"What each upcoming season's weather will be we aren't sure."
Since we know what's happening to weather, we have a pretty good idea.
"But we are sure our changes to the atmosphere are warming the planet..."
Speak for yourself. I don't know any such thing, and I've seen A LOT of data that say it isn't so.
"All your denialist microquibbles, character assassinations, and FUD are red herrings."
My "denialist microquibble" was about why a politician who was asking perfectly legitimate questions about things that are in fact questionable, is being labeled stupid for doing so. Calling people stupid for asking questions is not the way science works.
"It's basically accepted by everyone except one political faction in one scientifically illiterate country."
That's the most hilarious comment you've made yet. And you call ME "denialist". Wow. I must remember to inquire about what brand of blinders you're using, because they seem to be good ones.
"This is about science in general, not AGW in particular."
The video clip being discussed was about AGW, and it was the cause of people saying here that politicians are stupid. Claiming otherwise won't get you anywhere.
"But if you want to make it about AGW, the science is not based on surveys, nor is it based on computer models."
I didn't "make it" about anything. The videoclip was about AGW, and OP's post was (largely) about the video clip. And the video clip, in turn, was largely about the survey. You're trying to move the goalposts here.
But aside from that, you're still wrong. The computer models are supposed to be based on the science, not the other way around.
"It is based on old school physics that's been developing over centuries."
It is based on old-school physics that have been discredited. Fourier's conclusions about his friend's experiments turned out to be wrong... the experimental apparatus in fact formed a real greenhouse. But... greenhouse gas theory is not based based on a the kind of heating that occurs in real greenhouses, which is known to be the prevention of convective cooling. Greenhouse gas theory is completely different, having to do with trapping of radiation. Which has been thoroughly discredited. (Just one example of said discrediting.)
Don't try to debate me on the science, guy. I've got you beat. I can keep shooting you down all day.
"Who is using coercion to get this guy fired? I have yet to hear of a single person using violence or a threat of violence as a means to have him fired."
I didn't write violence, I wrote coercion. Violence can be used as a form of coercion, but there are other forms too. They are not quite the same things.
Bullying is a form of coercion, too, but not all bullying is violent. Just for example.
"Asking a man on the street for a dollar, and holding a gun to his head and asking him for a dollar are essentially the same thing. Can I get a Megyn Kelly meme?"
That isn't even close to what I wrote. Trying to put words in other peoples' mouths is not logic.
And I saw Megyn Kelly once, on YouTube. I don't remember what it was about. What does she have to do with anything?
75 or so cherry-picked responses out of a 10,000-person survey is not anything a responsible statistician would call valid.
And the "expert" doesn't even try to defend it. He does a fine job of moving the goalposts, but he doesn't support the actual claim at all. Because, of course, he knows it's bogus.
We also know, from the science, that there is no significant evidence that "climate change" has been increasing either the number or severity of extreme weather events. And so on.
The real question here is why a politician is actually asking perfectly legitimate questions, but is being labeled stupid on Slashdot for doing so.
"I am a lesbian and I still think hounding Eich for standing for Prop. 8 and threatening to boycott a cornerstone of the internet and internet development if he was CEO of the Mozilla foundation is complete and utter intolerant bullshit. I am very disappointed with people doing such things and disappointed he caved to such."
Thank you! While I am not a lesbian, I wrote the same thing a couple of days ago, and as a result an admin at Slashdot downgraded my karma. (Not just mod points... my overall modding was positive in the thread. But my karma was directly reduced, so it had to be somebody at Slashdot.)
I want to remind people that disagreeing is one thing, and coercion is quite another. Bullying and coercion of an entire -- and important -- organization has long been considered un-American.
You are still missing the point, which was: the hypocrisy of using coercion to try to get this guy fired.
If, as the other respondent said, this was a CEO who had pro-gay political views, and a conservative political movement tried to get him ousted (never forget this is about politics), those same liberals would be foaming at the mouth.
