Whatever dude, you have no hypothesis of any kind, your view of the evidence is so warped it isn't even funny, and you seem to fail to grasp the entire problem with your position, which is that you are contrasting a hypothesis with a great deal of evidence in favor of it against NOTHING. You have no explanation, no chain of evidence, no causal mechanisms, nothing. You have no leg to stand on. You can try to invoke uncertainties and very poorly understood evidence from time periods in the very distant past, but what you CANNOT DO is explain what is wrong with the current hypothesis or why the observations match its predictions so well. Until you can do those things you are just wrong. Occam's Razor cuts you.
I could care less if in your misguided mind you have convinced yourself that the truth is just some delusion. Reality could give a crap less what you believe. It would be easier if you would wake up, smell the coffee, and lift a hand in the great work ahead, but it is going to go on regardless. Don't expect any special breaks, you're going to pay your fair share.
Frankly we're not going to get any further. Your arguments don't float, they wouldn't convince the vast majority of the scientific community, and they will probably never convince me either. Good luck.
I don't know what you think the rules are here, but you need to demonstrate why adding CO2 to the air will not cause the temperature to go up. That's all there is to it. You're arguing with basic physics. If you cannot explain why basic physical processes will not work then you're just not going to get anywhere. Got it? Every analysis we have done that is at all realistic in the last 50 years has shown a sensitivity exactly in line with observation. The best available hypothesis is AGW. Again, you need to show how this will not happen, as there is no known mechanism that would result in the Earth NOT warming when we add CO2 to the atmosphere.
See, this is what you are not getting. It isn't a matter of proving something false in an absolute sense. It is a matter of you have to have a better theory. You do not have a better theory. You cannot explain why no other forcing matches the signature of what we are seeing except CO2. You cannot explain why CO2 will not raise the temperature, YOU HAVE NO HYPOTHESIS, nothing at all. You are asking people to accept that what we see is some random chance thing, and every bit of analysis that has been done demonstrates that at this the probably that is true is rather low, certainly no higher than 10%. "We just exited an ice age" is not a theory, nor is it even true, that was 12,000 years ago and the temperature has long since stopped recovering from that.
Now, BEYOND ALL OF THIS, air temperature rise is only a small part of the whole thermal picture, 3% approximately. 97% of the picture is hidden in the oceans, where all the evidence strongly indicates heat is accumulating. While we are still in the early phases of constructing a complete heat budget it is clear that significant changes are afoot, again only really consistent with CO2 forcing.
You have no idea what a 2C temperature change will do. For one thing this is only a global average. Some areas will have much greater increases, and every bit of theory indicates this will be concentrated in high latitudes. 2C is also the LOWEST likely result. What if the increase is 4C? That could mean 6C in the Arctic with no problem. 2C actually DOES have a very significant effect on the climate of a region. For instance (for whatever reason it has happened) the area in which I live has seen more than a 1C increase since 1970. Guess what, spring has advanced by almost 3 weeks, and snow cover now rarely exists before the end of December. Far more precipitation now falls in the winter and early spring, the summers are now significantly drier. This absolutely causes problems. We are a mild example of the effects.
Don't get me wrong, some of the more breathless panic is a little over the top, but 2C will cause a fairly large amount of economic loss worldwide. IPCC's assessments of that are probably fairly realistic. Given those estimates controlling CO2 output makes sense and will probably be cost-effective. Again though, this is at the LOW END of estimates. What we have seen so far is that consistently IPCC has been conservative. 3C is a much more likely outcome and 4C is probably more likely still for an overall 21st Century temperature increase. When you reach 4C the results are QUITE ugly.
You can be skeptical about exact sensitivities, but there's a point where this sort of 'optimism' becomes blindness. On our current course we are set to release something like 5 teratons of carbon into the atmosphere (3.7 teratons are already listed as assets on the books of energy companies). Beyond that degradation of the environment will probably result in the addition of another 500-1000 gigatons. Loss of natural sinks is likely to result in another teraton not being recycled into the soil/wood/etc. This is an astounding amount of material. Any suggestion that such a vast disruption of the carbon cycle and introduction of such unprecedented quantities of fossil carbon into the air will not have profound effects is ludicrous. Almost any change is likely to be bad for us, and this change is likely to be extremely rapid by g
You don't have to 'specify the falsifiability'. A falsifiable hypothesis is merely one where it is in principle possible to invalidate it. There isn't some form you fill out where you list the possible ways and if you leave it blank your hypothesis is unfalsifiable. Do you know anything about how science is conducted or what falsifiability means? I don't get the impression that you actually do.
