I appreciate the characterization of my faults and your detailed refutation of my position. As it happens, I don't have any opinions on this matter, but I would be happy to provide citations for any part which you thought insufficient. The nice thing about being on the side with facts is that they all match up with each other neatly, and you can always find a source for something. And, if that is still not sufficient, there are actually a variety of simple experiments you could perform to verify them.
I admit I'm pretty stupid. The IPCC report is a bit thick, you know? So I went back and read Tyndall. Then I read Arrhenius, and Callendar. I read Keeling and at least looked through Hansen. Most of the old stuff is available online, but there's also university libraries all over the place. I read a couple of atmospheric physics textbooks too. The one from 1950 was the funniest, explicitly disclaiming the role of CO2 in climate. It was correct with what was known at the time though. But I didn't find any opinions in all of that, so I guess I didn't do it right. Perhaps you can do better?
There is no line of physical observation that will not lead you to conclude that perpetual motion or "free" energy is impossible. Thermodynamics, Relativity, Quantum physics, whatever. And anyone wanting to argue about conservation laws is going to need to take that up with Noether's theorem. Conservation laws are more like a result of the laws of physics not being dependent on the conserved element. If energy is conserved, that means that (e.g.) light does not travel faster or slower through a vaccum depending on some sort of energy condition. All of this says that [1] we've tested CoE explicitly or implicitly with nearly every observation of anything, ever, and [2] if you violate that assumption everything in physics breaks in wildly weird and inconsistent ways even within the same theory, and might actually end our being able to understand physics at all.
Nothing is certain. Science is empirical, and measurement error will always be with us. That doesn't mean that nothing is knowable or predictable. The Sun will rise upon a weary Earth tomorrow, and there will never be any such thing as an ansible, a faster-than-light drive, or a perpetual motion machine. Yes, it's a bit depressing, but that's reality for you.
Consensus is how all competing models of reality are evaluated. However, global warming is not a model (per se). It is a very straightforward result of the properties of CO2. We'll skip semantic and philosophical arguments about what facts are, since it doesn't seem that you have much knowledge of the philosophy of science or epistemology generally, but suffice to say that you can test the principles of AGW the same way that Tyndall did, if you happen to think he needs revision. You should be able to make far more precise measurements.
Go ahead and pick apart the consensus, if you can. Do it with science -- it's the only way. It has changed before, so you have that going for you. Yes, you read that right. We thought we had disproved AGW conclusively until the mid-1950s. Then we got better data and the consensus changed. It wasn't some big deal, either, because people weren't trying to politicize the issue. No one was fired, and scientists just accepted that they were wrong before and kept on sciencing. Our ability to measure the world has expanded unimaginably since the foundations of AGW were laid over 100 years ago, so we're about as sure that increased CO2 will result in warming as we are of the germ theory of disease, but you're welcome to have a go at disproving it. It can only help all of us if you try, so please do. You should probably start by learning what the science currently says though.
So in the early 19th Century the prevailing wisdom was that the climate did not change. The idea of climate as being the long-term average of weather didn't die until the mid-1950s at the earliest. Theories of climate change were necessary to explain Ice Ages.
These days the terms "climate change" and "global warming" are both used interchangably, and both can be used to refer to the dominant theory of anthropogenic-CO2-mediated warming. There was once a distinction, and if there was any reason to believe that the climate might cool soon, we might start making a distinction between the two terms again. So not only are you completely wrong about why we have these two terms, apparently you're unaware the 'global warming' is the newer term/theory by at least 100 years.
CO2 within the natural carbon cycle is not pollution. CO2 created by human fossil fuel use is pollution because it causes the ice caps to melt and the oceans to acidify. Plants may like it, but humans aren't plants and have slightly different requirements for life.
Models have nothing to do with the evidence for global warming. The theory was developed in the 19th Century prior to the invention of the computer. Models are useful to try to predict specific outcomes, but AGW is a pretty straightforward result of the properties of atmospheric gases.
No, we think it's a man-made issue because we're dumping gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere. In the 1850s (and for that matter the 1950s as well) it was generally assumed that the climate was, if not static, then cyclical, to where cold years were balanced out by warmer ones. Evidence that the climate had been vastly different was beginning to arise, and it's about that time that Ice Ages were considered to be pretty well proven. Also, in 1859 Tyndall measured the absorption of heat by various atmospheric gases, which was the foundation for Arrhenius' 1896 paper describing the carbon dioxide theory of climate change. There were other theories of climate change, and at that time no one considered that warming could result from human activity, Arrhenius included calculations of the effects of both a halving and doubling of CO2 just for good measure. His theory was considered to have been refuted for the next 50 years. At that point, various better measures of the atmosphere were made that overturned our previous assumptions about what was going on up there. Now we have planes, rockets, satellites, computer modeling, and various devices and stations gathering information all over the globe, which have done nothing but confirm these findings for the last 60 years or so. There are specific observations which would falsify the theory. We have yet to observe them. At this point, it's about as likely that we're wrong about CO2 as it is that we're wrong about gravity.
You are clearly completely ignorant of anything related to this topic. You also didn't bother to read the papers presented. Your post is about as useful to a real discussion of this subject as a dog's barking. It takes years of study to be able to usefully critique a research paper, and I am not going to pretend to be able to do so myself. You should probably think carefully on what is meant by hybris before denigrating climate science.
