In a non-specific "biology", naturally. I took AP Bio and did well, but my pharmacist wife blows me away with her knowledge. But I know enough (and you probably do too) to be able to read a paper and figure out what's going on, to detect BS, and so forth. And in a much more specific biology, you can learn more of the field. I worked simulating cardiac heart cells in a Bioengineering department for a couple years. I never came close to the knowledge of the professors I worked with, but I still ended up with not only an understanding of all the different factors involved, but could also predict to a certain extent what would happen if you, say, changed the intracellular calcium levels
Global warming is not actually that hard to understand. The devil is in the details, but the basics are pretty easy.
>>Taken together, both sites make it clear that Watts believes climatologists are incompetent and/or engaged in a massive conspiracy.
Ok great. But his politics don't matter, unless he's lying about the surface station data. Are you saying his surface station data is wrong? That's the only thing that matters. I haven't seen anything that says it is, but I could be wrong.
In regards to the verification, what I mean is that the fact that his good stations agree with the national average shows his selection process is probably a good one, since it matches satellite temps.
>>Even the "large" uncertainties in current GCMs are small enough to show that anthropogenic greenhouse gases are responsible for the warming since 1970.
I'm not an AGW denier. By no means am I claiming that. I only take exception when people overstate a threat, or ascribe global warming to whatever news item of the week it is. Back when I was living in SF, pretty much everything was ascribed to global warming on the local news.
In terms of the error bars, I just find it amusing that they're so large you can basically never prove the predictions wrong. Being off by 30-50% over twenty years, for example, is considered acceptable. My own personal prediction is that by 2100, the temperature of the earth will be somewhere between the surface temperature of the sun, and absolute zero. Even though I'm confident this will play out, I'm still waiting to pick up my Nobel Prize, unfortunately.
>>I've recently been threatened with a lawsuit on Slashdot, so my commitment to anonymity is stronger than ever.
Ouch. Now that's what a nutcase actually looks like, BTW.
>>Yet a recent study comparing Watts' list of well and poorly sited stations showed that if anything after adjustments the poorly sited ones add a slight negative bias to the temperature record compared to the well sites ones.
Look, let me simplify the whole issue down to one question: Politics aside, is it better or not to know the quality of your surface stations?
Scroll down to the Hansen analysis. It's basically saying what I'm saying, that the prediction was wrong, statistically speaking, or at least on the outer edges of the lower boundary. Whereas I was probably a bit too harsh on it, RC.org is characteristically too weak.
A prediction of 0.26C+0.05C versus a reality of 0.19+0.05C becomes "running a little warm compared to the real world. BUT..." This is what I take RC.org to task for. It's not their science, really, nor their facts or data. (That's why I read the site.) It's the fact that they are, well, biased.
... without noticing that scientists perform many independent verifications of these stations.
As I said in another thread on here, if we stipulate that Watts was right, and 90% of stations are bad, there's simply no way of statistically filtering out the bad stations. Or, let me back up a second. If I had to pick, blindfoldeds, not knowing which guy was a crackpot and which was a NASA scientist, between two guys: Guy 1) A guy who did an empirical study of surface stations to determine their relative quality, and Guy 2) A guy who claimed that he could use the magic of statistics to filter out an arbitrarily high number of bad stations...
I'd be inclined to pick Guy #1. Now lets say they get the same answer for the temperature average. Does that mean that Guy #1 is right or wrong? It's neither.
This would be a good time to repeat my quote that you just quoted: The problem is, if you don't know that someone has put asphalt around your temperature station, how on Earth can you expect to correct for it accurately? They attempt to correct the data just using statistics, without actually sending people out to inspect the stations. That's why I called bullshit.
Now, if you're claiming that Watt is a crackpot and making up all of his surface station data, that's another thing entirely, but since his results correlate with other datasets... it's weird form of verification for him.
