"The most recent headlines would probably read something like "man goes on insane rampage, kills six with bolt-action hunting rifle", as opposed to a dozen."
No, they wouldn't, because we ALREADY know that doesn't happen. Keep in mind that various states and municipalities have banned guns every which way from near complete bans to restrictions on "assault" weapons, and they've been doing it for over 50 years (80 if you count Federal restrictions that were put in place back in the 30s).
The Department of Justice has been keeping records and statistics for all of that time. And we KNOW that bans don't work. The government's own statistics prove it.
The places that had the strictest bans continued to have the highest crime rates. The only real difference was that the guns used were, by definition, illegal. But they were still obtained, and still used.
I am well aware that the "fewer guns equals fewer deaths" argument seems straightforward and logical, and even obvious. But things are not always what they seem. And we KNOW that, at least here in the United States, restrictions don't work. They don't reduce crime. In fact, the number and severity of crimes tends to go UP.
"Same reason 20" rims and body kits are popular on cars, even though they do nothing to help performance (and in some cases, diminish it)."
BS.
Barrel shrouds serve very useful purposes, or they would not exist on military rifles.
For one thing (the original AR-15 with its poorly-designed shroud nothwithstanding), they provide a forward grip while keeping the your hands off the hot barrel. For another, they provide mounting points for sights and other gadgetry.
However, the point must be made that on many consumer firearms, barrel shrouds ARE nothing more than cosmetic, and using barrel shrouds as an important criterion for determining whether something is an "assault weapon" is ridiculous.
Some years ago, for example, New Jersey banned certain types of guns. The venerable Ruger Mini-14 was not a banned gun... if it had the wooden stock. But the same gun with the optional plastic stock was banned. Functionally the rifles were identical, but they outlawed the one they thought was nasty-looking.
"If not bullets, then explosives. If not explosives, then chemicals."
This is the point I made when the first anti-gun cries started after that theater shooting.
He could have burst open the door, and tossed a home-made claymore in a shoebox up to the ceiling, killing EVERYONE inside with 10 or more pieces of shrapnel... far more damage than was actually done.
And it would be cheaper than even 1 good gun, not to mention body armor.
That's the 47% who admitted it. I'm really not sure whether I'd answer Gallup honestly if they asked me questions about that.
Gallup polls aside, the Department of Justice reports that per-capita private ownership of guns has been increasing for the last 20 years... and all the while, the crime rate has been dropping.
I'm not trying to claim cause and effect here, but the actual numbers can't be denied.
"... I see no "liberal" or UN conspiracy to take any of that from me."
Then you haven't been paying attention.
This is from a letter from a Congresscritter to her constituents, on July 13, 2012:
"I recently joined many of my colleagues in a letter urging President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton to reject a United Nations Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) that infringes on our constitutional right to bear arms. While the Administration voted in the U.N. General Assembly to participate in the negotiation of this treaty, I am extremely concerned that the ATT -- as it stands -- will pose serious threats to our national security, foreign policy, economic interests, and constitutional rights."
The UN has publicly stated that one of its goals is to restrict private firearms ownership throughout the world. And in case you have forgotten, they have a giant statue of a revolver outside their building. It doesn't stand for "shoot thy neighbor". It's a symbol of their GOAL of taking guns away from people.
"The NRA opposes (in part) an assault rifle ban because they understand the functional definition of a rifle like the AR-15 (detachable magazine, semi-automatic,...) would apply to many hunting rifles as well."
That is NOT the only reason, or even the main reason.
The 2nd Amendment was put in place specifically to give people the right to own "military-grade" firearms, so they could protect themselves from a potentially tyrannical government. Hunting actually has little or nothing to do with that. It's just one more reason.
"For instance the ACLU is very specifically against defending the 2nd ammendment, even if they do good work in other areas."
They USED TO be. But they finally realized how hypocritical it was to staunchly defend some rights but not others, when they are given the same weight by the Constitution.
They have actually been involved in a few cases of 2nd Amendment rights infringement. But even with those changes, it isn't something they seem to actively push.
