It is because multiple research groups, using different methodology, have reached similar conclusions regarding climate change that multiple scientific reviews, both from the International Panel on Climate Change and from independent academies of top scientists such as the US National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society of London have agreed that the conclusions are robust, and that global warming is a genuine threat and the consequence of human CO2 emissions
To be honest, I don't care about the "consensus", because we know that Scientific progress works by overturning dominant paradigms, especially where problems exist with those paradigms (I'm drawn to the theory of Epicycles as an example, but there are numerous others). With respect to the IPCC, fully 20% of those who signed the report were Climate Scientists! You may also note that Scientists who dissented from the IPCC view (invited reviewers) had their opinions remove from the report. The IPCC is a political body, plain and simple.
No, I don't think that is the case. The wave function does not collapse at some arbitrary point, it's free to continue to evolve, taking in the measuring aparatus and anything and everything inbetween. We intrepret it as having "collapsed" when we take a measurement.
But on a more serious note, what does it really mean for two people to become entangled?
I think perhaps we are constantly entangled, but that our "consciousness" (whatever that may be), resolves the entanglement to a specific, given state. The point of the experiment on this interpretation is simply to demonstate entanglement using the human eye, rather than the proxy of a detector mediating between the event and our conscious experience of it. I'm tempted to say "move along, nothing to see here", but (apart from an appalling pun), I'm somewhat intrigued by what the result will be.
No, the point is that no matter which data set you look at, the trend is downwards. "Deniers" are those who completely ignore all of that data and say it's not happening at all. And trust me, they're out there.
It isn't so much that we're "deniers", it's more that we aren't credulous morons. The distinction is, I feel, an important one.
They didn't just say "Hey I could be wrong", they attempted to quantify the chances of them being wrong.
Have you seen the error bars on the assertions made in the IPCC reports? Any idea how they were generated? No? Neither has anyone else. Requests for information regarding this extremely important issue have met with what I can only describe as obfuscatory ignoramousisms.
It's interesting you use the term "cherry picking"; that's exactly what Hansen, Mann, Gore (eh?) et. al. have been doing since the 1980's.
The data is not "raw", it's been processed. Where it's been processed by people like Hansen and Mann, there are often some inexplicable statistical methods (not found in any textbooks) used to generate conclusions. The emminent Prof. Wegman had much to say about this, as does Steve McIntyre (a statistician/mathematician). But perhaps what should concern you more is not that these people aren't trained in statistics, yet are forming theories based on dubious statistical methods - you should be concerned that their studies are generally not replicable, because they do not publish all of their data and code (methods).
No, don't read RealClimate, read ClimateAudit, or WattsUpWithThat. The latter sites, unlike the former, aren't run by environmental activists, they're run by people who are concerned about public trust in the integrity of the scientific process.
Firstly, the reason why a lot of extraneous services start up in Windows when you do a fresh install is given here: Service Controller. If you watch the interview, you'll see there are problems in pre-7 Windows determining exactly what needs to run. Some of these issues are fixed in 7.
Next, this whole debate is somewhat stale; what you mean by an Operating System is not the same as a general user's understanding of what an OS is. The whole Windows Kernel is something like 25mb on disk. I'm not sure about Linux, but the minimum system required to get up and running is probably of a similar order of magnitude. For the user, the operating system is a whole lot more than a kernel, it's a whole load of applications, ease-of-use widgets/applets and an entire basic framework of applications to get you up and running (at the very least).
With respect to RAM, you should hold fire until you know what the OS is actually doing with it. I have 2gb of RAM and Windows 7 reports that 700mb are free and 800mb are "cached". I'm running a few apps at the moment, but as far as I'm concerned the OS can use as much RAM as it wants on the assumption that the OS knows better how my RAM should be used than I do (not always the case, but in general it's true for the average user).
I don't know where you've got this idea from, but this doesn't really happen. Researchers may keep ideas quiet until they publish to avoid someone else claiming the glory, but after they publish it's in their interests for as many people to use their work as possible. If people replicate their results, then that's independent verification of their results -- wonderful! If people build on their model to produce a better one, they get cited and gain influence -- great! The difficulty for researchers is actually the opposite problem -- getting people to notice and user their work. I'm sure there are counter examples, but that has been my experience.
Your faith in the scientific method is very sweet; unfortunately it has been shown (Wegman, McIntyre et al.) that Climate Scientists often don't publish all of their data and code. With a lot of these studies it's almost impossible to provide independent verification and a lot of work involves reverse engineering from their results to find out exactly what they did (`Mannian' PCA for example).