I've already been very critical of Gore, so I'm tempted to agree with that small criticism. But I haven't yet censored any posts on my article, and I think that was a mistake. Two programmers (also creationists, incidentally) wasted ~50 pages on nonsense. I don't blame scientists who want to keep the conversation focused on the facts, and I've seen contrary viewpoints on Real Climate. They just don't devote hundreds of pages on each article to blather like "Water vapor is more important than CO2, so scientists are conspirators/incompetent/both!"
Sure, and that's how most online forums work. RC.org takes it a step further and aggressively blocks or edits even the most reasonable of fact-based comments. I had a paragraph cut down to a single sentence, taken out of context, and then attacked by Gavin. (I believe I was criticizing the use of inferno-red colors in a graph to make it look like the world was on fire in AGW graphs. It's an old trick out of Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics. My point was that you shouldn't use tricks like that to describe relatively minor +0.1C temperature changes... which got cut out entirely.)
Considering that you haven't commented on James Annan's analyses...
Considering I just went back to the original source and verified the claim... ok, fine. James Annan claims that the date (1990) was cherry picked as a minimum. This is laughably wrong because 1) 1990-1992 were the dates that AR1 came out, and 2) as I showed in the links above, I was using an averaged temperature graph, and there was no minima in 1990. It confirmed the graph that I linked to, which showed AR1 being accurate only on the extreme lower edge of their estimates for temperature in the next 10 and 20 years.
Or to put it another way, because the article I linked to was accurate, there's very little reason in debunking a guy trying to debunk it. If you think I'm wrong, please let me know.
They don't provide predictions of temperatures per se, rather they predict the climate response (averaged over ~20 years to ignore weather noise) to changes in forcings like sunlight, CO2 concentration, stratospheric water vapor, etc.
All the analyses I've seen that have taken into account the actual history of these variables show that temperatures are well within the IPCC's error bars.
Sure, if you make your error bars large enough, you can always be right. =)
As I said, (and the article I linked to) it was right within their lower bound. The
Exactly. We mustn't do anything about global warming until such time as we find an utterly perfect solution that everyone in the world will participate in. Anything else isn't worth doing at all, and therefore we should just do nothing until that solution is found...
How about this for a solution?
We shut down or modify all power plants that emit CO2. We replace it with Zero CO2 power plants whose 10 year levelized (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelised_energy_cost) cost put them as close to current costs as possible.
We end up cutting CO2 emissions in half, meeting every target, and without requiring a single individual to change their behavior. No $2 tax on gas, no ban on SUVs. It'd bankrupt existing power companies, though.
>>This will be an elementary case of "The Laws of Unintended Consequences". Get ready folks to take notes. History is about to be made and you all get a front row seat.
Absolutely.
My lecture on global warming is chock full of stories about the law of unintended consequences.
To summarize very briefly, most of the environmental problems we have is the result of environmentalists trying to solve environmental problems.
>>Yes, they do use statistical methods to make the adjustments but they've tested them against the real world to verify their validity.
Let's say that Watts was completely right - 90% of the stations in America are badly sited, by the NOAA's own guidelines, and have error rates that can climb quite high. You can filter out the odd outlier, but you can't use statistical techniques to fix 90% of your data in any sort of fashion that would leave me confident in the results.
It's possible that the data from the good stations might end up matching the overall totals (and in fact it looks like it might be this way), but this doesn't mean that he's wrong. I think that's an important fact his detractors are missing.
I just find it dubious that IF 90% of the sites are bad (and who knows if he's telling the truth or not) that the NOAA has any basis whatsoever for saying they can fix it with statistics.
>>But when you look at the main page for AGW on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming) take a look at the very first graph you see. It just beckons the reader to continue the line on up. It's not like we haven't had a decade to put some new graphs together or something.
Sorry, I was wrong on this. It looked like a more famous graph I've seen in a lot of places that cuts off at 2000.
>>Damn right. Global warming legislation has the potential to make some people very powerful and other people very rich. Humans being greedy, fallible, manipulative, and power-hungry SOBs, need to have be put under a microscope whenever they suggest changes in the law that have the potential to benefit them this way.
