"This is clutching at straws. A sample of 1000 is sufficient to estimate the variance in a population of millions. (Look up the central limit theorem.) Depends on the variance, of course, but the variance was for her sample was/tiny/."
Nonsense. What you say is true ONLY if her sample were representative of the whole. But my point (which I stated more than once) is that it wasn't representative of the body of papers on climate at the time. Instead it selected for a particular subset that clearly tended to support her thesis. (For the simple reason that climate papers that DID NOT support the concept of AGW did not use phrases such as "global climate change", but those that did support it, did. Read Peiser's whole critique.)
For your statement to be true, you'd have to argue that there is a much greater chance that a paper would be against the consensus if it included "climate change" but not "global climate change" in the abstract. (A lot of those papers may not mention global climate change at all, and thus irrelevant.)
Those that do not mention it are not necessarily "irrelevant" at all. In fact they may be extremely relevant papers, even making predictions of future climate. They just don't predict significant global climate change! A prediction that something is going to hold steady is still a prediction. A prediction that climate might be variable but not change "globally" is still a prediction. One that, in fact, contradicts the concept of "global climate change".
"I don't expect to convince you. You've got your logic and "evidence" already worked out. It is, however, an empirical question."
You don't expect to convince me of what? That there is consensus? Even if I agreed that there was, it wouldn't matter. Because it is the observations and evidence that matter. Not some "consensus". If consensus = science, we would probably never have gotten past the geocentric model of the solar system, since the powers that be, and the clear consensus at the time, was in favor of it.
"This is additional information. There is a consensus (or set of) treatments for cancer. Would you go find the doctor who believes some research done on homeopathy? After-all, science isn't conensus -- the homeopathist could be correct! (Such studies exist.) This is a precise analogy to AGW."
Not only is that not a precise analogy, it is not even remotely valid. You are asking me if I would go to a doctor whose practices -- according to the EVIDENCE I have seen, not some "consensus" -- I know to be nothing but mythology. That is not even close to the same situation. You seem to be assuming (incorrectly), that someone who ignores a consensus is therefore rejecting solid evidence and the scientific method. But they are not the same things at all. Again I give you the examples of Galileo and Copernicus. They are hardly the only examples. On the contrary: every time a significant new scientific discovery is made today, it overturns an existing consensus. And it is very often -- most times, in fact -- done by an individual or small group, against the whole consensus.
If consensus = science, there would be little if any scientific progress at all.
Every respected professional body of science in the world, including NAS and the Royal Society, support the consensus on climate change. But somehow, in bizarro world, no consensus exists.
See? You did not even get that part right.
I did not say that no consensus exists. I really don't care whether one exists at present. What I stated was that Oreskes is not a reliable source to be citing about consensus. Or much of anything else, for that matter, but that is only my opinion. The former statement is supported by evidence. Which I have given you, but which you have demonstrated that you did not understand.
"I wouldn't make such a big deal about self-selection. Scientists trying to disprove something to do with climate change would probably put "global climate change" in their article, since they want it to be read by people who study global climate change."
It is important for 2 reasons.
First, that essay in Science was the seminal article that got the whole "consensus" ball rolling in the first place. Since the day that article appeared, no amount of contrary information ever again convinced many people that there wasn't in fact a solid, incontrovertible consensus on the subject. When in fact there was not.
Second, yes the self-selection is important because it means that Oreskes did not show precisely what she had set out to show: that there was a consensus. Had she used more realistic (i.e., representative) search terms, she would have been examining well over 10 times as many papers. I daresay a whole order of magnitude is important. And those papers would have been much less likely to support any "consensus" on climate change. That one little difference in the criteria (including "global" in the search terms) very definitely made a huge difference in the results, and there is nothing to show that it was justified. In fact, it is quite reasonable to think she knew full well it would skew the results. Even after many very solid criticisms of her methodology, she hasn't backed down from asserting her known-to-be-unwarranted conclusion.
"And there is consensus. There was in 1979. The NAS investigated the matter then, and declared that there was a consensus view. Here is the current NAS document."
Your "current NAS document" makes reference to only one actual source on the subject, which is an IPCC report that is over 10 years old that has not only been superseded 3 times since, but largely discredited, and the projections it made are very clearly out of line... the projections would have it nearly 1.0 degrees C hotter than 2001 by now, when in fact last year was about 0.1 degree cooler than 2001. (Source: the graph in the article linked to below. ITS source is data from CRU itself.)
And, apparently, it really has to be said yet again: consensus -- even where it really exists -- is not science.
Pardon me. That statement should have been: "... which caused Science to publish the following erratum..."