The whole debate exists not because AGW is falsifiable, but simply because there's not a yes or no answer to the question "how much does adding CO2 to the atmosphere raise the temperature". Given that observation has demonstrated that temperature has been rising at a rate well within the range predicted by climate models and that every other known forcing except CO2 has been shown NOT to correlate well with this warming we are left with the logical conclusion that the roughly 3C climate sensitivity is a good number and that no other hypothesis so far advanced seems to work. If you can show some other mechanism that is at work, which fits better, then you can falsify the CO2 based AGW hypothesis. It is as simple as that. It isn't up to me to dream up that hypothesis. Certainly if I have a moment of revelation on the subject you'll read about it, I'd be HAPPY to write that paper. Unfortunately nobody has yet come up with that theory, my guess is it doesn't exist.
As for the increase in the 20th Century? Sure, I'm going to blame a good part of it on AGW. Truthfully I don't see anything in the literature which indicates there is a particular reason to blame any of it on anything EXCEPT CO2. However there's an equally good fit to other processes in the timeframe 1880-1950 or so. Past that point there's no indication it wasn't 100% CO2 and its related feedbacks. So yeah, we're good:)
As for explaining the numbers I'm using. Seriously, if you don't know what standard sensitivity numbers are, you're really kinda pretty far in the dark. You can pick up that kind of basic understanding from any of the 'science explained' type sites. Again I'd recommend realclimate.org as it is the most rigorous, but others will do such as http://www.skepticalscience.com/argument.php
I don't think everyone is exactly like me, no, but the vast majority of people who are likely to use Ubuntu would never be harmed by anything Ubuntu is doing by default. I think that is a quite safe statement. Is it going to be true for every person on Earth, of course not. Does that mean we should overblow the whole thing? I don't think so.
Frankly, there are far more important things to consider here. Every time you drive down the street the police are recording where you go. I think anything anyone can garner from a local search is probably a little trivial compared to that kind of thing.
I think the fact that Ubuntu exists and gives people a choice of a generally very secure OS is probably helping them more than anything else they're doing is hurting anyone. I don't know if the way this particular issue is being handled is ideal, I don't use Ubuntu, but RMS is being rather extreme and silly, as usual. He's done some great things, but like many brilliant and energetic people he seems to be half an idiot grafted to half a genius. I'm grateful for all the GNU tools. OTOH I think he'd be much better served to lower his rhetoric a notch and basically grow up some.
This is all marvelous except you are sans facts. There is no realistic doubt at this time that we have already seen almost a 1C temperature rise due to anthropogenic CO2, nor that there will be at least a 2.2C total sensitivity, nor that 3C is much more probable. If you cannot accept these facts then you are not operating in the real world but instead in a land of pure fantasy. Again, I urge you to actually read the literature or at least the summaries and presentations of the findings written by the people who have done the research, not that written by hacks paid by the oil industry.
I'm not sure you even understand what falsifiability IS. Nor am I required to do anything. The burden on you is to understand the current literature. It isn't my obligation to educate you on a subject you are falsely claiming to know something about. Read the science. The people doing this research have advanced a theory and supported it with a mass of evidence from multiple lines of research. If you are going to assail that you have to actually come up with a hypothesis, attested by evidence, which contradicts the theory in a way that it cannot answer. You haven't done that, nor has any researcher done that or even come close to doing that. Until you understand how this works you are indeed correct, discussion is pointless.
Your ignorance of the topic is monumental. There's not even any reasonable place to begin. You need to educate yourself on the actual facts, then we can talk about options and policy. Until then its pointless. Here, here's a free link. http://www.realclimate.org/ Enjoy!;)
No, the hypothesis is that CO2 will cause temperature to increase. It is a validated hypothesis. Logically the action to be taken, should you wish to avoid this temperature increase, is to reduce CO2. Your problem is you've already decided what you will and won't do without even considering the most basic and fundamental option. Nor do you need ANY regional predictions in order to come to the one and only overarching policy choice. Knowing every detail of regional climate change for the next 500 years won't in any way shape or form alter the fact that avoiding climate change requires not putting CO2 in the air.
Your problem isn't with the science, your problem is you simply refuse to accept the inevitable and inescapable conclusion. No amount of building dikes and levees and whatever is going to matter in the long run, the CO2 level of the atmosphere MUST BE STABILIZED, PERIOD, END OF REPORT. You can wiggle and twist as much as you want, but you're never going to be let loose of the truth. There is only one set of choices, either start now and do it affordably, or start later and create an economic catastrophe, which will it be?
