Maybe I've misunderstood something fundamentally, but I don't understand how the choice of a geometry of the dimensions can be considered less arbitrary than the choice of particle masses.
Right now, it is arbitrary (though some hope that the dynamics of string theory will ultimately reveal some geometries to be much more likely than others).
In practice, you have to make arbitrary choices either way. The difference is only in principle: with a bunch of fundamental constants that you have to put in by hand, you can never hope to have an explanation of their values. With string theory, there's just one theory and everything is in principle determined by its unique dynamics, although in practice it may be impossible to actually calculate those values.
Very smart people (e.g., Sean Carroll, now at CalTech) have made convincing cases that inflation is actually incoherent in important ways.... since when?
As late as 2005, he was proposing to explain why "a universe like ours is likely to have begun via a period of inflation". I don't remember reading any papers of his demonstrating that "inflation is incoherent".
This spin 2 particle that string theory "predicts" is sort of a red herring; it doesn't predict anything about how the particle should interact
On the contrary, string theory predicts a unique interaction for the graviton.
String theory, on the other hand, makes no predictions, and has no supporting evidence.
That's a silly claim. There are plenty of string models which make predictions. The problem is in distinguishing them from the predictions of existing quantum field theory models.
ALL thought, logical or otherwise, is formed out of emotional constructs which motivate it and direct it That's a pretty bold assertion. What is the evidence? Or are you using the word "emotion" to mean something misleadingly broad, such as "goal-directed algorithm"?
The theory that emotion comes from thought is wrong. I believe that this is now accepted in the field of neurology (though not the field of AI). 1. Even if the theory that emotion comes from thought is wrong, that doesn't mean that thought comes from emotion. 2. The relation of thought and emotion in biological organisms does not demonstrate, by itself, anything about the relation of thought and emotion in computers.
Assuming the ultraintelligent computer cannot do magic, it will be bound by the same physical and logical laws we live by.
An unltraintelligent computer may think 10x faster than us, but not qualitatively 10x better. I don't see how you can conclude that. Arguably, humans think qualitatively better than, say, snails. Why is it "physically and logically" impossible for an ultraintelligent computer to think qualitatively 10x better than us?
Of course, your possibility is also true: that superintelligence is just like human intelligence, only faster or collectively organized.
Vinge calls these "strong" and "weak" superhumanity, respectively.
He reported that a tour guide said those glaciers are retreating (as from global warming). He also pointed out they had been retreating since being discovered in 1770. That's not a terribly surprising observation. After all, the gross temperature trend over the last few centuries has been one of gradual warming: it's not just a recent phenomenon. What people are worried about with respect to "global warming" is a recent acceleration of the rate of warming.
the best argument I've heard is about global warming on other planets, which shows that we're not really having as much of an effect as we thing we are That's actually one of the worst arguments against global warming, considering the vast differences between different planetary climates and the very small amount of data we have on them. The only common factor among all planets is the Sun, and solar effects do a rather poor job in explaining the observed temperature trends on any of the planets, let alone all of them. (Well, it does ok for Earth's temperature trends at some periods in the past, but not recently.) Furthermore, there are much more direct links to non-solar causes of climate change on other planets. You have to look at individual cases to see what's going on, e.g., albedo changes on Mars, convection changes on Jupiter, perihelion on Pluto, etc. See Phil Plait's overview. I can dig up more links/references if you like, both on planetary climate trends and on solar influences.
We have vastly more data about Earth climate and that is where you should look for good arguments for or against global warming. Other planets tell us very little about Earth climate.
MY question: how do we know that it isn't natural and cyclical? All the evidence certainly points to it... Really? "All" evidence? What is this evidence? It certainly contradicts the evidence summarized here.
There just isn't any evidence from past climate which indicates that a natural warming "cycle" like the one we're experiencing is due right now (see, e.g., here).
As for natural, non-cyclical warming, that's a harder issue. The short answer is that observations of both natural (solar effects, volcanoes, etc.) and human (greenhouse gases, atmospheric aerosols, etc.) sources of warming/cooling indicate that natural sources of warming can explain many warming events in the past, but strongly fail to account for the magnitude, timing, and rate of the warming trend over the last 30-40 years. On the other hand, inclusion of human sources can explain the observed warming pretty well. Both natural and human sources of climate change are necessary to explain observed trends, but natural sources alone appear unable to account for the recent warming that people are worried about.