Hypocrisy is hypocrisy. It isn't about whether Eich is a good guy. It's about what OKCupid decided to do about it.
"I understand science well enough to know that evidence-free claims won't get you far."
But apparently you don't understand it well enough to know that when others do present evidence (as I have elsewhere in this thread), and you ignore it, you don't get to claim there was no evidence.
"I wasn't aware OKCupid had funded a voter initiative to deny Eich from holding the office of CEO at Mozilla, backed by the full enforcement power of the State."
Coercion is coercion. And both actions are coercion. The problem here is that OKCupid thinks someone else's coercion is not okay, but their own coercion is.
How's that for "moral equivalence"?
You can argue about severity or degree all you want, but it's still hypocrisy.
"You confuse freedom of opinion with freedom from consequences."
I have confused nothing. Bullying people over their political views has long been considered to be an un-American activity.
The whole situation is hypocritical as hell. The one group says "He tried to restrict our freedom of association!" (or something similar), so they say "We'll try to restrict HIS political freedom by coercing his business partners."
No matter how you slice it, OKCupid is taking the stance that it's okay for THEM to do something that they won't tolerate in others.
"A year? People have been telling Microsoft Metro was a catastrophe since they released the public betas."
Even so, they've taken this dubious fall-back position: "Okay, we admit that it sucks and that nobody likes it, so we're going back to the old way. But we're going to keep pushing the obviously failed 'new' way at you anyway."
Because... ??? Honestly, the only reason that comes to mind is that they are incapable of admitting that the whole thing was just plain a bad idea.
But wait! I guess it did accomplish something. It got others in the industry to also adopt eye-burning flat toolbars and icons, containing little pictograms that the brain associates with nothing in particular.
"Nobody is denying you your opinion, they are just telling you what an asshole you are."
Ahah. But regardless of who you were aiming that comment at, this is the crux of the matter.
OKCupid is not just "disagreeing" with Eich, they are denying him his freedom of political opinion by trying to get him removed from his position at the company where he works. That's harm, not disagreement, and it's rather a violation of traditional American principles.
know you feel like you're being civil, but telling people that "It's just my opinion that you shouldn't be allowed to marry who you want" is far more insulting than I think you realize it is.
I realize it. And I even agree that his political views may reasonably be seen as offensive, or wrong-headed, or harmful. But you're missing my point. Or rather points.
The first point is: those are his personal views, not those of his company. Attempting to punish the entire (large) project because of the opinions of one person is just stupid. Even if they felt that what he did is a crime, trying punish everybody else for his behavior is not exactly acceptable behavior.
The second point is: he is ENTITLED, legally and morally, to his opinions on politics. If you don't like his views, vote against them. That is the way the United States is supposed to work. Here are a couple of quotes that illustrate the point:
"Freedom of speech is worthless without the freedom of offensive speech. Goebbels and Himmler were for freedom of speech... that was inoffensive to the state." -- Noam Chomsky
---
"I may disagree with everything that you say, but I shall defend to the death you're right to say it." -- Voltaire
---
"Popular speech does not need protection. Part of the Founders' concern in writing the First Amendment was that majorities might try to use the force of government to silence people with unpopular views." -- U.S. Supreme Court, National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie, 1977
"not willing to allow some people to have equality, freedom, or other social rights"
"That is the context of the discussion. If you can't grok this, well then you are a useless human being."
And a company is calling for a boycott of another entire company because it is not willing to allow one single person to have the freedom and the social right (not to mention Constitutional right) to follow his own personal views on politics.
If you can't grok this, then you don't understand what "hypocrisy" means.
"he meaning of the word 'boycott' can be easy looked up in a dictionary, likely even on wikipedia. The most you can accuse OKCupid for is a 'call for' boycott."
I wrote "trying to boycott". Close enough for most English speakers, I think.
"Which I support. That Eich guy should be removed from his position and imho prosecuted."
Support away. It says a lot about you that you would join a boycott of an entire major product (and all the employees of the project) over one guy's politics.