Sure, and such an accomplishment would be GREAT, but that doesn't mean the results we are getting are not incredibly useful. They show the range of likely outcomes regionally and the overall global numbers with a pretty high degree of confidence. From an overall decision making standpoint the global numbers are actually some of the most valuable. Since the solutions are global its not so important if area A gets wetter or drier, since area B is sure to do the opposite. Either way the answer is the same, less CO2.
You cannot divide these things up, CO2 and clouds are not separate things so your question is not sensible. Yes, we have narrowed the range of uncertainty in general. Time marches on and the Earth system is always understood better every year. Each increment of knowledge makes predictions more accurate. The point is that the most extreme possibilities for clouds in either direction just aren't that huge a difference. I mean it is a considerable difference, but no matter what it isn't going to invalidate the conclusions as this uncertainty has been taken into account.
And YES, ENSO is weather. I suggest reading the literature on the subject. It is a recurring instability which exhibits nonlinear behavior and is in fact a classic large scale weather feature. The difference being climate is an overall system state, weather is local transient state. The overall climate occupies a region of phase space around an attractor, weather is just a phenomenon which occurs transiently within certain regions of that phase space.
Bah! I call nonsense on that. You're fantasizing that anyone gives a crap what you think or that anyone could even tell from some trivial amount of data that some ad agency somewhere might get. Sorry, this kind of thing just isn't a substantive threat, get real.
Again, you'd have to lay out the actual setup and how it particularly works to be able to argue that the defaults need to be different.
Regional models have been predicting the ENSO months in advance for years. Global models produce oscillations. The timing is never identical with the real events, but this is not actually anticipated to EVER happen, ENSO is weather, not climate, you can predict the existence of weather phenomena, but not specific individual appearances. This has been the state of the art since the mid 90's.
Clouds cannot be summarized by "we now understand them" or "we don't understand them", there are a lot of different cloud phenomena. What we CAN say is go ahead and plug in the most optimistic and pessimistic cloud physics assumptions, what happens? You STILL get realistic models that STILL show substantial sensitivity. How do you think the low and high ends of the range are determined?
http://www.aip.org/history/climate/GCM.htm is a good summary of models and their history. They work quite well in terms of global predictions. As far as low level regional predictions it simply may never be possible to produce a single high confidence estimate because the exact pattern that evolves in the real world is partly dictated by processes with extreme sensitivity to input parameters.
Yes, but your assertion that GCMs are useless without EXACT predictions of regional conditions is silly. It is just as ridiculous as saying that a map of a city is useless because it doesn't have every detail. It is just not a sensible answer.
Exactly!
ANY safety plan will always be degraded over time by cost-conscious managers who become confident that nothing bad will happen, until the level of preparedness drops below the threshold where a giant disaster happens, at which point it will all start again.
Yeah, overbuilt. Odd how just down the coast they built their sea wall 3 meters higher and stopped the tsunami cold in its tracks. Oops!
The TRUTH is nuclear power plants are built to the lowest standard that the NRC will allow them to get away with, period. And that "allow" is tempered with the fact that they constantly beg for more and much of the NRC is made of of ex nuclear power people (understandably so, but still). Now, they don't perhaps do a TERRIBLE job, but they cut it as close as they possibly can.
I mean really, look at this proposal they're talking about here, creating one or more caches of emergency equipment and crews that can be dispatched on short emergency notice to any nuclear power plant. Is this concept sort of STUPIDLY FUCKING OBVIOUS???!!!! Is it not like the first or second thing you think of? Isn't something you just always assumed already existed because it was so FUCKING OBVIOUS!! And now 50 years into nuclear power it is only now being contemplated and only because of a massive backlash against nuclear power because the impossible happened and FOUR REACTORS went China Syndrome.
This is why I don't care for nuclear power. Truthfully, IN THEORY it can be quite safe, but human beings are not trustworthy enough to handle it.
Actually your assessment is quite good, except it would be applicable to the 1970's. Modern Earth system models are FAR more sophisticated and capable than you are stating. They respond in quite realistic ways to different forcings, reproduce both recent historical temperatures and paleoclimate. They are also virtually entirely physical, containing no 'fudge factors', just basic physics. There are plenty of things that aren't accurately measured and a few significant things that are only partially understood, but when we plug in various different models of those things (say clouds for instance) we can constrain the range of what these unknowns could possibly be hiding. It isn't much. One of the most remarkable facts about climate models is just how consistently they have produced quite similar overall results and how HARD it is to get them to produce really unrealistic results. Even the most grossly simplistic models usually demonstrate significant correspondence with reality.