You are arguing against scientific fact. Let's examine your thesis. It seems they are political in nature, stemming from a desire not to be told what to do. If I can restate it, you seem to be suggesting that the physical properties of carbon dioxide depending on which plane certain celebrities travel on.
We've been studying climate change for about 200 years now, mostly in the context of trying to explain ice ages. The CO2-mediated theory of climate change was first described in 1896, and despite a scientific consensus against it which persisted until the mid-1950s, today it is the dominant scientific understanding. There have been a number of key observations, but the fundamental science was the work of Tyndall in 1859 on the heat properties of gases.
Your Al-Gore-Airplane theory of climate change seems like it will be easily testable. I'll leave the experimental design to you. While we're at it, we should probably test the rest of the things you mentioned, to see if they also affect the optical properties of CO2. It sounds like Tyndall may be in serious need of revision. This will likely throw out almost all of our knowledge of extraterrestrial atmospheres too; you're not going to make NASA happy. Although it does provoke the question, if Al Gore affects carbon dioxide on this planet, does he also affect other worlds equally or is it more like an inverse square effect?
</sarcasm>Hi. You're a person, I'm a person. We have this planet thing that we live on and it's really neat. Unfortunately we have only got just the one, so we do have to share it. Even more unfortunately, we have a bit of a pollution problem. Unlike every other pollution problem we have had, this one is global and really hard to clean up. Humanity, as a whole, will need to get together and clean it up. Humanity as a whole hasn't done anything quite like that before, and not everyone can be counted on to act correctly all the time. There may even be some sort of tradeoffs involved, where (e.g.) we pollute a little to make solar panels, which then gives us a non-carbon-producing method of power generation. If your criterion for taking action is universal adherence (or universal penury?) then you must be considered to be deliberately choosing inaction regardless of the consequences.
I believe that all humans care about our planet. Earth is our home, after all. I believe that you do care about the world and the people in it, and I speculate that this is actually a strong reason for your denial: if it were true, it would compel action. I'm sorry to say that the science is unequivocal. We've tried like hell to prove this theory wrong, and for a long while we thought we had, but this is actually the way the world works, and the issue of who gets to ride which airplane has absolutely no bearing on that. I'm sorry if you think that the political consequences of this science won't work out well for you. I suspect that things will actually end up better than both of us fear. But arguing with global warming is like arguing with the tide. At some level I imagine that you know this, and that you know you're making a bad argument. I don't want you to stop fighting whatever political fight you think needs to be made, but I would suggest you not dispute climate science -- unless it is with rigorous measurements. Making ad hominem and tu quoque arguments against nonscientists is also not particularly clever.
Why is it that all climate change responses are about people giving up personal freedom and living under more restrictive laws and any change that really wouldn't be noticed by people is not really fought for...?
Confirmation bias. Also, it's not necessary to fight for things that don't affect people's lives.You also do not have a personal right to pollute, and on that basis I would suggest not taking up any supposed issues of freedom. Your personal philosophy may rank some freedom as more important that society's freedom not to be polluted, but you're not going to be able to convince anyone of
Yes, it may be shrinking a little, but the sampling period is extremely short, compared to our planet's age. This can or cannot be caused by humans
This is very true. However, in this case we are certain that it is, in fact, being caused by human activity. The Keeling curve leaves very little room for interpretation.
The dropped brick will still fall even if it is at the center of the Earth -- it will still be falling around the Sun, and falling around the galaxy.
The rate at which the ecosystem can absorb CO2 is obviously insufficient to compensate for our CO2 output, or CO2 levels would not be increasing. In point of fact, your objection was thought to be completely valid in the 1920s, and Arrhenius' theory of CO2-induced warming was considered debunked. Then we measured things like the turnover rate of the oceans and found that happened a lot more slowly than expected, and that was the end of that idea. Keeling's observations beginning in 1959 were the final nail in the coffin, but his were actually just the first unambiguous measurements. There had been plenty of papers published prior to then suggesting that we were producing carbon in excess of the natural world's ability to absorb it, which is the reason that anyone even bothered to attempt to measure a global atmospheric CO2 concentration. Your argument would be more pertinent if this were 1917 rather than 2017. You may want to update it to reflect the status of science in this century.
The disgrace is that the Climate Science community uses terms like "Consensus" which is not a thing in Science.
Consensus is how all competing models of reality are evaluated. It's not a part of Science so much as a part of how humans collectively interpret sensory data. And in point of fact, there was once a consensus against the theory of CO2-induced warming. It remained scientifically controversial up until the mid-1950s, until various better measures of the oceans and atmosphere were made. Not only did no one lose their jobs when the scientific opinion shifted, but there have been contrarian scientists publishing in respected journals for decades since then. In particular, noted contrarian Dr. Roy Spencer was lead author on sections of the IPCC reports, and he continues to publish criticism.
The other disgrace is that during the political debate, any push back, any question is met with the blunt instrument called, "Denier!".
No, denier is a term used in a very specific context. If you were able to substantiate your objections to scientific consensus with theory or observation you would be a contrarian. As it happens, AGW is a trivial result of the heat properties of atmospheric gases, and Tyndall's work of the mid-19th century was sufficient to establish CO2 as being a major component of atmospheric warming. His apparatus was a little large, but you should be able to verify his findings in your basement. You want to poke holes in the evidence? Go ahead. Tell us what's wrong about the atmospheric window observations, or our radiative transfer equations. Propose a new mechanism to transfer heat to space, or some unknown negative feedback. If your science is good, people will listen to you. Consensus shifted before on this issue. If you want it to shift again, you need to argue about the science. Alleging some conspiracy is responsible for the consensus is very literally politicizing the scientific debate. There is no evidence for a conspiracy, and substantial evidence in opposition.