You can read the above links for more information.
I have a hard time believing that, in the hundreds of millions of years that those asteroids have been stirring around the sun since "the one" broke off and smacked into us, the belt itself didn't regain gravitational stability. I don't know what you mean by "gravitational stability". But as for your overall claim, you can actually run N-body simulations of asteroid belt dynamics and find that yes, the "hole" can indeed stick around for hundreds of millions of years. That is, in fact, what the authors of this study did. Now, you could argue that the simulations are incomplete in some way (and no doubt someone will), but you can't simply dismiss the evidence with a facile analogy to cookie dough.
There are ground based gamma ray detectors (Google). They don't detect the gamma rays directly, but rather the showers as the gamma rays interact with molecules in the atmosphere.
May I draw your attention to the following articles that indeed show there is a correlation between Mars and Earth's tmeperature changes. I am aware of them; they are precisely what I was addressing. The correlation between the two planetary temperatures only exists for a short period of time, and moreover, the temperature changes on both planets don't agree well with solar forcing either in correlation or magnitude.
Religion is a system based on belief not fact: I see you have got Global Warming Religion. Spare me the rhetoric.
The point is not to try to directly equate "hot" regions with "urban" regions; you can't make that determination on temperature alone. The point is to equate industrialized/settled regions with "urban" regions. For that, you want to look at a proxy for population density, which is street and building lights.
It is well established that the Greenhouse Gas alarmists and their theories are half-baked, employing facts artistically in an attempt to prove opinions. I couldn't care less about some "alarmist" strawman of yours. If you want to discuss what the mainstream climate science community thinks, feel free.
when it comes down to it there will be no measurable improvement until we stop doing the stupid things that humans do such as utilizing obsolete energy sources, cutting down every tree that's in our way and a plethora of other completely insane activities That certainly is true, and the people who advocate conservation usually advocate new energy sources, reducing deforestation, etc. It's not an exclusive choice.
I am well educated in science I think the veracity of that statement speaks for itself in light of your comments in this thread.
I've double-checked some of your numbers (so far as to see that you copied and pasted them in correctly) and they match, but I don't imagine it is the definitive end-all statement you wanted to make. It's just another case where someone shows whatever evidence supports their claims You were wrong. Deal with it. This is not a case of "selective evidence": very concrete physical evidence supports the influence of planetary distance, albedo, and the greenhouse effect on planetary temperature in a known and verified quantitative relationship.
they in no way prove anything either way You were wrong. You can't save face by offhandedly conceding that but then claiming that facts don't prove anything. The greenhouse effect is very real, and not even the skeptical scientists deny that; their argument is about the feedbacks which modify the greenhouse effect.
You may be intelligent, but you're spouting the same line everyone else is and it's not actually accurate in that it's only a small part of the whole It is only intended to address the specific, wrong point you were attempting to make. There are plenty of other points to be made regarding the climate other than the existence of the greenhouse effect. If you want to make a real claim about the science, do it, don't just spout off with stupid and unfounded allegations.
Explore both sides of the argument and pick out the crap until you see the whole Global Warming brouhaha for what it is; a money making engine with no honest intent whatsoever. Put up or shut up. Show me the "both sides of the argument" that you have so carefully explored. Explain in specific, verifiable, quantitative terms what is wrong with current mainstream conclusions regarding global warming. Or admit that you have nothing backing up your opinion but political bias.
so that maybe you can go study science at a real school - where actually teaching students is accomplished. Been there, done that. I hope you weren't one of my students. That would be a great failure on my part.
Oh, I wasn't claiming that McIntyre (McKitrick is somebody else) was a statistician while Hansen is not. Yes, I meant to write McIntyre.
You were claiming that he as a "professional statistician" he may have more expertise than climate scientists, but that doesn't follow. Anyway, it's beside your point.
What I was peeved at was the double standard, talking McIntyre down and giving him grief while Hansen's protected as an AGW high priest (help, help the Bush administration is repressing me). The poster you were responding to didn't say that. He/she just said that open access isn't necessarily the panacea to scientific debate that some here have claimed, due to the relative lack of expertise outside the scientific community. Which is probably true, specific counterexamples like McIntyre notwithstanding.
