>Greenland was much warmer in the past than it is today. I am only telling you the truth about the archeology. Greenland is not the world. The medieval warm period was such a regional phenomenon that the global average didn't even change.
>The 'Greenland only' talking point you have doesn't match the observed evidence. As per the scientists who debunked that one - Greenland is the only place for which a piece of data exists that remotely matches what he drew for that time period, the rest of the world was much colder than that. This doesn't mean there haven't been other regional warm periods over time. But global averages have rarely shifted. Regional warm periods are generally offset by cold periods somewhere else.
>Have you never considered that perhaps you don't have all the data? Oh absolutely. Considered. Investigated. Dismissed after careful scrutiny.
> have you ever considered that the people you disagree with are simply using the Scientific Method better than you are I have - and then I studied. And it became clear that they have no evidence whatsoever, the claims they make range from deliberate deception through complete and utter fabrication, their conclusions do not follow from their premises, their claims more often than not are internally contradictory, and the data they cite is either misrepresented or flat out lied about, up and including frequently lying about what the temperature is right now, and such to-a-scientist utterly embarrasing mistakes as confusing the arctic and the antarctic.
>have you ever considered that the computer simulations of predicted change may not match reality? I have - but it's easy to verify that most models have consistently predicted the present well within their published margins of error - and that newer models have done better than older ones (which were pretty good already) and that they openly admit what factors they don't yet model well and account for them by widening margins of error. It's also easy to find that, due to the pressure not to sound alarmist, they consistently undersell when talking to the public - generally speaking about best-case-scenarios, and that where the models deviate from reality it's because reality has been worse. Temperatures higher or ice-melt significantly faster than the press releases said.
> that perhaps the climate 'scientists' did not understand Bode's feedback model at all? Bode's plot is an engineering principle, primarily in electrical engineering. You're claiming it has something significant to do with climate change that climate scientists have not considered. Well then the burden of evidence is on you to prove this. Go right ahead - if you're right, then you just won yourself a nobel prize. If you won't do it for millions of dollars and lifelong fame... I'll have to assume it's because you cannot, just like whatever bullshit-artist-pretending-to-be-a-scientist told you it was relevant. So au contraire, something for you to research - since there's a fortune in it for you. Not just the nobel prize, afterward you can expect a tenured position at any university you want (nobel prize winners don't struggle to get work or tenure - lifelong job security is nice) and an endless supply of grant money from fossil fuel companies who will love you for saving their industry. Frankly - the incentives to disprove climate change outweigh the incentives to push for it by literally lifelong fame and fortune... it's amazing that no scientist seems keen to take that fame and fortune. I can only conclude that, actually, plenty are - but none of them are actually able to do it. It tends to be hard to disprove a theory that is mostly correct.
My point wasn't about efficacy - frankly I don't believe it would be very effective, mass murder rarely is. Such a process would also require enormous resources, which creates a breeding ground for corruption. In practical terms - it would not be an effective way to achieve the goal and would open the door to many genuine atrocities.
My point was to put into perspective the point where libertarians ought to stop being libertarians - because of what becomes justified (justified != a good idea) when they do. People have a right to freedom of religion - but when you start believing you have the right to blow me up in the name of your deity I get the right to shoot you first. People have a right to freedom of speech - but when you are advocating that people should kills gays - we bloody well will lock you up, even in the USA. On the other side - I am (a kind of) socialist in my thinking, but at the point where socialists advocate violent revolutions I no longer support them. Those have historically caused massive hardship and slaughter of innocents, installed dictators and consistently failed to produce socialist outcomes anyway - the most successful socialist states achieved it by peaceful and democratic processes. No matter how good your idea is, no matter how nobel your goals may seem to be - all ideas have limits, and that limit is where other people can make a reasonable argument that your pursuit of this idea puts their welbeing at risk.
Even if libertarians claim they would offer workable alternatives to government prevention (and so far none has - all I've heard is 'recourse' which is the old Murray Rothbard argument and doesn't offer anything resembling a workable solution but they like to push that one because it *sounds* like the are solving the problem without actually stopping anybody from killing you) a sane version would declare that all laws and regulations on matters of public safety will stay intact until AFTER their alternative systems are in place, tested and working. You don't create a vaccuum in which slaughter can happen while going through the arduous process of building something else, even if you think that something is better (by whatever measure you decide it is better). You build the alternative BEFORE you dismantle the current one.
Because a bad system for public safety is still better than none at all, even if it's briefly - and legal changes are never 'briefly'.
I absolutely do agree that the best way to deal with the particular threat posed by libertarians is not through killing them in self defence. Hell even if somebody attacks you and wants to kill you right now my belief is that you shouldn't kill him in self defence if you have any other options. If you can escape - then you shouldn't kill. If you can disable without death then you should take that option. Killing, even in self defence, is a last resort. I wasn't advocating we kill libertarians - I was merely putting into perspective the risk they pose. If you believe in libertarianism, fine, we will never agree but we can live alongside each other. On issues of social liberalism we could even be allies even if our economics will always be as opponents. There's nothing wrong with that. But you ought to stop being a libertarians BEFORE the point where it risks the health and safety of other people. Just as you ought to stop being a christian BEFORE the point where you bash gays.
Oh, and all this is academic. Lets assume your insanity is true and climate change to this degree is normal and the historical record actually supports that claim. It's bullshit but lets pretend it was real.
See we have other records - archeological, anthropological etc. etc and the thing is - they show that every major climate shift humanity has experienced was a major calamity and we very nearly didn't survive any of them as a species. Every single one came close to an extinction level event for us. Every single one caused massive displacement, starvation and wars.
And we are MORE vulnerable now than we were when those happened. They happened when displacement was a much smaller problem. If you went somewhere else, there was a good chance you could find somewhere that somebody else wasn't already living and prepared to fight to keep you out off... there are no such places anymore. There is nowhere for the displaced to flee but to your country. America can't figure out how to deal with a few hundred thousand refugees from wars they caused - how the fuck are you going to deal when there's a few hundred million or more fleeing starvation and hunger and drought ? Sure it may make some places green which aren't now. Those places won't be producing much food anytime soon though - most of them are areas where the soil is not conducive to farming. No matter how much warmer and wetter you make it - Siberia will not have productive farmland for centuries. The soil is just to dead. And meantime - the places that were good farmland won't be anymore. Oh and the plagues... you are having a political crisis trying to deal with Zika right now. Malaria kills more people every year than any other cause. Even a small increase in the global average *massive* increases the areas where these diseases can spread. Many economists have calculated that Africa's economic woes can be *entirely* attributed to Malaria. Sure we have wars and corruption but so does everywhere else. We alone have malaria to deal with. With all those productive people dying young. All those kids missing school because mommy is sick, husbands and family missing work to take care of her and all that money wasted on funerals in a classic broken window fallacy. Imagine America with Africa's economy - all your wealth destroyed, all your resources spent just trying to avoid complete collapse - and for the same reason.