The main area of uncertainty, and one that may possibly be irreducible, are small scale regional predictions. Climate can have a lot of different similar states. It is perhaps impossible even with virtually infinite computer power to predict what the rainfall will be in New England around 2050. The answers you will get in each model run with slightly randomized initial state will vary somewhat. Interestingly though the GLOBAL results are generally rock solid consistent. Chances are this is just a feature of the real world, tiny effects WILL make a local difference, but the overall state of the whole system is constrained by basic conservation laws, so that the large scale predictions are highly accurate (and have generally been shown to be so). Truthfully we may be approaching the limit of what we can usefully do in terms of prediction.
This is a deep misunderstanding of complex non-linear dynamic systems. You may not be able to say what the PRECISE state of the system will be, as in exactly when it will rain for the weather, or which region will have exactly what rainfall for climate, but you CAN quite confidently map the basins of the various attractors and understand the ensemble state of the system. In other words you don't have to know the precise climate in every little region to know the overall climate. This is ESPECIALLY true of the climate because there is a phase space that represents the possible states. In other words the laws of physics basically govern the overall climate, if one area turns out a bit drier than you predicted then another one has to be a bit wetter because the rain has to fall SOMEWHERE. Excess heat in the system has to go somewhere, and eventually it has to drive increased evaporation, increased temperatures, etc. This stuff is just constrained by basic physical laws. The only real arguments at this point are about ACTUAL regional conditions and details like whether or not the extra rainfall in an area will fall in big storms or more small storms for instance. It is very true that models will not precisely predict these things. It may be impossible to do so, but that doesn't make the models useless at all.
What exhortations to violence? lol. Did you mispost or something? I didn't say a thing about what SHOULD happen. I didn't even say anything about what WILL happen. I just commented on the apparent personality traits of John McAfee, something any average human being is certainly qualified to observe.
For the record everyone deserves fair justice. I don't know if he will get it or not, but I in no way shape or form advocate anything else.
Yeah, of course. I sort of thought that one went without saying. I mean the neighbor he didn't get along with turned up with a bullet in his head, kinda suggestive already. Of course that doesn't mean the officials down there aren't pissed at the guy. I suspect any way you cut it he's pretty much boned, and I figure at some level he did it to himself.
You took the words right out of my mouth. Since when is John McAfee a human rights activist? Smells WAY more to me like the guy is a totally out of control ego on a short road to hell. It wouldn't surprise me ONE BIT if he DID piss someone off in Belize. He's exactly 'that guy' that will push something until someone pushes back and then its all the rest of the world's fucking fault because heaven forbid someone inconvenienced the asshole or didn't give him what he wanted. People like this tend to get squashed like bugs. Especially in some backwater little place like Belize where the difference between the law and what some official decides is going to be convenient to be the law today you asshole are not real different.
First of all, do most people actually have meaningful secrets? I doubt it.
Second of all the major lesson to be learned from security (and believe me I TEACH secure computing courses now and then at an advanced level) is that you don't have any and what you get from trying is inconvenience instead. There's a very good reason why most people don't opt for security over functionality. Security is also not a black and white thing, it is many shades of grey. You're always choosing more or less of it vs more or less of other things. Nobody is totally secure.
There are cases where you're correct, but actually in the majority of cases it is just not that way. The real question is only about expectations. Maybe in this particular case the system should throw up a prompt the first time and then offer to let you default it, and provide some indicator/widget you can use to change your security choices later on and get a hint about what they are.
Also I think in general for most users it is better to provide them with goal-oriented configuration. In other words don't show them security settings, show them degrees of security tradeoffs that are useful to achieve specific goals. One person may want to stay below the radar and be very secure, another may want more convenience.
What are you suggesting, that there are no options? That I just hand over all my concerns to RMS because he's the man? Like it or not we need options and there have to be defaults of some sort. As I've said before, the consideration should be how those are presented.
Right, but you know what, people mostly have other things to worry about. If the defaults work well for them, then chances are they're not inclined to think about it, have more important things to think about, and probably lack the information (or time and energy to acquire it). You can argue this both ways is the point, so there's no need for people to toss around words of moral approbation. This is in fact the general problem with RMS and of course many other fanatics, they make every little ambiguous choice in the world into a moral crisis. A mature approach would be perhaps to just point out the dimensions of the thing, its implications, and let people make their own judgments.
Again, more information is needed (frankly I don't go near Ubuntu with a 10' pole, I can handle myself thanks). So I don't know how this is all presented. The mere existence of the option, even if it is enabled by default isn't enough to make it bad. Even if it is a poor choice its simply a poor choice. People are just such drama queens.
God I'm so glad you're here to make sure I don't accidentally decide I want something that in your infinite wisdom you have decided is bad for me! Blessed is the Richard! I shall fear no evil!