Precisely; and being a scientist doesn't make you immune to that. It gives you a good insight into which solutions make more sense from a cost/benefit point of view, but given the hideous zombie abortion of a treaty that was Kyoto, forgive me if I don't trust even that very much.
>>Before slandering people you might bother to CYA by at least learning something about the topic at hand.
Which part of, "Satellite data makes the debate moot" do you not understand?
Did I claim AGW was false because of bad surface station data (as Watts hints, but fails to do)? Or do I take RC.org and others to task for not having any idea of the state of their own surface stations? As far as I can tell, they only use statistics and some high level data (urban vs. rural) to weed out the UHI effect.
>>The same analysis AGAIN USING WATTS OWN DATA show no difference.
>>I know weather stations have become more automated but they still get visited on a regular basis.
And reported to whom? As far as I can tell, they just use statistical methods to guess which stations are bad, as well as some high level attempts to sort stations into urban and rural.
They're using the endangerment clause ("air pollution which may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare") of the Clean Air Act (http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode42/usc_sec_42_00007521----000-.html), intended to be used to regulate actually dangerous emissions, to regulate CO2.
>>And the point of my modified salem hypothesis was that computer science isn't really all that closely related to the radiative physics of the atmosphere.
Out of curiosity, what do you think half of climate science is? It's computer modeling. Of what? Of the atmosphere, land, and oceans.
But my point remains that I wasn't standing on that as an expert, merely that I'd gone to the effort to educate myself on the issue. I'm a firm believer in doing primary research for oneself.
>>No, but I disagree with your assessment that Real Climate are bullshitting deceitful hacks, for reasons that I've explained at length in my article.
What article? And I do read everything Real Climate.org posts on their blog, so it's not like I think they're entirely composed of shit, merely that they stand on the wrong side of the facts sometimes, because of their political alignment, and I call them on it. For example, they defended the mistakes Al Gore made in an Inconvenient Truth, saying in essence that it was more important to get people talking about global warming than it was to get the facts right. This is the kind of stuff that irritates me about the site, along side of their heavy handed censorship of posts.
>>But I also disagree that "the IPCC has done a good enough job discrediting themselves
I just re-read AR1 recently (http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/publications_and_data_reports.htm#1), and it predicts a 0.3C rise per decade (or between 0.2C and 0.5C per decade). But if you look at the temperature graph (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Satellite_Temperatures.png), it is right on the lower boundary 0.2C per decade.
In other words, that graph that I linked to appears to be correct - that world temps are matching the lower bound of predictions, which is ~60% of their "best guess" for predictions. Perhaps "discrediting" is a bit too strong, but the data matches the graph and analysis that I linked to, so I think it's a reasonable accurate statement.
But what really sets me off are the people that cut off temperature graphs right when the temperatures were rising the sharpest. Al Gore (I know, I know) did it. In his movie, he got on a little electric lift to show how high temperatures would be if that trend continued. However, temperatures have remained higher than average, but not steeply increasing, in the last decade.
But when you look at the main page for AGW on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming) take a look at the very first graph you see. It just beckons the reader to continue the line on up. It's not like we haven't had a decade to put some new graphs together or something.
No idea about all the other weather stations around the world, but to me the onus to prove that the other adjustments are part of some grand evil plot by the scientists is clearly on the bloggers. And so far they've only been able to come up with a lot of hot air and noise as far as I'm concerned.
The problem is, if you don't know that someone has put asphalt around your temperature station, how on Earth can you expect to correct for it accurately? They attempt to correct the data just using statistics, without actually sending people out to inspect the stations. That's why I called bullshit.
In any event, with the move to satellite temperature recording, the debate will become increasingly irrelevant.
>>Another example of the modified salem hypothesis.
Did I mention it to begin with? No. So don't get angry when you bash on someone for not having graduate credentials in a related field, and they turn out to. I wasn't bragging, and if you read my original post, I'm encouraging people to do their own research instead of just reading what they should believe online. I can't believe anyone would disagree with that.
FWIW, I believe in AGW, and think it's a serious problem. Does that sound like a crackpot creationist to you? No? Oh, I guess you don't fucking know what you're talking about, do you?