That's the thing you think is not a major problem. Just because nature can be a bitch doesn't mean it's not idiotic to horrible things to ourselves. The lesson to learn from natural climate shifts is not that climate shifts is just something that happens and so what... the lesson is that it has come pretty close to eradicating our species several times, and never failed to cause enormous hardship and uncountable deaths and it will be *worse* next time. And, much like the zombie appocalypse, in a major climate change scenario - the single greatest threat is not the weather, it's the other humans. Who will happilly kill you for the water you have.
>the amount of industrialization 150 years ago was trivial compared to today comparable to volcanic activity And you were doing so well. You almost sounded like what you were saying wasn't complete bullshit... and then you come up with this such and complete and utter fabrication that it's impossible to believe somebody could actually still seriously claim this. The good news is - we don't have to guess, we have actual numbers. See the American Geophysical Union - who are pretty much the premier experts on volcanoes - actually answered the question. The average annual total CO2 output from volcanoes is 0.025% of what is put out by coal power plants. Just power plants, and just coal. That's not counting cars, or oil plants, or gas plants or any of the other emission generating fossil fuel industries. Just power plants alone put out 4000 times as much CO2 every year as all the volcanoes in the world. Oh and volcanic climate change, more often than not, is cooling - not heating. Volcanoes are more likely to cover the atmosphere in sun-blocking ash and sulphur, which makes it colder. It was a volcano, after all, that gave Europe it's infamous 19th century year without a summer. Volcanic heating from CO2 is actually extremely rare. It's just not a factor - which is why we believe that most previous major shifts in climate had to do with solar activity or changes in the eath's orbit. Things which are not happening to any significant degree at the moment.
>So then - the rise in temperatures 150 years ago was not a result of man-made global warming, Firstly, the industrial revolution started in the 18th century, not in the 19th, and was well along by 150 years ago - so your claim about the level of industrialization is another flagrant lie easily disputed by anybody who passed high school history class. Now high school history classes tend to be less than stellar in accuracy, being more obsessed with propaganda than actual history but they do tend to get the damn *dates* right. Besides which - nobody claims there was a significant rise 150 years ago because there wasn't. What there was, was the beginning of the rise that is significant TODAY. It started then, small, and has been accelerating ever since.
>do you think that a libertarian property owner would have no problem (and no recourse in a libertarian society) Recourse isn't good enough. Recourse cannot happen until after somebody did something bad - perhaps fatal. The ONLY reason to have recourse at all, since there is neither justice nor any other good served by vengeance, is as a deterrent. Prevention is what we actually need. It's not GOOD enough to punish the ones who did it for what harm they cause - you need to make it so damn scary that they don't try. Civl lawsuits don't work for that, we have them now - and they are not working (that was what Murray Rothbard proposed and it's pretty much the only well developed libertarian theory on the subject). And what's worse is that the court system as a whole - and indeed any recourse system - is fatally flawed as a way of dealing with this and property rights even moreso. For several reasons: 1) Poluting your OWN land is STILL evil - because polution doesn't obey land borders 2) Recourse need to exist for people who don't own land as well - in fact, currently, they are the ones most in need of protection, most current toxic polution events happen on land without clear single-person ownership under western law. 3) It's extremely hard to prove, how *do* I prove this poison came from YOUR factory and not your competitors ? What about air polution ? A recent study showed that a sigificant portion of the smog in LA originates from factories in china. Polution not only doesn't obey land borders - it doesn't even obey national borders. All polution is global polution. That brings up matters of jurisdiction, huge costs and difficulty proving the guilty party and then proving that the harm you suffered was from that polution. It's a nightmare and, generally, only rich people g
I can vote government out and you bet your ass the republicans will be losing Michigan over Flint. I cannot vote out PG&E.
Thats the difference. History has almost no examples at all of elected governments killing many citizens. In the case of Flint the fuckup was enforced by the state government against the demands of the local government who actually wanted to stop it. Interestingly the state government was the party of small government. See when you make government too small to stop corporations from killing you, you also made it too small to stop itself. You need a government of competing interests to act as watchdogs over each other. That unfortunately requires it to be large enough to have competing interests. Such a larger government is more efficient than a smaller one too because government departments actually have competition.
The failure of the EPA to prevent Flint is a direct result of congressional cuts to the EPA budget. Making government smaller kills the watchdogs that restrain it.
Do some googling. The whatsupwiththat version is a complete and utter frabrication and has been roundly debunked for such basic errors as confusing greenland for the entire planet !
Oh deniers love that lie. Claiming that warm periods which were so regional they didn't even *change* the global average were somehow spikes hotter than the climate change now so we don't have to worry. It's a peculiar form of eurocentrism to pretend that somethign which only happened in Europe happened to the world.
Actually your one-fourth conclusion at the end could be partially explained by the fact that you factored in the mass from oxygen when calculating CO2 from carbon mass but not when calculating the carbon added to the atmosphere.
Your maths are a bit off. You forgot that the O2 in CO2 came from the atmosphere in the first place. It's not exactly accurate since oxygen atoms don't have the same mass as carbon atoms but we can for a quick near-enough guess say that 2/3rds of the CO2 mass was there before the CO2 was there, only it used to be O2. Only the 1/3rd that is C was added by industrialization - having previously been sequestered since the carboniferous age.
So while your maths is cool - you need to adjust how you're doing the maths to factor in the mass of hte O2 that was there BEFORE it was part of the CO2.
The site's tagline is: "The national daily championing freedom, smaller government and human dignity."
Now while I'm sure there are genuine good people who just happen to believe government should be small - unfortunately their voices are drowned out by the insane bastards who want government to be powerless so there isn't anybody to stop them from throwing poison in your drinking water and making your air unbreathable. Climate change denial is a forte of theirs and claiming models aren't accurate (mostly by either lying about what models predicted or lying about what the actual temperature is right now) is a key part of how they deny things. The whole "we don't know and we can't know" schpiel from people claiming to be champions of science (which is the thing we use to know things with) is ridiculous. But that tagline says it all. That's not an article about maths, statistics, science or probability though it claims to be all of the above. It's an article about politics - which is being disguised because they don't want you to know it's about politics. It's an attempt to achieve a political goal - regardless of scientific fact.
