplete, this would doom humanity to know nothing about the world forever.
Firstly, I'm not writing an encyclopedia here, but merely providing my opionions and thoughts, which you are welcome to either agree with, or disagree with.
Well, if you are not going to be rigorous in your knowledge and in your logic, then your opinion is just noise. It amounts to nothing. Worse than nothing in fact. Because if you are convinced that your opinion has weight when in fact it is as substantial as dust, and if you are a voter in a democracy, and if there are enough of you, then our democracy will make increasingly bad decisions, based on insubstantial and illogical "knowledge", that has little or no relationship to objective reality.
The fact that I am not sitting under 2 km of ice suggests to me that the ice has been melting for quite some time already. The fact that ice continues to melt, knowing that history, does not seem that abnormal.
Your statement carries an implicit assumption the current melting of ice has been part of a consistent trend over the last ten thousand years or so. What you do not acknowledge is the possibility that most of the melting happened very quickly, over a few centuries, and that after a couple of thousand years, the majority of the ice had melted. You do not acknowledge the possibility that over the past few millennia, the amount of ice in the world has been relatively stable. And besides that, you have not given any reputable source or evidence for what you say, so we might as well be debating how many angels fit on the head of a pin.
Personally, I believe that with a claim that has as much impact as global warming, the amount of proof that must be presented has to be very strong, and I don't believe that the evidence for human caused global warming has that level of conclusiveness.
The above quote gives away your lack of logical skill and your serious lack of understanding of the scientific process and of what science actually is. You speak of proof, but in science, hypotheses are only either refuted or supported. If a particular hypothesis has survived many attempts at refutation, it becomes highly probable that it is true. We may prove an hypothesis wrong, but we cannot prove it to be true. All scientific reasoning is at its heart inductive, and thus based upon probabilities. It is not certain that the sun will rise tomorrow. It is only highly probable.
The fact that you have not bothered to consider the logic of what you speak of properly causes me to doubt that you actually care about the truth of what you write. It is a symptom of someone who treats facts and arguments like pieces of clothing that they can put on or take off at their whim. Such a person treats truth as if it is relative. There are no facts, only opinions in such a worldview, and so it is acceptable to think or believe anything that makes you feel comfortable about the way you live.
The earth has been getting warmer for thousands of years. Right now, where I am sitting, there used to be 2KM of ice. That ice is clearly gone now. That glacier has melted. Our current glaciers are just continuing to melt.
Your reasoning is flawed, and is based on an ignorance of the scientifically determined factors that affect the climate. If I may summarize the structure of your argument: The climate has changed in the past. Humans have not always existed. Therefore, humans cannot be causing climate change now.
The implicit reasoning is flawed because overemphasizes some causes of past warming, namely orbital fluctuations and asteroid collisions with the Earth, while underemphasizing the past role of greenhouse gas concentrations in causing the Earth to warm. The fact that other things have influenced the climate in the past does not mean that human produced greenhouse gasses cannot cause warming today. And if the climate is currently warming, and we can (and have) eliminated other possible causes for that change, then human produced greenhouse gasses are the most likely cause of our current warming.
This fallacious reasoning can be quite effective, since many in the public have lost their habit of logical analysis. The fact that this posting has been modded to 5, interesting is testament to this.
Oh yeah?! Well...
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This post has been terminated.
Does this not indicate that corporations such as BP, when under the gun will result to Orwellian bending of reality to serve their interests. I must admit I am disturbed by the recent comments by the BP CEO that minimize the environmental impacts of the spill.
Their apparent strategy:
Understate the amount of oil erupting from the well.
Apply dispersants so much of the oil stays underwater.
Implement a PR strategy to deny the impact of the invisible underwater oil.
As long as Flash and its cousins Flex and Shockwave remain the simplest tools for producing drop-dead gorgeous Websites, they'll keep their place on the Internet
I don't know about gorgeous, but I've seen lots of drop-dead websites. As in websites that cause my browser to "drop dead" and my CPU fan to whir like it is about to fly away.
How about confiscating shares and reselling them? I don't think that is done right now.
If you want to make corporations pay attention regarding flagrantly negligent behavior, how about threatening to take the damages directly out of shareholder equity. After all, when you buy shares, you already assume a fairly large amount of risk. If shareholders can be held liable for damages done by their company, I suspect corporate behavior would change markedly. The liability would be limited to the amount of equity owned. In an extreme case, perhaps where a corporation has blatantly flaunted the law, the shareholders or owners could have all of their equity liquidated, and sold to other buyers. Call it the corporate death penalty.
After all, if corporations are "people", why shouldn't they be held to the same level of responsibility as people? Why shouldn't they have penalties similar to those which we the people must live with? The idea of a corporate death penalty would likely have a huge effect, even if it is never used. Corporations would be far less likely to cut corners on safety. BP would have had to factor into its bottom line the costs of say drilling another relief well at the same time as the current well. They would be less likely to risk using an inferior method of cementing the casing. They would have had proven methods of capping such blowouts in place before they started drilling.
You aren't going to have to shut off your heating and electrical devices to reduce your consumption of energy. It will take years to happen, and it will begin with you making accumulating changes to what you buy and how you use energy. Eventually when your current car wears out, you will buy a new one. Instead of buying a Tahoe, you will buy the most efficient car that suits your needs. Eventually you will save up enough money to insulate your home more effectively. When your washing machine wears out you will choose to buy one with an extremely fast spin cycle, so that the dryer requires less energy. Perhaps when you sell your house next, you will choose to buy a home closer to were you work, perhaps something smaller, and maybe even a condo. And voila, you have reduced your energy consumption by 50% over ten to twenty years.
I honestly think that this is one of Jon Stewart's best routines ever. First there was TOP HAT. Then there was the HOT TAP. Hmmmmm.....
Enjoy
The May 13th Episode