Which still makes them hypocrites. Just a bit less so.
"It did, in 80's and early, pre-dotcom 90's. So it attracted a huge number of charlatans and frauds who heard that they can get an easy, high-paying job writing stuff in Visual Basic. And then the whole software industry went to shit."
I was around the whole time, and I don't see it that way at all. Visual Basic was a great (if pretty slow) platform for desktop apps. But it also made it easy to create sloppy, slapdash apps. That much I will give you.
But there were also better tools, like Delphi, which kicked Visual Basic's ass in just about every measure. But of course you needed to know some OO in order to really take advantage of it. In other words, it was geared more toward the "real programmer".
But the dot-com bust had NOTHING to do with programmers. It had to do with businesses that were riding the 'Net wave, with no coherent business plan or model. Some of the dot-com wave riders had excellent programmers working for them; but without a real business plan that didn't matter worth a damn.
"Boosting salaries will only help if there are enough people who would be great developers but are currently choosing to work in other fields because IT doesn't pay well enough."
My point was that long-term, since free markets generally work over a period of at least several years, if you pay programmers well, then the field will attract more programmers.
That is the way it works, with renewable commodities like people anyway. When there's a shortage, they are more valuable, so they get paid more. Higher pay attracts more people to the job. The market equalizes.
The problem is that in recent years corporations have seemed to want quality people, but want to pay them shit wages. That just doesn't work, in the long run.
I should also point out -- though I should not have to, because I felt it was clear that I was describing just one example, via analogy -- that total solar irradiance is NOT the only way the sun affects Earth's climate.
"Then you have the gall to form a "we don't know" type political opinion. It's insulting."
You, too, insist on taking my comments out of context, and calling that an argument?
WE DO NOT KNOW what the total solar irradiance was from any given period before the mid-19th century. We haven't been keeping good records anywhere near that long. We don't even know much about total solar irradiance as recently as 50 years ago. We do have records of sunspots, though, and there is a rough correlation.
(Translation: we don't know what it was before then.)
We can use certain proxies to estimate, just as we do with other kinds of data, but as Wikipedia points out, the variations are so small that we couldn't even measure it in realtime until recently. So your error bars are going to be VERY wide... perhaps too wide to provide anything useful at all.
"silentcoder has been remarkably patient with you. He's given you multiple excellent summaries of how the only thing that really matters is global ambient temperature increases, while you keep concentrating on the fact that it got cold yesterday where you live and have the gall to argue that it's the same thing."
And YOU are ignoring the context of the comment I made.
My ENTIRE point was only that NOT "all" of the indicators have been going the same way at the same time. You might view that as nitpicking -- go ahead if you like -- but it's still a true statement.
That's it. Nothing more. He doesn't HAVE to be "patient" with that, because it's an established and easily demonstrable fact.
HE was trying to argue that it doesn't matter. And maybe it doesn't. But I wasn't arguing about how much it mattered... only that it is the truth.
And I have been pretty damned patient with both of you, who completely failed to understand that, and apparently ASSUMED that I was arguing something that I wasn't.
"There's a HUGE deficit of IT workers in this country..."
If there is (and I don't think there is as huge a deficit as you say), then there is a simple, workable, market-based answer for that: PAY THEM MORE MONEY.
That's how "supply and demand" works: if there is a shortage of supply (and therefore a high demand), the goods you are short of (whether copper, peaches, or coders) cost more.
He did say that the meltdowns at Fukushima could be worse than Chernobyl... before they actually happened in full. But I don't recall him saying that they had been. Bit of a difference, there. One is a prediction based on incomplete information, the other is an observation of the results, after the fact.
Fukushima could have been much worse than Chernobyl. They had 20 YEARS worth of spent fuel rods in "temporary" storage that was only designed to hold them until they could be transported elsewhere. Totally irresponsible.
"Except the past 11 years haven't been centered around a maximum, but rather we just passed a minimum in 2008. Have you not even studied your own counter-"theory"?"
Apparently I know it better than you do. The activity may have been lower than usual, but it's STILL an 11-year (approximately) cycle, and the peak is STILL due about now. The last peak was around 2002.