The word there should have been "erratum" rather than "retraction". I was thinking about the claimed Peiser "retraction" at the time and it came out on the keyboard.
You could have found it yourself in under a minute if you had bothered to look. So don't go accusing me of making things up. I am only going to give you a couple of links here for free; if you want more you can easily find them yourself. My only "duty" here is to demonstrate my point. I am not here to do your homework for you.
The original study to which I referred is at that link. Note that while it appeared in Science, it was not peer-reviewed. And my memory was incorrect (as I implied it might be) about the number of papers she examined. It was 928, not 938.
The main issue with her search terms is simple: she claimed in her original essay in Science to have found 928 abstracts by searching the ISI database for the terms "climate change". But when others searched the same system using those search terms, more than 12,000 papers were returned (more than 12.9 times the number of papers she claimed to have found). As it turned out, her actual search terms were "global climate change". Which prompted Science to print the following retraction on Jan. 21, 2005, which shows in this pdf but not in the original article linked to above:
Erratum
Post date 21 January 2005
Essays: "The scientific consensus on climate change" by N. Oreskes (3 Dec. 2004, p. 1686). The final sentence of the fifth paragraph should read "That hypothesis was tested by analyzing 928 abstracts, published in refereed scientific journals between 1993 and 2003, and listed in the ISI database with the keywords 'global climate change' (9)." The keywords used were "global climate change," not "climate change." [emphasis added]
In any case, here are the problems. That page explains it at least as well as any other single source. But one point should be clarified, and that is what I stated about "self-selection" because of her search terms. You see, of all the climate papers written during that period, the only papers out of the whole bunch that were likely to mention "global climate change" at all, were papers specifically about AGW, by researchers who were pushing that very same idea. The rest were simply not likely to use that phrase, either positively or negatively. It simply didn't appear.
Also, if you go looking for information on this, I would be skeptical of the website "skeptical science". It lies by omission. For example, one page devoted to AGW "consensus" states that Benny Peiser retracted his criticisms of Oreskes' essay, and it links to another source that makes the same claim. But in fact Peiser had only retracted one of his many criticisms, which had to do with the particular number of documents found in the search. He maintained all his other assertions that Oreskes did not in fact show what her paper claimed to show.
To summarize: (a) Oreskes had mischaracterized what she had actually looked for, and in fact did not explain her full selection criteria until later. (b) Oreskes could not have examined the 928 abstracts she claimed, because there were only 905 abstracts with those keywords in he ISI database. (c) Her actual search criteria were self-selecting for materials that supported her premise. This alone invalidates her findings. (d) If she had used more representative search terms, he numbers would have been vastly different.
1. The group is focused on a living leader to whom members seem to display excessively zealous, unquestioning commitment.
Anthony Watts, McIntyre et. al.
Nope. Sorry. It's just not the same. Most of the people at the "core" of the AGW propaganda (Jones, Mann, Bradley, Hughes, Hansen, etc.) are in fact a rather small group, who have worked together over the years, and shared data and methodologies. The people you are talking about (Watts, McIntyre, McKittrick, etc.) are people who varied widely in both profession and geographical location. Until this issue brought them together they did not collaborate, or even know each other.
2. The group is preoccupied with bringing in new members.
Read the latest web sites and books? Anti-AGW is taught as a FACT, pages and pages. Have to indoctrinate early ya know.
Nonsense. It just isn't happening. In fact, the so-called "deniers" have been the ones calling for debate. It is solely the AGW proponents who have been claiming that the science is settled.
3. The group is preoccupied with making money.
Corporate Grants. Although I have to say that these guys are more narcissists that money grubbers.
Funny. Hansen was just shown to have claimed upwards of $1,000,000.00 in money for speaking engagements promoting AGW... and that's just the illegally unreported cash that we know about.
4. Questioning, doubt, and dissent are discouraged or even punished.
Editors losing jobs, those expressing legitimate doubts ostracized, etc. Turned against temperature record skeptic Richard Muller the momen he announced that the temperature record was indeed accurate ("he was never a skeptic" - er yes he was, he was skeptical about the temperature record.) It went from "Any result Muller comes out with will be top work" to "Muller is a fraud" overnight. Dissenting opinions must be removed.
It should also be noted that this statement by Muller was a 180-degree reversal from what he had repeatedly said before. That makes it highly suspect. Scientists don't just "change their opinions" about data. Further, when the claims of fraud come from his own lab partner, we should probably listen.
6. The leadership dictates sometimes in great detail how members should think, act, and feel (for example: members must get permission from leaders to date, change jobs, get married; leaders may prescribe what types of clothes to wear, where to live, how to discipline children, and so forth).