When you get to the point where you will deny science and reality for the sake of your poiltical beliefs - no matter how nobel those beliefs may otherwise be - they've become evil. At the point where you want government to be too small to keep the water drinkable, the air breathable and the CO2 levels survivable - small government libertarians are no longer just people with whom I have a difference of opinion - they become an actual and legitimate threat to my personal security and the national security of all nations. Killing them becomes justified on the basis of self defence. * You generally want to stop following the line of any ideology before the point where it becomes justifiable for other people to kill you in self defence over what you do in the name of that ideology.
*Note that I am speaking of what would be justified - not what I would actually do. I'm a pacifist and consider force the very last resort. I don't think we are *quite* at the last resort level in general yet. In a few specific cases yes, but not in general. If you live in a town where somebody is dumping poison in your drinking water though - and you kill the CEO of the company who did it and every idiot who tried to stop the government from preventing it, you are not a murderer though, that's self defence and even the most devoted pacifist will not begrudge you that.
>Tyson, as I've pointed out, obviously doesn't realize the obvious implications of his silly ramblings. He's also (very obviously) not one of the greatest minds alive. Remember my entire point?
Because those implications only exist in your mind, not in the actual science. And I'd say the head of the IAU and one of the most influential and celebrated researchers in his field, not to mention one of the extremely rare few in that field who *also* have a talent for speaking to the public in an entertaining manner and educating - is most definitely one of the greatest minds alive. Your failure to recognize that is as spurious as your reading of implications into a theory that are not in that theory. Not to mention that those implications depend on assuming his layman's description is actually the science - which does not *even* include a reliance on another species, merely says it's possible.
>Now, you are an idiot if you really think you can't be both a creationist and an atheist. Since two sentences later you prove you don't actually even know what creationism IS, it makes sense how you can believe such a ridiculous thing. These two belief systems flat-out contradict each other. And not subtly, the one consists of almost nothing BUT a contradiction of the other ! It's not possible to hold both without severe multiple personality disorder.
>Creationism does not imply anything supernatural Yes it does, it's literally a part of the definition and anything that doesn't is not and has nothing in common with creationism. Like I said, all you've proven is that you don't know what creationism *is*. The supernatural parts of the belief is what makes creationism *not* science. That's the ONLY part which isn't otherwise a scientifically valid hypotheses. Even Genesis meets the other criteria. It explains observations and makes testable predictions. The only trouble is that all the tests have failed to confirm it. It's a falsified theory - but had it been proposed in the age of science it would have been a legitimate theory before it was falsified... all the bits except god, calls to anything supernatural, untestable or inexplicable is automatically NOT science.
>If we were living in a simulation, we'd have absolutely no reason to believe anything about the universe which houses our simulation nor the creators who produced the simulation. You're making rather a lot of assumptions. You're assuming that the simulation is changeable and actively being maintained. Neither of those assumptions are remotely likely. A simulation on this scale is likely too massive to ever dare change a single line of code anywhere as the slightest change could destroy the entire thing - and there is absolutely no reason to suspect those who run the intervention are doing anything more than completely passive observation - indeed, it makes almost no sense to create it for anything else. Any species capable of creating such a simulation must have developed science - and science demands you do not interfere in the running of an experiment.
>We'd, very obviously, have no basis to form such beliefs Sure we would. Why can't you study a simulation from the inside ? If it is a simulation it was created to BE studied. Why would that only be possible from the outside ? We should set out to learn all we can about it. You also forget that this is a falsifiable hypotheses and there are active experiments running to test it. This is a real scientific hypotheses, not just philosophical mumbling - it makes predictions and sets out to test those predictions. It could be a while yet before *our* technology gives us a conclusive answer - current experiments test to the level we can and if they prove it wrong it's conclusive but failing to do so is not yet conclusive since there are other tests one would need to do and those are not yet doable - but that time will come. The mere fact that the scientists who propose this also propose it can be tested and verified, and are actively doing so, proves that your idea of it being an unknowable entity does not enter anywhere in their thinking. This is experimental physics - not theoretical.
Your problem is that you're assuming a simulation cannot also be reality - and you have no basis for assuming that.
I didn't say Tyson wrote a paper. There is, however, a great body of scientific papers exploring this topic. Tyson was commenting on them - in a lay forum. And there was some news coverage of what he said - which you read (probably only the./ summary which, by the way, was atrocious) and now you think you understand the science. The problem is - I'm trying to talk on your level. I'm dumbing down like never before... and then you respond to the dumbed down things by finding tiny nitpicks and claiming I'm lying.
Of course I'm fucking lying - simplifying to the point where you MAY understand what I am saying requires me to simplify to the point of a lie. I may have overshot a bit there - but not by much. Since you didn't even understand the layman's version Tyson said in that debate - how could I expect you to begin to understand the real science ?
If you seriously think the simulated universe hypotheses is a form of creationism then you are guilty of the worst case of wishful thinking I've ever seen.
I'm being called an idiot by somebody who sincerely believes that some of the greatest minds alive are both creationists and atheists at the same time... somehow, I'm just not giving much weight to your opinion of me.
Just in the billion to one chance you may understand. Tyson, like myself, is a Spinozan. It's a brand of atheism that sees the divine in the majesty of the cosmos. It's spirtuality without spirits. Divinity without a god. Holiness without obedience. Wonderousness and mystery and the soul - all without anything supernatural.
And that is the point you don't get. Even with your interpretation of what Tyson says it still has nothing in common with creationism because there is absolutely nothing supernatural or inexplicable there. No call to any god. No claim of divine intervention. The thing about it is - if indeed this universe was a simulation created by another species - then they are a species just like us. The only difference is slightly more advanced technology.
What he is really telling you is that, in a relatively short space of time, we will be able to create simulated universes which could evolve inhabitants as intelligent as us. If the runners of such a supposed simulation are gods - then, in the very near future, we ourselves, will be gods too. But we aren't and we won't be and neither are the beings supposedly running the simulation. They are no more gods than the Europeans who brought death and destruction to the Americas. Cortez was not a god by any means - he just had access to some slightly more advanced technology. He had guns and steel (and smallpox immunity). With that he wiped out 95% of the population of two continents in under a decade. He may have been as brutal as the god of the old testament - but that's where the similarity ends.
You heard a press release. You didn't read the paper. What he says in a press release is the idiots version - and you didn't even understand THAT right.
PS scientists comparing it to what we think of as a computer simulation, to an MMO etc. - are using layman's terms when speaking to the public, that's the super-simplified version so idiots can think they understand it. It has as much to do with the actual science as the phrase 'survival of the fittest' has to do with origin of species: which is to say nothing at all. That phrase never occurs anywhere in that book, or any of Darwin's other books or any of his papers. He never uttered it at all.