So, the reason you get called a denier is that your ignorance on this subject is deliberate and politically motivated. Scientists are not just people who try to take the world apart and see how it works. There is some inherent degree of nuttiness involved in examining different models of reality, and reality is frequently outlandish beyond common ken, so having a tolerance for crazy ideas about reality is very much part of scientific philosophy. There's that classic line by Bohr,
“We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.”
Now, maybe you don't adhere to the concept of an objective reality, and that's at least a valid philosophy. However, if such a thing exists, then science does describe that objective reality, and arguments about what the world is like need to be made by means of specific and precise empirical measurements. That is to say, if you're going to use political or rhetorical arguments against a vast body of scientific evidence, we can't really stop you from doing that, but you will probably not be taken very seriously and you may be called a "denier".
I admit I proofread it in a hurry. Did you have some sort of point to make, or are you just think that pointing out grammatical errors makes you look clever?
Islam is a social, political, religious, and legal system. One might think of it as something like a Christian monastery writ on a larger scale, Western Europeans and their descendants have been invading Islamic territory and trying to force them to adopt our customs and culture for what, about 1,000 years now? What's it like to set up a republic in a country that claims political/religious descent from Mohammed?
If someone is harassing you, have them arrested. The Western world has already won this conflict. Christianity is the world's majority religion, and western europeans and their descendants have a pretty solid lock on world power. Conversely, the countries on the block list are completely insignificant in every measure in comparison to the US. So yes, this Islam-Westerner thing has been going on for a while, and yeah, it's not pretty when it shows up as some thuggish jerks hassling people in quiet neighborhoods. But, not only can the Western world bomb whatever third-world Islamic shithole we want to, we do.
We've known these two social systems aren't compatible for centuries now. Each of our societies actually has rules that say that you can do what you want as long as you don't start shit. For westerners that's called freedom of religion, and in defining Islam as a community, Mohammed and the early leaders laid out pretty firmly that the proper role of that community to non-believers is not aggression. And I am sure that you could probably come up with some sort of justification for applying restrictions on what Moslems should wear to non-believers, but that's going to be a minority view as well. Nonbelievers have always played a role in historical Muslim states. They were typically barred from the highest positions and from military service, but allowed pretty much any other role in society. They paid an extra tax, but didn't pay a tax that applied only to believers, and things tended to work out. So maybe we can think about having our standards of behavior towards others be an improvement over the 14th Century rather than a regression.
Do note, I am not defending the religion, or defending terrorism or harassment on either side here. Frankly I think that Islam ended up bit a bit schizophrenic. The early leaders' tendency to kill one another produced some nasty theological splits. You're right that this is a conflict, and that insofar as it is a political movement, Islam should be resisted. Are you going to vote for sharia law? Everyone else around you perhaps? If it comes to violence, will you not fight? Your aggression against Islam and the extremists aggression against westerners are both born out of ignorance of Islam and the power imbalance at hand. If you didn't know, your side is the one with numbers, money, and nuclear weapons. The threat of Sharia law is a dog whistle for the ignorant and the fearful.
As I see it, the purpose of government is to correct for market inefficiencies. Presumably a hypothetical perfectly competitive market would not require any government interference, In the opposite case where the service is required to be universal, such as fire protection, postal service, and military defence, it's clear that allowing private ownership of these would amount to a private tax. And in the case of the natural monopoly, we recognize that there are inherently unequal bargaining positions, and well, I suspect most people here know all about rent-seeking behavior anyway. Point being, I think that the view that government has a balancing role to play in the economy is pretty much the definition of centrism, but I'm also pretty sure there are large parts of the United States where anything less than full-throated support for free market capitalism will be viewed as subversive behavior.
"Big government" is merely virtue signaling. I suppose it's what we're reduced to. One feels like some regression towards some mean is rapidly coming due, but what form it will take is hard to guess at.
No the line was that there would be no snow by 2010
The most often quoted line I've seen would be from David Viner, of the University of East Anglia, quoted in the U.K. newspaper The Independent on 20 March 2000 with the headline 'Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past', and as far as I know he was referring to the south of England only. No peer reviewed source has ever made any such claims, about either England or anywhere else, but here's a nice recent review article of snowfall patterns in England. It does show a reduction in the frequency and extent of snow-lying days.
These same theories were the same ones used in the 1920's, the only real difference is that they're using computer modeling instead of doing it by long hand.
This is categorically untrue. In the 1920s the closest thing to a GCM would be Arrhenius, but he was discredited, and the early computer modeling used very different strategies. But whether they're old or new models is irrelevant. Again, models are not empirical evidence and do not either support or refute AGW.
I must note that you did not reply to any of the questions I asked. What specifically about our knowledge of CO2 do you feel is incomplete or incorrect? Do you know why the consensus against AGW was overturned, and if so do you feel that was insufficently well supported by observation? Do answer as rigorously as you can.