The central issue remains, is part of the job of a scientist to enable fact checking efforts to be run quickly and efficiently or are scientists really only bound to grudging sharing and not always that (see the MBH98 controversy)? If you're in favor of openness and as many checks as possible, I can live with most everything else on the thread. I believe that all scientists need to make data products and procedural documentation available. I believe that Hansen ought to release source code. As for openness at the source code level in general, I don't think that's necessarily realistic given the current reward structure in science.
Scientists are rewarded for being first. As such, they are forced into a situation where intellectual property is important. Science needs to reproducible, so they need to make available all the information necessary to reproduce the result. But that doesn't include, say, releasing source code or experimental equipment, as long as they describe how to duplicate it in principle. It would suck to invest many man-years of effort into producing a widget or program and then have another group take it and scoop you on publications using the fruits of your labor: scientists usually don't get rewarded for writing the software, either, but for using it to do science.
That situation as it is, some scientists release source and some don't; it usually has more to do with the competitive consequences of disclosure than any desire for secrecy. Some groups can afford to give away their source to their competitors, and some can't. (I know some groups which have been scooped by larger and faster groups in exactly that way...) Many grants do stipulate disclosure at the source code level, though. (But I'm not sure how they define "timely" disclosure.)
Either science needs to change so that being first to publish doesn't matter (not bloody likely), or they need to come up with some other scheme to balance disclosure with credit. Maybe a moratorium: you have X months/years to publish papers using your tool, then it passes into the public domain. One common way that scientists have gotten around it so far is to request coauthorship on papers which use their tool, but then release of the tool is contingent on that publication.
That being said, this whole kerfluffle isn't about Hansen getting scooped, it's about inadequate documentation of his procedures so that they cannot be reproduced even from scratch.
1. The distance from the sun a planet is does NOT make as much a difference in the amount of radiation the planet will absorb as the composition of the atmosphere. That is an absurd statement in general. Mercury, with no atmosphere, is much hotter than the Earth, with an atmosphere; distance obviously matters. Venus is hotter than Mercury, but it has an EXTREME greenhouse effect.
As I have demonstrated, we know the makeup of the atmosphere and they are extremely similar. As I demonstrated, the relative makeup of the atmosphere is not important; what is important is the absolute amount of each gas. Mars has virtually no atmosphere and can have virtually no greenhouse effect even if it were pure CO2.
Your distance theory just makes you look stupid. It's called the inverse square law.
Mercury is 27 Million miles from the sun and has an average surface temperature of 250F - yeah, that seems really low for being so close to the sun, but that's because it spins so slowly and the high temperature only reaches about 800F (How can that be???). According to your distance logic, the average temperature of Mercury should be about 1450F and the average temperature of Earth should be approximately 413F - really dumb statements on your part. Here is what the distance logic predicts (formula here:
T_P = (1-a)^1/4 [R_S/(2D)]^1/2 T_S
where T_P is the temperature of the planet, T_S=5780 K is the temperature of the Sun, R_S=700,000 km is the radius of the Sun, D is the average distance of the planet from the Sun, and a is the planetary albedo.
For Mercury, a = 0.12 and D = 57 million km, giving T_M = 439 K = 331 F. The actual temperature of Mercury is 440 K (here).
For Earth, a = 0.387 and D = 148 million km, giving T_E = 249 K = -11 F. The actual temperature of the Earth is 254 K (here) top of atmosphere, but its surface temperature is 288 K (here). The ~30 K difference is very close to the predicted magnitude of the greenhouse effect.
In short, the "distance from the Sun" argument produces pretty much the exact answer (if you include albedo as well as distance).
2. The planet's size makes a difference? The other poster is wrong about that, as you can see from the above formula. (Well, it matters insofar as its size helps to determine how much atmosphere it has, and therefore how much of a greenhouse effect. But it doesn't matter directly.)
3. Composition of the planet does matter too - but you don't know how it matters or why it matters do you? It doesn't matter for the equilibrium temperature, except insofar as it may alter the albedo of the planet. It does matter somewhat to how quickly its temperature can change.
I can't effective explain it here, and will not even bother trying. It's like having a stimulating conversation with bunny turds - there is a lot we don't know about Venus and why it is so hot, but we do know that it is NOT all CO2's fault and knowing this; We don't "know" that. We, in fact, know the opposite: Venus is so hot because of the greenhouse effect of CO2 (and to a lesser extent, sulfur dioxide) in its atmosphere, and this has been known since the 1960s.