What I was taking issue with was the notion that because scientists know science, they can design economic and political systems just as well. This is clearly a flawed point of view, but one the OP clearly subscribed to.
>>Considering your other comment (which is wrong), it's probably not necessary for you to answer this question.
I was being sarcastic. Labeling CO2 as a poison is one of the most stupid recent advancements in the debate over global warming.
>>When you say "research" do you mean enrolling in graduate physics courses at an accredited university to learn about the radiative physics of the atmosphere?
I have a Master's degree in computer science; my master's thesis was on the modeling of seawater. But beyond that, I actually do my own research, and know how to eliminate crackpot theories better than Al Gore, who uncritically reported several false stories in an Inconvenient Truth.
>>Keep in mind that all the creationists I've seen are convinced that they understand evolution better than 97% of evolutionary biologists.
Consider that 97% of climate scientists think they can run an economy better than anyone else. Then become scared when they point to Kyoto as a model for the future.
>>100 hours? Please. It takes a lifetime to get the kind of knowledge required to be an expert in any field.
Why are you trying to actively not learn? It's puzzling.
Global warming is actually fairly simple to understand (in a certain sense). A certain amount of wattage comes in, a certain amount goes back out - if there's an inequality, the earth will become warmer or cooler by a certain amount (called the climate sensitivity). The complexity comes from trying to model a chaotic system (increased heat results in increased clouds which results in increased albedo), but the basics are fairly easy.
Since you trust the simplified opinions of experts, here's an analogy for you: If you eat an extra slice of pie a day, you'll probably get fatter. If you have more CO2 in the atmosphere, the planet will probably get warmer. The exact details of how much are complicated.
>>I'm not an expert in a relevant field to understand fully this issue, and chances are neither are you.
Spend a few hundred hours researching the issue, and you can be qualified to comment, too. None of the issues surrounding energy production and global warming aren't particularly hard to understand - the only reason it is so time consuming is that figuring out who is bullshitting on which point of contention takes a while.
For example, the issues surrounding bad station data is rather complex. RC.org hand-waves the issue, saying that they have "taken it into their calculations", but on this issue, it seems obvious that RC.org is bullshitting.
>>science is not a political process even when the conclusions polarizes people along political lines.
Not true. These are scientists trying to dip their toes into the political waters with this, so of course it's political. They're not arguing about facts or anything, they're proposing societal change, and honestly, they're probably out of their league here.
Case in point: Kyoto was one of the worst designed treaties ever written. It is "cap and trade", but would result in no CO2 reductions, only a transfer of money from America to Eastern Europe. Why? The CO2 levels were set at pre-USSR collapse levels, so all the Eastern Bloc countries have a massive amount of "credits" to sell to countries who therefore don't need to reduce levels at all.
I'm not singling you out for this, but it's really very dangerous when people give up on trying to research issues for themselves, and rely on what they hear from a single source as fact. Whether it be Fox News, or HuffPo, or "scientists", I've never once been happy with a single perspective on a problem.
Its weird that I am not allowed to drop rubbish in the street but disposing of some types of effluent in the atmosphere which we all need to breathe is perfectly okay.
Speak power to truth, comrade!
The "effluent" CO2 coming out of your body in every breath certainly needs to be regulated. In the future, when my "carbon zero" plan is adopted, all people must wear CO2 rebreathers as they go about their daily business - or be "cap and taxed", if you know what I mean. The guillotine is a carbon-neutral device, my friend!
Together we shall end this imperialist capitalist pig pollution chemical weapon! Death to CO2!
Given a large enough sample of different races, you will find equality of outcome, unless the race is inferior (are you arguing that?) or the there is institutionalized unfairness towards them (which is what I'm arguing.)
That's a false dichotomy. Or, in other words, the truth is neither of the above. My family (strongly conservative) has been working with poor black kids in education for the past decade, turning them into academic badasses, so I know what I'm talking about here.
The unfairness toward, say, black students is not institutionalized. As I've said above, there's actually an institutionalized bias FOR minority students. As long as you're not an Asian - there's a definite bias against Asians, but they do so well anyway they're not considered minorities by companies like Microsoft.