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Whatever dude, you have no hypothesis of any kind, your view of the evidence is so warped it isn't even funny, and you seem to fail to grasp the entire problem with your position, which is that you are contrasting a hypothesis with a great deal of evidence in favor of it against NOTHING. You have no explanation, no chain of evidence, no causal mechanisms, nothing. You have no leg to stand on. You can try to invoke uncertainties and very poorly understood evidence from time periods in the very distant past, but what you CANNOT DO is explain what is wrong with the current hypothesis or why the observations match its predictions so well. Until you can do those things you are just wrong. Occam's Razor cuts you.
I could care less if in your misguided mind you have convinced yourself that the truth is just some delusion. Reality could give a crap less what you believe. It would be easier if you would wake up, smell the coffee, and lift a hand in the great work ahead, but it is going to go on regardless. Don't expect any special breaks, you're going to pay your fair share.
Frankly we're not going to get any further. Your arguments don't float, they wouldn't convince the vast majority of the scientific community, and they will probably never convince me either. Good luck.
I don't know what you think the rules are here, but you need to demonstrate why adding CO2 to the air will not cause the temperature to go up. That's all there is to it. You're arguing with basic physics. If you cannot explain why basic physical processes will not work then you're just not going to get anywhere. Got it? Every analysis we have done that is at all realistic in the last 50 years has shown a sensitivity exactly in line with observation. The best available hypothesis is AGW. Again, you need to show how this will not happen, as there is no known mechanism that would result in the Earth NOT warming when we add CO2 to the atmosphere.
See, this is what you are not getting. It isn't a matter of proving something false in an absolute sense. It is a matter of you have to have a better theory. You do not have a better theory. You cannot explain why no other forcing matches the signature of what we are seeing except CO2. You cannot explain why CO2 will not raise the temperature, YOU HAVE NO HYPOTHESIS, nothing at all. You are asking people to accept that what we see is some random chance thing, and every bit of analysis that has been done demonstrates that at this the probably that is true is rather low, certainly no higher than 10%. "We just exited an ice age" is not a theory, nor is it even true, that was 12,000 years ago and the temperature has long since stopped recovering from that.
Now, BEYOND ALL OF THIS, air temperature rise is only a small part of the whole thermal picture, 3% approximately. 97% of the picture is hidden in the oceans, where all the evidence strongly indicates heat is accumulating. While we are still in the early phases of constructing a complete heat budget it is clear that significant changes are afoot, again only really consistent with CO2 forcing.
You have no idea what a 2C temperature change will do. For one thing this is only a global average. Some areas will have much greater increases, and every bit of theory indicates this will be concentrated in high latitudes. 2C is also the LOWEST likely result. What if the increase is 4C? That could mean 6C in the Arctic with no problem. 2C actually DOES have a very significant effect on the climate of a region. For instance (for whatever reason it has happened) the area in which I live has seen more than a 1C increase since 1970. Guess what, spring has advanced by almost 3 weeks, and snow cover now rarely exists before the end of December. Far more precipitation now falls in the winter and early spring, the summers are now significantly drier. This absolutely causes problems. We are a mild example of the effects.
Don't get me wrong, some of the more breathless panic is a little over the top, but 2C will cause a fairly large amount of economic loss worldwide. IPCC's assessments of that are probably fairly realistic. Given those estimates controlling CO2 output makes sense and will probably be cost-effective. Again though, this is at the LOW END of estimates. What we have seen so far is that consistently IPCC has been conservative. 3C is a much more likely outcome and 4C is probably more likely still for an overall 21st Century temperature increase. When you reach 4C the results are QUITE ugly.
You can be skeptical about exact sensitivities, but there's a point where this sort of 'optimism' becomes blindness. On our current course we are set to release something like 5 teratons of carbon into the atmosphere (3.7 teratons are already listed as assets on the books of energy companies). Beyond that degradation of the environment will probably result in the addition of another 500-1000 gigatons. Loss of natural sinks is likely to result in another teraton not being recycled into the soil/wood/etc. This is an astounding amount of material. Any suggestion that such a vast disruption of the carbon cycle and introduction of such unprecedented quantities of fossil carbon into the air will not have profound effects is ludicrous. Almost any change is likely to be bad for us, and this change is likely to be extremely rapid by g
You don't have to 'specify the falsifiability'. A falsifiable hypothesis is merely one where it is in principle possible to invalidate it. There isn't some form you fill out where you list the possible ways and if you leave it blank your hypothesis is unfalsifiable. Do you know anything about how science is conducted or what falsifiability means? I don't get the impression that you actually do.