[rest of your idiotic rant deleted] You need a basic science education before you can start slinging around accusations.
And in what way isn't that happening? As I said, new coal plants are not being built with the cleanest technologies, such as amine-based CO2 scrubbers.
However, I disagree with your premise anyhow, we should immediately limit construction of new conventional plants here, in favor of nuclear. That wasn't my premise. My premise is that we are not effectively reducing CO2 emissions in key areas.
Not at all, but nice job putting words in my mouth. I'm a poor buggy whip manufacturer, what can you expect?
I disagree, and my solar fabric example made the point - better, cheaper, cleaner solutions will happen simply due to improving technology and competition. That did not, in fact, make the point. In fact, it's just begging the question: you are asserting, without justification, that "technology" will magically solve everything. Economists don't agree. And even if it were true, CO2 still goes into the atmosphere before the technology (whatever it is) is invented; given its long residence time, it's better to prevent it from going in earlier rather than later. Finally, as I noted, if you support the free market, you should support the basic economic premise that an efficient market requires awareness of the true costs of business, which (again, if you except the premise) means that one way or another, there has to be a market cost to carbon.
Technology will improve, but barring unpredictable revolutions, it is not a substitute for mitigation, it only reduces the mitigation necessary.
A government mandate isn't needed to get people moving in the right direction (look at some of the polls). Talk is cheap; action is something else altogether.
Unfortunately, too many turn to government for every solution, while ignoring its huge cost and intrusion into every aspect of our lives. On the contrary, making the free market aware of the cost of carbon is probably the lowest cost solution, but it takes a government mandate to do it.
I'm not dismissing the results, I simply feel the error bars don't represent the true error space for this massive of a problem. I'm also quite sure that even with the increased observational capabilities of the last three decades, we're still far short of sufficient data to understand the Earth.
"Understanding the Earth" is a meaningless term. The question is, "Understanding the Earth well enough to make policy decisions". You have given no arguments why models are useless for that purpose, despite their successes in hindcasting, out-of-sample validation, and predicting actual climate on decadal periods.
Once again, I'm quite unsure the current crop of science is accounting for every input.
Science will never "account for every input". That, once again, is beside the point.
I'd prefer to see much better quantitative account of every significant environmental factor before rushing to judgment.
How much "better" is necessary before you think it's possible to draw any general conclusions, and what is your justification for that particular quantification?
We are talking about phenomena in which a century is an ephemera, after all.
No, we are talking about the climate on century scales, not the far distant future.
Actually that's rather an interesting chart. It seems to show that in this cycle, we've been at a long equilibrium period, something I've heard brought up before.
We are not at an equilibrium period; the climate has been cooling since the last deglaciation, as is clearly depicted.
In many of the other ice ages (if one believes this hindcasting)
That's not hindcasting, that's observation. (Hindcasting refers to model simulations of the past.)
there's been a precipitous drop to several degrees Celsius cooler. I'd not be so quick to dismiss the P/N scenario.;-)
If you believe Bill Ruddiman, humans have slowed the cooling, but that doesn't change the fact that descent into an ice age takes thousands or tens of thousands of years.
Note from the graph that the cooling in this cycle has been about a degree over 10,000 years, and in several other cycles has been less than twice that. The P/N scenario is not realistic science.
"If you're worried about ice ages, that's an argument for conserving our fossil fuels to use when we need them the most, not emitting them into the atmosphere now and having half or more of them scrubbed out of the atmosphere by the next ice age."
Don't worry - we'll be able to mitigate excessive warming very effectively long before those time scales come into play, or we'll be extinct.
That doesn't change the above point.
"The 'wait and see' argument is an excuse for indefinite inaction with no real criterion for how long we need to wait before actually doing something.
That's untrue. What's needed is a true bound of when scientific understanding is up to the challenge, coupled with effective policy.
Scientists now argue that scientific understanding is up to the challenge of setting initial policy; that was not the case 30 years ago, when they openly admitted that too little was known. If you want to disagree with them, you need actual scientific arguments. What do you think the "true" bound ought to be, and how do you justify that?
Recall, too, that policy is not set in stone. You can delay indefinitely "waiting for 'true' knowledge" (which basically means "whenever I personally am convinced), or you can set a mitigation/adaptation policy and revise it upwards or downwards as more is learned.