Dissenting opinions are quickly attacked and suppressed. Insist the "Mainstream Media" must support their point of view to be "fair and balanced".
Sorry, but at least the former statement won't wash. Nobody on the "skeptical" side has been doing any "suppressing". I repeat: it has been the skeptics who have kept calling for open debate. It is the AGW proponents who claim "consensus" and that "the science is settled."
7. The group is elitist, claiming a special, exalted status for itself, its leader(s), and members (for example: the leader is considered the Messiah or an avatar; the group and/or the leader has a special mission to save humanity).
If you accept climate change then you a liberal socialist Gore loving sheeple idiot. We know better.
Well, Gore *is* a liberal socialist, and if you follow him maybe you are an idiot. I certainly do not know different.
8. The group has a polarized us-versus-them mentality, which causes conflict with the wider society.
Juden, Alarmist, Warmist, Liberal, Elitist, Genocide supporter, Hoaxer etc. What will I have to sew onto my shirt?
I have been following this debate for years, since long before it became popular. And I can say with confidence tha
"and spewing half-truths, so perhaps you shouldn't try blaming the other side for acting how you do, even if it's simply made up slander to make yourself look better in your own eyes."
Pardon me, but in this case I have to take his side. I don't see any half-truths in that post. Looks like the pot calling the kettle black.
True, "hide the decline", in particular, might not be of much consequence (if we accept Mann's explanation for it, which I am not much inclined to do anyway). But even so, I don't see a single half-truth in the whole post.
Naomi Oreskes is herself guilty of cooking results. The "study" she did on "scientific consensus" was shown to have used search terms that self-selected for papers that supported her premise. When reviewed by others, it was shown to be downright ludicrous.
She claimed to have retrieved 900+ (I think it was 938, something like that) papers in her search, none of which contradicted what has been considered the "mainstream" position on AGW. However, critics of her paper, suspicious of her (rather extraordinary) results, tried using search terms that were less selective and came up with more than TEN TIMES as many papers, many of which were indeed critical of AGW theory.
Most of her findings -- no matter how invalid they were shown to have been -- somehow still made it into that book.
So citing Oreskes as any kind of unbiased source is really pretty ridiculous. Oreskes herself is among the dizziest of spin-doctors.
You can be forgiven. Because the facts are still not against Heartland Institute.
At the time they did that there was little, if any, real scientific evidence behind claims of ill effects from second-hand smoke. Certain government organizations, however, had taken it upon themselves to campaign against it, despite that lack of evidence. The tobacco industry (quite correctly) perceived that it was being singled out for unfair treatment, which turned out to be true. The Heartland Institute was (at that time) simply protecting a legitimate business from what it saw as government abuse.
This came to a head in the EPA report of 1993, which was such a shoddy job of cherry-picking data and attempting to fudge data to support foregone conclusions that the judge who heard the lawsuit against he lectured the EPA pretty harshly. He stated that it was entirely obvious that each section of the report was deliberately manipulated specifically to support its premise, in ways that differed from each other section. They cooked it, in other words. In gross and obvious ways.
I studied this EPA "study" in college. It was nothing but a government hatchet job against the tobacco industry.
So it's pretty hard to blame the Heartland Institute -- at that particular time -- for supporting the tobacco industry. They were indeed being railroaded.
Did real, and better, evidence regarding second-hand smoke become available later? Yes, I believe it has. Has Heartland tried to defend denials of second-hand-smoke toxicity since then? I am not sure, but I doubt it.
Read Heinlein's "The Man Who Sold The Moon". Sure, it's a work of fiction, but he discusses the (very real) legal principle that you own what is over your property as well as what's under it.
As a practical matter, the government has already usurped part of that right when it comes to commercial airlines (flight paths are, to a certain extent, government-regulated), but as far as I know, in general the law still holds.
Could you claim the moon if you owned land on the equator? Probably not. But you CAN legally prevent someone from flying over it.
Have you been paying attention to what's already been written here? (Obvious answer: no.)
The drone did not have people in it. That's a pretty damned big difference.
But to answer the rest of your question: if they are there to spy on what I am doing on my own property (which isn't otherwise visible to the public), then what I could do is notify the authorities and have them charged with trespassing and illegal surveillance when they land.
Where I live, by law you would have to give them a reasonable opportunity to retrieve their property (which might well involve a tow truck, as Dunbal mentioned)... but you can charge them a storage fee for the amount of time it was on your property.
As an example of what the law considers a "reasonable" storage fee: towing companies in my area typically charge $35 USD per day.
Personally, I do not consider that very "reasonable", but the courts apparently disagree.
That wasn't "my logic" at all. I will thank you to not try to put words in my mouth.
Nobody was sitting in that drone.