I'm probably at a 1300 ELO in chess, which means I can probably manage to not completely embarrass myself against the chess club president at Podunk High School, but reliably beat anyone who hasn't given the game some relatively serious study. I've read a dozen or so books about openings and endgames, and I keep some chess engines kicking around the smartphone and computer, but I've never had any serious interest in mastery nor any real hope of it. That said, one of the first things one notices about computer analysis of chess openings is that most paths get pruned *very* quickly. With expert play, it is very easy to turn a positional advantage into a material advantage, and this is true for human experts as well. The distribution of chess openings used in master-level play is extremely similar to the computer ranking of those openings, with the exceptions being the more obviously ridiculous things like 1. a4... 2. h4 that no computer would ever consider playing. It's also widely said that chess is the game where the winner is the person who made the second-to-last mistake. So while the theoretical number of possible moves in chess is large, in practice the number of viable positions is much smaller, and as long as you're sufficiently clever when evaluating positions and pruning branches then your average desktop computer will be able to completely evaluate all interesting positions up to 20+ ply (20 half-moves, so 10 moves from each player) in advance of a given position in just a few minutes, even without opening tables or endgame tables. The opening is an even worse example. The opening in chess is not just less complex than go, it's actually completely solved, and it's not inconceivable that at some point in the next century or two that the game could be solved completely. So in terms of how the game is actually played, this means that both chess engines and human players will have an "opening book" and not even start evaluating positions for the first 10-20 moves.
Chess games are as sharply decisive as they are because, I believe, most of the pieces can affect most other pieces, and because captures remove pieces from the board, which tends to further increase any advantage. It's fairly easy to evaluate at any given position, and one can prune branches extremely quickly. I don't personally have any idea how to evaluate a Go position; even on small boards I lose without knowing why. However, if we are to have a single definition of complexity, it must be the mathematical one. Go has more potential positions and more decisions, and whether or not it's easier or harder for computers or humans to actually play it is more of a tangential issue. I'm not sure on quite what basis you can dismiss that definition, but even aside from that, perhaps you can provide any example of a way in which Chess is more complex than Go, because your specific example proved rather the opposite point.
I think the line was that snowfall in South England would be rare by 2010, and focusing on the claims in the popular press rather than the scientific evidence is not a wise idea. What exactly about the properties of CO2 has been fixed incorrectly? CO2-based warming was discredited entirely up until at least the mid-1950s, and the opinions of climate researchers shifted rather suddenly with better information about the upper atmosphere. Do you know what that evidence was, and do you have any reason to dispute it? I'll give you a hint, the answer has nothing to do with global climate models.
You may do both of those things. Giving him a derogatory surname has been done already though. I do appreciate your spirited defense of the right to be an asshole, but I am not sure that your efforts are well spent.
Let's please not. The reason his last name means "sugar mountain" in German is because in the late 18th Century the various Germanic empires forced all Jews to have surnames, instead of being known as (e.g.) Yeshua ben Youssef -- a patronym, not a surname. If your family was on bad terms with the local magistrate then you might have had a surname that was actually insulting rather than merely ridiculous. So unless you're interested in reviving a particularly vile brand of antisemitism, please let's not give this man an insulting surname, even if you think he deserves shame and ridicule.
Next time could you bother to read the article? Yes, titanium dioxide is common, which is the entire point of mentioning that element, because the elemental form is far less common, and even less common then.
It's not that your comments aren't valuable, it's that you don't know when you have fine caviar in your hand or fetid dogshit -- it's the same to you either way. In this case — so you know — this is dogshit.
Why would you repeat such an obvious untruth? Given that this subject comes up every time any such story is published, I have a hard time believing that you have never been exposed to it before. Nevertheless it apparently needs to be explained, you can be pardoned at any time at the President's discretion, whether or not you have been convicted. Those of us who are old enough will remember when this happened to Richard Nixon.
I figured it would have to be Joomla. I'm doing maintenance programming on a Joomla site right now, and it's just a complete mess. There is nothing good about any part of the framework and no one should use it for anything. There is no "right way" to do things, and the documentation is beyond awful: obsolete, incomplete, badly written. Beyond the official documentation, most books on Joomla either don't cover the latest major version, or mention it but focus on the legacy interfaces. One is forced to look at the code itself for examples of what to do, and apparently that means make it up as you go along, There is no consistency even in the unit tests, hell, even in which testing framework they're using. And (at least IMO) there is no consistent vision because the fundamental design is crap.
Use of Joomla for any purpose should be a firing offense.
Anniston, AL and Sauget, IL, and some forty other past and current Superfund sites would like to have a word with you. Anniston in particular was knowingly polluted for decades:
In 1966, Monsanto managers discovered that fish submerged in that creek turned belly-up within 10 seconds, spurting blood and shedding skin as if dunked into boiling water. They told no one. In 1969, they found fish in another creek with 7,500 times the legal PCB levels. They decided "there is little object in going to expensive extremes in limiting discharges." In 1975, a company study found that PCBs caused tumors in rats. They ordered its conclusion changed from "slightly tumorigenic" to "does not appear to be carcinogenic."
Their pollution record is not quite the worst. They probably don't have as many direct deaths on their hands as Union Carbide, but I can't think of a more profound example of "damning with faint praise" than that. Also, their monopoly control over seeds and plant genetics cannot be discounted as "complete bullshit" -- it may be a complicated subject, but there are legitimate concerns. You would be completely correct to say that concerns about health effects of GM foods are greatly overblown, but Monsanto has a black history.