"If projections really were as uncertain as you believe, that would be an excuse for MORE action, not less: skeptics always make the classic mistake that uncertainty will always err on the side of less impacts, but uncertainty doesn't favor one or the other: it's equally possible that the impacts will be wors
Sorry, the opposite has already been established. I'll see how long you can keep it up until you give up in shame, or one of us hits the comment limit. Either way will be tacit acknowledgement of my victory, according to the official SIIHP protocol of "I'm redefining any action or inaction on your part or my part to equal your loss and my victory".
I didn't say there was any other statistician. And I'd like to hear your definition of "professional statistician" that includes McKitrick but excludes Hansen.
Now you're preemptively trying to find a "graceful" way out and declare victory because you're too immature to back down. No, keep at it. I agree to or admit nothing. I want to see how long you can keep up your self-flagellation. Just like that "Breakfast Club" scene with Bender and Principal Vernon. Of course, that's well before your time. It's morbid curiosity.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe I've misunderstood something fundamentally, but I don't understand how the choice of a geometry of the dimensions can be considered less arbitrary than the choice of particle masses.
Right now, it is arbitrary (though some hope that the dynamics of string theory will ultimately reveal some geometries to be much more likely than others).
In practice, you have to make arbitrary choices either way. The difference is only in principle: with a bunch of fundamental constants that you have to put in by hand, you can never hope to have an explanation of their values. With string theory, there's just one theory and everything is in principle determined by its unique dynamics, although in practice it may be impossible to actually calculate those values.
Very smart people (e.g., Sean Carroll, now at CalTech) have made convincing cases that inflation is actually incoherent in important ways. ... since when?
As late as 2005, he was proposing to explain why "a universe like ours is likely to have begun via a period of inflation". I don't remember reading any papers of his demonstrating that "inflation is incoherent".
This spin 2 particle that string theory "predicts" is sort of a red herring; it doesn't predict anything about how the particle should interact
On the contrary, string theory predicts a unique interaction for the graviton.
String theory, on the other hand, makes no predictions, and has no supporting evidence.
That's a silly claim. There are plenty of string models which make predictions. The problem is in distinguishing them from the predictions of existing quantum field theory models.
2. The relation of thought and emotion in biological organisms does not demonstrate, by itself, anything about the relation of thought and emotion in computers.
An unltraintelligent computer may think 10x faster than us, but not qualitatively 10x better. I don't see how you can conclude that. Arguably, humans think qualitatively better than, say, snails. Why is it "physically and logically" impossible for an ultraintelligent computer to think qualitatively 10x better than us?
Of course, your possibility is also true: that superintelligence is just like human intelligence, only faster or collectively organized.
Vinge calls these "strong" and "weak" superhumanity, respectively.
We have vastly more data about Earth climate and that is where you should look for good arguments for or against global warming. Other planets tell us very little about Earth climate.
There just isn't any evidence from past climate which indicates that a natural warming "cycle" like the one we're experiencing is due right now (see, e.g., here).
As for natural, non-cyclical warming, that's a harder issue. The short answer is that observations of both natural (solar effects, volcanoes, etc.) and human (greenhouse gases, atmospheric aerosols, etc.) sources of warming/cooling indicate that natural sources of warming can explain many warming events in the past, but strongly fail to account for the magnitude, timing, and rate of the warming trend over the last 30-40 years. On the other hand, inclusion of human sources can explain the observed warming pretty well. Both natural and human sources of climate change are necessary to explain observed trends, but natural sources alone appear unable to account for the recent warming that people are worried about.
You can read the above links for more information. I have a hard time believing that, in the hundreds of millions of years that those asteroids have been stirring around the sun since "the one" broke off and smacked into us, the belt itself didn't regain gravitational stability. I don't know what you mean by "gravitational stability". But as for your overall claim, you can actually run N-body simulations of asteroid belt dynamics and find that yes, the "hole" can indeed stick around for hundreds of millions of years. That is, in fact, what the authors of this study did. Now, you could argue that the simulations are incomplete in some way (and no doubt someone will), but you can't simply dismiss the evidence with a facile analogy to cookie dough.
There are ground based gamma ray detectors (Google). They don't detect the gamma rays directly, but rather the showers as the gamma rays interact with molecules in the atmosphere.