For a more appropriate analogy: If (in my state) somebody drove a remote-controlled car onto my property in order to spy on me, then yes, I would be within my rights to damage it in order to stop that crime.
If your deed gives the right to someone else, then that is a prior contract. It is completely irrelevant to the general law. You can sell mineral rights, too. But unless you have (or someone before you has) sold them, you do own those rights.
My point is: I didn't really explain HOW it applies, only that it made a difference whether it's on your property. Regardless of how (or whether) you think it applies, the airspace IS your property.
"Yes, you did just make it up, or at least you made up how to apply it to this case, which is completely different to mineral rights and airspace ownership."
Well, that's a half-comment. If it doesn't apply, then why don't you explain why it doesn't apply?
They weren't just "turning around in the driveway", they were deliberately spying on actions taking place on private property. There is a pretty big difference.
If they are using the drone to perform illegal surveillance (it would be illegal in my state anyway), then they have the right to prevent that action, within reason. If that means damaging the equipment that is being used to do it, especially if it is "on" your property (over counts as on), without endangering people, then yes that is almost certainly allowed.
Over the highway? No, they probably didn't have a legal right to shoot it. But depending on the state, the drone operators might still have been breaking the law.
They should have waited until the drone was over their own property (as I am sure it eventually would have been). Then they could have shot it down legally.
With the exception of federally-controlled routes, airspace over your property belongs to you, just as (without prior agreements to the contrary), the mineral rights under your property also belong to you.
This is a long-standing legal principle, not just something I made up.
"It's mixing another specie's DNA into our own DNA that we propagate through our kids. It's exactly the same thing as mixing genes from animals into plants. It's happened in the past and it's happening now. What makes you think the last retrovirus died off millions of years ago?"
You are either missing the point, or making straw-man arguments, or both.
The evidence that we have of such gene combinations indicate that they are millions of years old. Either you didn't know that, or forgot it? I'm not saying that the process has magically stopped, or anything like that... what I am saying is that the EVIDENCE we have of it happening at all, also says that it was very long ago. THEREFORE, we have had thousands of generations, at least, to get rid of any harmful mutations it might have caused.
There is absolutely no reason to think that therefore the process is not generally harmful. On the contrary: the likelihood is that it is.
Also note that viruses that attack human cells have a certain genetic affinity to start with... otherwise they would not be able to reproduce. That is FAR DIFFERENT from introducing DNA from a jellyfish, say, directly into the human genome.
To say that Monsanto's style of gene splicing has taken place naturally is simply wrong. It hasn't. Not even close.
THAT is, but it's not even remotely the same thing. There are some very important differences.
The first and probably the most worrying issue is that we have had millions of years to weed out any HARMFUL genes that might have been incorporated. Corn has had a few years. Pretty big difference, there.
In the very first paragraph, they discuss how insect resistance was achieved "... by incorporation of a gene that codes for the Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) toxin"
Guess where that gene came from? Why, from Bacillus thuringiensis, of course.
It is NOT a "plant gene" found anywhere in the natural world.
"... but GM itself isn't an inherent harm. We've been at it as a species since we first started selectively breeding plants and animals. This is kind of the next level stuff."
No, YOU missed the entire point. GM by itself is not an "inherent harm", any more than holding a gun does "inherent harm". It's what you do with it that counts. And Monsanto has been rather the opposite of responsible.
We have NOT been doing gene modification like Monsanto has done, until very recently. It is fundamentally different from cross-pollination and other forms of cross-breeding.
I understand WHY they do it (or at least, the potential good it can do, which is demonstrably not why Monsanto, in particular, is doing it).
But there have not been enough precautions, or enough tests. Even the fact that the genes have been escaping into other people's crops should be cause for grave concern.
Because malicious or even illegal use by some users is not probable cause for the seizure of the entire domain. That is the point everybody has been making here.
Lots of people read it that way, but that's not what it actually means. 18 USC 242 does not cover just discrimination. As many successfully prosecuted cases prove.
There is an "or" in there that makes all the difference. What it actually says is:
"... or to different punishments, pains, or penalties, on account of such person being an alien, or by reason of his color, or race, than are prescribed for the punishment of citizens..."
So it actually applies to:
"... the deprivation of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured or protected by the Constitution or laws of the United States"
OR to:
"... different punishments, pains, or penalties, on account of such person being an alien, or by reason of his color, or race, than are prescribed for the punishment of citizens..."
So it's deprivation of rights OR discrimination. And while IANAL, I have looked up cases and that is how the court has consistently interpreted it.
Slashdot Mirror
"This is clutching at straws. A sample of 1000 is sufficient to estimate the variance in a population of millions. (Look up the central limit theorem.) Depends on the variance, of course, but the variance was for her sample was /tiny/."
