fwiw, i was paranoid about getting a new screen, and i stared at a lot of them carefully before buying. biggest problem i could see was the quality of the coating on the screen. some just made text hard to focus on, even though the panel was expensive. in the end i got one that had the cleanest coating i could find.
second thing, i get dry eyes a lot, and that's just from forgetting to blink.
Users don't care about the beauty of the system, they just need to get their stuff done, with the minimum inconvenience.
Your solution to the problem needs to not become an additional problem for the users. If it does it is not a solution, it is a compromise, an annoyance.
If people don't want to follow this policy, maybe it is too much hassle. You could get the authority to force them, but that doesn't really help them. It just makes them do it (or find ways to avoid it undetected).
Really try to find a way to handle the technical issues in a way that is least inconvenience to your users. If there just isn't, then go the policy enforcement route. But really, rethink the solution. There is no reason why people's jobs should be made unecesarally more awkward and annoying. The computers should require as little nursing by the users as possible. People can be lazy but sometimes people just don't have the time to be running errands for you that are not directly related to their jobs. If they won't comply, maybe it is just too damned inconvenient. Do they drop off the laptop or collect the kids from school? Everyone has busy lives.
If they need to be forced to comply, then try to find another way.
I'll make the reasonable assumption that you are pretty intelligent, and evidently you are of skeptical disposition. Have you ever read any papers on climate science? How about earth science? If not, as would be the case for most intelligent non-climate-scientists (not just not just non-scientists), I can say without insulting your intelligence that you have no direct basis for determining what the general thrust of the literature is, much less what the camps are, who populates them and how strong the relative arguments are within those camps.
Thank you for a very considerate post, it is a pleasure to read.
Yes, I don't have direct basis, but not just because I haven't read all the literature--I don't have direct basis because I haven't replicated the findings of the literature. In effect, I get my information third hand, and most scientists get their information second hand, for they haven't replicated each paper either.
But let's stick with my third hand perspective for a moment. I try to listen to as many opinions as possible because humans are a varied and interesting bunch, and we all have different pairs of eyes. What one persons sees is sometimes overlooked by everyone else. However, if you try to listen to many opinions, you run into the problem: there are many opinions, so which is correct? The answer to that is to remember the many ways that people might be wrong about parts of their opinions, such that with some adjustment, you can actually arrive at a more organised and inclusive whole.
Including as many opinions as possible, whilst remembering ways in which people could be wrong, opens up one's perspective not just to the opinions and findings of one field, such as climatology, but also to other fields, such as astrophysics, geology, and even forecasting.
Again this is all third hand from my perspective, but third hand I can tell you this: one of the lead researchers in the field of forecasting claims that the IPCC breaks most known good principles of forecasting, as empirically derived from their study of what does and doesn't in practice lead to good forecasts. So here you have one field, forecasting, contradicting or finding fault with another area, namely the IPCC's literature review and summary reports.
Notice that I don't have to read the literature in climatology, nor the literature in forecasting, to notice that a lead published figure in forecasting, is calling into question findings of a lead authority in climate. So what do I make of this? Well I ask myself, how could they both be largely correct as much as possible and what mistakes might each of them be making?
Well, a simple mistake is that the climatology field doesn't study forecasts in other fields. So they have not perhaps sat back to ponder, empirically, the nature of forecasting and its fundamental principles. Perhaps if one really thinks about it, the fundamental principles of forecasting might be quite a difficult question, and might merit its own community of researchers to study the problem. Climatologists might simply not have the time, just like architects don't generally have the time to conduct research into building materials, so building research exists as a separate field to architecture, even though architects build buildings. And whilst building researchers might not always be listened to by architects, building researchers couldn't just start designing buildings. Now generally I don't hear these two fields calling each other's work into question, so perhaps the lines of communication between them are running smoothly. But if not, if building researchers were say, making important discoveries about fire spread, and these were being ignored by architects, then there could be a public controversy about it, and even people who only have 3rd hand information would still hear about it.
So I can imagine how one field could overlook things which are being studied from a different point of view in another field. I would probably then take a
Consider that most nations of the world arm themselves and have fought wars. All of that killing was immoral. And yet it happened, and continues to happen. USA can't even stop bombing innocent people in the middle east. Now consider whether it is just a "small vocal minority" who would not be bothered about a bit of flooding happening to someone else. The people who genuinely care about the world are a tiny percentage. My own scepticism about "we have to do something" is that most of the people who will do something are not morally developed enough to actually do the right things for the right reasons, and unintended consequences of forming global governance could be disastrous (just check out on the web all the organisations that are openly calling for global governance to combat climate change). The big organisations with the world famous politicians and other authorities behind them.
I beg all of you to please see this TED Talk before modding me down again.
Thank you for the link I'll watch it now.
Just from the title, can I say, it has been obvious to me for a long time that AGW has been a conflict about morality. The key is to look at what people propose to do to solve AGW. That tells you their morality.
There is nothing in AGW science that tells you what you should do about it. If you are a Robert Mugabe, you probably think of climate change as an opportunity to exploit to starve all the people from competing factions. You can starve them deliberately and blame it on climate change. Or if you are really lucky, climate change happens for real and those people are left stranded without food. Then you just prevent them migrating and starve them all. There is nothing about AGW that will change people's morality. This is what the environmental movement fails to understand. They see it as a way to make everyone become caring people, caring for each other and for the environment. It is far more likely that people will just react from the moral level that they are already at. A tribal Afghan will not stop firing rockets at American gunships just because he's now decided to devote himself to saving the planet. A Buddhist isn't about to stop spending all this time chanting in temples just because he's realised what he really needs to do is go out and learn how to build solar power stations for the village, as life is suffering anyway, so what difference does it make if the suffering is because of flood or disease? At the most climate change will be a football for environmentalists to progress the green party in Western countries. Nobody else cares.
The inquisition called on the US National Acedemies of Science to proffer an opinion on McIntyre's claims. Their testimony came down heavily in favour of Mann's conclusions but also made some minor crticisims of his confidence levels.
If by "minor" you mean chopping a 2000 year reconstruction down to 400 years ??? (because anything earlier was deemed by NAS to be too unreliable?)
And what was just after 400 years? The Medieval Warm Period. The whole point of the hockey stick was to demonstrate the that MWP hadn't happened globally. But now the NAS panel found the hockey stick just couldn't be relied upon for anything back that far.
And yet you call this "minor crticisims of his confidence levels" ? Ridiculous.
Well, consider the const/benefit of "saving the planet". Consider to cost/benefit of transforming the world population's moral stance. Let's see, in Johannesburg today, there are people faced with the moral question of whether it was right to put tyres around the necks of collaborators and thieves and set them on fire. In China they are faced with the moral issue of whether the government should force people to have no more than one child. In Afghanistan they are faced with the moral issue of whether allegiance to one's clan is more important than peace. The list goes on... that's just a sampling of the diversity of the moral issues around the world. What will the cost be of trying to convert all these people to change their lives to make their primary or secondary concern, the moral problems of the environment? From a cost/benefit stance, you'd be better off forgetting about climate change for a hundred years until the rest of the world is in a place where they have sorted out all their other shit and can actually begin to respond to the demands of global citizenship. Plus don't forget most of the world is religious, or tribal, or both. But some politicians would have us think that this can all be related to climate change, even suggesting that pressures of climate caused this or that genocide. Really? I think you'll find genocides and tribal conflicts and national conflicts were happening for the same reason they have always happened--namely people have a pretty low and narrow perspective, which comes from the sorts of cultures and living conditions that you find Europe used to be in the middle ages. Many women in the world can't even read, and let's not get started on gender equality. Buddhists don't even accept equal rights for women as that's just a minor detail to do with the incarnate world, which is all illusion anyway. Sure not Western Buddhists, but check out the rest of the undeveloped world. Really, from a cost benefit analysis, there is zero to be gained from trying to hit people with world-centric global issues and responsibilities when they are still dealing with much older shit. Sorry if this sounds a bit rantish--there is a very big world out there and trying to summarise the breadth of diversity of culture out there is not easy. We really forget how far the West came in development. We expect everyone else to suddenly become global citizens just because we realised we didn't need an SUV after all. Meanwhile in Afghanistan they are still running to their local war lords for protection and revenge against... Western soldiers. Just think about that.
