Many of them have suggested fairly simple, inexpensive experiments that might help settle the question but the AGW people aren't willing to take their suggestions, possibly because they might not like the results.
Such as? I've been making it a point for several years now to ask all "skeptics": What evidence is missing? What piece(s) of evidence would convince you were it to become well documented? What experiment is lacking? And have not received a single answer that was any more specific than "Something more convincing than what you have now!" Or, more honestly, "There is nothing that could convince me that humans are altering the climate!" Science, of course, requires a priori definition of what results would or would not cause rejection of the null hypothesis, and it's not science to refrain from doing so and just rely on post hoc characterization of any results as "Well, that wasn't convincing enough" There is no theory, hypothesis, law, dictum, or axiom, in science or any other endeavor, which cannot be countered by "Nope, that doesn't convince me, it could be something else than what you think it is", so that doesn't qualify as any sort of compelling argument.
In fact, as I alluded to in a previous post, "skeptics" certainly do not share any kind of a model or hypothesis other than a devout belief that the anthropogenic CO2 model is wrong, although they do not share any kind of model or hypothesis as to why it is wrong. They do not even agree as to whether or not there is warming. Their various hypotheses and guesses are more powerful arguments against each other than against the standard AGW model. In fact, as I pointed out previously, most of the self-proclaimed "skeptics" manage to hold contradictory theories, simultaneously.
In general, in science, you don't (and don't need to ) assume that you have a perfect model; it's sufficient that you have the best available model, in terms of explaining observations, predicting experimental results, and having a plausible mechanism. Anthropogenic CO2 GW theory has not just the best model in terms of these criteria, but the only viable one. "It might not be; it might be something else" is no more a plausible model than "God's doing it".
And in fact, Occam's Razor requires "skeptics" to not only model why the temperature is changing (and/or why it isn't changing but just looks like it is) but also why burning fossil carbon, causing a rise in atmospheric CO2, causing the atmosphere to absorb energy which would otherwise radiate outwards from the stratosphere, could possibly NOT be true, despite every step in the chain of causation being not only plausible, but verifiable to the best accuracy currently available.
I await news of a "skeptic" doctor in the emergency room ordering a full series of biochemical and physiological tests on somebody who shows up with a knife hilt protruding from his chest, on the grounds that there isn't any real proof that the knife is the source of the patient's problem and it takes more research to rule out other possible causes.
So, what were these " fairly simple, inexpensive experiments that might help settle the question" which the AGW people refuse to carry out? Just one will do. For extra credit, why can't one of the skeptics carry them out?
Verizon (and I would guess most of the big phone plans) has a parent/child thing that'll run on any phone with a gps, doesn't need to be smartphone, where the parent can see where the child is at any time, and get alerts when the child leaves a certain area, etc. Always thought that the smart thing to do would be to set my old phone to child status when it got obsolete instead of dropping it, then add a new phone, wire the old phone up to the car (or scooter) electrical, and stuff it behind the dash somewhere.
Our college dorm used to elect the dorm chairman by random lottery each meeting. One meeting, the cat got elected. Didn't seem to make any difference from term to term. Take home message; we were a small, smart, highly cooperative bunch of people. In the absence of a group with these characteristics, no leader will be functional. In the presence of said characteristics, no leader will be needed.
Which is the point of a constitution. It needs to be founded on a basic set of ethics. That of self ownership - I am the owner of me. No one should be able to initiate harm against me and I must not initiate harm against anyone else. In my opinion the very purpose of the state it to ensure people abide by those rules. The problem is that the state actively harms people, and it allows people to vote on what form the harm takes and whether people should be harmed any more.
The state should be protecting us, not harming us.