Nonsense. What you say is true ONLY if her sample were representative of the whole. But my point (which I stated more than once) is that it wasn't representative of the body of papers on climate at the time. Instead it selected for a particular subset that clearly tended to support her thesis. (For the simple reason that climate papers that DID NOT support the concept of AGW did not use phrases such as "global climate change", but those that did support it, did. Read Peiser's whole critique.)
For your statement to be true, you'd have to argue that there is a much greater chance that a paper would be against the consensus if it included "climate change" but not "global climate change" in the abstract. (A lot of those papers may not mention global climate change at all, and thus irrelevant.)
Those that do not mention it are not necessarily "irrelevant" at all. In fact they may be extremely relevant papers, even making predictions of future climate. They just don't predict significant global climate change! A prediction that something is going to hold steady is still a prediction. A prediction that climate might be variable but not change "globally" is still a prediction. One that, in fact, contradicts the concept of "global climate change".
"I don't expect to convince you. You've got your logic and "evidence" already worked out. It is, however, an empirical question."
You don't expect to convince me of what? That there is consensus? Even if I agreed that there was, it wouldn't matter. Because it is the observations and evidence that matter. Not some "consensus". If consensus = science, we would probably never have gotten past the geocentric model of the solar system, since the powers that be, and the clear consensus at the time, was in favor of it.
"This is additional information. There is a consensus (or set of) treatments for cancer. Would you go find the doctor who believes some research done on homeopathy? After-all, science isn't conensus -- the homeopathist could be correct! (Such studies exist.) This is a precise analogy to AGW."
Not only is that not a precise analogy, it is not even remotely valid. You are asking me if I would go to a doctor whose practices -- according to the EVIDENCE I have seen, not some "consensus" -- I know to be nothing but mythology. That is not even close to the same situation. You seem to be assuming (incorrectly), that someone who ignores a consensus is therefore rejecting solid evidence and the scientific method. But they are not the same things at all. Again I give you the examples of Galileo and Copernicus. They are hardly the only examples. On the contrary: every time a significant new scientific discovery is made today, it overturns an existing consensus. And it is very often -- most times, in fact -- done by an individual or small group, against the whole consensus.
If consensus = science, there would be little if any scientific progress at all.
Every respected professional body of science in the world, including NAS and the Royal Society, support the consensus on climate change. But somehow, in bizarro world, no consensus exists.
See? You did not even get that part right.
I did not say that no consensus exists. I really don't care whether one exists at present. What I stated was that Oreskes is not a reliable source to be citing about consensus. Or much of anything else, for that matter, but that is only my opinion. The former statement is supported by evidence. Which I have given you, but which you have demonstrated that you did not understand.
"As for your wall-street
"I wouldn't make such a big deal about self-selection. Scientists trying to disprove something to do with climate change would probably put "global climate change" in their article, since they want it to be read by people who study global climate change."
It is important for 2 reasons.
First, that essay in Science was the seminal article that got the whole "consensus" ball rolling in the first place. Since the day that article appeared, no amount of contrary information ever again convinced many people that there wasn't in fact a solid, incontrovertible consensus on the subject. When in fact there was not.
Second, yes the self-selection is important because it means that Oreskes did not show precisely what she had set out to show: that there was a consensus. Had she used more realistic (i.e., representative) search terms, she would have been examining well over 10 times as many papers. I daresay a whole order of magnitude is important. And those papers would have been much less likely to support any "consensus" on climate change. That one little difference in the criteria (including "global" in the search terms) very definitely made a huge difference in the results, and there is nothing to show that it was justified. In fact, it is quite reasonable to think she knew full well it would skew the results. Even after many very solid criticisms of her methodology, she hasn't backed down from asserting her known-to-be-unwarranted conclusion.
"And there is consensus. There was in 1979. The NAS investigated the matter then, and declared that there was a consensus view. Here is the current NAS document."
Your "current NAS document" makes reference to only one actual source on the subject, which is an IPCC report that is over 10 years old that has not only been superseded 3 times since, but largely discredited, and the projections it made are very clearly out of line... the projections would have it nearly 1.0 degrees C hotter than 2001 by now, when in fact last year was about 0.1 degree cooler than 2001. (Source: the graph in the article linked to below. ITS source is data from CRU itself.)
And, apparently, it really has to be said yet again: consensus -- even where it really exists -- is not science.
Anyway, I see your NAS document and raise you this one from yesterday's WSJ.
Pardon me. That statement should have been: "... which caused Science to publish the following erratum..."