While labeled flamebait, this is something of a problem, even in less politicized fields of science. Most scientists are earnest truth-seekers, but a minority are not, and the peer-review system is not always robust to them. I work in an area of computer science that will never make Fox News, but even in this area things are sometimes suppressed for what's hard to describe as other than political reasons. At the very least, politically unpopular positions get all sorts of extra hoops to jump through that others don't--- e.g. if you're casting doubt on a position the journal editor or one of his friends staked his career on, better expect some random made-up requirements. If your paper scoops a large and well-funded group's work, there's a chance it'll be rejected by one of their friends, so they get to publication first--- and their publication might coincidentally borrow a few ideas or theorems from your rejected paper.
It's not all bad, and in fact most is probably good. But there are some very rotten parts of the scientific-publishing apparatus. It doesn't help that most journals are run by for-profit companies that are a bit shady themselves (Kluwer, Springer, etc.) who have no real interest in the quality of the science they publish or how to improve it. And it doubly doesn't help that the academic rat-race has gotten increasingly cut-throat, so people feel they need to resort to dirty tricks to get/keep a job, get tenure, get grants, etc.
It seems perfectly natural and common place that anybody in employment has political issues to deal with, and that occasionally these will actually get in the way of the job being done right. Institutions also need to survive, and they also have political games to play.
What raised my sceptical curiosity about climate change was the constant repeating that anybody who disagreed was corrupt, and anybody who was in line was honest. If I accept that oil companies could be distorting research, then I have to also accept that activists can be distorting research. Any research could be distorted, potentially. Not that it is for real, necessarily, but the potential is there because we're all people with some degree of self-interest. Imagining you have a noble cause on your side really does not help one escape self-delusionary bias--at least money is a bit easier to see, but principles about saving the world? The world's religions have suffered massively due to their inability to self--discern their ideals from their human failings. But no... only the "bad" people disagree. That's what made me sceptical. I'm not a scientist, but I am human.
Perhaps it's time to once again point out that "scientific proof" is a red herring. As any number of science's theoreticians have carefully explained over the years, scientific methods rarely if ever actually "prove" anything. Rather, science works mostly with a double-negative approach: An accepted theory is one that we have failed to disprove. Scientific testing and data collection is mostly aimed at showing that a hypothesis is wrong. Results that agree with a hypothesis are generally called "support", not "proof", because usually the tests can't provide proof. But a single (correctly done;-) test or observation is often sufficient to disprove a theory.
Unfortunately when I've said as much, in my reaction against the message that "the science is settled", I've been told that I don't understand science and I'm naive about how science works. Apparently Popper's ideas are not considered to be the way the world works anymore. Then I get really sceptical about what global warming advocates are saying, and then people say I'm just ignorant.
I'm almost not that bothered if they all said that as far as we know so far, it looks like there is a problem with the climate... I would be quite happy if they just said, as far as we can see, and we can't be sure, but there could be a big problem ahead with the climate. Then we could as a society simply consider the risks, and choose what to do, and how. But someone somewhere seems to have decided that it is time to force the world to change... for whatever reason... and they're using science as propaganda. Then they have the cheek to say that the public doesn't understand science... whereas they've corrupted how they represent it to the public already.
You are missing the point; if everyone's idiotic claims have to be subject to point by point analysis, then intelligence can be overwhelmed by stupidity when it has superior numbers. At a certain point you've got to say "My time as a scientist is costly, and not worth spending on such an obvious cretin"
The question is largely irrelevant. The real problems with climate science are being highlighted by intelligent people, not by cretins.
There are plenty of researchers out there, qualified, with careers, respected by their peers, who look at the IPCC stuff and say it is not working. These are researchers who know how to think about hard problems.
As for the public opinion, most people appreciate that most predictions about complex systems unfolding in the future, tend to turn out wrong, especially when those predictions are made by experts. I really would like to see where people get the idea that predicting climate is a hard science. At best it is a soft science.
Most of the controversy comes from scientists having decided that it is a moral stance that they need to uphold, that they must not give any openings to "evil" or "dumb" people who don't have the same moral principles, whereby they would willingly work to save the planet. So they have to try to make out that the science is watertight (but amongst themselves they use nuanced academic language, and that's how they get the respect of their peers).
It is the idea that the public is dumb and evil that is causing the controversy. Scientists have decided that they have not just superior expertise, but also a superior moral stance. Well I've listened a lot to people of outstanding moral character, and wannabe world saviours don't impress me. Trying to scare the population into "action" does not impress me.
Climate change is a moral issue. Many believe that the public is too weak morally to do anything about it. This is not unlike Tony Blair admitting that they lied about Saddam's WMDs to get the public to support the war, when they knew full well he might not even have any, but they just wanted, for "other reasons" to get rid of him, and that even if he had no weapons at all, it was "still the right thing to do". Sound familiar? Even Al Gore says this, he said that even if climate change wasn't man made, it was still right to do things "for other reasons".
Stop treating the public like imbeciles and maybe you'll be surprised what they are capable of understanding.
Just how many people do you know would go to a homeopath instead of a doctor? Sure there are some. But there are some green nuts too. Often they are one and the same. Funny that.
Society has outsourced its heavy-duty thinking to scientific specialists, and so shouldn't be complaining when those specialists consider each others (peer reviewed) conclusions to be inherently more valuable than the rants of some-twat-on-tinternet.
We also notice that being a specialist in one area does not make you a specialist in every area. We also notice that the climate is a system that involves many specialities. What looks like a concrete weight of evidence using data and methods of one speciality, might contradict the weight of evidence from the findings and methods of another speciality. Even if we only listen to qualified scientists, scientists in different fields disagree over the climate. When I've gotten into this point in the past, you know what scientists say? They just dismiss the other speciality.
When scientists themselves start upholding the principle of respecting science, THEN you can ask the "uneducated" masses to do the same thing.
Fair enough, but sometimes you have to make a decision now, based on what you know now. If you allow your "skepticism" to turn into "I'll make decisions based on the theory that is most personally convenient to me, even if the current evidence, while not conclusive, weighs against it" then you are not just being skeptical, you're being foolish.
Why always assume selfishness and malice in other people? If people are capable of selfishness, then so are scientists. They're being paid and they are working in a field that is gaining importance and recognition. Explain how as humans they are immune to selfishness? And as a group, a large group of people with political importance, how is that group immune to selfishness?
Being selfish isn't just about not wanting to give up your car. It is also about wanting more importance, more ego-need gratification, more status, more authority.
Wanting to save the world so that you are the one who saves the world.
This point seems often lost on those who haven't taken up any sort of spiritual and moral discipline.
often critics are dishonest people who are attacking the science in order to advance a political agenda, and that is very frustrating to someone who wants to do honest science.
Our species is doomed if we don't learn to recognise our shadow issues.
But the questioning needs to be done intelligently. Most of the questioning that came about from climategate has seemed to come from people that either don't understand science or (and I think this is more likely) don't want to understand it.
It would help if you gave your definition of what is and isn't science in this case. I'm not trying to be confrontational, it is just that I think there are many subtleties. If a journal published rubbish, good scientists would want to ignore it. If a journal published something reasonable but for whatever reason, unpalatable, then some scientists would want to ignore it. The other day a medical professor said, regarding some important findings about recommended clinical practice, "when scientists see a paper they don't like, they ignore it". Now climategate doesn't prove who is in the right--it could be that they talked or joked about destroying a journal for good reasons--the journal was publishing rubbish--but it doesn't help when AGW proponents dismiss climategate as irrelevant. See it still doesn't help to answer that question, were they trying to protect good science, or bad science?