"You're only noticing it more because YOU are paying more attention now than you did before."
No, I am referring to a definite trend that I have observed over the last 6 years.
Of course intolerance has always been around. But when the Left, which promotes itself as the group most behind social and civil tolerance, instead becomes an intolerant bully to those who politely disagree, it is noticeable. VERY noticeable.
Many people, not just me, have noticed how the political Left has turned into "the party of political correctness and intolerance". It isn't something I imagined.
The UN is not disconnected from "all of us". This discussion feels like when something is happening in the EU and everyone complains that "the EU decided that we have to do X" and "the EU has taken away our liberty to Y".
Only because you seem to have forgotten what this discussion was about: whether plausible motivations for the IPCC to be politically driven.
I didn't say my scenario was real or even likely; only that it was plausible.
"... because I don't really want to get into the bickering about whether it is or not, this is about something completely different..."
But that's not reasonable, because there is no rational way to separate this from the scenario you describe. IPCC itself has said that even if a large percentage of total global resources were expended to reduce CO2 emissions, it is unlikely to do much good.
Don't you think it's reasonable to insist on some kind of solid (as opposed to the existing very weak) science showing that CO2 warming is real, before expending a significant portion of global resources on "solving" only a small part of it? If I made the claim that the sky was falling (not so different a claim as it may first appear), wouldn't you want some kind of strong evidence that it actually was before spending 20% of your country's GDP to try to prevent it?
Maybe the same resources would be better spent making sure starving children in the world have enough to eat.
Seems to me, OKCupid trying to boycott a perfectly good company and product over a single person's political views, is grounds for boycotting OKCupid.
Stupidity abounds. This is a grand example of the INtolerance of opposing views we have been seeing since Obama took office. (I'm not blaming him, just pointing out the approximate timing.)
"You keep trotting out that invisionfree list of selected papers, as if that somehow invalidates the entire body of work on climate science over the last few decades ((tens of thousands of papers)"
If you think so, then you have reading comprehension issues. Because when I have cited it, I have clearly stated that what it is refuting is that bullshit "97% consensus" claim made recently. I did not claim it says anything about the science itself, except that the survey purporting to show that "97%" was a BS parody of responsible statistics.
"Maybe you should try analysing the data yourself instead of parroting someone else's misinformation; I did."
So did I. The data you cite was cherry-picked, so of course it supports your conclusion. Naomi Oreskes tried the same kind of literature cherry-picking about 10 years ago, and the method is no more statistically valid now than it was then. Get real.
Dude, shoving cherry picked selection of literature from an explicit searched for the phrase "climate change" just won't wash as science. I don't know why you think I'm stupid, but in my engineering statistics classes in college I learned better than to fall for that kind of BS.
"If you truly believe this is not an accurate survey of the state of climate science, despite similar results to half a dozen other surveys"
Please cite these half-dozen other surveys. Hell... while most meteorologists are not "climate researchers" per se, they are professionals in the climate field, and their own survey of the members of their own professional association found a "consensus" of only 52%... but that isn't even the most interesting part. That was (from the linked abstract) that 2 of the top 3 predictors for belief in AGW were "perceived scientific consensus" and "liberal political ideology".
No surprise here.
The point being: I don't have to have access to contrary surveys to know that a particular survey was done using improper statistical methods. Suggesting that I do demonstrates a weak understanding of science.
Slashdot Mirror
And by the way: here are a few of the peer-reviewed papers by those people you claim don't exist.
"What each upcoming season's weather will be we aren't sure."
Since we know what's happening to weather, we have a pretty good idea.
"But we are sure our changes to the atmosphere are warming the planet..."
Speak for yourself. I don't know any such thing, and I've seen A LOT of data that say it isn't so.
"All your denialist microquibbles, character assassinations, and FUD are red herrings."
My "denialist microquibble" was about why a politician who was asking perfectly legitimate questions about things that are in fact questionable, is being labeled stupid for doing so. Calling people stupid for asking questions is not the way science works.