With respect to getting people to notice their work, in Climate Science it consists of a simple press release warning of (take your pick) catastrophic warming, catastrophic flooding, catastrophic cooling, catastrophic extinction, catastrophic weather, dead penguins (Linux fans please note!).
Hang on a second, didn't the IPCC already study this? Its third report completely removed the medieval warm period from a series of graphs and statistics! Are you telling me that was all a load of rubbish and that we don't actually know the climate of the last 1,000 years? So if that's the case, why are Hansen and Gore running around the world with their trousers around their ankles preaching that current warming is unprecedented in the last 1,000 years?
I invite knowledgeable sceptics to respond (this is not a troll!).
Why don't people mod this up more? It's a very important point. If OEM's want to put Firefox onto a box and make it the default browser, there's nothing stopping them from doing so but it would be silly of Microsoft to ship an OS without any browser at all. Are they saying MS should ship with Firefox instead?
Don't upgrade it (you'll be left with a non-functioning OS in August). Make a new partition or get another hard drive or something and install it fresh onto that, keeping your existing installation. If you don't mind wiping your laptop, you can format the partition when you boot the CD.
I'm afraid this is standard practice. Outsourcing allows those in charge to blame the company or corporation for any theft or data loss, not government ministers.
Seasonal variability in ice cover does not somehow disprove global warming. You make the same mistake below with regard to the global temperature record.
That graph shows long term trends. Look at the key. Furthermore, what exactly is required to disprove this theory? Growing ice? Reducing temperature? CO2 lagging temperature in the geological record? Anything at all?
The global temperature anomaly does not contradict the theory of CO2-based global warming. In fact, it is the primary set of evidence which supports it.
I don't think it does. Unless of course you attribute previous temperature rises to CO2, which you absolutely cannot. If you've read the Wegman report, or follow Steve McIntyre's blog (two people better versed in the mathematics of statistical analysis than any Climate Scientist), you will see that they do not concur either.
No one has claimed that "run-away warming" (that is, warming which increases without bound) is going to take place. The claim is that some warming will take place. That claim is SUPPORTED by paleoclimate evidence; the same Phanerozoic record you cite implies a climate sensitivity similar to modern estimates. See, e.g., Royer et al. in Nature last year.
Yes they have. James Hasen and Al Gore to name just two. That is what this theory is all about and why they consider it dangerous to Humanity (they usually wheel out Venus as an example!). The actual forcing for Co2 in the atmosphere is logarithmic and cannot be greater than 1 - 1.5 degrees. The theory is entirely based on the possibility of secondary effects.
Once again, that does not contradict the theory of CO2-induced greenhouse warming. The paleo data support that hypothesis.
Again, the paleo data supports CO2 lagging temperature. This cannot be disputed. According to some Climate Scientists, it somehow "flips" over to start driving it. There's no evidence for this whatsoever.
P.S. If you're so worried about forestalling the next ice age, you should be arguing that we save our excess fossil carbon for later when we really need it for climate control, instead of using it all up now when we don't.
The argument is that man changes the Climate and has done since he started deforestation and agriculture. It's hard to argue with this as it's obvious. What's also obvious (and should be obvious to any intelligent person), is that when you are "against" warming or cooling, you're against it given the value you associate with the status-quo. That is, you assign a value judgement to current climate as your starting point for "best". It's clear that no run-away warming can take place, given the paleoclimate record:
, you can see that CO2 has been far, far higher in history than today, as have global temperatures. If these very simple facts aren't enough to convince you to at least question the hypothesis, then I'd say you are the one looking for evidence to support your position, not I.
Ice shelves are melting. The Northwest Passage is open. That's not disputable. *Something* is driving rapid warming right now, and that means rapid climate change, and rapid change means trauma.
The ice-sheets are growing at the moment, although the "adjusters" do have a nasty habit of making it disapear.
The Northwest passage has been open before (first navigated by Roald Amundsen in 1903-1906), so that's not really "evidence" of man-made climate change. Although of course, as I've posted already, there is evidence that man does influence climate, but perhaps not in ways you might associate with anything catastrophic for the species:
Well ok, I agree with you in a way - but only because I don't like us sending Russia and the Middle East $1,000,000,000,000 per annum to pay for natural gas and oil! But that's the only reason. On the other hand, I happen to think that the integrity of the Scientific process is probably worth at least that much and it's being battered at the moment from all sides. Given the following (an hypothesis of course):
Addressing scientists on Dec 17 at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union, Vavrus and colleagues John Kutzbach and Gwenaëlle Philippon provided detailed evidence in support of a controversial idea first put forward by climatologist William F. Ruddiman of the University of Virginia. That idea, debated for the past several years by climate scientists, holds that the introduction of large-scale rice agriculture in Asia, coupled with extensive deforestation in Europe began to alter world climate by pumping significant amounts of greenhouse gases -- methane from terraced rice paddies and carbon dioxide from burning forests -- into the atmosphere. In turn, a warmer atmosphere heated the oceans making them much less efficient storehouses of carbon dioxide and reinforcing global warming.......Thus, the accumulation of greenhouse gases over the past few thousands of years, the Wisconsin-Virginia team argue, is very likely forestalling the onset of a new glacial cycle, such as have occurred at regular 100,000-year intervals during the last million years.