The whole debate exists not because AGW is falsifiable, but simply because there's not a yes or no answer to the question "how much does adding CO2 to the atmosphere raise the temperature". Given that observation has demonstrated that temperature has been rising at a rate well within the range predicted by climate models and that every other known forcing except CO2 has been shown NOT to correlate well with this warming we are left with the logical conclusion that the roughly 3C climate sensitivity is a good number and that no other hypothesis so far advanced seems to work. If you can show some other mechanism that is at work, which fits better, then you can falsify the CO2 based AGW hypothesis. It is as simple as that. It isn't up to me to dream up that hypothesis. Certainly if I have a moment of revelation on the subject you'll read about it, I'd be HAPPY to write that paper. Unfortunately nobody has yet come up with that theory, my guess is it doesn't exist.
As for the increase in the 20th Century? Sure, I'm going to blame a good part of it on AGW. Truthfully I don't see anything in the literature which indicates there is a particular reason to blame any of it on anything EXCEPT CO2. However there's an equally good fit to other processes in the timeframe 1880-1950 or so. Past that point there's no indication it wasn't 100% CO2 and its related feedbacks. So yeah, we're good :)
As for explaining the numbers I'm using. Seriously, if you don't know what standard sensitivity numbers are, you're really kinda pretty far in the dark. You can pick up that kind of basic understanding from any of the 'science explained' type sites. Again I'd recommend realclimate.org as it is the most rigorous, but others will do such as http://www.skepticalscience.com/argument.php
I don't think everyone is exactly like me, no, but the vast majority of people who are likely to use Ubuntu would never be harmed by anything Ubuntu is doing by default. I think that is a quite safe statement. Is it going to be true for every person on Earth, of course not. Does that mean we should overblow the whole thing? I don't think so.
Frankly, there are far more important things to consider here. Every time you drive down the street the police are recording where you go. I think anything anyone can garner from a local search is probably a little trivial compared to that kind of thing.
I think the fact that Ubuntu exists and gives people a choice of a generally very secure OS is probably helping them more than anything else they're doing is hurting anyone. I don't know if the way this particular issue is being handled is ideal, I don't use Ubuntu, but RMS is being rather extreme and silly, as usual. He's done some great things, but like many brilliant and energetic people he seems to be half an idiot grafted to half a genius. I'm grateful for all the GNU tools. OTOH I think he'd be much better served to lower his rhetoric a notch and basically grow up some.
This is all marvelous except you are sans facts. There is no realistic doubt at this time that we have already seen almost a 1C temperature rise due to anthropogenic CO2, nor that there will be at least a 2.2C total sensitivity, nor that 3C is much more probable. If you cannot accept these facts then you are not operating in the real world but instead in a land of pure fantasy. Again, I urge you to actually read the literature or at least the summaries and presentations of the findings written by the people who have done the research, not that written by hacks paid by the oil industry.
I'm not sure you even understand what falsifiability IS. Nor am I required to do anything. The burden on you is to understand the current literature. It isn't my obligation to educate you on a subject you are falsely claiming to know something about. Read the science. The people doing this research have advanced a theory and supported it with a mass of evidence from multiple lines of research. If you are going to assail that you have to actually come up with a hypothesis, attested by evidence, which contradicts the theory in a way that it cannot answer. You haven't done that, nor has any researcher done that or even come close to doing that. Until you understand how this works you are indeed correct, discussion is pointless.
Your ignorance of the topic is monumental. There's not even any reasonable place to begin. You need to educate yourself on the actual facts, then we can talk about options and policy. Until then its pointless. Here, here's a free link. http://www.realclimate.org/ Enjoy! ;)
No, the hypothesis is that CO2 will cause temperature to increase. It is a validated hypothesis. Logically the action to be taken, should you wish to avoid this temperature increase, is to reduce CO2. Your problem is you've already decided what you will and won't do without even considering the most basic and fundamental option. Nor do you need ANY regional predictions in order to come to the one and only overarching policy choice. Knowing every detail of regional climate change for the next 500 years won't in any way shape or form alter the fact that avoiding climate change requires not putting CO2 in the air.
Your problem isn't with the science, your problem is you simply refuse to accept the inevitable and inescapable conclusion. No amount of building dikes and levees and whatever is going to matter in the long run, the CO2 level of the atmosphere MUST BE STABILIZED, PERIOD, END OF REPORT. You can wiggle and twist as much as you want, but you're never going to be let loose of the truth. There is only one set of choices, either start now and do it affordably, or start later and create an economic catastrophe, which will it be?