The point is not to try to directly equate "hot" regions with "urban" regions; you can't make that determination on temperature alone. The point is to equate industrialized/settled regions with "urban" regions. For that, you want to look at a proxy for population density, which is street and building lights.
You just ... can't ... stop. It's like watching a train wreck.
You were claiming that he as a "professional statistician" he may have more expertise than climate scientists, but that doesn't follow. Anyway, it's beside your point. What I was peeved at was the double standard, talking McIntyre down and giving him grief while Hansen's protected as an AGW high priest (help, help the Bush administration is repressing me). The poster you were responding to didn't say that. He/she just said that open access isn't necessarily the panacea to scientific debate that some here have claimed, due to the relative lack of expertise outside the scientific community. Which is probably true, specific counterexamples like McIntyre notwithstanding. The central issue remains, is part of the job of a scientist to enable fact checking efforts to be run quickly and efficiently or are scientists really only bound to grudging sharing and not always that (see the MBH98 controversy)? If you're in favor of openness and as many checks as possible, I can live with most everything else on the thread. I believe that all scientists need to make data products and procedural documentation available. I believe that Hansen ought to release source code. As for openness at the source code level in general, I don't think that's necessarily realistic given the current reward structure in science.
Scientists are rewarded for being first. As such, they are forced into a situation where intellectual property is important. Science needs to reproducible, so they need to make available all the information necessary to reproduce the result. But that doesn't include, say, releasing source code or experimental equipment, as long as they describe how to duplicate it in principle. It would suck to invest many man-years of effort into producing a widget or program and then have another group take it and scoop you on publications using the fruits of your labor: scientists usually don't get rewarded for writing the software, either, but for using it to do science.
That situation as it is, some scientists release source and some don't; it usually has more to do with the competitive consequences of disclosure than any desire for secrecy. Some groups can afford to give away their source to their competitors, and some can't. (I know some groups which have been scooped by larger and faster groups in exactly that way
Either science needs to change so that being first to publish doesn't matter (not bloody likely), or they need to come up with some other scheme to balance disclosure with credit. Maybe a moratorium: you have X months/years to publish papers using your tool, then it passes into the public domain. One common way that scientists have gotten around it so far is to request coauthorship on papers which use their tool, but then release of the tool is contingent on that publication.
That being said, this whole kerfluffle isn't about Hansen getting scooped, it's about inadequate documentation of his procedures so that they cannot be reproduced even from scratch.
T_P = (1-a)^1/4 [R_S/(2D)]^1/2 T_S
where T_P is the temperature of the planet, T_S=5780 K is the temperature of the Sun, R_S=700,000 km is the radius of the Sun, D is the average distance of the planet from the Sun, and a is the planetary albedo.
For Mercury, a = 0.12 and D = 57 million km, giving T_M = 439 K = 331 F. The actual temperature of Mercury is 440 K (here).
For Earth, a = 0.387 and D = 148 million km, giving T_E = 249 K = -11 F. The actual temperature of the Earth is 254 K (here) top of atmosphere, but its surface temperature is 288 K (here). The ~30 K difference is very close to the predicted magnitude of the greenhouse effect.
In short, the "distance from the Sun" argument produces pretty much the exact answer (if you include albedo as well as distance). 2. The planet's size makes a difference? The other poster is wrong about that, as you can see from the above formula. (Well, it matters insofar as its size helps to determine how much atmosphere it has, and therefore how much of a greenhouse effect. But it doesn't matter directly.) 3. Composition of the planet does matter too - but you don't know how it matters or why it matters do you? It doesn't matter for the equilibrium temperature, except insofar as it may alter the albedo of the planet. It does matter somewhat to how quickly its temperature can change. I can't effective explain it here, and will not even bother trying. It's like having a stimulating conversation with bunny turds - there is a lot we don't know about Venus and why it is so hot, but we do know that it is NOT all CO2's fault and knowing this; We don't "know" that. We, in fact, know the opposite: Venus is so hot because of the greenhouse effect of CO2 (and to a lesser extent, sulfur dioxide) in its atmosphere, and this has been known since the 1960s. [rest of your idiotic rant deleted] You need a basic science education before you can start slinging around accusations.
Technology will improve, but barring unpredictable revolutions, it is not a substitute for mitigation, it only reduces the mitigation necessary. A government mandate isn't needed to get people moving in the right direction (look at some of the polls). Talk is cheap; action is something else altogether. Unfortunately, too many turn to government for every solution, while ignoring its huge cost and intrusion into every aspect of our lives. On the contrary, making the free market aware of the cost of carbon is probably the lowest cost solution, but it takes a government mandate to do it.