, you may see that in fact mankind does influence the climate, perhaps in ways incidentally beneficial to the species. The fact is that nobody is doing research into the positive effects of Global Warming, because a lot of Scientists are engaged at the moment in the process of policy based evidence making. It's a good way to secure grants from Government for your institution and thereby increase your chances of getting tenure (excuse my cynicism) or indeed today, of winning yourself a nobel prize!
Parent should be modded up. The warmists are in favour of the precautionary principle. All of these hair-brained (actually, idiotic) schemes like Carbon Capture are bound to fall foul of the law of unintended consequences. The fact is we don't know enough to come up with a scheme to stop "it", whatever "it" actually is (assuming "it" exists at all).
Where are the peer-reviewed papers by all these guys?
The use of "Peer Review" as somehow validating is a little suspect in my opinion. Peer Review has its problems; reviewers are often "gate keepers" for journal publication and are not immune from personal prejudice (`the confining walls of academia'). There are many examples one could give of good Peer Review resulting in bad science. Just think of how many papers were published in Geology that were Peer Reviewed before the theory of Plate Tectonics came about. And what about the many thousands of papers published about the effects of diet on the development of stomach ulcers! Did Peer Review catch the errors in James Hansen's paper that gave rise to the Hockey Stick? Of course it didn't.
Peer Review is not audit and is particularly problematic in Climate Science. The Wegman Report shows us why.
Yes, this is my main problem with the whole AGW scare. The warmists are essentially involved in a process of policy based evidence making. When I step back and look at the policy itself (less use of fossil fuels), I see a huge benefit to National Security in that we'll no longer be bent over a table by producers such as Russia and those in the Middle East. We won't be sending them over a trillion dollars a year for our fuel either.
However the issue is a little deeper than that. Public trust in Science and the Scientific process is being sorely tested in a whole host of areas. Institutions competing for Government grants are in an ever escalating fight with each other to capture the imagination of the public and therefore the politicians. We see increasingly idiotic media stories promoted by scientists in support of their work and reinforced by self-interested parties hoping to ride the wave of public ignorance to a fortune (Al Gore for instance).
If you care about Humanity, you should care about Science, because the survival of the former (at least in its civilised form) is utterly dependent on the integrity of the latter. If you care about Science, you should care about its current mis-use in support of something cretinously entitled `Climate Change'.
Gavin Schmidt of "real-climate" fame recently posted an article showing how good the model predictions actually were (with respect to tropical temperatures as measured by satellite). As Steve McIntyre (of Climate-Audit fame) noted, Schmidt appears to have carefully chosen his starting point to give the best possible correlation between the models and reality. No surprise there then.
Indeed. In fact they have risen by over 120m since the end of the last ice-age. That's approximately 10mm per year (assuming the last ice-age ended around 12,000 years ago), although the rise is unlikely to have been linear. I would say our current 1.7mm/y is rather pedestrian by comparison.
Slashdot Mirror
To be honest, I don't care about the "consensus", because we know that Scientific progress works by overturning dominant paradigms, especially where problems exist with those paradigms (I'm drawn to the theory of Epicycles as an example, but there are numerous others). With respect to the IPCC, fully 20% of those who signed the report were Climate Scientists! You may also note that Scientists who dissented from the IPCC view (invited reviewers) had their opinions remove from the report. The IPCC is a political body, plain and simple.
No, I don't think that is the case. The wave function does not collapse at some arbitrary point, it's free to continue to evolve, taking in the measuring aparatus and anything and everything inbetween. We intrepret it as having "collapsed" when we take a measurement.
I think perhaps we are constantly entangled, but that our "consciousness" (whatever that may be), resolves the entanglement to a specific, given state. The point of the experiment on this interpretation is simply to demonstate entanglement using the human eye, rather than the proxy of a detector mediating between the event and our conscious experience of it. I'm tempted to say "move along, nothing to see here", but (apart from an appalling pun), I'm somewhat intrigued by what the result will be.