>That's my point. The idea is absurd, yet its endorsed by idiotic science evangelists. It's no different that the creationist nonsense idiots here are complaining about. The only difference is that they give the version that sounds like science a pass. Scientists can be idiots too. Just look at Neil Tyson. He's promoting his own "scientific" brand of creationism, while simultaneously bashing the minority religious version. The problem, as I've stated, isn't with religion. It's with people. People are irrational.
You clearly didn't understand what I said. NO scientists believe in what you think they believe in - including Neil Tyson.
>The simulation hypothesis described by Neil Tyson, as I mentioned, presupposes a civilization which produces a simulation No it doesn't. It merely considers it as a possibility. But as you failed to understand - EVEN if you presuppose a civilization - which he does not, that is NOT creationism, as it explicitely states that that civilization could, themselves, be a simulation. On the contrary - it's simulations all the way down. Like an NPC in WoW that writes his own MMO.
>As to your terrarium nonsense, again, It's YOUR creationist interpretation that sounds like a terarium. As I said - even if we assume that a civilization is involved AND that said civilization is real - we are almost certainly not the purpose of the experiment. Those running the civilization probably haven't even noticed earth. Earth, and indeed life itself, is more likely a bug than a purpose of the simulation. If you build a simulation as big as this universe - your'e doing it to study universes, not the contents of one tiny little planet that happened to form in some tiny and otherwise quite insignificant little star somewhere. In fact other science backs that up - the more we look the more exoplanets we discover and the better we get at looking the more we find that are very much earthlike. The most recent one, named after Keppler, is probably almost completely earthlike. If it is earthlike - that alone proves it has life, because earth wasn't earthlike BEFORE it had life and couldn't have become earthlike without life - life is what MADE earth be like earth. Life is probably extremely abundant in the universe - and if they care about it at all, it's about it's abundance over-all, not about any particular planet and the short brief moment when a few members of one species on it figured out how to wonder if they live in a simulation. It's the opposite of creationism - because it says that, even if there were creators, they don't give a flying fuck about us. They probably haven't even noticed us.
>This isn't complicated. Why are you struggling so much with this? Because I actually understand the REAL theory and you're arguing about a strawman version of it that only ever existed in your own fevered imagination.
>There is no way to disprove that the stars travel around the earth, because you can build an entirely consistent mathematical system around just this assumption It's extremely easy to disprove - it's called "use a telescope" hell - we've been to space rather often by now and have been studying distant galaxies for quite some time.
Besides which - you remain wrong about even what science or the scientific method is. Hint Ptolomy never used the scientific method because it didn't exist yet.
Actually - you're the one who seems to have a very odd idea of it - as is not endorsed by any sane scientist in the world.
What I gave you was one of the dozens of possibilities they ARE describing - none of which imply any of the things you think it does - and, ironically, even YOUR version of what it means doesn't imply those things ! The existence of the watch does not prove a watchmaker, never has, never will - and just as it doesn't work for the human eyeball it doesn't work for the universe - simulated or otherwise.
Wow... so much bullshit. There is NOTHING scientists have believed for thousands of years because science is less than 200 years old. There was proto-science for a long time before that gradually evolving into what would become science - but science did not exist until the current form of the scientific method was defined in the 19th century.
I'll address the rest of your bullshit with that being said. 1) No they never believed the earth was flat. Philosophers (the earliest proto-scientists) already knew it was round by at least 300BC and probably long before that. There are loads of clues - by 300BC they not only knew it was round - one of them actually calculated it's circumference ! 2) the stars travel around the earth, This one was actually disproven in the earliest days of the process that would gradually turn natural philosophy into science. The very first bit of what would become the scientific method already forced this battle to the fore, and the proto-scientists were readily convinced by the evidence as soon as they started seriously studying it. It was mostly religion that resisted it. 3) there are no limits on velocity And this one was disproven within a century of the scientific method reaching it's current state. It was one of the very first breakthroughs of actual (rather than proto-)science.
>those who wish to shut up the skeptics are behaving more like religious zealots than scientists. Says somebody who 1) apparently has no clue what the scientific method is, or even what a scientist is, and who just attributed one of the most famous blunders of religious zealots to scientists (exactly the opposite of what actually happened).
> Second of all, there are scientists like Dick Lindzen (MIT, retired), Freeman Dyson (Institute for Advanced Study) Wow you found some REAL scientists. There's just two problems. Firstly - neither of them have *any* expertise whatsoever in the field they were opining on. Science is extremely specialized and neither of them were educated about it and what they said was not serious research anyway, just personal opinions. Secondly they both expressed those opinions more than than 40 years ago when the evidence for this theory wasn't nearly as complete, the theory itself was in it's infancy and a lot of questions were not yet answered. You will struggle to find a phycisist actively doing research today who agrees with what Dyson said in 1974 - among the people who do not is Dyson himself.
Actually... you pretty much just proved that you have no idea what it means. Nowhere did I assume the conclusion of my argument true without providing evidence of it's truth. In fact I listed a whole lot of evidence.
Erm... please define 'unnatural' taxation, and natural while your at it. Money is not a naturally occurring thing and the laws of economics are not natural laws - they are simply conventions we agree on. There are several sets out there right now that work reasonably well and a few that work really badly but how well it works mostly consists ONLY of how good you are at convincing people to adopt the convention because that's ALL they are.
Such an entirely abstract thing cannot possibly have 'natural' or 'unnatural' as a descriptor in any sane sentence. However your use of it does reveal you as a strong anti-government probably libertarian economic conservative. The kind who always dismiss climate science based on provably false claims (like "the science is corrupted") which they never question because the reason they are fighting this theory has fuckall to do with the theory. It's an argumentum ad consequentum fallacy. They don't like the consequences of the theory (more regulation) so they claim the theory cannot possibly be true because it has consequences which they consider unpleasant.
Partly they are the kind of people who usually think that economics is a natural science governed by natural laws. Objectivist, Austrian school and Chicago School types typically. Which is doubly ironic since those, unique among all economics, are the only schools that reject empiricism making them the LEAST scientific ideas about economics we have. The only ones where, no matter how many times a bad idea fails, no matter how many times an action does NOT have the effect they predict - they never, ever change their ideas because they reject empirical data as a means of proving or disproving economic claims.
Isn't it ironic that those schools which treat economics as an engineered set of conventions - are MORE empirical than those that don't? They actually look at what happens in the real world and refine their theories when consequences consistently fail to agree with expectations.
Slashdot Mirror
>Greenland was much warmer in the past than it is today. I am only telling you the truth about the archeology.
Greenland is not the world. The medieval warm period was such a regional phenomenon that the global average didn't even change.
>The 'Greenland only' talking point you have doesn't match the observed evidence.
