If that is going to be done, you need to fund the higher education and earmark STEM R & D funds appropriately for the next 30 years or so, or else you get what we have now. It needs to be seen as a liability, same as social security.
I would say this will never be done correctly, so the government should stay out. The other problems are law of diminishing returns and that determining which fields to fund requires a self-preserving bureaucracy with the impossible job of predicting the future.
Please stop trying to pigeon hole me. No, it is not ok to discriminate against "undesirables", it is also dumb. Employee offered healthcare is a scam because:
1) It is a tax avoidance scheme 2) I am not sure how common this is... but for my job if I opt out of the employee health plan I receive no extra money. If the value of my work is equal to salary + insurance, why do I not have the choice to take a raise instead?
Ok, I think religious organizations should receive no special treatment at all. The less special treatment they receive the better.
I suppose I have issue with making the condition in the first place. However, once the condition is in place, exceptions should not be made, especially not on the basis of money or political clout.
The problem I see is that It seems like these exceptions are always made. Someone always gets special treatment.
Let me start out by saying I think employee healthcare is a scam to being with. There a couple of things more scammy than that, one of them is religion. As far as I am concerned, calling your opinion "faith" is just an excuse for it seem more important than it is.
If they have a religious objection to offering health care to Jews, black people and liberals (however they choose to define them), you still okay with it? I mean hey, they can always choose to work somewhere else, right?
This is equivalent to paying certain groups less (if we assume their paychecks aren't larger). It is not similar to offering a different healthcare plan than other employers.
I still don't get this. The employer offered health plan is basically an incentive to work somewhere. Not liking your work health plan is like not liking your salary. If you want a better healthplan work somewhere else.
More or less... recent studies that have attempted to separate natural and human effects on temperature have found that human activity accounts for over 100% of the warming.
I think it is "less". Look, I get what you are saying, but people really need to stop acting like CO2 has been added to the atmosphere and caused warming, then taken out and the warming went away. This is what would be required to actually do the experiment "showing" that it is CO2 emissions. As it stands right now human activity is the most plausible explanation for the warming. There may be some unknown factor (although I doubt it). Without removing CO2 and seeing what happens we will not know if the CO2 emissions were necessary to cause this warming. Even then there will be no "control earth", but such is the nature of this type of science, all we can do is look for very strong correlations and a mechanism of action consistent with known physical laws.
Under the simplifying conditions of a number of climate models, CO2 can account for over 100% of the warming. This is not the same as adding CO2 to the atmosphere and seeing if it warms. But, oh wait, we did do that and it did warm. So is CO2 sufficient to cause warming? Well, we don't have a negative control, so it is hard to say for sure. It sure looks like it though.
I think it is commonly accepted that the presence of positive feedbacks (water vapor, decreased albedo, etc) are the important factor. There is not enough CO2 to have a large direct effect. So, on its own, knowing that CO2 absorbs IR tells you little about how the system will react. For that reason I view the CO2 absorption spectrum as the corroborating evidence.
"I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the civilized world no longer a Government by free opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men." -Woodrow Wilson, after signing the Federal Reserve into existence
There are other examples of this (see above). If you have a conspiracy you strongly support you better be able to find the primary source so people can know how much to trust it. I haven't looked into the Ted turner quote but I can easily believe it is made up or taken out of context. If you cannot source it satisfactorily, you are only doing yourself and your cause a disservice by repeating it, cunir wolf.
B - Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming
Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods.
-Phil Jones
It was you who posted this excerpt of Phil Jones talking about stats somewhere in this thread... What that guy was saying shows a deeply and fundamentally flawed understanding of statistics. I mean it is scary that someone of such high standing in a politically-important field would say anything about "almost getting a significant p-value of.05".
It is things like that that make me put " " around experts. I really hope I am misinterpreting his statement.
Well, it isn't necessarily "belief", I know the conclusions found in any individual paper may be wrong, same for reviews (like the IPCC reports). The key is at least understanding the sources of uncertainty and what a variety of "experts" think about it before forming a strong opinion. For example, I know that there are no good models of cloud behaviour. The IPCC reports account for this and the authors have estimated a lower bound on negative feedback due to clouds. This is based on paleo-climate data, which relies on various proxies for climate conditions. There is some disagreement on how much confidence should be placed in these proxies. For now I will accept the IPCC number as the best available, but I do not "believe" it.
I choose option C. The best thing is to go read the IPCC reports and peer-reviewed literature. If I am unable to completely understand the methods, etc, I will have to take the interpretation provided for me, knowing that I am using the argument from authority heuristic.
So, I think we agree. It is often cheaper to look at multiple lines of evidence with weak criterion for significance than to do one study and require a strong criterion.
I think it is more a practical issue. There are so many confounding variables when studying complex systems (biology, climate) that no one would ever publish if a low criterion for "significance" was not used.
You are correct that science is not about proving. But if you say something has "been shown", you imply that X was reported to be necessary and sufficient to cause Y. In this case, you should say that "CO2 has been shown to explain the warming in climate modeling experiments."
Holy shit. People with that crappy an understanding of statistics are running the show here??? I did not realize this. I really hope he was just saying stuff for the public ears, and doesn't really believe that "almost getting p=. 05", from unrepeatable historical data at that, means anything except "reviewers might let it through". Play with this applet to see how likely it is to get a false positive when p=.05
Slashdot Mirror
That simple. Ok. Why has much worse happened before?
And at what point did you trust the interpretation of the data?
If that is going to be done, you need to fund the higher education and earmark STEM R & D funds appropriately for the next 30 years or so, or else you get what we have now. It needs to be seen as a liability, same as social security.