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I appreciate the characterization of my faults and your detailed refutation of my position. As it happens, I don't have any opinions on this matter, but I would be happy to provide citations for any part which you thought insufficient. The nice thing about being on the side with facts is that they all match up with each other neatly, and you can always find a source for something. And, if that is still not sufficient, there are actually a variety of simple experiments you could perform to verify them.
I admit I'm pretty stupid. The IPCC report is a bit thick, you know? So I went back and read Tyndall. Then I read Arrhenius, and Callendar. I read Keeling and at least looked through Hansen. Most of the old stuff is available online, but there's also university libraries all over the place. I read a couple of atmospheric physics textbooks too. The one from 1950 was the funniest, explicitly disclaiming the role of CO2 in climate. It was correct with what was known at the time though. But I didn't find any opinions in all of that, so I guess I didn't do it right. Perhaps you can do better?
Absolutist statements are dangerous.
Calibrate your irony meter.
There is no line of physical observation that will not lead you to conclude that perpetual motion or "free" energy is impossible. Thermodynamics, Relativity, Quantum physics, whatever. And anyone wanting to argue about conservation laws is going to need to take that up with Noether's theorem. Conservation laws are more like a result of the laws of physics not being dependent on the conserved element. If energy is conserved, that means that (e.g.) light does not travel faster or slower through a vaccum depending on some sort of energy condition. All of this says that [1] we've tested CoE explicitly or implicitly with nearly every observation of anything, ever, and [2] if you violate that assumption everything in physics breaks in wildly weird and inconsistent ways even within the same theory, and might actually end our being able to understand physics at all.
Nothing is certain. Science is empirical, and measurement error will always be with us. That doesn't mean that nothing is knowable or predictable. The Sun will rise upon a weary Earth tomorrow, and there will never be any such thing as an ansible, a faster-than-light drive, or a perpetual motion machine. Yes, it's a bit depressing, but that's reality for you.
Consensus is how all competing models of reality are evaluated. However, global warming is not a model (per se). It is a very straightforward result of the properties of CO2. We'll skip semantic and philosophical arguments about what facts are, since it doesn't seem that you have much knowledge of the philosophy of science or epistemology generally, but suffice to say that you can test the principles of AGW the same way that Tyndall did, if you happen to think he needs revision. You should be able to make far more precise measurements.
Go ahead and pick apart the consensus, if you can. Do it with science -- it's the only way. It has changed before, so you have that going for you. Yes, you read that right. We thought we had disproved AGW conclusively until the mid-1950s. Then we got better data and the consensus changed. It wasn't some big deal, either, because people weren't trying to politicize the issue. No one was fired, and scientists just accepted that they were wrong before and kept on sciencing. Our ability to measure the world has expanded unimaginably since the foundations of AGW were laid over 100 years ago, so we're about as sure that increased CO2 will result in warming as we are of the germ theory of disease, but you're welcome to have a go at disproving it. It can only help all of us if you try, so please do. You should probably start by learning what the science currently says though.
So in the early 19th Century the prevailing wisdom was that the climate did not change. The idea of climate as being the long-term average of weather didn't die until the mid-1950s at the earliest. Theories of climate change were necessary to explain Ice Ages.
These days the terms "climate change" and "global warming" are both used interchangably, and both can be used to refer to the dominant theory of anthropogenic-CO2-mediated warming. There was once a distinction, and if there was any reason to believe that the climate might cool soon, we might start making a distinction between the two terms again. So not only are you completely wrong about why we have these two terms, apparently you're unaware the 'global warming' is the newer term/theory by at least 100 years.
CO2 within the natural carbon cycle is not pollution. CO2 created by human fossil fuel use is pollution because it causes the ice caps to melt and the oceans to acidify. Plants may like it, but humans aren't plants and have slightly different requirements for life.
Models have nothing to do with the evidence for global warming. The theory was developed in the 19th Century prior to the invention of the computer. Models are useful to try to predict specific outcomes, but AGW is a pretty straightforward result of the properties of atmospheric gases.
You can blame this on liberals or other politicians all you want, but it's not true, and you're not going to fight science with bullets.
If you insist on political stances at odds with empirical reality, you're going to be disappointed at the results.
No, we think it's a man-made issue because we're dumping gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere. In the 1850s (and for that matter the 1950s as well) it was generally assumed that the climate was, if not static, then cyclical, to where cold years were balanced out by warmer ones. Evidence that the climate had been vastly different was beginning to arise, and it's about that time that Ice Ages were considered to be pretty well proven. Also, in 1859 Tyndall measured the absorption of heat by various atmospheric gases, which was the foundation for Arrhenius' 1896 paper describing the carbon dioxide theory of climate change. There were other theories of climate change, and at that time no one considered that warming could result from human activity, Arrhenius included calculations of the effects of both a halving and doubling of CO2 just for good measure. His theory was considered to have been refuted for the next 50 years. At that point, various better measures of the atmosphere were made that overturned our previous assumptions about what was going on up there. Now we have planes, rockets, satellites, computer modeling, and various devices and stations gathering information all over the globe, which have done nothing but confirm these findings for the last 60 years or so. There are specific observations which would falsify the theory. We have yet to observe them. At this point, it's about as likely that we're wrong about CO2 as it is that we're wrong about gravity.