As if nobody disagrees with that. "The state should be protecting us, not harming us" "What? No!" Do you (not meant personally) think that the problem with all prior governments is that they never thought of that? Making a benevolent government which serves the people is hardly a new idea. It's not as if the Founding Fathers decided "ah, let's just screw everybody and inhibit their freedoms" "well, it's against my principles, but OK". Hell, even the communist countries were founded on the basis of the government doing good things for people, in contrast to the regimes they replaced. The devil, dear sir or madam, is most definitely in the details. I just don't think we're capable of organizing anything much more complex than a tribe (and certainly no guarantee that we can always run one of those effectively; a sizable fraction of the species can't even come up with a halfway functional family) and we sure as heck don't do well in an unstructured, anarchic environment. Evolution hardly guarantees that we are capable of anything anywhere near the kind of civilization everybody dreams of, even though their dreams vary wildly in what the end product would look and function like.
We have one lousy late October storm and literally millions of people are left in the dark and cold (let alone no contact with the outside world by internet, tv, or phone) here in the resourceful and wealthy Northeast, some of them still without power; on top of which all the gas stations are dead without electricity so that even when people can get through the tree-blocked streets they're lucky if they can get refueled before they run out of gas. I hope future generations enjoy scratching the dirt to get some cabbages to feed the family.
you can't housebreak primates. we're lucky humans can be toilet trained. that's what comes from evolving in trees instead of dens where the crap builds up.
Communist Russia, China, and their derivatives had little to do with Marx. Marx theorized that capitalism would eventually blow itself up as the tension between owners and workers finally got too great. He never theorized that you could skip right over the capitalism step, as the communists figured they could do. Whether he was right about what would follow capitalism is still unknown, but the internal contradictions of the system are obvious now.
au contraire; an "ideal" system would be suspended in a vacuum with nothing physically contacting it to act as a heat sink; as in the earth. all input energy and output energy, by IR. the laboratory system is the one which has lost control of a bunch of variables.
Well, presumably you " got a full professor from a research institution fired for serious lapses on research" by something a little more specific than stating they were "a matter of historical record", so you can presumably cite exactly which "some of the academic GW players were not financially viable until they hooked into the GW gig" or else you'd understand why the blanket assertion would be dismissed.
Is it more likely that the unusual surface formations found on Manhattan Island are the result of human effects, or is it more likely that Nature with far more power than humans have yet achieved is the cause?
A clear choice was presented to the American people; accept the reality that there costs to everything, and limits to reality, as Carter pointed out, or accept that we have unlimited resources and any bills need never be paid, and vote for Reagan. Nothing much has changed since then.
Why do you always try to blaim everything religious on the Republicans? You have your own (flunked out) preacher in Al Gore, the holy pope of Global Warming. He uses the same speech methods as any preacher on the pulpit. Ya-heous, Jeh-he-zious is looooooooking downnnnnnnnnnn onnnnnnnn ya-hoo, and-da youze mUST! deliver unto his heavionaly servent (Gore) all your earthly material possessions as a gift to his glorious exortations (campaign donations), least you feel his justified wrath and damnation (loss of hookers in the oval office will do that).
Denialists who base their argument on insulting Al Gore always remind me of that scene in Enemy Mine where the earthling insults the alien's holy book, and the alien comes up with the strongest retort he can think of:
"Earthman, your Mickey Mouse is one big stupid dope!"
Unfortunately, perhaps, software engineering falls into the more dubious side of the divide, along with sanitation engineer; if you want to hang out a shingle as a mechanical engineer you need to be certified and probably have had to take a lot of courses; to be a software engineer you can just fool around with C++ in your bedroom and stick it on your resume. and that's why windows crashes more often than bridges do.
The main problem is, we honestly have no clue what's going on. Anyone who says we have this all figured out is either an idiot or someone pandering for funding.
Because as we all know, there are no other alternatives. Either you have it all figured out, or you have no clue. And since there is no topic anywhere on earth that somebody has ALL figured out, nobody has any clue. So you might as well vote for somebody who obviously has no clue. And that's the Republican platform, in a nutshell.