I started out believing all the climate science stuff, on the basis that it is science.
But after a while, as more was said, the inconsistencies in what the scientists themselves were saying began to bother me. I'm not talking about subtleties about statistics, where I have no stats training whatsoever, I'm talking about stuff like, "our rocket achieved orbit!" and I'm wondering, "so what's that giant fireball and pile of rubble over there?"
If they could present a clear case, I'd be believing it again. Simple as that. You can follow the arguments and counter arguments back and forth, and the thing I'm left wondering is, given all that, how can they be so sure?
Here is a simple one: the computer models are considered consistent with climate change, but ten years of relatively little or no warming is only weather noise... so if recent temps are just noise, then what are they comparing their models against to show they have skill? All that is left is hindcasting. And how can hindcasting be taken as basis for "virtual certainty" regards the future?
People realise there is a difference between science as a method, and science as an institution of people with cultures and subcultures.
Both exist, and ultimately the science-culture is grounded in the science-method, but science-culture has plenty of opportunity to screw things up out of sheer unintended cultural blind spots, and for a long time, before reality starts shouting loud enough.
I can tell you how, after spending a few years living in an Apartheid country, how everybody around you, including all the qualified smart people, can have the same massive cultural blind spots (that racism is wrong). And yet, they still did, for decades.
Incidentally, I agree that we need a new moral obligation to look after the environment, but I disagree that we need science to tell us that. It is not a science question, in essence. The science could perhaps warn us about some problems, but the moral realisation to wake up to a new sort of environmental care is essentially a cultural transformation. It doesn't need science.
Besides, it puts scientists under enormous cultural pressure to produce "evidence" of catastrophe. That should not be required. You don't shove your kids in front of cars and to teach them that they should look before crossing. You just teach them the principle of care. You teach them the principle of safety. You teach them to look after themselves and their neighbours.
By all means teach people about care and compassion towards Nature and each other. Don't make it a "science" issue, because one thing is pretty sure--when people with low morality are pressured, they respond from a low moral place. All this stirring about "global catastrophe" is likely to trigger some very bad stuff.
It just happened to stop reflecting temperature for one period for reasons unknown, a period where we had thermometer records to check against. But you know, we will continue to assume (for reasons unknown) that the series reflects temperature back in time, in those periods where we don't have thermometer temperatures to check against. Riiiight.
Put it to you this way. You make 10 predictions. 5 of them come true, and 5 turn out false. You now hide the 5 that came out false. You present the 5 that came true as your original 5 predictions, and everyone believes you got it right 100% of the time. Your predictions are therefore highly reliable. A sceptic comes along and steals your private notebook. Therein he finds not just the 5 predictions that came true, but the whole 10 including the 5 you got wrong. You now appear to be someone who gets it right only 50% of the time (ie. like any naive unskilled person would). When questioned, you and your buddies say, in respectable sounding academic language, "it would have been inappropriate to show all 10 predictions." Riiiight.
I am not a climate scientist, but I do know that in my own field it takes about 10 to 15 years to get really useful at anything. Therefore I am loath to make some quick contrary claim to someone who has spent many years thinking about something. Nearly everyone I have encountered who dismisses AGW is either pretty ignorant about doing science (that's fine, I am sure they are good at other things - it's unrealistic to believe scientific literacy could be universal), or are just plainly unable to contemplate or accept the changes required in the organisation of human affairs (even though these changes would also happen in the absence of global warming), or are just full of anti-environmental politics for various delusional reasons of their won.
If you spent 15 years in a field and then claimed with virtual certainty (for all practical purposes) to have cured cancer, or created cold fusion, or programmed a sentient AI, would everyone else not be sceptical? How about, predict the long term trends of a complex system with multiple interacting components subject to multiple cycles over varying time spans, most of which we have little data for, compared to the time span we propose to predict over? And how about when that system also involves a number of living components, like global plant cover, and social systems, like human land use changes? You only have to glance at one of the earlier IPCC reports to see where it says that clouds are the greatest area of uncertainty. Imagine that, you're predicting likely climate scenarios for the next 100 years, and you're not very sure how clouds work... do they cool or do they warm? Most of the projected warming isn't because of CO2 itself, it is because of how complex feedbacks with water are modelled. This isn't next year's iPod they're designing (a thing you can rigorously test in a lab), it is a huge complex living system of systems of systems. Of course you can try to simplify it for the purpose of study, but until your predictions come true, how do we know the simplifications employed by the latest cutting edge science in the field, were correct?
Because he's simplifying to the point of being wrong. So are you.
It's called climate change because "global warming" has been so soiled by deliberate misunderstanding that it's problematic to use. "Skeptics" have managed to insert a wedge of "creative" misinterpretation into our popular conscious: they'll note a cooling trend in a specific locale, or a specific time period, and gleefully use that cherry-picked factoid to shoot down the whole theory. It'll get some consideration, too, because the idea that the whole planet can go up in temperature on overage, but Podunk can get two snowy winters, is hard for may laypeople to understand.
Your description of sceptics is right for some sceptics, but not for many. Sceptics are well aware that climate is the long term trends in weather. Sceptics know that you can't take one cold year as evidence, so they are amused when they watch climate change activists advocate one bad hurricane as an "example" of what climate change will bring (and some activists even go so far as to say the hurricane was likely caused by global warming.) Climate change activists are also quite vocal about "record" temperature years, even though one year does not a trend make. But let's leave that aside as a minor issue.
The bigger issue is that climate is at the minimum a 15 to 30 year trend. Sceptics know this. And you know what that means? It means the models and the hypothesis cannot be demonstrated to be consistent with observations unless we wait another 30 years. Notice the recent decade has been more or less flat or just not warmed enough, and we are expected to ignore that because 10 years is still short of 15 to 30 years. Fine. I am happy to wait 30 years to know whether the hypothesis is consistent with observations. Just don't claim the hypothesis is already proven beyond reasonable doubt.
And if you feel the need to say, "but by then it will be too late", then fine, I am happy to listen to people say "we have a speculation based on the data gathered so far, about the climate where we think it could lead to disaster sometime in the future--we can't prove it, it might be right or wrong, but we need y'all to pay attention, and you need to fund this thing more so we can gather much more data and do a real engineering-quality study with checks and counterchecks".
I used to believe global warming 100% until I heard them start saying that they were virtually certain, for all practical purposes, about their 50 and 100 year "scenarios" (predictions) about climate. Most predictions by experts have a high likelihood of being wrong, unless they have been made using an empirical study of the kinds of things that lead to good predictions. Empirically, being an expert in the field tends to make your prediction less likely to be true, due to bias of overconfidence in being an expert. There are ways round that, but sitting in your ivory tower shouting "But I'm the expert!!" is not one of them.
I'm fucking fed up with people absolutely losing their minds whenever the word "environment" is mentioned. Suddenly they're willing to buy stupid shit that makes no sense. People lose all objectivity, all ability to add up total cost of ownership and conversion and turn into sock puppets for large corps who are selling them fairytales about being green.
Shit like this wouldn't fly with a sane rationed well educated public:
Thanks for your post, very much agree. At the end of the day, if there are more people than the means to support them with capacity to spare then there's a problem. I say that because the "too much waste" argument is backwards. We should be able to waste lots, as that is a sign that we have plenty of spare capacity to work with, that we have the spare raw materials to go out and invent new stuff. It is about having backups and spares. I mean, I have several backup disks, instead of one I have four--is that waste? Or is that resilience and "sustainability" of my data?
The people who go for the "too much waste" argument are basically coming from the view that "humans are selfish and greedy". Well, there is some truth in that, but it has little to do with the environmental system, a system where multiple species compete, and you know, eat each other. That's how life works.