"It's basically accepted by everyone except one political faction in one scientifically illiterate country."
That's the most hilarious comment you've made yet. And you call ME "denialist". Wow. I must remember to inquire about what brand of blinders you're using, because they seem to be good ones.
"This is about science in general, not AGW in particular."
The video clip being discussed was about AGW, and it was the cause of people saying here that politicians are stupid. Claiming otherwise won't get you anywhere.
"But if you want to make it about AGW, the science is not based on surveys, nor is it based on computer models."
I didn't "make it" about anything. The videoclip was about AGW, and OP's post was (largely) about the video clip. And the video clip, in turn, was largely about the survey. You're trying to move the goalposts here.
But aside from that, you're still wrong. The computer models are supposed to be based on the science, not the other way around.
"It is based on old school physics that's been developing over centuries."
It is based on old-school physics that have been discredited. Fourier's conclusions about his friend's experiments turned out to be wrong... the experimental apparatus in fact formed a real greenhouse. But... greenhouse gas theory is not based based on a the kind of heating that occurs in real greenhouses, which is known to be the prevention of convective cooling. Greenhouse gas theory is completely different, having to do with trapping of radiation. Which has been thoroughly discredited. (Just one example of said discrediting.)
Don't try to debate me on the science, guy. I've got you beat. I can keep shooting you down all day.
"Who is using coercion to get this guy fired? I have yet to hear of a single person using violence or a threat of violence as a means to have him fired."
I didn't write violence, I wrote coercion. Violence can be used as a form of coercion, but there are other forms too. They are not quite the same things.
Bullying is a form of coercion, too, but not all bullying is violent. Just for example.
"Asking a man on the street for a dollar, and holding a gun to his head and asking him for a dollar are essentially the same thing. Can I get a Megyn Kelly meme?"
That isn't even close to what I wrote. Trying to put words in other peoples' mouths is not logic.
And I saw Megyn Kelly once, on YouTube. I don't remember what it was about. What does she have to do with anything?
"And this is why we fail."
Yep. That's why you fail.
We KNOW that the survey that reported a 97% consensus was, in fact, bogus.
75 or so cherry-picked responses out of a 10,000-person survey is not anything a responsible statistician would call valid.
And the "expert" doesn't even try to defend it. He does a fine job of moving the goalposts, but he doesn't support the actual claim at all. Because, of course, he knows it's bogus.
We also know, from the science, that there is no significant evidence that "climate change" has been increasing either the number or severity of extreme weather events. And so on.
The real question here is why a politician is actually asking perfectly legitimate questions, but is being labeled stupid on Slashdot for doing so.
This is the domain of ideologues, not science.
Correction: I meant to write "bullying and coercion of an entire organization over one member's politics has long been considered un-American."
You don't have to think Eich is a good guy to recognize this.
"I am a lesbian and I still think hounding Eich for standing for Prop. 8 and threatening to boycott a cornerstone of the internet and internet development if he was CEO of the Mozilla foundation is complete and utter intolerant bullshit. I am very disappointed with people doing such things and disappointed he caved to such."
Thank you! While I am not a lesbian, I wrote the same thing a couple of days ago, and as a result an admin at Slashdot downgraded my karma. (Not just mod points... my overall modding was positive in the thread. But my karma was directly reduced, so it had to be somebody at Slashdot.)
I want to remind people that disagreeing is one thing, and coercion is quite another. Bullying and coercion of an entire -- and important -- organization has long been considered un-American.
You are still missing the point, which was: the hypocrisy of using coercion to try to get this guy fired.
If, as the other respondent said, this was a CEO who had pro-gay political views, and a conservative political movement tried to get him ousted (never forget this is about politics), those same liberals would be foaming at the mouth.
Hypocrisy is hypocrisy. It isn't about whether Eich is a good guy. It's about what OKCupid decided to do about it.
"I understand science well enough to know that evidence-free claims won't get you far."