You are clearly completely ignorant of anything related to this topic. You also didn't bother to read the papers presented. Your post is about as useful to a real discussion of this subject as a dog's barking. It takes years of study to be able to usefully critique a research paper, and I am not going to pretend to be able to do so myself. You should probably think carefully on what is meant by hybris before denigrating climate science.
You are arguing against scientific fact. Let's examine your thesis. It seems they are political in nature, stemming from a desire not to be told what to do. If I can restate it, you seem to be suggesting that the physical properties of carbon dioxide depending on which plane certain celebrities travel on.
We've been studying climate change for about 200 years now, mostly in the context of trying to explain ice ages. The CO2-mediated theory of climate change was first described in 1896, and despite a scientific consensus against it which persisted until the mid-1950s, today it is the dominant scientific understanding. There have been a number of key observations, but the fundamental science was the work of Tyndall in 1859 on the heat properties of gases.
Your Al-Gore-Airplane theory of climate change seems like it will be easily testable. I'll leave the experimental design to you. While we're at it, we should probably test the rest of the things you mentioned, to see if they also affect the optical properties of CO2. It sounds like Tyndall may be in serious need of revision. This will likely throw out almost all of our knowledge of extraterrestrial atmospheres too; you're not going to make NASA happy. Although it does provoke the question, if Al Gore affects carbon dioxide on this planet, does he also affect other worlds equally or is it more like an inverse square effect?
</sarcasm>Hi. You're a person, I'm a person. We have this planet thing that we live on and it's really neat. Unfortunately we have only got just the one, so we do have to share it. Even more unfortunately, we have a bit of a pollution problem. Unlike every other pollution problem we have had, this one is global and really hard to clean up. Humanity, as a whole, will need to get together and clean it up. Humanity as a whole hasn't done anything quite like that before, and not everyone can be counted on to act correctly all the time. There may even be some sort of tradeoffs involved, where (e.g.) we pollute a little to make solar panels, which then gives us a non-carbon-producing method of power generation. If your criterion for taking action is universal adherence (or universal penury?) then you must be considered to be deliberately choosing inaction regardless of the consequences.
I believe that all humans care about our planet. Earth is our home, after all. I believe that you do care about the world and the people in it, and I speculate that this is actually a strong reason for your denial: if it were true, it would compel action. I'm sorry to say that the science is unequivocal. We've tried like hell to prove this theory wrong, and for a long while we thought we had, but this is actually the way the world works, and the issue of who gets to ride which airplane has absolutely no bearing on that. I'm sorry if you think that the political consequences of this science won't work out well for you. I suspect that things will actually end up better than both of us fear. But arguing with global warming is like arguing with the tide. At some level I imagine that you know this, and that you know you're making a bad argument. I don't want you to stop fighting whatever political fight you think needs to be made, but I would suggest you not dispute climate science -- unless it is with rigorous measurements. Making ad hominem and tu quoque arguments against nonscientists is also not particularly clever.
Why is it that all climate change responses are about people giving up personal freedom and living under more restrictive laws and any change that really wouldn't be noticed by people is not really fought for...?
Confirmation bias. Also, it's not necessary to fight for things that don't affect people's lives.You also do not have a personal right to pollute, and on that basis I would suggest not taking up any supposed issues of freedom. Your personal philosophy may rank some freedom as more important that society's freedom not to be polluted, but you're not going to be able to convince anyone of
Yes, it may be shrinking a little, but the sampling period is extremely short, compared to our planet's age. This can or cannot be caused by humans
This is very true. However, in this case we are certain that it is, in fact, being caused by human activity. The Keeling curve leaves very little room for interpretation.
So your objection to AGW is political in nature and has nothing to do with facts?
The dropped brick will still fall even if it is at the center of the Earth -- it will still be falling around the Sun, and falling around the galaxy.
The rate at which the ecosystem can absorb CO2 is obviously insufficient to compensate for our CO2 output, or CO2 levels would not be increasing. In point of fact, your objection was thought to be completely valid in the 1920s, and Arrhenius' theory of CO2-induced warming was considered debunked. Then we measured things like the turnover rate of the oceans and found that happened a lot more slowly than expected, and that was the end of that idea. Keeling's observations beginning in 1959 were the final nail in the coffin, but his were actually just the first unambiguous measurements. There had been plenty of papers published prior to then suggesting that we were producing carbon in excess of the natural world's ability to absorb it, which is the reason that anyone even bothered to attempt to measure a global atmospheric CO2 concentration. Your argument would be more pertinent if this were 1917 rather than 2017. You may want to update it to reflect the status of science in this century.
The disgrace is that the Climate Science community uses terms like "Consensus" which is not a thing in Science.
Consensus is how all competing models of reality are evaluated. It's not a part of Science so much as a part of how humans collectively interpret sensory data. And in point of fact, there was once a consensus against the theory of CO2-induced warming. It remained scientifically controversial up until the mid-1950s, until various better measures of the oceans and atmosphere were made. Not only did no one lose their jobs when the scientific opinion shifted, but there have been contrarian scientists publishing in respected journals for decades since then. In particular, noted contrarian Dr. Roy Spencer was lead author on sections of the IPCC reports, and he continues to publish criticism.
The other disgrace is that during the political debate, any push back, any question is met with the blunt instrument called, "Denier!".