I would say this will never be done correctly, so the government should stay out. The other problems are law of diminishing returns and that determining which fields to fund requires a self-preserving bureaucracy with the impossible job of predicting the future.
Please stop trying to pigeon hole me. No, it is not ok to discriminate against "undesirables", it is also dumb. Employee offered healthcare is a scam because:
1) It is a tax avoidance scheme
2) I am not sure how common this is... but for my job if I opt out of the employee health plan I receive no extra money. If the value of my work is equal to salary + insurance, why do I not have the choice to take a raise instead?
Ok, I think religious organizations should receive no special treatment at all. The less special treatment they receive the better.
I suppose I have issue with making the condition in the first place. However, once the condition is in place, exceptions should not be made, especially not on the basis of money or political clout.
The problem I see is that It seems like these exceptions are always made. Someone always gets special treatment.
Let me start out by saying I think employee healthcare is a scam to being with. There a couple of things more scammy than that, one of them is religion. As far as I am concerned, calling your opinion "faith" is just an excuse for it seem more important than it is.
This is equivalent to paying certain groups less (if we assume their paychecks aren't larger). It is not similar to offering a different healthcare plan than other employers.
Does anyone have a more reasonable explanation?
I still don't get this. The employer offered health plan is basically an incentive to work somewhere. Not liking your work health plan is like not liking your salary. If you want a better healthplan work somewhere else.
Anything else must be a ponzi right???
I think it is "less". Look, I get what you are saying, but people really need to stop acting like CO2 has been added to the atmosphere and caused warming, then taken out and the warming went away. This is what would be required to actually do the experiment "showing" that it is CO2 emissions. As it stands right now human activity is the most plausible explanation for the warming. There may be some unknown factor (although I doubt it). Without removing CO2 and seeing what happens we will not know if the CO2 emissions were necessary to cause this warming. Even then there will be no "control earth", but such is the nature of this type of science, all we can do is look for very strong correlations and a mechanism of action consistent with known physical laws.
Under the simplifying conditions of a number of climate models, CO2 can account for over 100% of the warming. This is not the same as adding CO2 to the atmosphere and seeing if it warms. But, oh wait, we did do that and it did warm. So is CO2 sufficient to cause warming? Well, we don't have a negative control, so it is hard to say for sure. It sure looks like it though.
There is no need to exaggerate this.
I think it is commonly accepted that the presence of positive feedbacks (water vapor, decreased albedo, etc) are the important factor. There is not enough CO2 to have a large direct effect. So, on its own, knowing that CO2 absorbs IR tells you little about how the system will react. For that reason I view the CO2 absorption spectrum as the corroborating evidence.
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:Woodrow_Wilson
There are other examples of this (see above). If you have a conspiracy you strongly support you better be able to find the primary source so people can know how much to trust it. I haven't looked into the Ted turner quote but I can easily believe it is made up or taken out of context. If you cannot source it satisfactorily, you are only doing yourself and your cause a disservice by repeating it, cunir wolf.
-Phil Jones
It was you who posted this excerpt of Phil Jones talking about stats somewhere in this thread... What that guy was saying shows a deeply and fundamentally flawed understanding of statistics. I mean it is scary that someone of such high standing in a politically-important field would say anything about "almost getting a significant p-value of .05".
It is things like that that make me put " " around experts. I really hope I am misinterpreting his statement.
Well, it isn't necessarily "belief", I know the conclusions found in any individual paper may be wrong, same for reviews (like the IPCC reports). The key is at least understanding the sources of uncertainty and what a variety of "experts" think about it before forming a strong opinion. For example, I know that there are no good models of cloud behaviour. The IPCC reports account for this and the authors have estimated a lower bound on negative feedback due to clouds. This is based on paleo-climate data, which relies on various proxies for climate conditions. There is some disagreement on how much confidence should be placed in these proxies. For now I will accept the IPCC number as the best available, but I do not "believe" it.
I choose option C. The best thing is to go read the IPCC reports and peer-reviewed literature. If I am unable to completely understand the methods, etc, I will have to take the interpretation provided for me, knowing that I am using the argument from authority heuristic.
Well I think 10 years is too short for them to be proved right or wrong...
So, I think we agree. It is often cheaper to look at multiple lines of evidence with weak criterion for significance than to do one study and require a strong criterion.
Yea but then it gets sticky. Published one paper on that topic? 10? A graduate student in the lab of a well published PI? What is the cut off?
This is why I prefer to just ignore the argument from authority approach altogether.
I think it is more a practical issue. There are so many confounding variables when studying complex systems (biology, climate) that no one would ever publish if a low criterion for "significance" was not used.
You are correct that science is not about proving. But if you say something has "been shown", you imply that X was reported to be necessary and sufficient to cause Y. In this case, you should say that "CO2 has been shown to explain the warming in climate modeling experiments."
Holy shit. People with that crappy an understanding of statistics are running the show here??? I did not realize this. I really hope he was just saying stuff for the public ears, and doesn't really believe that "almost getting p=. 05", from unrepeatable historical data at that, means anything except "reviewers might let it through". Play with this applet to see how likely it is to get a false positive when p=.05
Accompanying paper: www.stat.duke.edu/~berger/papers/02-01.ps
And website: http://www.stat.duke.edu/~berger/p-values.html
What is your reason for predicting "billions dead, perpetual war"? I have not seen that in the IPCC reports.
No, the null hypothesis is not "random processes" either... try again.
Looks like peer review for politicians.
This is something I always wondered. How do you define climatologist?
I think he meant "only allow one individual from the corporation to vote". It was a crucial word.