As per the scientists who debunked that one - Greenland is the only place for which a piece of data exists that remotely matches what he drew for that time period, the rest of the world was much colder than that.
This doesn't mean there haven't been other regional warm periods over time. But global averages have rarely shifted. Regional warm periods are generally offset by cold periods somewhere else.
>Have you never considered that perhaps you don't have all the data?
Oh absolutely. Considered. Investigated. Dismissed after careful scrutiny.
> have you ever considered that the people you disagree with are simply using the Scientific Method better than you are
I have - and then I studied. And it became clear that they have no evidence whatsoever, the claims they make range from deliberate deception through complete and utter fabrication, their conclusions do not follow from their premises, their claims more often than not are internally contradictory, and the data they cite is either misrepresented or flat out lied about, up and including frequently lying about what the temperature is right now, and such to-a-scientist utterly embarrasing mistakes as confusing the arctic and the antarctic.
>have you ever considered that the computer simulations of predicted change may not match reality?
I have - but it's easy to verify that most models have consistently predicted the present well within their published margins of error - and that newer models have done better than older ones (which were pretty good already) and that they openly admit what factors they don't yet model well and account for them by widening margins of error. It's also easy to find that, due to the pressure not to sound alarmist, they consistently undersell when talking to the public - generally speaking about best-case-scenarios, and that where the models deviate from reality it's because reality has been worse. Temperatures higher or ice-melt significantly faster than the press releases said.
> that perhaps the climate 'scientists' did not understand Bode's feedback model at all?
Bode's plot is an engineering principle, primarily in electrical engineering. You're claiming it has something significant to do with climate change that climate scientists have not considered. Well then the burden of evidence is on you to prove this. Go right ahead - if you're right, then you just won yourself a nobel prize. If you won't do it for millions of dollars and lifelong fame... I'll have to assume it's because you cannot, just like whatever bullshit-artist-pretending-to-be-a-scientist told you it was relevant.
So au contraire, something for you to research - since there's a fortune in it for you. Not just the nobel prize, afterward you can expect a tenured position at any university you want (nobel prize winners don't struggle to get work or tenure - lifelong job security is nice) and an endless supply of grant money from fossil fuel companies who will love you for saving their industry.
Frankly - the incentives to disprove climate change outweigh the incentives to push for it by literally lifelong fame and fortune... it's amazing that no scientist seems keen to take that fame and fortune. I can only conclude that, actually, plenty are - but none of them are actually able to do it. It tends to be hard to disprove a theory that is mostly correct.
My point wasn't about efficacy - frankly I don't believe it would be very effective, mass murder rarely is. Such a process would also require enormous resources, which creates a breeding ground for corruption. In practical terms - it would not be an effective way to achieve the goal and would open the door to many genuine atrocities.
My point was to put into perspective the point where libertarians ought to stop being libertarians - because of what becomes justified (justified != a good idea) when they do. People have a right to freedom of religion - but when you start believing you have the right to blow me up in the name of your deity I get the right to shoot you first. People have a right to freedom of speech - but when you are advocating that people should kills gays - we bloody well will lock you up, even in the USA. On the other side - I am (a kind of) socialist in my thinking, but at the point where socialists advocate violent revolutions I no longer support them. Those have historically caused massive hardship and slaughter of innocents, installed dictators and consistently failed to produce socialist outcomes anyway - the most successful socialist states achieved it by peaceful and democratic processes.
No matter how good your idea is, no matter how nobel your goals may seem to be - all ideas have limits, and that limit is where other people can make a reasonable argument that your pursuit of this idea puts their welbeing at risk.
Even if libertarians claim they would offer workable alternatives to government prevention (and so far none has - all I've heard is 'recourse' which is the old Murray Rothbard argument and doesn't offer anything resembling a workable solution but they like to push that one because it *sounds* like the are solving the problem without actually stopping anybody from killing you) a sane version would declare that all laws and regulations on matters of public safety will stay intact until AFTER their alternative systems are in place, tested and working.
You don't create a vaccuum in which slaughter can happen while going through the arduous process of building something else, even if you think that something is better (by whatever measure you decide it is better). You build the alternative BEFORE you dismantle the current one.
Because a bad system for public safety is still better than none at all, even if it's briefly - and legal changes are never 'briefly'.
I absolutely do agree that the best way to deal with the particular threat posed by libertarians is not through killing them in self defence. Hell even if somebody attacks you and wants to kill you right now my belief is that you shouldn't kill him in self defence if you have any other options. If you can escape - then you shouldn't kill. If you can disable without death then you should take that option.
Killing, even in self defence, is a last resort. I wasn't advocating we kill libertarians - I was merely putting into perspective the risk they pose. If you believe in libertarianism, fine, we will never agree but we can live alongside each other. On issues of social liberalism we could even be allies even if our economics will always be as opponents.
There's nothing wrong with that. But you ought to stop being a libertarians BEFORE the point where it risks the health and safety of other people. Just as you ought to stop being a christian BEFORE the point where you bash gays.
Oh, and all this is academic. Lets assume your insanity is true and climate change to this degree is normal and the historical record actually supports that claim. It's bullshit but lets pretend it was real.
See we have other records - archeological, anthropological etc. etc and the thing is - they show that every major climate shift humanity has experienced was a major calamity and we very nearly didn't survive any of them as a species. Every single one came close to an extinction level event for us. Every single one caused massive displacement, starvation and wars.
And we are MORE vulnerable now than we were when those happened. They happened when displacement was a much smaller problem. If you went somewhere else, there was a good chance you could find somewhere that somebody else wasn't already living and prepared to fight to keep you out off... there are no such places anymore. There is nowhere for the displaced to flee but to your country. America can't figure out how to deal with a few hundred thousand refugees from wars they caused - how the fuck are you going to deal when there's a few hundred million or more fleeing starvation and hunger and drought ? Sure it may make some places green which aren't now. Those places won't be producing much food anytime soon though - most of them are areas where the soil is not conducive to farming. No matter how much warmer and wetter you make it - Siberia will not have productive farmland for centuries. The soil is just to dead. And meantime - the places that were good farmland won't be anymore.
Oh and the plagues... you are having a political crisis trying to deal with Zika right now. Malaria kills more people every year than any other cause. Even a small increase in the global average *massive* increases the areas where these diseases can spread. Many economists have calculated that Africa's economic woes can be *entirely* attributed to Malaria. Sure we have wars and corruption but so does everywhere else. We alone have malaria to deal with. With all those productive people dying young. All those kids missing school because mommy is sick, husbands and family missing work to take care of her and all that money wasted on funerals in a classic broken window fallacy.
Imagine America with Africa's economy - all your wealth destroyed, all your resources spent just trying to avoid complete collapse - and for the same reason.