It isn't so much that we're "deniers", it's more that we aren't credulous morons. The distinction is, I feel, an important one.
Have you seen the error bars on the assertions made in the IPCC reports? Any idea how they were generated? No? Neither has anyone else. Requests for information regarding this extremely important issue have met with what I can only describe as obfuscatory ignoramousisms.
It's interesting you use the term "cherry picking"; that's exactly what Hansen, Mann, Gore (eh?) et. al. have been doing since the 1980's.
The data is not "raw", it's been processed. Where it's been processed by people like Hansen and Mann, there are often some inexplicable statistical methods (not found in any textbooks) used to generate conclusions. The emminent Prof. Wegman had much to say about this, as does Steve McIntyre (a statistician/mathematician). But perhaps what should concern you more is not that these people aren't trained in statistics, yet are forming theories based on dubious statistical methods - you should be concerned that their studies are generally not replicable, because they do not publish all of their data and code (methods).
No, don't read RealClimate, read ClimateAudit, or WattsUpWithThat. The latter sites, unlike the former, aren't run by environmental activists, they're run by people who are concerned about public trust in the integrity of the scientific process.
Firstly, the reason why a lot of extraneous services start up in Windows when you do a fresh install is given here: Service Controller. If you watch the interview, you'll see there are problems in pre-7 Windows determining exactly what needs to run. Some of these issues are fixed in 7.
Next, this whole debate is somewhat stale; what you mean by an Operating System is not the same as a general user's understanding of what an OS is. The whole Windows Kernel is something like 25mb on disk. I'm not sure about Linux, but the minimum system required to get up and running is probably of a similar order of magnitude. For the user, the operating system is a whole lot more than a kernel, it's a whole load of applications, ease-of-use widgets/applets and an entire basic framework of applications to get you up and running (at the very least).
With respect to RAM, you should hold fire until you know what the OS is actually doing with it. I have 2gb of RAM and Windows 7 reports that 700mb are free and 800mb are "cached". I'm running a few apps at the moment, but as far as I'm concerned the OS can use as much RAM as it wants on the assumption that the OS knows better how my RAM should be used than I do (not always the case, but in general it's true for the average user).
Your faith in the scientific method is very sweet; unfortunately it has been shown (Wegman, McIntyre et al.) that Climate Scientists often don't publish all of their data and code. With a lot of these studies it's almost impossible to provide independent verification and a lot of work involves reverse engineering from their results to find out exactly what they did (`Mannian' PCA for example).
With respect to getting people to notice their work, in Climate Science it consists of a simple press release warning of (take your pick) catastrophic warming, catastrophic flooding, catastrophic cooling, catastrophic extinction, catastrophic weather, dead penguins (Linux fans please note!).
Hang on a second, didn't the IPCC already study this? Its third report completely removed the medieval warm period from a series of graphs and statistics! Are you telling me that was all a load of rubbish and that we don't actually know the climate of the last 1,000 years? So if that's the case, why are Hansen and Gore running around the world with their trousers around their ankles preaching that current warming is unprecedented in the last 1,000 years?
I invite knowledgeable sceptics to respond (this is not a troll!).
Why don't people mod this up more? It's a very important point. If OEM's want to put Firefox onto a box and make it the default browser, there's nothing stopping them from doing so but it would be silly of Microsoft to ship an OS without any browser at all. Are they saying MS should ship with Firefox instead?
Don't upgrade it (you'll be left with a non-functioning OS in August). Make a new partition or get another hard drive or something and install it fresh onto that, keeping your existing installation. If you don't mind wiping your laptop, you can format the partition when you boot the CD.
I mostly drink decafe - would the potential health benefits remain the same, or is it caffeine that's the real benefit here?
Or it could mean that our theory of the nature of gravity at these very large scales is wrong.
I'm afraid this is standard practice. Outsourcing allows those in charge to blame the company or corporation for any theft or data loss, not government ministers.
So true!
That graph shows long term trends. Look at the key. Furthermore, what exactly is required to disprove this theory? Growing ice? Reducing temperature? CO2 lagging temperature in the geological record? Anything at all?
I don't think it does. Unless of course you attribute previous temperature rises to CO2, which you absolutely cannot. If you've read the Wegman report, or follow Steve McIntyre's blog (two people better versed in the mathematics of statistical analysis than any Climate Scientist), you will see that they do not concur either.
Yes they have. James Hasen and Al Gore to name just two. That is what this theory is all about and why they consider it dangerous to Humanity (they usually wheel out Venus as an example!). The actual forcing for Co2 in the atmosphere is logarithmic and cannot be greater than 1 - 1.5 degrees. The theory is entirely based on the possibility of secondary effects.