Sure, and such an accomplishment would be GREAT, but that doesn't mean the results we are getting are not incredibly useful. They show the range of likely outcomes regionally and the overall global numbers with a pretty high degree of confidence. From an overall decision making standpoint the global numbers are actually some of the most valuable. Since the solutions are global its not so important if area A gets wetter or drier, since area B is sure to do the opposite. Either way the answer is the same, less CO2.
You cannot divide these things up, CO2 and clouds are not separate things so your question is not sensible. Yes, we have narrowed the range of uncertainty in general. Time marches on and the Earth system is always understood better every year. Each increment of knowledge makes predictions more accurate. The point is that the most extreme possibilities for clouds in either direction just aren't that huge a difference. I mean it is a considerable difference, but no matter what it isn't going to invalidate the conclusions as this uncertainty has been taken into account.
And YES, ENSO is weather. I suggest reading the literature on the subject. It is a recurring instability which exhibits nonlinear behavior and is in fact a classic large scale weather feature. The difference being climate is an overall system state, weather is local transient state. The overall climate occupies a region of phase space around an attractor, weather is just a phenomenon which occurs transiently within certain regions of that phase space.
Bah! I call nonsense on that. You're fantasizing that anyone gives a crap what you think or that anyone could even tell from some trivial amount of data that some ad agency somewhere might get. Sorry, this kind of thing just isn't a substantive threat, get real. Again, you'd have to lay out the actual setup and how it particularly works to be able to argue that the defaults need to be different.
Regional models have been predicting the ENSO months in advance for years. Global models produce oscillations. The timing is never identical with the real events, but this is not actually anticipated to EVER happen, ENSO is weather, not climate, you can predict the existence of weather phenomena, but not specific individual appearances. This has been the state of the art since the mid 90's. Clouds cannot be summarized by "we now understand them" or "we don't understand them", there are a lot of different cloud phenomena. What we CAN say is go ahead and plug in the most optimistic and pessimistic cloud physics assumptions, what happens? You STILL get realistic models that STILL show substantial sensitivity. How do you think the low and high ends of the range are determined? http://www.aip.org/history/climate/GCM.htm is a good summary of models and their history. They work quite well in terms of global predictions. As far as low level regional predictions it simply may never be possible to produce a single high confidence estimate because the exact pattern that evolves in the real world is partly dictated by processes with extreme sensitivity to input parameters.
Yes, but your assertion that GCMs are useless without EXACT predictions of regional conditions is silly. It is just as ridiculous as saying that a map of a city is useless because it doesn't have every detail. It is just not a sensible answer.
Exactly! ANY safety plan will always be degraded over time by cost-conscious managers who become confident that nothing bad will happen, until the level of preparedness drops below the threshold where a giant disaster happens, at which point it will all start again.
Yeah, overbuilt. Odd how just down the coast they built their sea wall 3 meters higher and stopped the tsunami cold in its tracks. Oops! The TRUTH is nuclear power plants are built to the lowest standard that the NRC will allow them to get away with, period. And that "allow" is tempered with the fact that they constantly beg for more and much of the NRC is made of of ex nuclear power people (understandably so, but still). Now, they don't perhaps do a TERRIBLE job, but they cut it as close as they possibly can. I mean really, look at this proposal they're talking about here, creating one or more caches of emergency equipment and crews that can be dispatched on short emergency notice to any nuclear power plant. Is this concept sort of STUPIDLY FUCKING OBVIOUS???!!!! Is it not like the first or second thing you think of? Isn't something you just always assumed already existed because it was so FUCKING OBVIOUS!! And now 50 years into nuclear power it is only now being contemplated and only because of a massive backlash against nuclear power because the impossible happened and FOUR REACTORS went China Syndrome. This is why I don't care for nuclear power. Truthfully, IN THEORY it can be quite safe, but human beings are not trustworthy enough to handle it.
Actually your assessment is quite good, except it would be applicable to the 1970's. Modern Earth system models are FAR more sophisticated and capable than you are stating. They respond in quite realistic ways to different forcings, reproduce both recent historical temperatures and paleoclimate. They are also virtually entirely physical, containing no 'fudge factors', just basic physics. There are plenty of things that aren't accurately measured and a few significant things that are only partially understood, but when we plug in various different models of those things (say clouds for instance) we can constrain the range of what these unknowns could possibly be hiding. It isn't much. One of the most remarkable facts about climate models is just how consistently they have produced quite similar overall results and how HARD it is to get them to produce really unrealistic results. Even the most grossly simplistic models usually demonstrate significant correspondence with reality. The main area of uncertainty, and one that may possibly be irreducible, are small scale regional predictions. Climate can have a lot of different similar states. It is perhaps impossible even with virtually infinite computer power to predict what the rainfall will be in New England around 2050. The answers you will get in each model run with slightly randomized initial state will vary somewhat. Interestingly though the GLOBAL results are generally rock solid consistent. Chances are this is just a feature of the real world, tiny effects WILL make a local difference, but the overall state of the whole system is constrained by basic conservation laws, so that the large scale predictions are highly accurate (and have generally been shown to be so). Truthfully we may be approaching the limit of what we can usefully do in terms of prediction.