The main problems are threefold: 1) Poverty, 2) Culture, 3) Expectation.
You could argue that poverty is an institutionalized bias against them because property taxes and thus school funding is lower in poor neighborhoods - but that's why we have Title I and similar programs to make up funding shortfalls. You could also blame poverty on the poor academic outcomes, but the truth is a bit more complicated than that - it has to do more with culture than poverty.
A Chinese factory owner, who lost everything in the Cultural Revolution, was tortured, etc., and finally managed to escape by bribing the border guards with every last dollar he had, still has his culture of success. When he gets to America, he has less money than anyone else, and yet his kids grow up to be successful (an accountant, real estate agent, VP of a large bank, etc.) and THEIR kids become pharmacists, UCLA business school grads, etc. And if this sounds specific, it is because it is the story of my wife's family. Never forget the horrors of communism.
An established poor working class family, however, has much lower expectations than a poor family that comes with expectations of success. The culture is also heavily biased against the poor black kid. I went to school in the ghetto (which is why we returned there) - kids are absorbing the cultures and expectations and biasing themselves against success. So all of the institutionalized biases FOR them don't help. It doesn't matter how many opportunities exist when the kids themselves consider professional athlete or rapper as their only career options. While it's trite to blame Ludacris for the failures of poor black youth, it's certainly a significant part of the problem. Whatever you adopt as your identity for yourself becomes the most powerful factor guiding your life.
When you show them instead that they can become academic badasses, it turns them around for life, and they can take advantages of all the opportunities just waiting for them.
Uh, the RCC was the closest thing to an international body back in those days. I'm not sure anyone else could have pulled together the multinational force needed to invade the middle east.
>>I consistently said that Christians today believe their own involvement to have been unjust
Indeed, and this is a shame, since accounting for differences in place and time (which you have to do, you just can't get away from it), it was a just intervention. The Muslims HAD actually been spreading their religion by the sword, and began butchering Christians on their way to pilgrimages in Jerusalem. There was a need for a UN intervention, certainly. And lest you think I'm being religion-ist, I think there was a similar need against the nominally Christian Khanates as well. They posed as grave a risk to Western Europe as the Muslims did.
The really interesting point here is that this was generally accepted in the US in the 1950s and earlier (I've read books from the time), but the PC crowd has introduced a bias into the textbooks, making the Muslims look like the nation on the defensive, being invaded by evil empire-builders. The reality is a lot more complex than that, and the current textbooks are even worse at simplifying the situation than the 1950s era ones were.
There's simply no excuse for whitewashing Islamic expansionism and what can be nicely called "human rights violations" and trying to dump it all on the Christian nations at the time by judging just their actions by modern day morality.
If you want a thesis statement for what I'm saying, there it is.
>>Quite frankly, there were hardly any wars that were ever just anywhere in the world prior to the end of the Victorian age. Remember- pacifist.
The problem with pacifism is that it allows evil to go unchecked. As much as I sympathize as a fellow protestant against the excesses of the Catholic church, you owe your freedom today to the tremendous Catholic sacrifices made at Vienna, Malta, and Poitiers.
Slashdot Mirror
What data? His data on which stations match NOAA guidelines. Again, do you think this data is accurate or not? That is the only question that matters.
In a non-specific "biology", naturally. I took AP Bio and did well, but my pharmacist wife blows me away with her knowledge. But I know enough (and you probably do too) to be able to read a paper and figure out what's going on, to detect BS, and so forth. And in a much more specific biology, you can learn more of the field. I worked simulating cardiac heart cells in a Bioengineering department for a couple years. I never came close to the knowledge of the professors I worked with, but I still ended up with not only an understanding of all the different factors involved, but could also predict to a certain extent what would happen if you, say, changed the intracellular calcium levels
Global warming is not actually that hard to understand. The devil is in the details, but the basics are pretty easy.
>>Taken together, both sites make it clear that Watts believes climatologists are incompetent and/or engaged in a massive conspiracy.