Our problem is that perhaps we have more people than the systems to support them. But it is a timing issue. More people means more brains and greater concentrations of people which leads to advancements in local culture (poor rural people have big families, educated people in Western cities have fewer children, I for one have none and am married and 40). The advancements mean that those parts of the world will continue to develop and who knows, we might all be running off of Chinese fusion reactors one day.
Our task is just to get to the next level before we die on this level. Sure, people can spiritually evolve, become less greedy, less selfish, less concerned with material wealth, but make no mistake--and this is the mistake most extreme environmentalists make--our present world and freedoms are built on material prosperity. If you reduce material prosperity, you throw culture back to an earlier period. How far back depends on how bad it gets. Want to go back to those times when women were possessions and slavery was an essential and natural part of the economy? Environmentalists have no clue about this. And the first thing to suffer will be the environment. Older periods were also periods of greater war and even greater selfishness. Slavery, racism, brutality, and cut down every tree in sight.
We need more technologies that allow us to do more with less, not less technology. We need ways to support twenty billion people, so that everyone is in such comfort materially that they never need to reach ten billion. So that everyone's material needs are so satisfied that they have time to turn their minds to higher aspirations, so that we can all afford to be loving to our neighbour, and to feel common human bond of humanity.
We just need the technology: mass produce/grow meat in labs; super materials to build very high to house everyone on a small footprint; virtually unlimited energy, either nuclear or hydrocarbons from the other planets; free flow of information so every individual is highly educated and none will remain trapped in fundie terrorist breeding grounds; cities architected to have multiple backup systems to withstand any sudden natural climate shifts; the list goes on.
Greenies seem to believe that we are all too selfish or too ignorant--we'd rather have our furry pet, or we'd rather not know what it really costs to feed--but even if we know that, what difference does it make? We have always had to face environmental and resource issues, just like every other species does, all the time. What we need are solutions to the problem of how to survive. Greed has little to do with it. If I forsake my lunch, the food doesn't automat
Under what mathematical law does the fact that two graphs don't look the same mean that they are not related? This is really sad: Experts spend years analyzing the data, come to an extremely complicated conclusion based on mountains of evidence, and then someone who has not the slightest fucking clue about science or mathematics walks in and says "But those graphs look different!" and decides those experts are all wrong. And worse, other people who share this guy's lack of clue believe his argument because it's the only one simple enough for them to understand.
Roughly speaking, more CO2 in the atmosphere causes the temperature to rise faster, and yearly CO2 emissions are adding to what is already there. So the CO2 emissions graph is something like the second derivative of the temperature graph. That means that if we keep emitting CO2 at a constant rate (flat graph) then temperatures will rise faster and faster over time (quadratic curve). Yeah, the graphs don't look the same, but they are related. (And in reality it's much more complicated than this.)
Any fool knows it is more complicated than that. Look into the matter of whether more CO2 always means higher temp. Look into the matter of how many more degrees of warming can be attributed to CO2 alone. Look into how they know how much feedback there will be from water vapour. Look into how they know how to correct for biases. Look into all of it, please, do look. But please don't just sit there and say there's "mountains of evidence"--that is just hearsay. Actually go and look and whenever you read something, ask yourself, ok, how do they know this?
And just for the record, I'm very green at heart. Oh, and you'd getter get your ass down to a meditation class, because the only thing that will change people to become less selfish, is to take up a long term and high quality meditation exercise. If we are heading for disaster, be it from climate change, water depletion, nuclear proliferation, mass crop failure due to genetic engineering, or just another dumb war started over some stupid event that spirals unpredictably out of control due to everyone selfishly making a grab for power, the only thing that can save us is if we have started transcending our limited selfish egocentric psychology, the same psychology that is more interested in the next iPod than in the Constitution, that is more interested in the next pizza than in giving to charity, the same selfishness that is more interested in copying DVDs than in equal healthcare, the same selfishness that is unable to see the point of view of an Iraqi, of a Chinese person, or of an Indian. And there is only one thing in existence that has ever been shown to do be able to do that, namely meditation.
Indeed. What happens if the cup has holes that open and close from time to time, and other people come pour more stuff from time to time? Then how do you predict the future temperature? I became a skeptic through listening to real climate scientists, the very ones who were saying the debate is over. There's just not enough data and their explanations become ever more tortured as more is added to what little we know. The rest is politics.
Like most liberal fantasies, it rapidly devolved into an authoritarian group usurping natural ownership and dictating rules galore. "We automatically own all your stuff" isn't the only BMO rule totally contrary to the events original spirit.
More specifically, I'd say it is about "freedom", and when people are free to be themselves, you end up with the group devolving or evolving to whatever the average person in the group is really like at heart. So if you say to a bunch of nuns, "be free!", they'll probably spend the day in prayer. But if you say it to a bunch of people who believe "the system is bad", then often you get social drop-outs who couldn't organise anything more complicated than just... well they become a gang of thugs who wanna just live impulsively. And if there's some proportion of people like that who go to BM, then that's what it will devolve to.
It really bothers me that I can't find any vocal resistance in the press to these buzzwords. Is there anyone with a brain?
My wife asked me "what's the 'cloud'?" and I couldn't tell her... "it is something very vague", I eventually replied. I guess that's great for journalists... they can't be proven wrong.
But I think the excitement is there and that's real... so I'm going off at a tangent now... excuse me... here goes: we do want new developments, now that we've seen what the web has done so far. But web apps are not it, obviously, as we can plainly see. I mean, I love CAD and 3D modeling, so that's always pushing the limits of what a workstation can do... never going to be done in a browser, that's just silly, and whilst you can get some 3D plugins for browsers, they are very limited. Web apps are simply not the point. Twitter has a web app, but that's not the point.
The point is a protocol and a set of apps and a set of users and companies and databases. And they can each evolve in part, new clients, new user demographics, new database optimisations, new business models, and so on. And yeah there's also a web app which just fulfills a particular niche requirement of providing a low quality connection, like having an interpreter follow you around on a business trip. But it is not about web apps. The web app just lets you launch something more easily, get around the problem of not having an installed base. It allows you to launch something for long enough to create a culture of people and demographics of users who adopt it in their life, to actually give the thing a reason to exist, and then more developers can jump on and actually write some decent interfaces that are slick and powerful.
Going back to "MS hatred", what I hate is that MS Word is doing the job of being a protocol for documents. It was OK for printing paper, fails for DTP, and sucks for collaboration. Information is locked away in documents, and that information can't be reused or retransmitted by other services. But that's OK because in fairness nobody's invented a protocol and architecture of systems to make general business documents "flow" the way Tweets flow (or is that Google Wave... dunno). When someone works out how to make a better office protocol and architecture, then MS Office will die.
What does this even mean in the absence of socially defined gender roles? Please. To use your later example -- in my relationship, sometimes I'm the crazy one and she's the rock, and vice versa. Sometimes we're both a little crazy -- and that's problematic, but we both always know that it will pass.
Yes, exactly, and as Uberhund noted above, there is much more to it. Problem is that at best I only posted a brief snip (it's the part that's on my mind a lot these days). But my snip is incomplete and isn't a summary. For example, what about gay and lesbian relationships? Deida talks about those, and says he's learnt stuff from talking to them, and including that in the picture.
The picture I've got is that there's about three levels of depth to this. There's the surface level of roles and games and stereotypes and all the disingenuous stuff. If you're with someone disingenuous, then they need to start reflecting on themselves, start being honest, start telling the truth, start being real with you. And if they can't be then leave, or even better as you say, just avoid.
But if you're with someone who is already open with you, and you can trust them, then you can be together as very good partners, great friends, and actually make a good partnership in life. But see this is where Deida's sort of third stage comes in. People can be great friends, good partners, and his experience talking to couples at this stage is that they can be a great partnership, honest, real, but the sex still goes. So what is it that can take the relationship even deeper? Well he's got his ideas about what that takes. And in a sense it does read like roles and games again, but they're something you inhabit as a sense of loving service, rather than as a manipulation. You might lovingly decide to have sex. You might lovingly decide to not have sex. You might lovingly dominate, or lovingly be passive, when dealing with stuff as a couple. So it is still about love, just a more conscious love. That's as much as I gather.