But apparently you don't understand it well enough to know that when others do present evidence (as I have elsewhere in this thread), and you ignore it, you don't get to claim there was no evidence.
"I wasn't aware OKCupid had funded a voter initiative to deny Eich from holding the office of CEO at Mozilla, backed by the full enforcement power of the State."
Coercion is coercion. And both actions are coercion. The problem here is that OKCupid thinks someone else's coercion is not okay, but their own coercion is.
How's that for "moral equivalence"?
You can argue about severity or degree all you want, but it's still hypocrisy.
"You confuse freedom of opinion with freedom from consequences."
I have confused nothing. Bullying people over their political views has long been considered to be an un-American activity.
The whole situation is hypocritical as hell. The one group says "He tried to restrict our freedom of association!" (or something similar), so they say "We'll try to restrict HIS political freedom by coercing his business partners."
No matter how you slice it, OKCupid is taking the stance that it's okay for THEM to do something that they won't tolerate in others.
"Honestly, why are you even on this site? Slashdot is kinda meant for tech talk, and all you do is rant with right-wing Rushtalk."
Reading comprehension issues much? Or, wait... more likely just logic failure.
Disagreeing with certain positions on those of the political Left wing does not make me Right wing. Unless you can only think in one dimension.
"A year? People have been telling Microsoft Metro was a catastrophe since they released the public betas."
Even so, they've taken this dubious fall-back position: "Okay, we admit that it sucks and that nobody likes it, so we're going back to the old way. But we're going to keep pushing the obviously failed 'new' way at you anyway."
Because... ??? Honestly, the only reason that comes to mind is that they are incapable of admitting that the whole thing was just plain a bad idea.
But wait! I guess it did accomplish something. It got others in the industry to also adopt eye-burning flat toolbars and icons, containing little pictograms that the brain associates with nothing in particular.
"Nobody is denying you your opinion, they are just telling you what an asshole you are."
Ahah. But regardless of who you were aiming that comment at, this is the crux of the matter.
OKCupid is not just "disagreeing" with Eich, they are denying him his freedom of political opinion by trying to get him removed from his position at the company where he works. That's harm, not disagreement, and it's rather a violation of traditional American principles.
know you feel like you're being civil, but telling people that "It's just my opinion that you shouldn't be allowed to marry who you want" is far more insulting than I think you realize it is.
I realize it. And I even agree that his political views may reasonably be seen as offensive, or wrong-headed, or harmful. But you're missing my point. Or rather points.
The first point is: those are his personal views, not those of his company. Attempting to punish the entire (large) project because of the opinions of one person is just stupid. Even if they felt that what he did is a crime, trying punish everybody else for his behavior is not exactly acceptable behavior.
The second point is: he is ENTITLED, legally and morally, to his opinions on politics. If you don't like his views, vote against them. That is the way the United States is supposed to work. Here are a couple of quotes that illustrate the point:
"Freedom of speech is worthless without the freedom of offensive speech. Goebbels and Himmler were for freedom of speech... that was inoffensive to the state." -- Noam Chomsky
---
"I may disagree with everything that you say, but I shall defend to the death you're right to say it." -- Voltaire
---
"Popular speech does not need protection. Part of the Founders' concern in writing the First Amendment was that majorities might try to use the force of government to silence people with unpopular views." -- U.S. Supreme Court, National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie, 1977
"not willing to allow some people to have equality, freedom, or other social rights"
"That is the context of the discussion. If you can't grok this, well then you are a useless human being."
And a company is calling for a boycott of another entire company because it is not willing to allow one single person to have the freedom and the social right (not to mention Constitutional right) to follow his own personal views on politics.
If you can't grok this, then you don't understand what "hypocrisy" means.
"So you *are* blaming Obama."
No, I'm not. I consider Obama to be about as "Left" as Mussolini.
"he meaning of the word 'boycott' can be easy looked up in a dictionary, likely even on wikipedia. The most you can accuse OKCupid for is a 'call for' boycott."