The actual low part of the cycle was around 2007 or so (again, give or take... this is all approximate). And it could have been delayed to around 2008... 12-year cycles and longer are hardly unknown. But that still puts us right about on schedule. Even if it hasn't peaked yet, it's still on the upswing, and we can expect more activity than we have seen in the last 5 years or so.
"Any climatologist will tell you that an increase in the average temperature of the planet will cause some places to actually become colder (at least in the short term)."
No shit, Sherlock. You honestly think I didn't know that? That wasn't the point.
The point -- which you just repeated -- is that not all the indicators have gone in the same direction at any given time. GP was trying to claim ALL indicators point in the same direction, and that's just false.
"AGW proponents (in particular scientists) look at global averages, and the expected outcomes of that. They expect weather in some areas to change because of average warming in ways that may not be alike- including that global warming can CAUSE some places to have unusually cold weather."
Despite your assumptions, I am not an idiot.
Yes, it is exactly the same argument, but not in the sense you mean here. It is the same argument in that there is strong evidence that this represents WEATHER, i.e., a very temporary phenomenon, as opposed to "climate" which is steady or a trend.
A fact I mentioned myself in another comment. Your point is?
This graph of the last two solar cycles [wikipedia.org] shows that Solar Cycle 24 [wikipedia.org] is not nearly as strong as Cycle 23 (which peaked in 2000). So why didn't we have a similar or even greater melt off back in 2000?
Take a look at this graph from Wikipedia. Notice that the latter half of the 20th Century has seen more sunspot activity (generally correlated with total solar irradiance) than the earlier 20th Century, or the latter half of the 19th.
If you put a pot of water on the burner of your stove, and turn the heat up to, say just hypothetically, medium-high, and let it sit there for a while, guess what happens? The pot will eventually begin to boil, because you are inputting more heat than it can dissipate otherwise.
If you then turn the heat down to, say, 5 (out of 10), guess what happens? It continues to boil. Because you are STILL putting in more heat than the pot of water can otherwise dissipate.
See, the exact up-and-down of the knob doesn't matter so much. The only thing necessary is that the heat input is greater than the heat dissipation.
We have no evidence that this is NOT the case with the Earth in the latter half of the 20th Century. The heat input (solar irradiance) was unprecedented, at least for recorded times. Yes, it has lessened... but who is to say that it has lessened enough to cause cooling to actually occur? We don't know because we haven't been recording that long.
Has solar activity been lower lately? Yes. But as the pot of water analogy shows, the temperature does not have to follow the actual curve of the input (one of AGW advocates' favorite -- but completely bogus -- arguments). It is sufficient that the input is over the minimal level that results in a net gain. Even if it's only 50% of what it was last year (an exaggeration, but the point is made).
Although the SHORT-TERM solar cycle has been milder than normal, we have been at the peak of longer-term cycles (called the "Solar Grand Maximum"), and that is going away now, or will be within a year or two. I expect most global warming predictions to start failing just about then.
Yes, significance DOES have a very precise meaning (I get it you didn't detect the sarcasm in my comment). The issue is that it just doesn't apply in this case.
Slashdot Mirror
"The most recent headlines would probably read something like "man goes on insane rampage, kills six with bolt-action hunting rifle", as opposed to a dozen."
No, they wouldn't, because we ALREADY know that doesn't happen. Keep in mind that various states and municipalities have banned guns every which way from near complete bans to restrictions on "assault" weapons, and they've been doing it for over 50 years (80 if you count Federal restrictions that were put in place back in the 30s).
The Department of Justice has been keeping records and statistics for all of that time. And we KNOW that bans don't work. The government's own statistics prove it.
The places that had the strictest bans continued to have the highest crime rates. The only real difference was that the guns used were, by definition, illegal. But they were still obtained, and still used.
I am well aware that the "fewer guns equals fewer deaths" argument seems straightforward and logical, and even obvious. But things are not always what they seem. And we KNOW that, at least here in the United States, restrictions don't work. They don't reduce crime. In fact, the number and severity of crimes tends to go UP.