I'm not dismissing the results, I simply feel the error bars don't represent the true error space for this massive of a problem. I'm also quite sure that even with the increased observational capabilities of the last three decades, we're still far short of sufficient data to understand the Earth.
"Understanding the Earth" is a meaningless term. The question is, "Understanding the Earth well enough to make policy decisions". You have given no arguments why models are useless for that purpose, despite their successes in hindcasting, out-of-sample validation, and predicting actual climate on decadal periods.
Once again, I'm quite unsure the current crop of science is accounting for every input.
Science will never "account for every input". That, once again, is beside the point.
I'd prefer to see much better quantitative account of every significant environmental factor before rushing to judgment.
How much "better" is necessary before you think it's possible to draw any general conclusions, and what is your justification for that particular quantification?
We are talking about phenomena in which a century is an ephemera, after all.
No, we are talking about the climate on century scales, not the far distant future.
Actually that's rather an interesting chart. It seems to show that in this cycle, we've been at a long equilibrium period, something I've heard brought up before.
We are not at an equilibrium period; the climate has been cooling since the last deglaciation, as is clearly depicted.
In many of the other ice ages (if one believes this hindcasting)
That's not hindcasting, that's observation. (Hindcasting refers to model simulations of the past.)
there's been a precipitous drop to several degrees Celsius cooler. I'd not be so quick to dismiss the P/N scenario. ;-)
If you believe Bill Ruddiman, humans have slowed the cooling, but that doesn't change the fact that descent into an ice age takes thousands or tens of thousands of years.
Note from the graph that the cooling in this cycle has been about a degree over 10,000 years, and in several other cycles has been less than twice that. The P/N scenario is not realistic science.
"If you're worried about ice ages, that's an argument for conserving our fossil fuels to use when we need them the most, not emitting them into the atmosphere now and having half or more of them scrubbed out of the atmosphere by the next ice age."
Don't worry - we'll be able to mitigate excessive warming very effectively long before those time scales come into play, or we'll be extinct.
That doesn't change the above point.
"The 'wait and see' argument is an excuse for indefinite inaction with no real criterion for how long we need to wait before actually doing something.
That's untrue. What's needed is a true bound of when scientific understanding is up to the challenge, coupled with effective policy.
Scientists now argue that scientific understanding is up to the challenge of setting initial policy; that was not the case 30 years ago, when they openly admitted that too little was known. If you want to disagree with them, you need actual scientific arguments. What do you think the "true" bound ought to be, and how do you justify that?
Recall, too, that policy is not set in stone. You can delay indefinitely "waiting for 'true' knowledge" (which basically means "whenever I personally am convinced), or you can set a mitigation/adaptation policy and revise it upwards or downwards as more is learned.
"If projections really were as uncertain as you believe, that would be an excuse for MORE action, not less: skeptics always make the classic mistake that uncertainty will always err on the side of less impacts, but uncertainty doesn't favor one or the other: it's equally possible that the impacts will be wors
You stopped replying by replying. Funny.
16.
And yet you just can't stop. Fascinating. 15.
14. Keep dancing.
Sorry, the opposite has already been established. I'll see how long you can keep it up until you give up in shame, or one of us hits the comment limit. Either way will be tacit acknowledgement of my victory, according to the official SIIHP protocol of "I'm redefining any action or inaction on your part or my part to equal your loss and my victory".
13. Keep dancing.
Nice of you to do exactly what I wanted.
You mean, exactly what I wanted, and stated I was going to do. But real clever of you, forecasting the future like that.
Eleven. And hey, twelve.
Keep it up, you can go the distance.
I didn't say there was any other statistician. And I'd like to hear your definition of "professional statistician" that includes McKitrick but excludes Hansen.
Now you're preemptively trying to find a "graceful" way out and declare victory because you're too immature to back down. No, keep at it. I agree to or admit nothing. I want to see how long you can keep up your self-flagellation. Just like that "Breakfast Club" scene with Bender and Principal Vernon. Of course, that's well before your time. It's morbid curiosity.
Ten.
Now you're lying about what I've "admitted".
Nine. Keep it up, champ. You know I'm right.