No, denier is a term used in a very specific context. If you were able to substantiate your objections to scientific consensus with theory or observation you would be a contrarian. As it happens, AGW is a trivial result of the heat properties of atmospheric gases, and Tyndall's work of the mid-19th century was sufficient to establish CO2 as being a major component of atmospheric warming. His apparatus was a little large, but you should be able to verify his findings in your basement. You want to poke holes in the evidence? Go ahead. Tell us what's wrong about the atmospheric window observations, or our radiative transfer equations. Propose a new mechanism to transfer heat to space, or some unknown negative feedback. If your science is good, people will listen to you. Consensus shifted before on this issue. If you want it to shift again, you need to argue about the science. Alleging some conspiracy is responsible for the consensus is very literally politicizing the scientific debate. There is no evidence for a conspiracy, and substantial evidence in opposition.
So, the reason you get called a denier is that your ignorance on this subject is deliberate and politically motivated. Scientists are not just people who try to take the world apart and see how it works. There is some inherent degree of nuttiness involved in examining different models of reality, and reality is frequently outlandish beyond common ken, so having a tolerance for crazy ideas about reality is very much part of scientific philosophy. There's that classic line by Bohr,
“We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.”
Now, maybe you don't adhere to the concept of an objective reality, and that's at least a valid philosophy. However, if such a thing exists, then science does describe that objective reality, and arguments about what the world is like need to be made by means of specific and precise empirical measurements. That is to say, if you're going to use political or rhetorical arguments against a vast body of scientific evidence, we can't really stop you from doing that, but you will probably not be taken very seriously and you may be called a "denier".
I admit I proofread it in a hurry. Did you have some sort of point to make, or are you just think that pointing out grammatical errors makes you look clever?
Islam is a social, political, religious, and legal system. One might think of it as something like a Christian monastery writ on a larger scale, Western Europeans and their descendants have been invading Islamic territory and trying to force them to adopt our customs and culture for what, about 1,000 years now? What's it like to set up a republic in a country that claims political/religious descent from Mohammed?
If someone is harassing you, have them arrested. The Western world has already won this conflict. Christianity is the world's majority religion, and western europeans and their descendants have a pretty solid lock on world power. Conversely, the countries on the block list are completely insignificant in every measure in comparison to the US. So yes, this Islam-Westerner thing has been going on for a while, and yeah, it's not pretty when it shows up as some thuggish jerks hassling people in quiet neighborhoods. But, not only can the Western world bomb whatever third-world Islamic shithole we want to, we do.
We've known these two social systems aren't compatible for centuries now. Each of our societies actually has rules that say that you can do what you want as long as you don't start shit. For westerners that's called freedom of religion, and in defining Islam as a community, Mohammed and the early leaders laid out pretty firmly that the proper role of that community to non-believers is not aggression. And I am sure that you could probably come up with some sort of justification for applying restrictions on what Moslems should wear to non-believers, but that's going to be a minority view as well. Nonbelievers have always played a role in historical Muslim states. They were typically barred from the highest positions and from military service, but allowed pretty much any other role in society. They paid an extra tax, but didn't pay a tax that applied only to believers, and things tended to work out. So maybe we can think about having our standards of behavior towards others be an improvement over the 14th Century rather than a regression.
Do note, I am not defending the religion, or defending terrorism or harassment on either side here. Frankly I think that Islam ended up bit a bit schizophrenic. The early leaders' tendency to kill one another produced some nasty theological splits. You're right that this is a conflict, and that insofar as it is a political movement, Islam should be resisted. Are you going to vote for sharia law? Everyone else around you perhaps? If it comes to violence, will you not fight? Your aggression against Islam and the extremists aggression against westerners are both born out of ignorance of Islam and the power imbalance at hand. If you didn't know, your side is the one with numbers, money, and nuclear weapons. The threat of Sharia law is a dog whistle for the ignorant and the fearful.
As I see it, the purpose of government is to correct for market inefficiencies. Presumably a hypothetical perfectly competitive market would not require any government interference, In the opposite case where the service is required to be universal, such as fire protection, postal service, and military defence, it's clear that allowing private ownership of these would amount to a private tax. And in the case of the natural monopoly, we recognize that there are inherently unequal bargaining positions, and well, I suspect most people here know all about rent-seeking behavior anyway. Point being, I think that the view that government has a balancing role to play in the economy is pretty much the definition of centrism, but I'm also pretty sure there are large parts of the United States where anything less than full-throated support for free market capitalism will be viewed as subversive behavior.
"Big government" is merely virtue signaling. I suppose it's what we're reduced to. One feels like some regression towards some mean is rapidly coming due, but what form it will take is hard to guess at.
No the line was that there would be no snow by 2010
The most often quoted line I've seen would be from David Viner, of the University of East Anglia, quoted in the U.K. newspaper The Independent on 20 March 2000 with the headline 'Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past', and as far as I know he was referring to the south of England only. No peer reviewed source has ever made any such claims, about either England or anywhere else, but here's a nice recent review article of snowfall patterns in England. It does show a reduction in the frequency and extent of snow-lying days.
These same theories were the same ones used in the 1920's, the only real difference is that they're using computer modeling instead of doing it by long hand.
This is categorically untrue. In the 1920s the closest thing to a GCM would be Arrhenius, but he was discredited, and the early computer modeling used very different strategies. But whether they're old or new models is irrelevant. Again, models are not empirical evidence and do not either support or refute AGW.