"Same reason 20" rims and body kits are popular on cars, even though they do nothing to help performance (and in some cases, diminish it)."
BS.
Barrel shrouds serve very useful purposes, or they would not exist on military rifles.
For one thing (the original AR-15 with its poorly-designed shroud nothwithstanding), they provide a forward grip while keeping the your hands off the hot barrel. For another, they provide mounting points for sights and other gadgetry.
However, the point must be made that on many consumer firearms, barrel shrouds ARE nothing more than cosmetic, and using barrel shrouds as an important criterion for determining whether something is an "assault weapon" is ridiculous.
Some years ago, for example, New Jersey banned certain types of guns. The venerable Ruger Mini-14 was not a banned gun... if it had the wooden stock. But the same gun with the optional plastic stock was banned. Functionally the rifles were identical, but they outlawed the one they thought was nasty-looking.
"If not bullets, then explosives. If not explosives, then chemicals."
This is the point I made when the first anti-gun cries started after that theater shooting.
He could have burst open the door, and tossed a home-made claymore in a shoebox up to the ceiling, killing EVERYONE inside with 10 or more pieces of shrapnel... far more damage than was actually done.
And it would be cheaper than even 1 good gun, not to mention body armor.
"47% based in a recent Gallup poll."
That's the 47% who admitted it. I'm really not sure whether I'd answer Gallup honestly if they asked me questions about that.
Gallup polls aside, the Department of Justice reports that per-capita private ownership of guns has been increasing for the last 20 years... and all the while, the crime rate has been dropping.
I'm not trying to claim cause and effect here, but the actual numbers can't be denied.
You honestly expect us to take an anecdotal opinion, expressed in a HuffPo article, seriously?
The NRA is the least extreme of all the gun owner's groups.
"... I see no "liberal" or UN conspiracy to take any of that from me."
Then you haven't been paying attention.
This is from a letter from a Congresscritter to her constituents, on July 13, 2012:
"I recently joined many of my colleagues in a letter urging President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton to reject a United Nations Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) that infringes on our constitutional right to bear arms. While the Administration voted in the U.N. General Assembly to participate in the negotiation of this treaty, I am extremely concerned that the ATT -- as it stands -- will pose serious threats to our national security, foreign policy, economic interests, and constitutional rights."
The UN has publicly stated that one of its goals is to restrict private firearms ownership throughout the world. And in case you have forgotten, they have a giant statue of a revolver outside their building. It doesn't stand for "shoot thy neighbor". It's a symbol of their GOAL of taking guns away from people.
"The NRA opposes (in part) an assault rifle ban because they understand the functional definition of a rifle like the AR-15 (detachable magazine, semi-automatic, ...) would apply to many hunting rifles as well."
That is NOT the only reason, or even the main reason.
The 2nd Amendment was put in place specifically to give people the right to own "military-grade" firearms, so they could protect themselves from a potentially tyrannical government. Hunting actually has little or nothing to do with that. It's just one more reason.
"For instance the ACLU is very specifically against defending the 2nd ammendment, even if they do good work in other areas."
They USED TO be. But they finally realized how hypocritical it was to staunchly defend some rights but not others, when they are given the same weight by the Constitution.
They have actually been involved in a few cases of 2nd Amendment rights infringement. But even with those changes, it isn't something they seem to actively push.
Which still makes them hypocrites. Just a bit less so.
"It did, in 80's and early, pre-dotcom 90's. So it attracted a huge number of charlatans and frauds who heard that they can get an easy, high-paying job writing stuff in Visual Basic. And then the whole software industry went to shit."
I was around the whole time, and I don't see it that way at all. Visual Basic was a great (if pretty slow) platform for desktop apps. But it also made it easy to create sloppy, slapdash apps. That much I will give you.
But there were also better tools, like Delphi, which kicked Visual Basic's ass in just about every measure. But of course you needed to know some OO in order to really take advantage of it. In other words, it was geared more toward the "real programmer".
