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  1. Re:Yes. on Should Science Be King In Politics? · · Score: 1

    And who turns review boards that will determine if certain treatments are worth the cost for specific patients into "end of life consoling"? You really believe that those boards were there to make the people who were denied treatment feel better about their life ending?

    And what the Republicans were calling death panels had nothing to do with review boards to determine the cost effectiveness of treatment. The provision they called setting up death panels was to allow Medicare to pay doctors for the time they take to counsel patients what end of life options are available to them when the patient voluntarily asks the doctor about it. Currently that is not an allowed Medicare coverage so doctors either fake it with another code or charge the patient directly for it.

  2. Re:Yes. on Should Science Be King In Politics? · · Score: 1

    To date I haven't seen anything in the AGW faith that is falsifiable, thus it isn't science.

    The problem is that climate change theory isn't made of one (or even a few) simple thing(s). It's a combination of strings of evidence from several different fields. I saw recently that one climate scientist described climate change theory as like a rope hammock, with so many different pieces that you may falsify one piece of it but that doesn't destroy the utility of the theory. There are lots of things that taken together could falsify the theory, just not one simple way to do it.

  3. Re:Amazing on Canadian Ice Shelves Halve In Six Years · · Score: 1

    Ok, I was saying 10,000 years for the glaciation to fully develop. It's may be true that the switchover to glaciation conditions occurs relatively quickly. I still stand by the 20,000 years for the start of the next glaciation. That is from calculations of Milankovitch cycles without consideration of what humans may do to change it.

  4. Re:Uh, Greenland redux? on Canadian Ice Shelves Halve In Six Years · · Score: 1

    The page has links to actual peer reviewed papers on the subject. If you want to refute the science you have to refute what's in those papers.

  5. Re:Uh, Greenland redux? on Canadian Ice Shelves Halve In Six Years · · Score: 1

    We will see what happens, won't we.

  6. Re:5th Amendment on Drone Kills Top Al Qaeda Figure · · Score: 1

    The man was a US citizen. They should have at least held a proforma trial in absentia before executing him.

  7. Re:Fast way to reduce CO2 global warming... on Canadian Ice Shelves Halve In Six Years · · Score: 1

    8 Gigatons per year of diamonds? (That's how much carbon is going into the atmosphere each year). That would quickly make diamonds worthless.

  8. Re:There were glaciers all over Montana on Canadian Ice Shelves Halve In Six Years · · Score: 1

    So we should only believe the proxies that say it was warmer during the MWP? Many proxies are limited in the area they cover (tree rings for instance) so a better estimation is probably made by combining them into a meta-number.

  9. Re:Amazing on Canadian Ice Shelves Halve In Six Years · · Score: 1

    Here is a little research into the subject that backs me up. As I said, it's not as simple as you'd like it to be.

  10. Re:The Alarmism misses a key detail on Canadian Ice Shelves Halve In Six Years · · Score: 1

    And nobody but some mistaken atlas has said that 15% of Greenland ice has melted. Sea levels will continue to rise in millimeters per year although that may become centimeters per year after 2050. In another answer to you I explained that rainfall is a factor in the lack of SLR in the last couple of years.

  11. Re:The Alarmism misses a key detail on Canadian Ice Shelves Halve In Six Years · · Score: 1

    What does 5 feet of sea level rise have to do with it? That's about the maximum rise expected by 2100 under current predictions. I was talking about the fact that sea level hasn't risen for the past couple of years.

  12. Re:It doesn't matter... on Canadian Ice Shelves Halve In Six Years · · Score: 1

    The scientific solution it to quit raising the level of CO2 (and that of some other emitted GHG's) in the atmosphere. It's that simple. I'm willing to listen to anyone with a suggestion of how to achieve that.

  13. Re:It doesn't matter... on Canadian Ice Shelves Halve In Six Years · · Score: 1

    ... and prepare to plant crops further north in Canada/Siberia, those melted glaciers will expose rich virgin soil ...

    Generally there is no soil beneath glaciers. It is scraped off by the glacial action. It would take hundreds of years for soil to develop there.

    ... it's too late to stop global warming...

    But it's not to late to keep it from getting worse than it is already going to get.

  14. Re:The Alarmism misses a key detail on Canadian Ice Shelves Halve In Six Years · · Score: 1

    Record high temperature outnumbered record cold temperatures by 2-1 in the 2000's. Admittedly that only covers the US but in 2010 17 countries had all time record high temperatures.

  15. Re:The Alarmism misses a key detail on Canadian Ice Shelves Halve In Six Years · · Score: 1

    No, ice shelves melting don't change sea level significantly because they are already floating on the ocean. But the glaciers that feed them no longer have as much resistance at the bottom end and so typically speed up feeding more ice to the sea. That does raise sea level.

  16. Re:The Alarmism misses a key detail on Canadian Ice Shelves Halve In Six Years · · Score: 1

    You should look into sea level, it's really pretty interesting. There are all sorts of regional effects. For instance the gravitational attraction of mountain ranges like the Andes and the Antarctic Ice Sheet make sea level adjacent to them higher than it would be otherwise. The Antarctic Ice sheet increases sea level around the continent by as much as 30 meters (damn, that's a lot). Here's a paper on the subject but since that's paywalled, here's an article on it.

  17. Re:"These observations should dispel..." on Canadian Ice Shelves Halve In Six Years · · Score: 1

    Spencer, Lindzen and Christie are examples of the 3% that do get funding, tenure and published. But I will admit they don't get a lot of respect in the field.