I must note that you did not reply to any of the questions I asked. What specifically about our knowledge of CO2 do you feel is incomplete or incorrect? Do you know why the consensus against AGW was overturned, and if so do you feel that was insufficently well supported by observation? Do answer as rigorously as you can.
I'm probably at a 1300 ELO in chess, which means I can probably manage to not completely embarrass myself against the chess club president at Podunk High School, but reliably beat anyone who hasn't given the game some relatively serious study. I've read a dozen or so books about openings and endgames, and I keep some chess engines kicking around the smartphone and computer, but I've never had any serious interest in mastery nor any real hope of it. That said, one of the first things one notices about computer analysis of chess openings is that most paths get pruned *very* quickly. With expert play, it is very easy to turn a positional advantage into a material advantage, and this is true for human experts as well. The distribution of chess openings used in master-level play is extremely similar to the computer ranking of those openings, with the exceptions being the more obviously ridiculous things like 1. a4 ... 2. h4 that no computer would ever consider playing. It's also widely said that chess is the game where the winner is the person who made the second-to-last mistake. So while the theoretical number of possible moves in chess is large, in practice the number of viable positions is much smaller, and as long as you're sufficiently clever when evaluating positions and pruning branches then your average desktop computer will be able to completely evaluate all interesting positions up to 20+ ply (20 half-moves, so 10 moves from each player) in advance of a given position in just a few minutes, even without opening tables or endgame tables. The opening is an even worse example. The opening in chess is not just less complex than go, it's actually completely solved, and it's not inconceivable that at some point in the next century or two that the game could be solved completely. So in terms of how the game is actually played, this means that both chess engines and human players will have an "opening book" and not even start evaluating positions for the first 10-20 moves.
Chess games are as sharply decisive as they are because, I believe, most of the pieces can affect most other pieces, and because captures remove pieces from the board, which tends to further increase any advantage. It's fairly easy to evaluate at any given position, and one can prune branches extremely quickly. I don't personally have any idea how to evaluate a Go position; even on small boards I lose without knowing why. However, if we are to have a single definition of complexity, it must be the mathematical one. Go has more potential positions and more decisions, and whether or not it's easier or harder for computers or humans to actually play it is more of a tangential issue. I'm not sure on quite what basis you can dismiss that definition, but even aside from that, perhaps you can provide any example of a way in which Chess is more complex than Go, because your specific example proved rather the opposite point.
I think the line was that snowfall in South England would be rare by 2010, and focusing on the claims in the popular press rather than the scientific evidence is not a wise idea. What exactly about the properties of CO2 has been fixed incorrectly? CO2-based warming was discredited entirely up until at least the mid-1950s, and the opinions of climate researchers shifted rather suddenly with better information about the upper atmosphere. Do you know what that evidence was, and do you have any reason to dispute it? I'll give you a hint, the answer has nothing to do with global climate models.
You may do both of those things. Giving him a derogatory surname has been done already though. I do appreciate your spirited defense of the right to be an asshole, but I am not sure that your efforts are well spent.
Let's please not. The reason his last name means "sugar mountain" in German is because in the late 18th Century the various Germanic empires forced all Jews to have surnames, instead of being known as (e.g.) Yeshua ben Youssef -- a patronym, not a surname. If your family was on bad terms with the local magistrate then you might have had a surname that was actually insulting rather than merely ridiculous. So unless you're interested in reviving a particularly vile brand of antisemitism, please let's not give this man an insulting surname, even if you think he deserves shame and ridicule.
Next time could you bother to read the article? Yes, titanium dioxide is common, which is the entire point of mentioning that element, because the elemental form is far less common, and even less common then.
It's not that your comments aren't valuable, it's that you don't know when you have fine caviar in your hand or fetid dogshit -- it's the same to you either way. In this case — so you know — this is dogshit.
Why would you repeat such an obvious untruth? Given that this subject comes up every time any such story is published, I have a hard time believing that you have never been exposed to it before. Nevertheless it apparently needs to be explained, you can be pardoned at any time at the President's discretion, whether or not you have been convicted. Those of us who are old enough will remember when this happened to Richard Nixon.
I figured it would have to be Joomla. I'm doing maintenance programming on a Joomla site right now, and it's just a complete mess. There is nothing good about any part of the framework and no one should use it for anything. There is no "right way" to do things, and the documentation is beyond awful: obsolete, incomplete, badly written. Beyond the official documentation, most books on Joomla either don't cover the latest major version, or mention it but focus on the legacy interfaces. One is forced to look at the code itself for examples of what to do, and apparently that means make it up as you go along, There is no consistency even in the unit tests, hell, even in which testing framework they're using. And (at least IMO) there is no consistent vision because the fundamental design is crap.
Use of Joomla for any purpose should be a firing offense.
Anniston, AL and Sauget, IL, and some forty other past and current Superfund sites would like to have a word with you. Anniston in particular was knowingly polluted for decades:
(source)
Their pollution record is not quite the worst. They probably don't have as many direct deaths on their hands as Union Carbide, but I can't think of a more profound example of "damning with faint praise" than that. Also, their monopoly control over seeds and plant genetics cannot be discounted as "complete bullshit" -- it may be a complicated subject, but there are legitimate concerns. You would be completely correct to say that concerns about health effects of GM foods are greatly overblown, but Monsanto has a black history.