Oh sure, let's save 1% of the budget and let the damn foreigners die from disasters and epidemics or whatever. That's consistent with the way we respond to domestic crises, after all.
When was the last time the "Defense Department" did anything defensive? War of 1812, maybe? And it was the War Department then, IIRC. In fact, the Defense Department should be titled more correctly, the Department of Force Projection in Foreign Countries. I mean, prior to 9/11 we were defending South Korea better than we were defending Manhattan, obviously; and since then, we quickly bagged the idea of using the Defense Department to defend ourselves, and cooked up a whole new organization, Homeland Security, to do a bad job of actually defending us.
Nope, we need the Defense Department to slap people into line if they refuse to get with the program that we are entitled to unlimited access to whatever we need to satisfy our every whim, no matter where it might be found. I'm not sure it wouldn't be better in the end to just maybe curb our appetites to realistic levels.
Seriously, why would they want to come here to exterminate us for the good of the galaxy, when it's pretty obvious we're never going to get out of the solar system? We'll be lucky if we're a visible presence in the other planets. And, if we ever get ourselves sane enough to manage to get off the Earth, then by definition we won't be crazy enough to be dangerous any more.
I just wonder how do so many US'ians get brainwashed like Khallow. It's like they live in a seperate reality.
I take great exception to that. They don't live in any reality at all, they live in a separate fantasy, where the universe is full of infinite resources, tended by friendly savages whose only wish is to provide them to us as cheaply as possible, because they so admire our civilization, lifestyle, character, morality, and intelligence, and they know that we deserve to live like Roman emperors while the rest of the world lives as serfs. After all, we were smart enough to be born here. Gotta watch for those sneaky ones who try to be born here when they don't deserve it though!
Slashdot Mirror
so why did the animals get kicked out for eve and the snake's bad behavior? boy, no wonder they won't talk to us any more.
They failed to fix the Yminus2k problem in their birth and death records.
right. you never want to teach a kid in school that energy is conserved. or that f=ma. much better for them to keep their tiny minds open.
Many of them have suggested fairly simple, inexpensive experiments that might help settle the question but the AGW people aren't willing to take their suggestions, possibly because they might not like the results.
Such as? I've been making it a point for several years now to ask all "skeptics": What evidence is missing? What piece(s) of evidence would convince you were it to become well documented? What experiment is lacking? And have not received a single answer that was any more specific than "Something more convincing than what you have now!" Or, more honestly, "There is nothing that could convince me that humans are altering the climate!" Science, of course, requires a priori definition of what results would or would not cause rejection of the null hypothesis, and it's not science to refrain from doing so and just rely on post hoc characterization of any results as "Well, that wasn't convincing enough" There is no theory, hypothesis, law, dictum, or axiom, in science or any other endeavor, which cannot be countered by "Nope, that doesn't convince me, it could be something else than what you think it is", so that doesn't qualify as any sort of compelling argument.
In fact, as I alluded to in a previous post, "skeptics" certainly do not share any kind of a model or hypothesis other than a devout belief that the anthropogenic CO2 model is wrong, although they do not share any kind of model or hypothesis as to why it is wrong. They do not even agree as to whether or not there is warming. Their various hypotheses and guesses are more powerful arguments against each other than against the standard AGW model. In fact, as I pointed out previously, most of the self-proclaimed "skeptics" manage to hold contradictory theories, simultaneously.
In general, in science, you don't (and don't need to ) assume that you have a perfect model; it's sufficient that you have the best available model, in terms of explaining observations, predicting experimental results, and having a plausible mechanism. Anthropogenic CO2 GW theory has not just the best model in terms of these criteria, but the only viable one. "It might not be; it might be something else" is no more a plausible model than "God's doing it".
And in fact, Occam's Razor requires "skeptics" to not only model why the temperature is changing (and/or why it isn't changing but just looks like it is) but also why burning fossil carbon, causing a rise in atmospheric CO2, causing the atmosphere to absorb energy which would otherwise radiate outwards from the stratosphere, could possibly NOT be true, despite every step in the chain of causation being not only plausible, but verifiable to the best accuracy currently available.