Slashdot Mirror
fwiw, i was paranoid about getting a new screen, and i stared at a lot of them carefully before buying. biggest problem i could see was the quality of the coating on the screen. some just made text hard to focus on, even though the panel was expensive. in the end i got one that had the cleanest coating i could find.
second thing, i get dry eyes a lot, and that's just from forgetting to blink.
remember to blink people.
Users don't care about the beauty of the system, they just need to get their stuff done, with the minimum inconvenience.
Your solution to the problem needs to not become an additional problem for the users. If it does it is not a solution, it is a compromise, an annoyance.
If people don't want to follow this policy, maybe it is too much hassle. You could get the authority to force them, but that doesn't really help them. It just makes them do it (or find ways to avoid it undetected).
Really try to find a way to handle the technical issues in a way that is least inconvenience to your users. If there just isn't, then go the policy enforcement route. But really, rethink the solution. There is no reason why people's jobs should be made unecesarally more awkward and annoying. The computers should require as little nursing by the users as possible. People can be lazy but sometimes people just don't have the time to be running errands for you that are not directly related to their jobs. If they won't comply, maybe it is just too damned inconvenient. Do they drop off the laptop or collect the kids from school? Everyone has busy lives.
If they need to be forced to comply, then try to find another way.
Thank you for a very considerate post, it is a pleasure to read.
Yes, I don't have direct basis, but not just because I haven't read all the literature--I don't have direct basis because I haven't replicated the findings of the literature. In effect, I get my information third hand, and most scientists get their information second hand, for they haven't replicated each paper either.
But let's stick with my third hand perspective for a moment. I try to listen to as many opinions as possible because humans are a varied and interesting bunch, and we all have different pairs of eyes. What one persons sees is sometimes overlooked by everyone else. However, if you try to listen to many opinions, you run into the problem: there are many opinions, so which is correct? The answer to that is to remember the many ways that people might be wrong about parts of their opinions, such that with some adjustment, you can actually arrive at a more organised and inclusive whole.
Including as many opinions as possible, whilst remembering ways in which people could be wrong, opens up one's perspective not just to the opinions and findings of one field, such as climatology, but also to other fields, such as astrophysics, geology, and even forecasting.
Again this is all third hand from my perspective, but third hand I can tell you this: one of the lead researchers in the field of forecasting claims that the IPCC breaks most known good principles of forecasting, as empirically derived from their study of what does and doesn't in practice lead to good forecasts. So here you have one field, forecasting, contradicting or finding fault with another area, namely the IPCC's literature review and summary reports.
Notice that I don't have to read the literature in climatology, nor the literature in forecasting, to notice that a lead published figure in forecasting, is calling into question findings of a lead authority in climate. So what do I make of this? Well I ask myself, how could they both be largely correct as much as possible and what mistakes might each of them be making?
Well, a simple mistake is that the climatology field doesn't study forecasts in other fields. So they have not perhaps sat back to ponder, empirically, the nature of forecasting and its fundamental principles. Perhaps if one really thinks about it, the fundamental principles of forecasting might be quite a difficult question, and might merit its own community of researchers to study the problem. Climatologists might simply not have the time, just like architects don't generally have the time to conduct research into building materials, so building research exists as a separate field to architecture, even though architects build buildings. And whilst building researchers might not always be listened to by architects, building researchers couldn't just start designing buildings. Now generally I don't hear these two fields calling each other's work into question, so perhaps the lines of communication between them are running smoothly. But if not, if building researchers were say, making important discoveries about fire spread, and these were being ignored by architects, then there could be a public controversy about it, and even people who only have 3rd hand information would still hear about it.
So I can imagine how one field could overlook things which are being studied from a different point of view in another field. I would probably then take a
Consider that most nations of the world arm themselves and have fought wars. All of that killing was immoral. And yet it happened, and continues to happen. USA can't even stop bombing innocent people in the middle east. Now consider whether it is just a "small vocal minority" who would not be bothered about a bit of flooding happening to someone else. The people who genuinely care about the world are a tiny percentage. My own scepticism about "we have to do something" is that most of the people who will do something are not morally developed enough to actually do the right things for the right reasons, and unintended consequences of forming global governance could be disastrous (just check out on the web all the organisations that are openly calling for global governance to combat climate change). The big organisations with the world famous politicians and other authorities behind them.
I beg all of you to please see this TED Talk before modding me down again.
Thank you for the link I'll watch it now.
Just from the title, can I say, it has been obvious to me for a long time that AGW has been a conflict about morality. The key is to look at what people propose to do to solve AGW. That tells you their morality.
There is nothing in AGW science that tells you what you should do about it. If you are a Robert Mugabe, you probably think of climate change as an opportunity to exploit to starve all the people from competing factions. You can starve them deliberately and blame it on climate change. Or if you are really lucky, climate change happens for real and those people are left stranded without food. Then you just prevent them migrating and starve them all. There is nothing about AGW that will change people's morality. This is what the environmental movement fails to understand. They see it as a way to make everyone become caring people, caring for each other and for the environment. It is far more likely that people will just react from the moral level that they are already at. A tribal Afghan will not stop firing rockets at American gunships just because he's now decided to devote himself to saving the planet. A Buddhist isn't about to stop spending all this time chanting in temples just because he's realised what he really needs to do is go out and learn how to build solar power stations for the village, as life is suffering anyway, so what difference does it make if the suffering is because of flood or disease? At the most climate change will be a football for environmentalists to progress the green party in Western countries. Nobody else cares.
The inquisition called on the US National Acedemies of Science to proffer an opinion on McIntyre's claims. Their testimony came down heavily in favour of Mann's conclusions but also made some minor crticisims of his confidence levels.
If by "minor" you mean chopping a 2000 year reconstruction down to 400 years ??? (because anything earlier was deemed by NAS to be too unreliable?)
And what was just after 400 years? The Medieval Warm Period. The whole point of the hockey stick was to demonstrate the that MWP hadn't happened globally. But now the NAS panel found the hockey stick just couldn't be relied upon for anything back that far.
And yet you call this "minor crticisims of his confidence levels" ? Ridiculous.
Well, consider the const/benefit of "saving the planet". Consider to cost/benefit of transforming the world population's moral stance. Let's see, in Johannesburg today, there are people faced with the moral question of whether it was right to put tyres around the necks of collaborators and thieves and set them on fire. In China they are faced with the moral issue of whether the government should force people to have no more than one child. In Afghanistan they are faced with the moral issue of whether allegiance to one's clan is more important than peace. The list goes on... that's just a sampling of the diversity of the moral issues around the world. What will the cost be of trying to convert all these people to change their lives to make their primary or secondary concern, the moral problems of the environment? From a cost/benefit stance, you'd be better off forgetting about climate change for a hundred years until the rest of the world is in a place where they have sorted out all their other shit and can actually begin to respond to the demands of global citizenship. Plus don't forget most of the world is religious, or tribal, or both. But some politicians would have us think that this can all be related to climate change, even suggesting that pressures of climate caused this or that genocide. Really? I think you'll find genocides and tribal conflicts and national conflicts were happening for the same reason they have always happened--namely people have a pretty low and narrow perspective, which comes from the sorts of cultures and living conditions that you find Europe used to be in the middle ages. Many women in the world can't even read, and let's not get started on gender equality. Buddhists don't even accept equal rights for women as that's just a minor detail to do with the incarnate world, which is all illusion anyway. Sure not Western Buddhists, but check out the rest of the undeveloped world. Really, from a cost benefit analysis, there is zero to be gained from trying to hit people with world-centric global issues and responsibilities when they are still dealing with much older shit. Sorry if this sounds a bit rantish--there is a very big world out there and trying to summarise the breadth of diversity of culture out there is not easy. We really forget how far the West came in development. We expect everyone else to suddenly become global citizens just because we realised we didn't need an SUV after all. Meanwhile in Afghanistan they are still running to their local war lords for protection and revenge against... Western soldiers. Just think about that.