The word there should have been "erratum" rather than "retraction". I was thinking about the claimed Peiser "retraction" at the time and it came out on the keyboard.
The original study to which I referred is at that link. Note that while it appeared in Science, it was not peer-reviewed. And my memory was incorrect (as I implied it might be) about the number of papers she examined. It was 928, not 938.
The main issue with her search terms is simple: she claimed in her original essay in Science to have found 928 abstracts by searching the ISI database for the terms "climate change". But when others searched the same system using those search terms, more than 12,000 papers were returned (more than 12.9 times the number of papers she claimed to have found). As it turned out, her actual search terms were "global climate change". Which prompted Science to print the following retraction on Jan. 21, 2005, which shows in this pdf but not in the original article linked to above:
Erratum
Post date 21 January 2005
Essays: "The scientific consensus on climate change" by N. Oreskes (3 Dec. 2004, p. 1686). The final sentence of the fifth paragraph should read "That hypothesis was tested by analyzing 928 abstracts, published in refereed scientific journals between 1993 and 2003, and listed in the ISI database with the keywords 'global climate change' (9)." The keywords used were "global climate change," not "climate change." [emphasis added]
In any case, here are the problems. That page explains it at least as well as any other single source. But one point should be clarified, and that is what I stated about "self-selection" because of her search terms. You see, of all the climate papers written during that period, the only papers out of the whole bunch that were likely to mention "global climate change" at all, were papers specifically about AGW, by researchers who were pushing that very same idea. The rest were simply not likely to use that phrase, either positively or negatively. It simply didn't appear.
Also, if you go looking for information on this, I would be skeptical of the website "skeptical science". It lies by omission. For example, one page devoted to AGW "consensus" states that Benny Peiser retracted his criticisms of Oreskes' essay, and it links to another source that makes the same claim. But in fact Peiser had only retracted one of his many criticisms, which had to do with the particular number of documents found in the search. He maintained all his other assertions that Oreskes did not in fact show what her paper claimed to show.
To summarize: (a) Oreskes had mischaracterized what she had actually looked for, and in fact did not explain her full selection criteria until later. (b) Oreskes could not have examined the 928 abstracts she claimed, because there were only 905 abstracts with those keywords in he ISI database. (c) Her actual search criteria were self-selecting for materials that supported her premise. This alone invalidates her findings. (d) If she had used more representative search terms, he numbers would have been vastly different.
The same way it is measured going down. That is to say, a line drawn from the geometric center of the earth, through the boundary of your property.
So yes, the area of a cross-section gets larger as you go outward.
Nice try, but it just doesn't work.
1. The group is focused on a living leader to whom members seem to display excessively zealous, unquestioning commitment.
Anthony Watts, McIntyre et. al.
Nope. Sorry. It's just not the same. Most of the people at the "core" of the AGW propaganda (Jones, Mann, Bradley, Hughes, Hansen, etc.) are in fact a rather small group, who have worked together over the years, and shared data and methodologies. The people you are talking about (Watts, McIntyre, McKittrick, etc.) are people who varied widely in both profession and geographical location. Until this issue brought them together they did not collaborate, or even know each other.
2. The group is preoccupied with bringing in new members.
Read the latest web sites and books? Anti-AGW is taught as a FACT, pages and pages. Have to indoctrinate early ya know.
Nonsense. It just isn't happening. In fact, the so-called "deniers" have been the ones calling for debate. It is solely the AGW proponents who have been claiming that the science is settled.
3. The group is preoccupied with making money.
Corporate Grants. Although I have to say that these guys are more narcissists that money grubbers.
Funny. Hansen was just shown to have claimed upwards of $1,000,000.00 in money for speaking engagements promoting AGW... and that's just the illegally unreported cash that we know about.
4. Questioning, doubt, and dissent are discouraged or even punished.
Editors losing jobs, those expressing legitimate doubts ostracized, etc. Turned against temperature record skeptic Richard Muller the momen he announced that the temperature record was indeed accurate ("he was never a skeptic" - er yes he was, he was skeptical about the temperature record.) It went from "Any result Muller comes out with will be top work" to "Muller is a fraud" overnight. Dissenting opinions must be removed.
It should also be noted that this statement by Muller was a 180-degree reversal from what he had repeatedly said before. That makes it highly suspect. Scientists don't just "change their opinions" about data. Further, when the claims of fraud come from his own lab partner, we should probably listen.
6. The leadership dictates sometimes in great detail how members should think, act, and feel (for example: members must get permission from leaders to date, change jobs, get married; leaders may prescribe what types of clothes to wear, where to live, how to discipline children, and so forth).
Dissenting opinions are quickly attacked and suppressed. Insist the "Mainstream Media" must support their point of view to be "fair and balanced".