  18. Re:The Alarmism misses a key detail on Canadian Ice Shelves Halve In Six Years · · Score: 1

    Lack of sea level rise is partially due to the record setting precipitation around the world, Pakistan last year and this, Australia, the US Midwest. The some of the rainfall gets absorbed in the land and aquifers and doesn't return for a while.

  19. Re:Bad phrasing on Canadian Ice Shelves Halve In Six Years · · Score: 1

    I think if you compared IPCC predictions to reality you would find that they more often underpredict rather than overpredict.

  20. Re:Why would that dispel anything? on Canadian Ice Shelves Halve In Six Years · · Score: 1

    No, the sinks take up CO2 regardless of the source. But there is more total carbon in the carbon cycle so the levels increase everywhere. Only around 45% of the CO2 emitted by humans each year remains in the atmosphere, the rest is absorbed by the sinks.

  21. Re:Why would that dispel anything? on Canadian Ice Shelves Halve In Six Years · · Score: 1

    CO2 is CO2 regardless of the source (except there can be differences at the isotope level). The way it works is that in the Carbon Cycle there is a natural balance of carbon between the atmosphere, the hydrosphere, the biosphere, the geosphere and the pedosphere. When you increase the total carbon in the cycle it gets distributed among the various 'spheres' increasing the level until a new balance is reached. The yearly cycle continues as it always has, just with more total carbon in it. The most obvious signs of this are the increase in CO2 levels in the atmosphere and ocean acidification.

  22. Re:New measurement unit? on Canadian Ice Shelves Halve In Six Years · · Score: 1

    If that was the only time and place it happened it wouldn't matter much. But it has been happening and will continue to happen as long as the Earth keeps warming until there is no ice left. Check out what's been happening with the Pine Island Glacier and ice shelf in Antarctica.

  23. Re:Not year over year on Canadian Ice Shelves Halve In Six Years · · Score: 1

    No, it's not misleading. Ice shelves are the lobes of glaciers floating on the sea, typically tens or hundreds of meters thick, not the sea ice that melts and reforms each year and typically never gets more than maybe 10 meters thick. At no time in the past 5,000 years would you have been able to go to those ice shelves and find them to have broken up as they have in the past 6 years.

  24. Re:Amazing on Canadian Ice Shelves Halve In Six Years · · Score: 1

    The Earth's climate temperature is sensitive to the level of CO2 in the atmosphere regardless of the source. Before the 1830's human CO2 emissions were low enough that they pretty much got absorbed by the natural sinks (mostly the ocean) so they didn't raise the level. Before about 1960 the level was still below 320 ppmv (up from ~280 ppmv) which would cause a small enough temperature rise that it's mostly overwhelmed by natural processes. So I would say that AGW started to become significant in the 1960's-1970's. Scientists have said it would be best to keep the level to 350 ppmv or below to limit the temperature increase to tolerable levels. We are currently at 390 ppmv and still rising.

    "Burn in Hell on Earth" and $300T are just straw men, exaggerations with no connection to reality.

    It's not a business decision at all, the science is the science, what we're going to do about it is a political decision.

  25. Re:"These observations should dispel..." on Canadian Ice Shelves Halve In Six Years · · Score: 2

    I certainly didn't say "scientists" before in this tread because that was my only post (until this one) in the thread. But in general if I say scientists it's in the context of the field being discussed, not every scientist in the world. I guess the GP did use the term "*Some* scientists" but I don't consider those not working the field in question to have much authority to comment on it.

    In regards to surface temperature there's a project called Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature lead by the physicist Richard Muller who has expressed some skepticism of global warming that is examining that right now. They still have a long way to go for their final report but the initial findings don't do anything to discredit the current science.

    A preliminary analysis of 2% of the Berkeley Earth dataset shows a global temperature trend that goes up and down with global cycles, and does so broadly in sync with the temperature records from other groups such as NOAA, NASA, and Hadley CRU. However, the preliminary analysis includes only a very small subset (2%) of randomly chosen data, and does not include any method for correcting for biases such as the urban heat island effect, the time of observation, or other potentially influential biases.

    I left the second sentence in because I acknowledge they have much work to do yet but I will be surprised if their results don't largely validate the current science.

    Throw out all of the proxy data and it doesn't matter that much. It's merely corroborating evidence. What matters is the science that's being done today on today's climate.

    Economics don't matter until you decide what to do about it which is a political question. It doesn't change the science one bit.

    The CRU's paleoclimate temperature estimate code is not a computer model. It is code to process a large dataset. Code for several of the major GCM's such as NASA/GISS Model E are available so feel free to analyze them yourself. Not sure what you're getting at with that last sentence.

    The only thing that isn't reproducible in climate science is the data about what happened in the past. It's easy enough to redo the research that determined the effects of different factors on the climate. It's true that it isn't particularly amenable to much lab experimentation but even that occurs (the CERN CLOUD project).

    I largely agree with your third point.

    I think you see bias because the findings don't say what you want to hear. Someone's going to have to make a much more solid case on that before I'll take the accusation seriously.

    An argument from authority isn't necessarily wrong.

    The strength of this argument depends upon two factors:

            The authority is a legitimate expert on the subject.
            A consensus exists among legitimate experts on the matter under discussion.

    I would argue that climatologists are indeed legitimate experts on the subject and the study I cited demonstrates there is a consensus in the field. Therefore it is not a fallacious appeal to authority.