Ok great. But his politics don't matter, unless he's lying about the surface station data. Are you saying his surface station data is wrong? That's the only thing that matters. I haven't seen anything that says it is, but I could be wrong.
In regards to the verification, what I mean is that the fact that his good stations agree with the national average shows his selection process is probably a good one, since it matches satellite temps.
>>Even the "large" uncertainties in current GCMs are small enough to show that anthropogenic greenhouse gases are responsible for the warming since 1970.
I'm not an AGW denier. By no means am I claiming that. I only take exception when people overstate a threat, or ascribe global warming to whatever news item of the week it is. Back when I was living in SF, pretty much everything was ascribed to global warming on the local news.
In terms of the error bars, I just find it amusing that they're so large you can basically never prove the predictions wrong. Being off by 30-50% over twenty years, for example, is considered acceptable. My own personal prediction is that by 2100, the temperature of the earth will be somewhere between the surface temperature of the sun, and absolute zero. Even though I'm confident this will play out, I'm still waiting to pick up my Nobel Prize, unfortunately.
>>I've recently been threatened with a lawsuit on Slashdot, so my commitment to anonymity is stronger than ever.
Ouch. Now that's what a nutcase actually looks like, BTW.
>>Yet a recent study comparing Watts' list of well and poorly sited stations showed that if anything after adjustments the poorly sited ones add a slight negative bias to the temperature record compared to the well sites ones.
Look, let me simplify the whole issue down to one question: Politics aside, is it better or not to know the quality of your surface stations?
Second quick note, based on one of your references (I've been reading through the various links off your site, good times):
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/12/updates-to-model-data-comparisons/
Scroll down to the Hansen analysis. It's basically saying what I'm saying, that the prediction was wrong, statistically speaking, or at least on the outer edges of the lower boundary. Whereas I was probably a bit too harsh on it, RC.org is characteristically too weak.
A prediction of 0.26C+0.05C versus a reality of 0.19+0.05C becomes "running a little warm compared to the real world. BUT..." This is what I take RC.org to task for. It's not their science, really, nor their facts or data. (That's why I read the site.) It's the fact that they are, well, biased.
As I said in another thread on here, if we stipulate that Watts was right, and 90% of stations are bad, there's simply no way of statistically filtering out the bad stations. Or, let me back up a second. If I had to pick, blindfoldeds, not knowing which guy was a crackpot and which was a NASA scientist, between two guys:
Guy 1) A guy who did an empirical study of surface stations to determine their relative quality, and
Guy 2) A guy who claimed that he could use the magic of statistics to filter out an arbitrarily high number of bad stations...
I'd be inclined to pick Guy #1. Now lets say they get the same answer for the temperature average. Does that mean that Guy #1 is right or wrong? It's neither.
This would be a good time to repeat my quote that you just quoted: The problem is, if you don't know that someone has put asphalt around your temperature station, how on Earth can you expect to correct for it accurately? They attempt to correct the data just using statistics, without actually sending people out to inspect the stations. That's why I called bullshit.
Now, if you're claiming that Watt is a crackpot and making up all of his surface station data, that's another thing entirely, but since his results correlate with other datasets... it's weird form of verification for him.
Sure, and that's how most online forums work. RC.org takes it a step further and aggressively blocks or edits even the most reasonable of fact-based comments. I had a paragraph cut down to a single sentence, taken out of context, and then attacked by Gavin. (I believe I was criticizing the use of inferno-red colors in a graph to make it look like the world was on fire in AGW graphs. It's an old trick out of Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics. My point was that you shouldn't use tricks like that to describe relatively minor +0.1C temperature changes... which got cut out entirely.)
Considering I just went back to the original source and verified the claim... ok, fine. James Annan claims that the date (1990) was cherry picked as a minimum. This is laughably wrong because 1) 1990-1992 were the dates that AR1 came out, and 2) as I showed in the links above, I was using an averaged temperature graph, and there was no minima in 1990. It confirmed the graph that I linked to, which showed AR1 being accurate only on the extreme lower edge of their estimates for temperature in the next 10 and 20 years.