Sorry, but at least the former statement won't wash. Nobody on the "skeptical" side has been doing any "suppressing". I repeat: it has been the skeptics who have kept calling for open debate. It is the AGW proponents who claim "consensus" and that "the science is settled."
7. The group is elitist, claiming a special, exalted status for itself, its leader(s), and members (for example: the leader is considered the Messiah or an avatar; the group and/or the leader has a special mission to save humanity).
If you accept climate change then you a liberal socialist Gore loving sheeple idiot. We know better.
Well, Gore *is* a liberal socialist, and if you follow him maybe you are an idiot. I certainly do not know different.
8. The group has a polarized us-versus-them mentality, which causes conflict with the wider society.
Juden, Alarmist, Warmist, Liberal, Elitist, Genocide supporter, Hoaxer etc. What will I have to sew onto my shirt?
I have been following this debate for years, since long before it became popular. And I can say with confidence tha
"and spewing half-truths, so perhaps you shouldn't try blaming the other side for acting how you do, even if it's simply made up slander to make yourself look better in your own eyes."
Pardon me, but in this case I have to take his side. I don't see any half-truths in that post. Looks like the pot calling the kettle black.
True, "hide the decline", in particular, might not be of much consequence (if we accept Mann's explanation for it, which I am not much inclined to do anyway). But even so, I don't see a single half-truth in the whole post.
Naomi Oreskes is herself guilty of cooking results. The "study" she did on "scientific consensus" was shown to have used search terms that self-selected for papers that supported her premise. When reviewed by others, it was shown to be downright ludicrous.
She claimed to have retrieved 900+ (I think it was 938, something like that) papers in her search, none of which contradicted what has been considered the "mainstream" position on AGW. However, critics of her paper, suspicious of her (rather extraordinary) results, tried using search terms that were less selective and came up with more than TEN TIMES as many papers, many of which were indeed critical of AGW theory.
Most of her findings -- no matter how invalid they were shown to have been -- somehow still made it into that book.
So citing Oreskes as any kind of unbiased source is really pretty ridiculous. Oreskes herself is among the dizziest of spin-doctors.
You can be forgiven. Because the facts are still not against Heartland Institute.
At the time they did that there was little, if any, real scientific evidence behind claims of ill effects from second-hand smoke. Certain government organizations, however, had taken it upon themselves to campaign against it, despite that lack of evidence. The tobacco industry (quite correctly) perceived that it was being singled out for unfair treatment, which turned out to be true. The Heartland Institute was (at that time) simply protecting a legitimate business from what it saw as government abuse.
This came to a head in the EPA report of 1993, which was such a shoddy job of cherry-picking data and attempting to fudge data to support foregone conclusions that the judge who heard the lawsuit against he lectured the EPA pretty harshly. He stated that it was entirely obvious that each section of the report was deliberately manipulated specifically to support its premise, in ways that differed from each other section. They cooked it, in other words. In gross and obvious ways.
I studied this EPA "study" in college. It was nothing but a government hatchet job against the tobacco industry.
So it's pretty hard to blame the Heartland Institute -- at that particular time -- for supporting the tobacco industry. They were indeed being railroaded.
Did real, and better, evidence regarding second-hand smoke become available later? Yes, I believe it has. Has Heartland tried to defend denials of second-hand-smoke toxicity since then? I am not sure, but I doubt it.
Read Heinlein's "The Man Who Sold The Moon". Sure, it's a work of fiction, but he discusses the (very real) legal principle that you own what is over your property as well as what's under it.
As a practical matter, the government has already usurped part of that right when it comes to commercial airlines (flight paths are, to a certain extent, government-regulated), but as far as I know, in general the law still holds.
Could you claim the moon if you owned land on the equator? Probably not. But you CAN legally prevent someone from flying over it.
Have you been paying attention to what's already been written here? (Obvious answer: no.)
The drone did not have people in it. That's a pretty damned big difference.
But to answer the rest of your question: if they are there to spy on what I am doing on my own property (which isn't otherwise visible to the public), then what I could do is notify the authorities and have them charged with trespassing and illegal surveillance when they land.
Where I live, by law you would have to give them a reasonable opportunity to retrieve their property (which might well involve a tow truck, as Dunbal mentioned)... but you can charge them a storage fee for the amount of time it was on your property.
As an example of what the law considers a "reasonable" storage fee: towing companies in my area typically charge $35 USD per day.
Personally, I do not consider that very "reasonable", but the courts apparently disagree.
That wasn't "my logic" at all. I will thank you to not try to put words in my mouth.
Nobody was sitting in that drone.