While labeled flamebait, this is something of a problem, even in less politicized fields of science. Most scientists are earnest truth-seekers, but a minority are not, and the peer-review system is not always robust to them. I work in an area of computer science that will never make Fox News, but even in this area things are sometimes suppressed for what's hard to describe as other than political reasons. At the very least, politically unpopular positions get all sorts of extra hoops to jump through that others don't--- e.g. if you're casting doubt on a position the journal editor or one of his friends staked his career on, better expect some random made-up requirements. If your paper scoops a large and well-funded group's work, there's a chance it'll be rejected by one of their friends, so they get to publication first--- and their publication might coincidentally borrow a few ideas or theorems from your rejected paper.
It's not all bad, and in fact most is probably good. But there are some very rotten parts of the scientific-publishing apparatus. It doesn't help that most journals are run by for-profit companies that are a bit shady themselves (Kluwer, Springer, etc.) who have no real interest in the quality of the science they publish or how to improve it. And it doubly doesn't help that the academic rat-race has gotten increasingly cut-throat, so people feel they need to resort to dirty tricks to get/keep a job, get tenure, get grants, etc.
It seems perfectly natural and common place that anybody in employment has political issues to deal with, and that occasionally these will actually get in the way of the job being done right. Institutions also need to survive, and they also have political games to play.
What raised my sceptical curiosity about climate change was the constant repeating that anybody who disagreed was corrupt, and anybody who was in line was honest. If I accept that oil companies could be distorting research, then I have to also accept that activists can be distorting research. Any research could be distorted, potentially. Not that it is for real, necessarily, but the potential is there because we're all people with some degree of self-interest. Imagining you have a noble cause on your side really does not help one escape self-delusionary bias--at least money is a bit easier to see, but principles about saving the world? The world's religions have suffered massively due to their inability to self--discern their ideals from their human failings. But no... only the "bad" people disagree. That's what made me sceptical. I'm not a scientist, but I am human.
Perhaps it's time to once again point out that "scientific proof" is a red herring. As any number of science's theoreticians have carefully explained over the years, scientific methods rarely if ever actually "prove" anything. Rather, science works mostly with a double-negative approach: An accepted theory is one that we have failed to disprove. Scientific testing and data collection is mostly aimed at showing that a hypothesis is wrong. Results that agree with a hypothesis are generally called "support", not "proof", because usually the tests can't provide proof. But a single (correctly done;-) test or observation is often sufficient to disprove a theory.
Unfortunately when I've said as much, in my reaction against the message that "the science is settled", I've been told that I don't understand science and I'm naive about how science works. Apparently Popper's ideas are not considered to be the way the world works anymore. Then I get really sceptical about what global warming advocates are saying, and then people say I'm just ignorant.
I'm almost not that bothered if they all said that as far as we know so far, it looks like there is a problem with the climate... I would be quite happy if they just said, as far as we can see, and we can't be sure, but there could be a big problem ahead with the climate. Then we could as a society simply consider the risks, and choose what to do, and how. But someone somewhere seems to have decided that it is time to force the world to change... for whatever reason... and they're using science as propaganda. Then they have the cheek to say that the public doesn't understand science... whereas they've corrupted how they represent it to the public already.
You are missing the point; if everyone's idiotic claims have to be subject to point by point analysis, then intelligence can be overwhelmed by stupidity when it has superior numbers. At a certain point you've got to say "My time as a scientist is costly, and not worth spending on such an obvious cretin"
The question is largely irrelevant. The real problems with climate science are being highlighted by intelligent people, not by cretins.
There are plenty of researchers out there, qualified, with careers, respected by their peers, who look at the IPCC stuff and say it is not working. These are researchers who know how to think about hard problems.
As for the public opinion, most people appreciate that most predictions about complex systems unfolding in the future, tend to turn out wrong, especially when those predictions are made by experts. I really would like to see where people get the idea that predicting climate is a hard science. At best it is a soft science.
Most of the controversy comes from scientists having decided that it is a moral stance that they need to uphold, that they must not give any openings to "evil" or "dumb" people who don't have the same moral principles, whereby they would willingly work to save the planet. So they have to try to make out that the science is watertight (but amongst themselves they use nuanced academic language, and that's how they get the respect of their peers).
It is the idea that the public is dumb and evil that is causing the controversy. Scientists have decided that they have not just superior expertise, but also a superior moral stance. Well I've listened a lot to people of outstanding moral character, and wannabe world saviours don't impress me. Trying to scare the population into "action" does not impress me.
Climate change is a moral issue. Many believe that the public is too weak morally to do anything about it. This is not unlike Tony Blair admitting that they lied about Saddam's WMDs to get the public to support the war, when they knew full well he might not even have any, but they just wanted, for "other reasons" to get rid of him, and that even if he had no weapons at all, it was "still the right thing to do". Sound familiar? Even Al Gore says this, he said that even if climate change wasn't man made, it was still right to do things "for other reasons".
Stop treating the public like imbeciles and maybe you'll be surprised what they are capable of understanding.
Just how many people do you know would go to a homeopath instead of a doctor? Sure there are some. But there are some green nuts too. Often they are one and the same. Funny that.
Society has outsourced its heavy-duty thinking to scientific specialists, and so shouldn't be complaining when those specialists consider each others (peer reviewed) conclusions to be inherently more valuable than the rants of some-twat-on-tinternet.
We also notice that being a specialist in one area does not make you a specialist in every area. We also notice that the climate is a system that involves many specialities. What looks like a concrete weight of evidence using data and methods of one speciality, might contradict the weight of evidence from the findings and methods of another speciality. Even if we only listen to qualified scientists, scientists in different fields disagree over the climate. When I've gotten into this point in the past, you know what scientists say? They just dismiss the other speciality.
When scientists themselves start upholding the principle of respecting science, THEN you can ask the "uneducated" masses to do the same thing.
Fair enough, but sometimes you have to make a decision now, based on what you know now. If you allow your "skepticism" to turn into "I'll make decisions based on the theory that is most personally convenient to me, even if the current evidence, while not conclusive, weighs against it" then you are not just being skeptical, you're being foolish.
Why always assume selfishness and malice in other people? If people are capable of selfishness, then so are scientists. They're being paid and they are working in a field that is gaining importance and recognition. Explain how as humans they are immune to selfishness? And as a group, a large group of people with political importance, how is that group immune to selfishness?
Being selfish isn't just about not wanting to give up your car. It is also about wanting more importance, more ego-need gratification, more status, more authority.
Wanting to save the world so that you are the one who saves the world.
This point seems often lost on those who haven't taken up any sort of spiritual and moral discipline.
often critics are dishonest people who are attacking the science in order to advance a political agenda, and that is very frustrating to someone who wants to do honest science.
Our species is doomed if we don't learn to recognise our shadow issues.
But the questioning needs to be done intelligently. Most of the questioning that came about from climategate has seemed to come from people that either don't understand science or (and I think this is more likely) don't want to understand it.
It would help if you gave your definition of what is and isn't science in this case. I'm not trying to be confrontational, it is just that I think there are many subtleties. If a journal published rubbish, good scientists would want to ignore it. If a journal published something reasonable but for whatever reason, unpalatable, then some scientists would want to ignore it. The other day a medical professor said, regarding some important findings about recommended clinical practice, "when scientists see a paper they don't like, they ignore it". Now climategate doesn't prove who is in the right--it could be that they talked or joked about destroying a journal for good reasons--the journal was publishing rubbish--but it doesn't help when AGW proponents dismiss climategate as irrelevant. See it still doesn't help to answer that question, were they trying to protect good science, or bad science?
I started out believing all the climate science stuff, on the basis that it is science.