That's the thing you think is not a major problem. Just because nature can be a bitch doesn't mean it's not idiotic to horrible things to ourselves. The lesson to learn from natural climate shifts is not that climate shifts is just something that happens and so what... the lesson is that it has come pretty close to eradicating our species several times, and never failed to cause enormous hardship and uncountable deaths and it will be *worse* next time.
And, much like the zombie appocalypse, in a major climate change scenario - the single greatest threat is not the weather, it's the other humans. Who will happilly kill you for the water you have.
>the amount of industrialization 150 years ago was trivial compared to today comparable to volcanic activity
And you were doing so well. You almost sounded like what you were saying wasn't complete bullshit... and then you come up with this such and complete and utter fabrication that it's impossible to believe somebody could actually still seriously claim this.
The good news is - we don't have to guess, we have actual numbers. See the American Geophysical Union - who are pretty much the premier experts on volcanoes - actually answered the question. The average annual total CO2 output from volcanoes is 0.025% of what is put out by coal power plants. Just power plants, and just coal. That's not counting cars, or oil plants, or gas plants or any of the other emission generating fossil fuel industries. Just power plants alone put out 4000 times as much CO2 every year as all the volcanoes in the world.
Oh and volcanic climate change, more often than not, is cooling - not heating. Volcanoes are more likely to cover the atmosphere in sun-blocking ash and sulphur, which makes it colder. It was a volcano, after all, that gave Europe it's infamous 19th century year without a summer. Volcanic heating from CO2 is actually extremely rare. It's just not a factor - which is why we believe that most previous major shifts in climate had to do with solar activity or changes in the eath's orbit. Things which are not happening to any significant degree at the moment.
>So then - the rise in temperatures 150 years ago was not a result of man-made global warming,
Firstly, the industrial revolution started in the 18th century, not in the 19th, and was well along by 150 years ago - so your claim about the level of industrialization is another flagrant lie easily disputed by anybody who passed high school history class. Now high school history classes tend to be less than stellar in accuracy, being more obsessed with propaganda than actual history but they do tend to get the damn *dates* right.
Besides which - nobody claims there was a significant rise 150 years ago because there wasn't. What there was, was the beginning of the rise that is significant TODAY. It started then, small, and has been accelerating ever since.
>do you think that a libertarian property owner would have no problem (and no recourse in a libertarian society)
Recourse isn't good enough. Recourse cannot happen until after somebody did something bad - perhaps fatal. The ONLY reason to have recourse at all, since there is neither justice nor any other good served by vengeance, is as a deterrent. Prevention is what we actually need.
It's not GOOD enough to punish the ones who did it for what harm they cause - you need to make it so damn scary that they don't try. Civl lawsuits don't work for that, we have them now - and they are not working (that was what Murray Rothbard proposed and it's pretty much the only well developed libertarian theory on the subject).
And what's worse is that the court system as a whole - and indeed any recourse system - is fatally flawed as a way of dealing with this and property rights even moreso. For several reasons:
1) Poluting your OWN land is STILL evil - because polution doesn't obey land borders
2) Recourse need to exist for people who don't own land as well - in fact, currently, they are the ones most in need of protection, most current toxic polution events happen on land without clear single-person ownership under western law.
3) It's extremely hard to prove, how *do* I prove this poison came from YOUR factory and not your competitors ? What about air polution ? A recent study showed that a sigificant portion of the smog in LA originates from factories in china. Polution not only doesn't obey land borders - it doesn't even obey national borders. All polution is global polution. That brings up matters of jurisdiction, huge costs and difficulty proving the guilty party and then proving that the harm you suffered was from that polution. It's a nightmare and, generally, only rich people g
I can vote government out and you bet your ass the republicans will be losing Michigan over Flint. I cannot vote out PG&E.
Thats the difference. History has almost no examples at all of elected governments killing many citizens.
In the case of Flint the fuckup was enforced by the state government against the demands of the local government who actually wanted to stop it. Interestingly the state government was the party of small government. See when you make government too small to stop corporations from killing you, you also made it too small to stop itself. You need a government of competing interests to act as watchdogs over each other. That unfortunately requires it to be large enough to have competing interests. Such a larger government is more efficient than a smaller one too because government departments actually have competition.
The failure of the EPA to prevent Flint is a direct result of congressional cuts to the EPA budget. Making government smaller kills the watchdogs that restrain it.
Mmm. I misread that. You are correct sir.
The cessation aid in this case being "death". Which, I will grant you, has a 100% success rate at getting people to stop smoking.
Do some googling. The whatsupwiththat version is a complete and utter frabrication and has been roundly debunked for such basic errors as confusing greenland for the entire planet !
Oh deniers love that lie. Claiming that warm periods which were so regional they didn't even *change* the global average were somehow spikes hotter than the climate change now so we don't have to worry. It's a peculiar form of eurocentrism to pretend that somethign which only happened in Europe happened to the world.
Actually your one-fourth conclusion at the end could be partially explained by the fact that you factored in the mass from oxygen when calculating CO2 from carbon mass but not when calculating the carbon added to the atmosphere.
Your maths are a bit off. You forgot that the O2 in CO2 came from the atmosphere in the first place. It's not exactly accurate since oxygen atoms don't have the same mass as carbon atoms but we can for a quick near-enough guess say that 2/3rds of the CO2 mass was there before the CO2 was there, only it used to be O2. Only the 1/3rd that is C was added by industrialization - having previously been sequestered since the carboniferous age.
So while your maths is cool - you need to adjust how you're doing the maths to factor in the mass of hte O2 that was there BEFORE it was part of the CO2.
The site's tagline is: "The national daily championing freedom, smaller government and human dignity."
Now while I'm sure there are genuine good people who just happen to believe government should be small - unfortunately their voices are drowned out by the insane bastards who want government to be powerless so there isn't anybody to stop them from throwing poison in your drinking water and making your air unbreathable. Climate change denial is a forte of theirs and claiming models aren't accurate (mostly by either lying about what models predicted or lying about what the actual temperature is right now) is a key part of how they deny things. The whole "we don't know and we can't know" schpiel from people claiming to be champions of science (which is the thing we use to know things with) is ridiculous. But that tagline says it all. That's not an article about maths, statistics, science or probability though it claims to be all of the above. It's an article about politics - which is being disguised because they don't want you to know it's about politics. It's an attempt to achieve a political goal - regardless of scientific fact.