For a more appropriate analogy: If (in my state) somebody drove a remote-controlled car onto my property in order to spy on me, then yes, I would be within my rights to damage it in order to stop that crime.
If your deed gives the right to someone else, then that is a prior contract. It is completely irrelevant to the general law. You can sell mineral rights, too. But unless you have (or someone before you has) sold them, you do own those rights.
My point is: I didn't really explain HOW it applies, only that it made a difference whether it's on your property. Regardless of how (or whether) you think it applies, the airspace IS your property.
"Yes, you did just make it up, or at least you made up how to apply it to this case, which is completely different to mineral rights and airspace ownership."
Well, that's a half-comment. If it doesn't apply, then why don't you explain why it doesn't apply?
They weren't just "turning around in the driveway", they were deliberately spying on actions taking place on private property. There is a pretty big difference.
If they are using the drone to perform illegal surveillance (it would be illegal in my state anyway), then they have the right to prevent that action, within reason. If that means damaging the equipment that is being used to do it, especially if it is "on" your property (over counts as on), without endangering people, then yes that is almost certainly allowed.
Over the highway? No, they probably didn't have a legal right to shoot it. But depending on the state, the drone operators might still have been breaking the law.
They should have waited until the drone was over their own property (as I am sure it eventually would have been). Then they could have shot it down legally.
With the exception of federally-controlled routes, airspace over your property belongs to you, just as (without prior agreements to the contrary), the mineral rights under your property also belong to you.
This is a long-standing legal principle, not just something I made up.
"It's mixing another specie's DNA into our own DNA that we propagate through our kids. It's exactly the same thing as mixing genes from animals into plants. It's happened in the past and it's happening now. What makes you think the last retrovirus died off millions of years ago?"
You are either missing the point, or making straw-man arguments, or both.
The evidence that we have of such gene combinations indicate that they are millions of years old. Either you didn't know that, or forgot it? I'm not saying that the process has magically stopped, or anything like that... what I am saying is that the EVIDENCE we have of it happening at all, also says that it was very long ago. THEREFORE, we have had thousands of generations, at least, to get rid of any harmful mutations it might have caused.
There is absolutely no reason to think that therefore the process is not generally harmful. On the contrary: the likelihood is that it is.
Also note that viruses that attack human cells have a certain genetic affinity to start with... otherwise they would not be able to reproduce. That is FAR DIFFERENT from introducing DNA from a jellyfish, say, directly into the human genome.
To say that Monsanto's style of gene splicing has taken place naturally is simply wrong. It hasn't. Not even close.
"I'm not going to get into a debate about parsing that one sentence."
I'm not either. I don't have to. Instead, I just looked up what the COURTS have to say about it. And they interpret it the way I stated.
I'm not debating, I'm simply stating facts.
"It's perfectly normal and natural."
THAT is, but it's not even remotely the same thing. There are some very important differences.
The first and probably the most worrying issue is that we have had millions of years to weed out any HARMFUL genes that might have been incorporated. Corn has had a few years. Pretty big difference, there.
Try the Wikipedia page.
In the very first paragraph, they discuss how insect resistance was achieved "... by incorporation of a gene that codes for the Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) toxin"
Guess where that gene came from? Why, from Bacillus thuringiensis, of course.
It is NOT a "plant gene" found anywhere in the natural world.
"... but GM itself isn't an inherent harm. We've been at it as a species since we first started selectively breeding plants and animals. This is kind of the next level stuff."
No, YOU missed the entire point. GM by itself is not an "inherent harm", any more than holding a gun does "inherent harm". It's what you do with it that counts. And Monsanto has been rather the opposite of responsible.
We have NOT been doing gene modification like Monsanto has done, until very recently. It is fundamentally different from cross-pollination and other forms of cross-breeding.
I understand WHY they do it (or at least, the potential good it can do, which is demonstrably not why Monsanto, in particular, is doing it).
But there have not been enough precautions, or enough tests. Even the fact that the genes have been escaping into other people's crops should be cause for grave concern.
Because malicious or even illegal use by some users is not probable cause for the seizure of the entire domain. That is the point everybody has been making here.
There is an "or" in there that makes all the difference. What it actually says is:
"... or to different punishments, pains, or penalties, on account of such person being an alien, or by reason of his color, or race, than are prescribed for the punishment of citizens..."
So it actually applies to:
"... the deprivation of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured or protected by the Constitution or laws of the United States"
OR to:
"... different punishments, pains, or penalties, on account of such person being an alien, or by reason of his color, or race, than are prescribed for the punishment of citizens..."
So it's deprivation of rights OR discrimination. And while IANAL, I have looked up cases and that is how the court has consistently interpreted it.