Again, the paleo data supports CO2 lagging temperature. This cannot be disputed. According to some Climate Scientists, it somehow "flips" over to start driving it. There's no evidence for this whatsoever.
Yes, I have. It's up 20%.
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/S_timeseries.png
There's no need. All I need do is show a graph of the global temperature anomaly.
http://www.nationalpost.com/893554.bin
The argument is that man changes the Climate and has done since he started deforestation and agriculture. It's hard to argue with this as it's obvious. What's also obvious (and should be obvious to any intelligent person), is that when you are "against" warming or cooling, you're against it given the value you associate with the status-quo. That is, you assign a value judgement to current climate as your starting point for "best". It's clear that no run-away warming can take place, given the paleoclimate record:
http://www.clearlight.com/~mhieb/WVFossils/PageMill_Images/image277.gif
, you can see that CO2 has been far, far higher in history than today, as have global temperatures. If these very simple facts aren't enough to convince you to at least question the hypothesis, then I'd say you are the one looking for evidence to support your position, not I.
The ice-sheets are growing at the moment, although the "adjusters" do have a nasty habit of making it disapear.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/12/13/something-is-rotten-in-norway-500000-sq-km-of-sea-ice-disappears-overnight
The Northwest passage has been open before (first navigated by Roald Amundsen in 1903-1906), so that's not really "evidence" of man-made climate change. Although of course, as I've posted already, there is evidence that man does influence climate, but perhaps not in ways you might associate with anything catastrophic for the species:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/12/081217190433.htm
I don't know about you, but I think this whole theory of CO2 based Global Warming is looking a little threadbare right now.
, you may see that in fact mankind does influence the climate, perhaps in ways incidentally beneficial to the species. The fact is that nobody is doing research into the positive effects of Global Warming, because a lot of Scientists are engaged at the moment in the process of policy based evidence making . It's a good way to secure grants from Government for your institution and thereby increase your chances of getting tenure (excuse my cynicism) or indeed today, of winning yourself a nobel prize!
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article5367941.ece
Parent should be modded up. The warmists are in favour of the precautionary principle. All of these hair-brained (actually, idiotic) schemes like Carbon Capture are bound to fall foul of the law of unintended consequences. The fact is we don't know enough to come up with a scheme to stop "it", whatever "it" actually is (assuming "it" exists at all).
The use of "Peer Review" as somehow validating is a little suspect in my opinion. Peer Review has its problems; reviewers are often "gate keepers" for journal publication and are not immune from personal prejudice (`the confining walls of academia'). There are many examples one could give of good Peer Review resulting in bad science. Just think of how many papers were published in Geology that were Peer Reviewed before the theory of Plate Tectonics came about. And what about the many thousands of papers published about the effects of diet on the development of stomach ulcers! Did Peer Review catch the errors in James Hansen's paper that gave rise to the Hockey Stick? Of course it didn't.
Peer Review is not audit and is particularly problematic in Climate Science. The Wegman Report shows us why.
Yes, this is my main problem with the whole AGW scare. The warmists are essentially involved in a process of policy based evidence making . When I step back and look at the policy itself (less use of fossil fuels), I see a huge benefit to National Security in that we'll no longer be bent over a table by producers such as Russia and those in the Middle East. We won't be sending them over a trillion dollars a year for our fuel either.
However the issue is a little deeper than that. Public trust in Science and the Scientific process is being sorely tested in a whole host of areas. Institutions competing for Government grants are in an ever escalating fight with each other to capture the imagination of the public and therefore the politicians. We see increasingly idiotic media stories promoted by scientists in support of their work and reinforced by self-interested parties hoping to ride the wave of public ignorance to a fortune (Al Gore for instance).
If you care about Humanity, you should care about Science, because the survival of the former (at least in its civilised form) is utterly dependent on the integrity of the latter. If you care about Science, you should care about its current mis-use in support of something cretinously entitled `Climate Change'.
Gavin Schmidt of "real-climate" fame recently posted an article showing how good the model predictions actually were (with respect to tropical temperatures as measured by satellite). As Steve McIntyre (of Climate-Audit fame) noted, Schmidt appears to have carefully chosen his starting point to give the best possible correlation between the models and reality. No surprise there then.
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=4687
Indeed. In fact they have risen by over 120m since the end of the last ice-age. That's approximately 10mm per year (assuming the last ice-age ended around 12,000 years ago), although the rise is unlikely to have been linear. I would say our current 1.7mm/y is rather pedestrian by comparison.