When you get to the point where you will deny science and reality for the sake of your poiltical beliefs - no matter how nobel those beliefs may otherwise be - they've become evil. At the point where you want government to be too small to keep the water drinkable, the air breathable and the CO2 levels survivable - small government libertarians are no longer just people with whom I have a difference of opinion - they become an actual and legitimate threat to my personal security and the national security of all nations. Killing them becomes justified on the basis of self defence. *
You generally want to stop following the line of any ideology before the point where it becomes justifiable for other people to kill you in self defence over what you do in the name of that ideology.
*Note that I am speaking of what would be justified - not what I would actually do. I'm a pacifist and consider force the very last resort. I don't think we are *quite* at the last resort level in general yet. In a few specific cases yes, but not in general. If you live in a town where somebody is dumping poison in your drinking water though - and you kill the CEO of the company who did it and every idiot who tried to stop the government from preventing it, you are not a murderer though, that's self defence and even the most devoted pacifist will not begrudge you that.
The last ice age ended about 10 thousand years ago... you do know that ten-thousand is quite a bit less than 120-thousand right ?
Like 110 millennia more. The last time it was this warm the only people around hadn't discovered fire yet.
I was dumbing down. I already acknowledged that in doing so I was sacrificing accuracy for clarity. Get the fuck over it.
>Tyson, as I've pointed out, obviously doesn't realize the obvious implications of his silly ramblings. He's also (very obviously) not one of the greatest minds alive. Remember my entire point?
Because those implications only exist in your mind, not in the actual science. And I'd say the head of the IAU and one of the most influential and celebrated researchers in his field, not to mention one of the extremely rare few in that field who *also* have a talent for speaking to the public in an entertaining manner and educating - is most definitely one of the greatest minds alive. Your failure to recognize that is as spurious as your reading of implications into a theory that are not in that theory. Not to mention that those implications depend on assuming his layman's description is actually the science - which does not *even* include a reliance on another species, merely says it's possible.
>Now, you are an idiot if you really think you can't be both a creationist and an atheist.
Since two sentences later you prove you don't actually even know what creationism IS, it makes sense how you can believe such a ridiculous thing. These two belief systems flat-out contradict each other. And not subtly, the one consists of almost nothing BUT a contradiction of the other ! It's not possible to hold both without severe multiple personality disorder.
>Creationism does not imply anything supernatural
Yes it does, it's literally a part of the definition and anything that doesn't is not and has nothing in common with creationism. Like I said, all you've proven is that you don't know what creationism *is*. The supernatural parts of the belief is what makes creationism *not* science. That's the ONLY part which isn't otherwise a scientifically valid hypotheses. Even Genesis meets the other criteria. It explains observations and makes testable predictions. The only trouble is that all the tests have failed to confirm it. It's a falsified theory - but had it been proposed in the age of science it would have been a legitimate theory before it was falsified... all the bits except god, calls to anything supernatural, untestable or inexplicable is automatically NOT science.
>If we were living in a simulation, we'd have absolutely no reason to believe anything about the universe which houses our simulation nor the creators who produced the simulation.
You're making rather a lot of assumptions. You're assuming that the simulation is changeable and actively being maintained. Neither of those assumptions are remotely likely. A simulation on this scale is likely too massive to ever dare change a single line of code anywhere as the slightest change could destroy the entire thing - and there is absolutely no reason to suspect those who run the intervention are doing anything more than completely passive observation - indeed, it makes almost no sense to create it for anything else. Any species capable of creating such a simulation must have developed science - and science demands you do not interfere in the running of an experiment.
>We'd, very obviously, have no basis to form such beliefs
Sure we would. Why can't you study a simulation from the inside ? If it is a simulation it was created to BE studied. Why would that only be possible from the outside ? We should set out to learn all we can about it.
You also forget that this is a falsifiable hypotheses and there are active experiments running to test it. This is a real scientific hypotheses, not just philosophical mumbling - it makes predictions and sets out to test those predictions. It could be a while yet before *our* technology gives us a conclusive answer - current experiments test to the level we can and if they prove it wrong it's conclusive but failing to do so is not yet conclusive since there are other tests one would need to do and those are not yet doable - but that time will come. The mere fact that the scientists who propose this also propose it can be tested and verified, and are actively doing so, proves that your idea of it being an unknowable entity does not enter anywhere in their thinking.
This is experimental physics - not theoretical.
Your problem is that you're assuming a simulation cannot also be reality - and you have no basis for assuming that.
I didn't say Tyson wrote a paper. There is, however, a great body of scientific papers exploring this topic. Tyson was commenting on them - in a lay forum. And there was some news coverage of what he said - which you read (probably only the ./ summary which, by the way, was atrocious) and now you think you understand the science.
The problem is - I'm trying to talk on your level. I'm dumbing down like never before... and then you respond to the dumbed down things by finding tiny nitpicks and claiming I'm lying.
Of course I'm fucking lying - simplifying to the point where you MAY understand what I am saying requires me to simplify to the point of a lie. I may have overshot a bit there - but not by much.
Since you didn't even understand the layman's version Tyson said in that debate - how could I expect you to begin to understand the real science ?
If you seriously think the simulated universe hypotheses is a form of creationism then you are guilty of the worst case of wishful thinking I've ever seen.
I'm being called an idiot by somebody who sincerely believes that some of the greatest minds alive are both creationists and atheists at the same time... somehow, I'm just not giving much weight to your opinion of me.
Just in the billion to one chance you may understand. Tyson, like myself, is a Spinozan. It's a brand of atheism that sees the divine in the majesty of the cosmos. It's spirtuality without spirits. Divinity without a god. Holiness without obedience. Wonderousness and mystery and the soul - all without anything supernatural.
And that is the point you don't get. Even with your interpretation of what Tyson says it still has nothing in common with creationism because there is absolutely nothing supernatural or inexplicable there. No call to any god. No claim of divine intervention. The thing about it is - if indeed this universe was a simulation created by another species - then they are a species just like us. The only difference is slightly more advanced technology.
What he is really telling you is that, in a relatively short space of time, we will be able to create simulated universes which could evolve inhabitants as intelligent as us. If the runners of such a supposed simulation are gods - then, in the very near future, we ourselves, will be gods too. But we aren't and we won't be and neither are the beings supposedly running the simulation. They are no more gods than the Europeans who brought death and destruction to the Americas. Cortez was not a god by any means - he just had access to some slightly more advanced technology. He had guns and steel (and smallpox immunity). With that he wiped out 95% of the population of two continents in under a decade.
He may have been as brutal as the god of the old testament - but that's where the similarity ends.
You heard a press release. You didn't read the paper. What he says in a press release is the idiots version - and you didn't even understand THAT right.
PS scientists comparing it to what we think of as a computer simulation, to an MMO etc. - are using layman's terms when speaking to the public, that's the super-simplified version so idiots can think they understand it.