But after a while, as more was said, the inconsistencies in what the scientists themselves were saying began to bother me. I'm not talking about subtleties about statistics, where I have no stats training whatsoever, I'm talking about stuff like, "our rocket achieved orbit!" and I'm wondering, "so what's that giant fireball and pile of rubble over there?"
If they could present a clear case, I'd be believing it again. Simple as that. You can follow the arguments and counter arguments back and forth, and the thing I'm left wondering is, given all that, how can they be so sure?
Here is a simple one: the computer models are considered consistent with climate change, but ten years of relatively little or no warming is only weather noise... so if recent temps are just noise, then what are they comparing their models against to show they have skill? All that is left is hindcasting. And how can hindcasting be taken as basis for "virtual certainty" regards the future?
People realise there is a difference between science as a method, and science as an institution of people with cultures and subcultures.
Both exist, and ultimately the science-culture is grounded in the science-method, but science-culture has plenty of opportunity to screw things up out of sheer unintended cultural blind spots, and for a long time, before reality starts shouting loud enough.
I can tell you how, after spending a few years living in an Apartheid country, how everybody around you, including all the qualified smart people, can have the same massive cultural blind spots (that racism is wrong). And yet, they still did, for decades.
Incidentally, I agree that we need a new moral obligation to look after the environment, but I disagree that we need science to tell us that. It is not a science question, in essence. The science could perhaps warn us about some problems, but the moral realisation to wake up to a new sort of environmental care is essentially a cultural transformation. It doesn't need science.
Besides, it puts scientists under enormous cultural pressure to produce "evidence" of catastrophe. That should not be required. You don't shove your kids in front of cars and to teach them that they should look before crossing. You just teach them the principle of care. You teach them the principle of safety. You teach them to look after themselves and their neighbours.
By all means teach people about care and compassion towards Nature and each other. Don't make it a "science" issue, because one thing is pretty sure--when people with low morality are pressured, they respond from a low moral place. All this stirring about "global catastrophe" is likely to trigger some very bad stuff.
It just happened to stop reflecting temperature for one period for reasons unknown, a period where we had thermometer records to check against. But you know, we will continue to assume (for reasons unknown) that the series reflects temperature back in time, in those periods where we don't have thermometer temperatures to check against. Riiiight.
Put it to you this way. You make 10 predictions. 5 of them come true, and 5 turn out false. You now hide the 5 that came out false. You present the 5 that came true as your original 5 predictions, and everyone believes you got it right 100% of the time. Your predictions are therefore highly reliable. A sceptic comes along and steals your private notebook. Therein he finds not just the 5 predictions that came true, but the whole 10 including the 5 you got wrong. You now appear to be someone who gets it right only 50% of the time (ie. like any naive unskilled person would). When questioned, you and your buddies say, in respectable sounding academic language, "it would have been inappropriate to show all 10 predictions." Riiiight.
I am not a climate scientist, but I do know that in my own field it takes about 10 to 15 years to get really useful at anything. Therefore I am loath to make some quick contrary claim to someone who has spent many years thinking about something. Nearly everyone I have encountered who dismisses AGW is either pretty ignorant about doing science (that's fine, I am sure they are good at other things - it's unrealistic to believe scientific literacy could be universal), or are just plainly unable to contemplate or accept the changes required in the organisation of human affairs (even though these changes would also happen in the absence of global warming), or are just full of anti-environmental politics for various delusional reasons of their won.
If you spent 15 years in a field and then claimed with virtual certainty (for all practical purposes) to have cured cancer, or created cold fusion, or programmed a sentient AI, would everyone else not be sceptical? How about, predict the long term trends of a complex system with multiple interacting components subject to multiple cycles over varying time spans, most of which we have little data for, compared to the time span we propose to predict over? And how about when that system also involves a number of living components, like global plant cover, and social systems, like human land use changes? You only have to glance at one of the earlier IPCC reports to see where it says that clouds are the greatest area of uncertainty. Imagine that, you're predicting likely climate scenarios for the next 100 years, and you're not very sure how clouds work... do they cool or do they warm? Most of the projected warming isn't because of CO2 itself, it is because of how complex feedbacks with water are modelled. This isn't next year's iPod they're designing (a thing you can rigorously test in a lab), it is a huge complex living system of systems of systems. Of course you can try to simplify it for the purpose of study, but until your predictions come true, how do we know the simplifications employed by the latest cutting edge science in the field, were correct?
Because he's simplifying to the point of being wrong. So are you.
It's called climate change because "global warming" has been so soiled by deliberate misunderstanding that it's problematic to use. "Skeptics" have managed to insert a wedge of "creative" misinterpretation into our popular conscious: they'll note a cooling trend in a specific locale, or a specific time period, and gleefully use that cherry-picked factoid to shoot down the whole theory. It'll get some consideration, too, because the idea that the whole planet can go up in temperature on overage, but Podunk can get two snowy winters, is hard for may laypeople to understand.
Your description of sceptics is right for some sceptics, but not for many. Sceptics are well aware that climate is the long term trends in weather. Sceptics know that you can't take one cold year as evidence, so they are amused when they watch climate change activists advocate one bad hurricane as an "example" of what climate change will bring (and some activists even go so far as to say the hurricane was likely caused by global warming.) Climate change activists are also quite vocal about "record" temperature years, even though one year does not a trend make. But let's leave that aside as a minor issue.
The bigger issue is that climate is at the minimum a 15 to 30 year trend. Sceptics know this. And you know what that means? It means the models and the hypothesis cannot be demonstrated to be consistent with observations unless we wait another 30 years. Notice the recent decade has been more or less flat or just not warmed enough, and we are expected to ignore that because 10 years is still short of 15 to 30 years. Fine. I am happy to wait 30 years to know whether the hypothesis is consistent with observations. Just don't claim the hypothesis is already proven beyond reasonable doubt.
And if you feel the need to say, "but by then it will be too late", then fine, I am happy to listen to people say "we have a speculation based on the data gathered so far, about the climate where we think it could lead to disaster sometime in the future--we can't prove it, it might be right or wrong, but we need y'all to pay attention, and you need to fund this thing more so we can gather much more data and do a real engineering-quality study with checks and counterchecks".
I used to believe global warming 100% until I heard them start saying that they were virtually certain, for all practical purposes, about their 50 and 100 year "scenarios" (predictions) about climate. Most predictions by experts have a high likelihood of being wrong, unless they have been made using an empirical study of the kinds of things that lead to good predictions. Empirically, being an expert in the field tends to make your prediction less likely to be true, due to bias of overconfidence in being an expert. There are ways round that, but sitting in your ivory tower shouting "But I'm the expert!!" is not one of them.
I'm fucking fed up with people absolutely losing their minds whenever the word "environment" is mentioned. Suddenly they're willing to buy stupid shit that makes no sense. People lose all objectivity, all ability to add up total cost of ownership and conversion and turn into sock puppets for large corps who are selling them fairytales about being green.
Shit like this wouldn't fly with a sane rationed well educated public:
Thanks for your post, very much agree. At the end of the day, if there are more people than the means to support them with capacity to spare then there's a problem. I say that because the "too much waste" argument is backwards. We should be able to waste lots, as that is a sign that we have plenty of spare capacity to work with, that we have the spare raw materials to go out and invent new stuff. It is about having backups and spares. I mean, I have several backup disks, instead of one I have four--is that waste? Or is that resilience and "sustainability" of my data?
The people who go for the "too much waste" argument are basically coming from the view that "humans are selfish and greedy". Well, there is some truth in that, but it has little to do with the environmental system, a system where multiple species compete, and you know, eat each other. That's how life works.
Our problem is that perhaps we have more people than the systems to support them. But it is a timing issue. More people means more brains and greater concentrations of people which leads to advancements in local culture (poor rural people have big families, educated people in Western cities have fewer children, I for one have none and am married and 40). The advancements mean that those parts of the world will continue to develop and who knows, we might all be running off of Chinese fusion reactors one day.