But the dot-com bust had NOTHING to do with programmers. It had to do with businesses that were riding the 'Net wave, with no coherent business plan or model. Some of the dot-com wave riders had excellent programmers working for them; but without a real business plan that didn't matter worth a damn.
"Boosting salaries will only help if there are enough people who would be great developers but are currently choosing to work in other fields because IT doesn't pay well enough."
My point was that long-term, since free markets generally work over a period of at least several years, if you pay programmers well, then the field will attract more programmers.
That is the way it works, with renewable commodities like people anyway. When there's a shortage, they are more valuable, so they get paid more. Higher pay attracts more people to the job. The market equalizes.
The problem is that in recent years corporations have seemed to want quality people, but want to pay them shit wages. That just doesn't work, in the long run.
And they have nobody to blame but themselves.
I should also point out -- though I should not have to, because I felt it was clear that I was describing just one example, via analogy -- that total solar irradiance is NOT the only way the sun affects Earth's climate.
"Then you have the gall to form a "we don't know" type political opinion. It's insulting."
You, too, insist on taking my comments out of context, and calling that an argument?
WE DO NOT KNOW what the total solar irradiance was from any given period before the mid-19th century. We haven't been keeping good records anywhere near that long. We don't even know much about total solar irradiance as recently as 50 years ago. We do have records of sunspots, though, and there is a rough correlation.
If you don't believe me, would you believe a reference in Wikipedia? Variations in total solar irradiance were too small to detect with technology available before the satellite era... (paragraph 2).
(Translation: we don't know what it was before then.)
We can use certain proxies to estimate, just as we do with other kinds of data, but as Wikipedia points out, the variations are so small that we couldn't even measure it in realtime until recently. So your error bars are going to be VERY wide... perhaps too wide to provide anything useful at all.
So take your criticism and stuff it up your nose.
"silentcoder has been remarkably patient with you. He's given you multiple excellent summaries of how the only thing that really matters is global ambient temperature increases, while you keep concentrating on the fact that it got cold yesterday where you live and have the gall to argue that it's the same thing."
And YOU are ignoring the context of the comment I made.
My ENTIRE point was only that NOT "all" of the indicators have been going the same way at the same time. You might view that as nitpicking -- go ahead if you like -- but it's still a true statement.
That's it. Nothing more. He doesn't HAVE to be "patient" with that, because it's an established and easily demonstrable fact.
HE was trying to argue that it doesn't matter. And maybe it doesn't. But I wasn't arguing about how much it mattered... only that it is the truth.
And I have been pretty damned patient with both of you, who completely failed to understand that, and apparently ASSUMED that I was arguing something that I wasn't.
"You're incapable of reading."
That's nice. While I admit that I misunderstood what he was saying, 3 other people made the same mistake. But you had to pick on me, eh?
So you work for them for 2 weeks, and then say, "Ehhh, I don't think I like it. No thanks." And walk out.
If they made you sign a fixed-term contract, then they are bound to it too (which means they hardly ever do that).
"There's a HUGE deficit of IT workers in this country..."
If there is (and I don't think there is as huge a deficit as you say), then there is a simple, workable, market-based answer for that: PAY THEM MORE MONEY.
That's how "supply and demand" works: if there is a shortage of supply (and therefore a high demand), the goods you are short of (whether copper, peaches, or coders) cost more.
It's simple. And it works.
"Then why was 2008 one of the hottest years on record?"
Sigh.
See this comment from elsewhere in this thread.
Is that the answer? I don't know. But it's a perfectly plausible answer.
"The reason it's not the same argument is that AGW deniers decry ALL warming events as "weather","
You somehow managed to mix a straw-man argument together with an ad hominem, and came up with... bullshit?
If you're going to complain, address the actual issue I raised. This ain't it.
"... because there are virtually NO scientists who agree with their position"
You are simply hurting your own credibility here.
He did say that the meltdowns at Fukushima could be worse than Chernobyl... before they actually happened in full. But I don't recall him saying that they had been. Bit of a difference, there. One is a prediction based on incomplete information, the other is an observation of the results, after the fact.