I await news of a "skeptic" doctor in the emergency room ordering a full series of biochemical and physiological tests on somebody who shows up with a knife hilt protruding from his chest, on the grounds that there isn't any real proof that the knife is the source of the patient's problem and it takes more research to rule out other possible causes.
So, what were these " fairly simple, inexpensive experiments that might help settle the question" which the AGW people refuse to carry out? Just one will do. For extra credit, why can't one of the skeptics carry them out?
Verizon (and I would guess most of the big phone plans) has a parent/child thing that'll run on any phone with a gps, doesn't need to be smartphone, where the parent can see where the child is at any time, and get alerts when the child leaves a certain area, etc. Always thought that the smart thing to do would be to set my old phone to child status when it got obsolete instead of dropping it, then add a new phone, wire the old phone up to the car (or scooter) electrical, and stuff it behind the dash somewhere.
Ahh, the old Jack Benny line.
"Your money or your life!"
"Give me a minute, I"m thinking"
Our college dorm used to elect the dorm chairman by random lottery each meeting. One meeting, the cat got elected. Didn't seem to make any difference from term to term. Take home message; we were a small, smart, highly cooperative bunch of people. In the absence of a group with these characteristics, no leader will be functional. In the presence of said characteristics, no leader will be needed.
It explains Fermi's Paradox.
Which is the point of a constitution. It needs to be founded on a basic set of ethics. That of self ownership - I am the owner of me. No one should be able to initiate harm against me and I must not initiate harm against anyone else. In my opinion the very purpose of the state it to ensure people abide by those rules.
The problem is that the state actively harms people, and it allows people to vote on what form the harm takes and whether people should be harmed any more.
The state should be protecting us, not harming us.
As if nobody disagrees with that.
"The state should be protecting us, not harming us"
"What? No!"
Do you (not meant personally) think that the problem with all prior governments is that they never thought of that?
Making a benevolent government which serves the people is hardly a new idea. It's not as if the Founding Fathers decided "ah, let's just screw everybody and inhibit their freedoms" "well, it's against my principles, but OK". Hell, even the communist countries were founded on the basis of the government doing good things for people, in contrast to the regimes they replaced.
The devil, dear sir or madam, is most definitely in the details. I just don't think we're capable of organizing anything much more complex than a tribe (and certainly no guarantee that we can always run one of those effectively; a sizable fraction of the species can't even come up with a halfway functional family) and we sure as heck don't do well in an unstructured, anarchic environment. Evolution hardly guarantees that we are capable of anything anywhere near the kind of civilization everybody dreams of, even though their dreams vary wildly in what the end product would look and function like.
We have one lousy late October storm and literally millions of people are left in the dark and cold (let alone no contact with the outside world by internet, tv, or phone) here in the resourceful and wealthy Northeast, some of them still without power; on top of which all the gas stations are dead without electricity so that even when people can get through the tree-blocked streets they're lucky if they can get refueled before they run out of gas. I hope future generations enjoy scratching the dirt to get some cabbages to feed the family.
you can't housebreak primates. we're lucky humans can be toilet trained. that's what comes from evolving in trees instead of dens where the crap builds up.
Communist Russia, China, and their derivatives had little to do with Marx. Marx theorized that capitalism would eventually blow itself up as the tension between owners and workers finally got too great. He never theorized that you could skip right over the capitalism step, as the communists figured they could do. Whether he was right about what would follow capitalism is still unknown, but the internal contradictions of the system are obvious now.
au contraire; an "ideal" system would be suspended in a vacuum with nothing physically contacting it to act as a heat sink; as in the earth. all input energy and output energy, by IR. the laboratory system is the one which has lost control of a bunch of variables.