It has as much to do with the actual science as the phrase 'survival of the fittest' has to do with origin of species: which is to say nothing at all. That phrase never occurs anywhere in that book, or any of Darwin's other books or any of his papers. He never uttered it at all.
>That's my point. The idea is absurd, yet its endorsed by idiotic science evangelists. It's no different that the creationist nonsense idiots here are complaining about. The only difference is that they give the version that sounds like science a pass. Scientists can be idiots too. Just look at Neil Tyson. He's promoting his own "scientific" brand of creationism, while simultaneously bashing the minority religious version. The problem, as I've stated, isn't with religion. It's with people. People are irrational.
You clearly didn't understand what I said. NO scientists believe in what you think they believe in - including Neil Tyson.
>The simulation hypothesis described by Neil Tyson, as I mentioned, presupposes a civilization which produces a simulation
No it doesn't. It merely considers it as a possibility. But as you failed to understand - EVEN if you presuppose a civilization - which he does not, that is NOT creationism, as it explicitely states that that civilization could, themselves, be a simulation. On the contrary - it's simulations all the way down. Like an NPC in WoW that writes his own MMO.
>As to your terrarium nonsense, again,
It's YOUR creationist interpretation that sounds like a terarium. As I said - even if we assume that a civilization is involved AND that said civilization is real - we are almost certainly not the purpose of the experiment. Those running the civilization probably haven't even noticed earth. Earth, and indeed life itself, is more likely a bug than a purpose of the simulation. If you build a simulation as big as this universe - your'e doing it to study universes, not the contents of one tiny little planet that happened to form in some tiny and otherwise quite insignificant little star somewhere. In fact other science backs that up - the more we look the more exoplanets we discover and the better we get at looking the more we find that are very much earthlike. The most recent one, named after Keppler, is probably almost completely earthlike. If it is earthlike - that alone proves it has life, because earth wasn't earthlike BEFORE it had life and couldn't have become earthlike without life - life is what MADE earth be like earth. Life is probably extremely abundant in the universe - and if they care about it at all, it's about it's abundance over-all, not about any particular planet and the short brief moment when a few members of one species on it figured out how to wonder if they live in a simulation.
It's the opposite of creationism - because it says that, even if there were creators, they don't give a flying fuck about us. They probably haven't even noticed us.
>This isn't complicated. Why are you struggling so much with this?
Because I actually understand the REAL theory and you're arguing about a strawman version of it that only ever existed in your own fevered imagination.
>There is no way to disprove that the stars travel around the earth, because you can build an entirely consistent mathematical system around just this assumption
It's extremely easy to disprove - it's called "use a telescope" hell - we've been to space rather often by now and have been studying distant galaxies for quite some time.
Besides which - you remain wrong about even what science or the scientific method is. Hint Ptolomy never used the scientific method because it didn't exist yet.
Actually - you're the one who seems to have a very odd idea of it - as is not endorsed by any sane scientist in the world.
What I gave you was one of the dozens of possibilities they ARE describing - none of which imply any of the things you think it does - and, ironically, even YOUR version of what it means doesn't imply those things ! The existence of the watch does not prove a watchmaker, never has, never will - and just as it doesn't work for the human eyeball it doesn't work for the universe - simulated or otherwise.
Wow... so much bullshit.
There is NOTHING scientists have believed for thousands of years because science is less than 200 years old.
There was proto-science for a long time before that gradually evolving into what would become science - but science did not exist until the current form of the scientific method was defined in the 19th century.
I'll address the rest of your bullshit with that being said.
1) No they never believed the earth was flat. Philosophers (the earliest proto-scientists) already knew it was round by at least 300BC and probably long before that. There are loads of clues - by 300BC they not only knew it was round - one of them actually calculated it's circumference !
2) the stars travel around the earth,
This one was actually disproven in the earliest days of the process that would gradually turn natural philosophy into science. The very first bit of what would become the scientific method already forced this battle to the fore, and the proto-scientists were readily convinced by the evidence as soon as they started seriously studying it. It was mostly religion that resisted it.
3) there are no limits on velocity
And this one was disproven within a century of the scientific method reaching it's current state. It was one of the very first breakthroughs of actual (rather than proto-)science.
>those who wish to shut up the skeptics are behaving more like religious zealots than scientists.
Says somebody who
1) apparently has no clue what the scientific method is, or even what a scientist is, and who just attributed one of the most famous blunders of religious zealots to scientists (exactly the opposite of what actually happened).
> Second of all, there are scientists like Dick Lindzen (MIT, retired), Freeman Dyson (Institute for Advanced Study)
Wow you found some REAL scientists. There's just two problems. Firstly - neither of them have *any* expertise whatsoever in the field they were opining on. Science is extremely specialized and neither of them were educated about it and what they said was not serious research anyway, just personal opinions. Secondly they both expressed those opinions more than than 40 years ago when the evidence for this theory wasn't nearly as complete, the theory itself was in it's infancy and a lot of questions were not yet answered. You will struggle to find a phycisist actively doing research today who agrees with what Dyson said in 1974 - among the people who do not is Dyson himself.
Actually... you pretty much just proved that you have no idea what it means. Nowhere did I assume the conclusion of my argument true without providing evidence of it's truth. In fact I listed a whole lot of evidence.
>, and taxation in an unnatural way
Erm... please define 'unnatural' taxation, and natural while your at it. Money is not a naturally occurring thing and the laws of economics are not natural laws - they are simply conventions we agree on. There are several sets out there right now that work reasonably well and a few that work really badly but how well it works mostly consists ONLY of how good you are at convincing people to adopt the convention because that's ALL they are.
Such an entirely abstract thing cannot possibly have 'natural' or 'unnatural' as a descriptor in any sane sentence. However your use of it does reveal you as a strong anti-government probably libertarian economic conservative. The kind who always dismiss climate science based on provably false claims (like "the science is corrupted") which they never question because the reason they are fighting this theory has fuckall to do with the theory. It's an argumentum ad consequentum fallacy. They don't like the consequences of the theory (more regulation) so they claim the theory cannot possibly be true because it has consequences which they consider unpleasant.
Partly they are the kind of people who usually think that economics is a natural science governed by natural laws. Objectivist, Austrian school and Chicago School types typically. Which is doubly ironic since those, unique among all economics, are the only schools that reject empiricism making them the LEAST scientific ideas about economics we have. The only ones where, no matter how many times a bad idea fails, no matter how many times an action does NOT have the effect they predict - they never, ever change their ideas because they reject empirical data as a means of proving or disproving economic claims.
Isn't it ironic that those schools which treat economics as an engineered set of conventions - are MORE empirical than those that don't? They actually look at what happens in the real world and refine their theories when consequences consistently fail to agree with expectations.