Fukushima could have been much worse than Chernobyl. They had 20 YEARS worth of spent fuel rods in "temporary" storage that was only designed to hold them until they could be transported elsewhere. Totally irresponsible.
"Except the past 11 years haven't been centered around a maximum, but rather we just passed a minimum in 2008. Have you not even studied your own counter-"theory"?"
Apparently I know it better than you do. The activity may have been lower than usual, but it's STILL an 11-year (approximately) cycle, and the peak is STILL due about now. The last peak was around 2002.
The actual low part of the cycle was around 2007 or so (again, give or take... this is all approximate). And it could have been delayed to around 2008... 12-year cycles and longer are hardly unknown. But that still puts us right about on schedule. Even if it hasn't peaked yet, it's still on the upswing, and we can expect more activity than we have seen in the last 5 years or so.
"Any climatologist will tell you that an increase in the average temperature of the planet will cause some places to actually become colder (at least in the short term)."
No shit, Sherlock. You honestly think I didn't know that? That wasn't the point.
The point -- which you just repeated -- is that not all the indicators have gone in the same direction at any given time. GP was trying to claim ALL indicators point in the same direction, and that's just false.
"Sorry, I hadn't had coffee yet, I meant to write 5 Degrees over the WHOLE decade, as opposed to 0.5 over the whole decad"
Wait.... WHAT? You are claiming that the temperature has gone up an average of 5 degrees C over the last decade?
You're loony. The actual figures are nothing like that at all. Up to this year, the temperature was pretty much on par with 1998.
"AGW proponents (in particular scientists) look at global averages, and the expected outcomes of that. They expect weather in some areas to change because of average warming in ways that may not be alike- including that global warming can CAUSE some places to have unusually cold weather."
Despite your assumptions, I am not an idiot.
Yes, it is exactly the same argument, but not in the sense you mean here. It is the same argument in that there is strong evidence that this represents WEATHER, i.e., a very temporary phenomenon, as opposed to "climate" which is steady or a trend.
Pretty big difference, that.
The link you cite was a prediction from 2009.
A fact I mentioned myself in another comment. Your point is?
This graph of the last two solar cycles [wikipedia.org] shows that Solar Cycle 24 [wikipedia.org] is not nearly as strong as Cycle 23 (which peaked in 2000). So why didn't we have a similar or even greater melt off back in 2000?
Take a look at this graph from Wikipedia. Notice that the latter half of the 20th Century has seen more sunspot activity (generally correlated with total solar irradiance) than the earlier 20th Century, or the latter half of the 19th.
If you put a pot of water on the burner of your stove, and turn the heat up to, say just hypothetically, medium-high, and let it sit there for a while, guess what happens? The pot will eventually begin to boil, because you are inputting more heat than it can dissipate otherwise.
If you then turn the heat down to, say, 5 (out of 10), guess what happens? It continues to boil. Because you are STILL putting in more heat than the pot of water can otherwise dissipate.
See, the exact up-and-down of the knob doesn't matter so much. The only thing necessary is that the heat input is greater than the heat dissipation.
We have no evidence that this is NOT the case with the Earth in the latter half of the 20th Century. The heat input (solar irradiance) was unprecedented, at least for recorded times. Yes, it has lessened... but who is to say that it has lessened enough to cause cooling to actually occur? We don't know because we haven't been recording that long.
Has solar activity been lower lately? Yes. But as the pot of water analogy shows, the temperature does not have to follow the actual curve of the input (one of AGW advocates' favorite -- but completely bogus -- arguments). It is sufficient that the input is over the minimal level that results in a net gain. Even if it's only 50% of what it was last year (an exaggeration, but the point is made).
Although the SHORT-TERM solar cycle has been milder than normal, we have been at the peak of longer-term cycles (called the "Solar Grand Maximum"), and that is going away now, or will be within a year or two. I expect most global warming predictions to start failing just about then.
Yes, significance DOES have a very precise meaning (I get it you didn't detect the sarcasm in my comment). The issue is that it just doesn't apply in this case.