Our task is just to get to the next level before we die on this level. Sure, people can spiritually evolve, become less greedy, less selfish, less concerned with material wealth, but make no mistake--and this is the mistake most extreme environmentalists make--our present world and freedoms are built on material prosperity. If you reduce material prosperity, you throw culture back to an earlier period. How far back depends on how bad it gets. Want to go back to those times when women were possessions and slavery was an essential and natural part of the economy? Environmentalists have no clue about this. And the first thing to suffer will be the environment. Older periods were also periods of greater war and even greater selfishness. Slavery, racism, brutality, and cut down every tree in sight.
We need more technologies that allow us to do more with less, not less technology. We need ways to support twenty billion people, so that everyone is in such comfort materially that they never need to reach ten billion. So that everyone's material needs are so satisfied that they have time to turn their minds to higher aspirations, so that we can all afford to be loving to our neighbour, and to feel common human bond of humanity.
We just need the technology: mass produce/grow meat in labs; super materials to build very high to house everyone on a small footprint; virtually unlimited energy, either nuclear or hydrocarbons from the other planets; free flow of information so every individual is highly educated and none will remain trapped in fundie terrorist breeding grounds; cities architected to have multiple backup systems to withstand any sudden natural climate shifts; the list goes on.
Greenies seem to believe that we are all too selfish or too ignorant--we'd rather have our furry pet, or we'd rather not know what it really costs to feed--but even if we know that, what difference does it make? We have always had to face environmental and resource issues, just like every other species does, all the time. What we need are solutions to the problem of how to survive. Greed has little to do with it. If I forsake my lunch, the food doesn't automat
Under what mathematical law does the fact that two graphs don't look the same mean that they are not related? This is really sad: Experts spend years analyzing the data, come to an extremely complicated conclusion based on mountains of evidence, and then someone who has not the slightest fucking clue about science or mathematics walks in and says "But those graphs look different!" and decides those experts are all wrong. And worse, other people who share this guy's lack of clue believe his argument because it's the only one simple enough for them to understand.
Roughly speaking, more CO2 in the atmosphere causes the temperature to rise faster, and yearly CO2 emissions are adding to what is already there. So the CO2 emissions graph is something like the second derivative of the temperature graph. That means that if we keep emitting CO2 at a constant rate (flat graph) then temperatures will rise faster and faster over time (quadratic curve). Yeah, the graphs don't look the same, but they are related. (And in reality it's much more complicated than this.)
Any fool knows it is more complicated than that. Look into the matter of whether more CO2 always means higher temp. Look into the matter of how many more degrees of warming can be attributed to CO2 alone. Look into how they know how much feedback there will be from water vapour. Look into how they know how to correct for biases. Look into all of it, please, do look. But please don't just sit there and say there's "mountains of evidence"--that is just hearsay. Actually go and look and whenever you read something, ask yourself, ok, how do they know this?
And just for the record, I'm very green at heart. Oh, and you'd getter get your ass down to a meditation class, because the only thing that will change people to become less selfish, is to take up a long term and high quality meditation exercise. If we are heading for disaster, be it from climate change, water depletion, nuclear proliferation, mass crop failure due to genetic engineering, or just another dumb war started over some stupid event that spirals unpredictably out of control due to everyone selfishly making a grab for power, the only thing that can save us is if we have started transcending our limited selfish egocentric psychology, the same psychology that is more interested in the next iPod than in the Constitution, that is more interested in the next pizza than in giving to charity, the same selfishness that is more interested in copying DVDs than in equal healthcare, the same selfishness that is unable to see the point of view of an Iraqi, of a Chinese person, or of an Indian. And there is only one thing in existence that has ever been shown to do be able to do that, namely meditation.
Not a direct analogy
Indeed. What happens if the cup has holes that open and close from time to time, and other people come pour more stuff from time to time? Then how do you predict the future temperature? I became a skeptic through listening to real climate scientists, the very ones who were saying the debate is over. There's just not enough data and their explanations become ever more tortured as more is added to what little we know. The rest is politics.
Like most liberal fantasies, it rapidly devolved into an authoritarian group usurping natural ownership and dictating rules galore.
"We automatically own all your stuff" isn't the only BMO rule totally contrary to the events original spirit.
More specifically, I'd say it is about "freedom", and when people are free to be themselves, you end up with the group devolving or evolving to whatever the average person in the group is really like at heart. So if you say to a bunch of nuns, "be free!", they'll probably spend the day in prayer. But if you say it to a bunch of people who believe "the system is bad", then often you get social drop-outs who couldn't organise anything more complicated than just... well they become a gang of thugs who wanna just live impulsively. And if there's some proportion of people like that who go to BM, then that's what it will devolve to.
It really bothers me that I can't find any vocal resistance in the press to these buzzwords. Is there anyone with a brain?
My wife asked me "what's the 'cloud'?" and I couldn't tell her... "it is something very vague", I eventually replied. I guess that's great for journalists... they can't be proven wrong.
But I think the excitement is there and that's real... so I'm going off at a tangent now... excuse me... here goes: we do want new developments, now that we've seen what the web has done so far. But web apps are not it, obviously, as we can plainly see. I mean, I love CAD and 3D modeling, so that's always pushing the limits of what a workstation can do... never going to be done in a browser, that's just silly, and whilst you can get some 3D plugins for browsers, they are very limited. Web apps are simply not the point. Twitter has a web app, but that's not the point.
The point is a protocol and a set of apps and a set of users and companies and databases. And they can each evolve in part, new clients, new user demographics, new database optimisations, new business models, and so on. And yeah there's also a web app which just fulfills a particular niche requirement of providing a low quality connection, like having an interpreter follow you around on a business trip. But it is not about web apps. The web app just lets you launch something more easily, get around the problem of not having an installed base. It allows you to launch something for long enough to create a culture of people and demographics of users who adopt it in their life, to actually give the thing a reason to exist, and then more developers can jump on and actually write some decent interfaces that are slick and powerful.
Going back to "MS hatred", what I hate is that MS Word is doing the job of being a protocol for documents. It was OK for printing paper, fails for DTP, and sucks for collaboration. Information is locked away in documents, and that information can't be reused or retransmitted by other services. But that's OK because in fairness nobody's invented a protocol and architecture of systems to make general business documents "flow" the way Tweets flow (or is that Google Wave... dunno). When someone works out how to make a better office protocol and architecture, then MS Office will die.
What does this even mean in the absence of socially defined gender roles? Please. To use your later example -- in my relationship, sometimes I'm the crazy one and she's the rock, and vice versa. Sometimes we're both a little crazy -- and that's problematic, but we both always know that it will pass.
Yes, exactly, and as Uberhund noted above, there is much more to it. Problem is that at best I only posted a brief snip (it's the part that's on my mind a lot these days). But my snip is incomplete and isn't a summary. For example, what about gay and lesbian relationships? Deida talks about those, and says he's learnt stuff from talking to them, and including that in the picture.
The picture I've got is that there's about three levels of depth to this. There's the surface level of roles and games and stereotypes and all the disingenuous stuff. If you're with someone disingenuous, then they need to start reflecting on themselves, start being honest, start telling the truth, start being real with you. And if they can't be then leave, or even better as you say, just avoid.
But if you're with someone who is already open with you, and you can trust them, then you can be together as very good partners, great friends, and actually make a good partnership in life. But see this is where Deida's sort of third stage comes in. People can be great friends, good partners, and his experience talking to couples at this stage is that they can be a great partnership, honest, real, but the sex still goes. So what is it that can take the relationship even deeper? Well he's got his ideas about what that takes. And in a sense it does read like roles and games again, but they're something you inhabit as a sense of loving service, rather than as a manipulation. You might lovingly decide to have sex. You might lovingly decide to not have sex. You might lovingly dominate, or lovingly be passive, when dealing with stuff as a couple. So it is still about love, just a more conscious love. That's as much as I gather.