This is a deep misunderstanding of complex non-linear dynamic systems. You may not be able to say what the PRECISE state of the system will be, as in exactly when it will rain for the weather, or which region will have exactly what rainfall for climate, but you CAN quite confidently map the basins of the various attractors and understand the ensemble state of the system. In other words you don't have to know the precise climate in every little region to know the overall climate. This is ESPECIALLY true of the climate because there is a phase space that represents the possible states. In other words the laws of physics basically govern the overall climate, if one area turns out a bit drier than you predicted then another one has to be a bit wetter because the rain has to fall SOMEWHERE. Excess heat in the system has to go somewhere, and eventually it has to drive increased evaporation, increased temperatures, etc. This stuff is just constrained by basic physical laws. The only real arguments at this point are about ACTUAL regional conditions and details like whether or not the extra rainfall in an area will fall in big storms or more small storms for instance. It is very true that models will not precisely predict these things. It may be impossible to do so, but that doesn't make the models useless at all.
What exhortations to violence? lol. Did you mispost or something? I didn't say a thing about what SHOULD happen. I didn't even say anything about what WILL happen. I just commented on the apparent personality traits of John McAfee, something any average human being is certainly qualified to observe. For the record everyone deserves fair justice. I don't know if he will get it or not, but I in no way shape or form advocate anything else.
Yeah, of course. I sort of thought that one went without saying. I mean the neighbor he didn't get along with turned up with a bullet in his head, kinda suggestive already. Of course that doesn't mean the officials down there aren't pissed at the guy. I suspect any way you cut it he's pretty much boned, and I figure at some level he did it to himself.
You took the words right out of my mouth. Since when is John McAfee a human rights activist? Smells WAY more to me like the guy is a totally out of control ego on a short road to hell. It wouldn't surprise me ONE BIT if he DID piss someone off in Belize. He's exactly 'that guy' that will push something until someone pushes back and then its all the rest of the world's fucking fault because heaven forbid someone inconvenienced the asshole or didn't give him what he wanted. People like this tend to get squashed like bugs. Especially in some backwater little place like Belize where the difference between the law and what some official decides is going to be convenient to be the law today you asshole are not real different.
First of all, do most people actually have meaningful secrets? I doubt it. Second of all the major lesson to be learned from security (and believe me I TEACH secure computing courses now and then at an advanced level) is that you don't have any and what you get from trying is inconvenience instead. There's a very good reason why most people don't opt for security over functionality. Security is also not a black and white thing, it is many shades of grey. You're always choosing more or less of it vs more or less of other things. Nobody is totally secure. There are cases where you're correct, but actually in the majority of cases it is just not that way. The real question is only about expectations. Maybe in this particular case the system should throw up a prompt the first time and then offer to let you default it, and provide some indicator/widget you can use to change your security choices later on and get a hint about what they are. Also I think in general for most users it is better to provide them with goal-oriented configuration. In other words don't show them security settings, show them degrees of security tradeoffs that are useful to achieve specific goals. One person may want to stay below the radar and be very secure, another may want more convenience.
What are you suggesting, that there are no options? That I just hand over all my concerns to RMS because he's the man? Like it or not we need options and there have to be defaults of some sort. As I've said before, the consideration should be how those are presented.
Right, but you know what, people mostly have other things to worry about. If the defaults work well for them, then chances are they're not inclined to think about it, have more important things to think about, and probably lack the information (or time and energy to acquire it). You can argue this both ways is the point, so there's no need for people to toss around words of moral approbation. This is in fact the general problem with RMS and of course many other fanatics, they make every little ambiguous choice in the world into a moral crisis. A mature approach would be perhaps to just point out the dimensions of the thing, its implications, and let people make their own judgments.
Down you worshiper of the anti-keyboard! Foul beast with 1000 keycaps, BEGONE!
Again, more information is needed (frankly I don't go near Ubuntu with a 10' pole, I can handle myself thanks). So I don't know how this is all presented. The mere existence of the option, even if it is enabled by default isn't enough to make it bad. Even if it is a poor choice its simply a poor choice. People are just such drama queens.
God I'm so glad you're here to make sure I don't accidentally decide I want something that in your infinite wisdom you have decided is bad for me! Blessed is the Richard! I shall fear no evil!