I wrote "trying to boycott". Close enough for most English speakers, I think.
"Which I support. That Eich guy should be removed from his position and imho prosecuted."
Support away. It says a lot about you that you would join a boycott of an entire major product (and all the employees of the project) over one guy's politics.
Can you say intolerance? Sure. I knew you could.
"You're only noticing it more because YOU are paying more attention now than you did before."
No, I am referring to a definite trend that I have observed over the last 6 years.
Of course intolerance has always been around. But when the Left, which promotes itself as the group most behind social and civil tolerance, instead becomes an intolerant bully to those who politely disagree, it is noticeable. VERY noticeable.
Many people, not just me, have noticed how the political Left has turned into "the party of political correctness and intolerance". It isn't something I imagined.
"Worldwide average temperatures. According to NASA and NOAA."
No, only according to GISS.
And there is real evidence that GISS "fudged" those figures.
"Spoken like a true denialist: "I don't have to have reliable data that supports my position, I just believe your data is wrong." No surprise here."
Spoken like a true ideologue who doesn't understand science.
The UN is not disconnected from "all of us". This discussion feels like when something is happening in the EU and everyone complains that "the EU decided that we have to do X" and "the EU has taken away our liberty to Y".
Only because you seem to have forgotten what this discussion was about: whether plausible motivations for the IPCC to be politically driven.
I didn't say my scenario was real or even likely; only that it was plausible.
"... because I don't really want to get into the bickering about whether it is or not, this is about something completely different..."
But that's not reasonable, because there is no rational way to separate this from the scenario you describe. IPCC itself has said that even if a large percentage of total global resources were expended to reduce CO2 emissions, it is unlikely to do much good.
Don't you think it's reasonable to insist on some kind of solid (as opposed to the existing very weak) science showing that CO2 warming is real, before expending a significant portion of global resources on "solving" only a small part of it? If I made the claim that the sky was falling (not so different a claim as it may first appear), wouldn't you want some kind of strong evidence that it actually was before spending 20% of your country's GDP to try to prevent it?
Maybe the same resources would be better spent making sure starving children in the world have enough to eat.
Seems to me, OKCupid trying to boycott a perfectly good company and product over a single person's political views, is grounds for boycotting OKCupid.
Stupidity abounds. This is a grand example of the INtolerance of opposing views we have been seeing since Obama took office. (I'm not blaming him, just pointing out the approximate timing.)
"You keep trotting out that invisionfree list of selected papers, as if that somehow invalidates the entire body of work on climate science over the last few decades ((tens of thousands of papers)"
If you think so, then you have reading comprehension issues. Because when I have cited it, I have clearly stated that what it is refuting is that bullshit "97% consensus" claim made recently. I did not claim it says anything about the science itself, except that the survey purporting to show that "97%" was a BS parody of responsible statistics.
"Maybe you should try analysing the data yourself instead of parroting someone else's misinformation; I did."
So did I. The data you cite was cherry-picked, so of course it supports your conclusion. Naomi Oreskes tried the same kind of literature cherry-picking about 10 years ago, and the method is no more statistically valid now than it was then. Get real.
Dude, shoving cherry picked selection of literature from an explicit searched for the phrase "climate change" just won't wash as science. I don't know why you think I'm stupid, but in my engineering statistics classes in college I learned better than to fall for that kind of BS.
"If you truly believe this is not an accurate survey of the state of climate science, despite similar results to half a dozen other surveys"
Please cite these half-dozen other surveys. Hell... while most meteorologists are not "climate researchers" per se, they are professionals in the climate field, and their own survey of the members of their own professional association found a "consensus" of only 52%... but that isn't even the most interesting part. That was (from the linked abstract) that 2 of the top 3 predictors for belief in AGW were "perceived scientific consensus" and "liberal political ideology".
No surprise here.
The point being: I don't have to have access to contrary surveys to know that a particular survey was done using improper statistical methods. Suggesting that I do demonstrates a weak understanding of science.