Well, presumably you " got a full professor from a research institution fired for serious lapses on research" by something a little more specific than stating they were "a matter of historical record", so you can presumably cite exactly which "some of the academic GW players were not financially viable until they hooked into the GW gig" or else you'd understand why the blanket assertion would be dismissed.
I can demonstrate CO2 absorbing IR whenever I want to. I cannot demonstrate God absorbing IR whenever I want to. Maybe you can?
Is it more likely that the unusual surface formations found on Manhattan Island are the result of human effects, or is it more likely that Nature with far more power than humans have yet achieved is the cause?
A clear choice was presented to the American people; accept the reality that there costs to everything, and limits to reality, as Carter pointed out, or accept that we have unlimited resources and any bills need never be paid, and vote for Reagan. Nothing much has changed since then.
Why do you always try to blaim everything religious on the Republicans? You have your own (flunked out) preacher in Al Gore, the holy pope of Global Warming. He uses the same speech methods as any preacher on the pulpit. Ya-heous, Jeh-he-zious is looooooooking downnnnnnnnnnn onnnnnnnn ya-hoo, and-da youze mUST! deliver unto his heavionaly servent (Gore) all your earthly material possessions as a gift to his glorious exortations (campaign donations), least you feel his justified wrath and damnation (loss of hookers in the oval office will do that).
Denialists who base their argument on insulting Al Gore always remind me of that scene in Enemy Mine where the earthling insults the alien's holy book, and the alien comes up with the strongest retort he can think of:
"Earthman, your Mickey Mouse is one big stupid dope!"
Unfortunately, perhaps, software engineering falls into the more dubious side of the divide, along with sanitation engineer; if you want to hang out a shingle as a mechanical engineer you need to be certified and probably have had to take a lot of courses; to be a software engineer you can just fool around with C++ in your bedroom and stick it on your resume. and that's why windows crashes more often than bridges do.
The main problem is, we honestly have no clue what's going on. Anyone who says we have this all figured out is either an idiot or someone pandering for funding.
Because as we all know, there are no other alternatives. Either you have it all figured out, or you have no clue. And since there is no topic anywhere on earth that somebody has ALL figured out, nobody has any clue. So you might as well vote for somebody who obviously has no clue. And that's the Republican platform, in a nutshell.
Oh sure, let's save 1% of the budget and let the damn foreigners die from disasters and epidemics or whatever. That's consistent with the way we respond to domestic crises, after all.
When was the last time the "Defense Department" did anything defensive? War of 1812, maybe? And it was the War Department then, IIRC. In fact, the Defense Department should be titled more correctly, the Department of Force Projection in Foreign Countries. I mean, prior to 9/11 we were defending South Korea better than we were defending Manhattan, obviously; and since then, we quickly bagged the idea of using the Defense Department to defend ourselves, and cooked up a whole new organization, Homeland Security, to do a bad job of actually defending us.
Nope, we need the Defense Department to slap people into line if they refuse to get with the program that we are entitled to unlimited access to whatever we need to satisfy our every whim, no matter where it might be found. I'm not sure it wouldn't be better in the end to just maybe curb our appetites to realistic levels.
Seriously, why would they want to come here to exterminate us for the good of the galaxy, when it's pretty obvious we're never going to get out of the solar system? We'll be lucky if we're a visible presence in the other planets. And, if we ever get ourselves sane enough to manage to get off the Earth, then by definition we won't be crazy enough to be dangerous any more.
i assumed he had a fishin engine
I just wonder how do so many US'ians get brainwashed like Khallow. It's like they live in a seperate reality.
I take great exception to that. They don't live in any reality at all, they live in a separate fantasy, where the universe is full of infinite resources, tended by friendly savages whose only wish is to provide them to us as cheaply as possible, because they so admire our civilization, lifestyle, character, morality, and intelligence, and they know that we deserve to live like Roman emperors while the rest of the world lives as serfs. After all, we were smart enough to be born here. Gotta watch for those sneaky ones who try to be born here when they don't deserve it though!