Or to put it another way, because the article I linked to was accurate, there's very little reason in debunking a guy trying to debunk it. If you think I'm wrong, please let me know.
Sure, if you make your error bars large enough, you can always be right. =)
As I said, (and the article I linked to) it was right within their lower bound. The
Exactly. We mustn't do anything about global warming until such time as we find an utterly perfect solution that everyone in the world will participate in. Anything else isn't worth doing at all, and therefore we should just do nothing until that solution is found...
How about this for a solution?
We shut down or modify all power plants that emit CO2. We replace it with Zero CO2 power plants whose 10 year levelized (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelised_energy_cost) cost put them as close to current costs as possible.
We end up cutting CO2 emissions in half, meeting every target, and without requiring a single individual to change their behavior. No $2 tax on gas, no ban on SUVs. It'd bankrupt existing power companies, though.
>>This will be an elementary case of "The Laws of Unintended Consequences". Get ready folks to take notes. History is about to be made and you all get a front row seat.
Absolutely.
My lecture on global warming is chock full of stories about the law of unintended consequences.
To summarize very briefly, most of the environmental problems we have is the result of environmentalists trying to solve environmental problems.
>>It's why I've avoided aion entirely and will most likely continue to do so.
I beta tested it, and that was more than enough to get me to avoid the game.
They'd have to cut grinding by about 75% to make the game playable in my book.
>>Yes, they do use statistical methods to make the adjustments but they've tested them against the real world to verify their validity.
Let's say that Watts was completely right - 90% of the stations in America are badly sited, by the NOAA's own guidelines, and have error rates that can climb quite high. You can filter out the odd outlier, but you can't use statistical techniques to fix 90% of your data in any sort of fashion that would leave me confident in the results.
It's possible that the data from the good stations might end up matching the overall totals (and in fact it looks like it might be this way), but this doesn't mean that he's wrong. I think that's an important fact his detractors are missing.
I just find it dubious that IF 90% of the sites are bad (and who knows if he's telling the truth or not) that the NOAA has any basis whatsoever for saying they can fix it with statistics.
>>But when you look at the main page for AGW on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming) take a look at the very first graph you see. It just beckons the reader to continue the line on up. It's not like we haven't had a decade to put some new graphs together or something.
Sorry, I was wrong on this. It looked like a more famous graph I've seen in a lot of places that cuts off at 2000.
>>Damn right. Global warming legislation has the potential to make some people very powerful and other people very rich. Humans being greedy, fallible, manipulative, and power-hungry SOBs, need to have be put under a microscope whenever they suggest changes in the law that have the potential to benefit them this way.
Precisely; and being a scientist doesn't make you immune to that. It gives you a good insight into which solutions make more sense from a cost/benefit point of view, but given the hideous zombie abortion of a treaty that was Kyoto, forgive me if I don't trust even that very much.
>>Before slandering people you might bother to CYA by at least learning something about the topic at hand.
Which part of, "Satellite data makes the debate moot" do you not understand?
Did I claim AGW was false because of bad surface station data (as Watts hints, but fails to do)? Or do I take RC.org and others to task for not having any idea of the state of their own surface stations? As far as I can tell, they only use statistics and some high level data (urban vs. rural) to weed out the UHI effect.
>>The same analysis AGAIN USING WATTS OWN DATA show no difference.
So why on earth are you hating on him?
>>I know weather stations have become more automated but they still get visited on a regular basis.
And reported to whom? As far as I can tell, they just use statistical methods to guess which stations are bad, as well as some high level attempts to sort stations into urban and rural.
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/features/200711_temptracker/page2.html
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/
As I said, satellite data ought to make the debate moot.
Just because it's funny to say "Straight from the horse's mouth":
http://www.speaker.gov/newsroom/pressreleases?id=1109
But here's the primary link:
http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/endangerment.html
They're using the endangerment clause ("air pollution which may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare") of the Clean Air Act (http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode42/usc_sec_42_00007521----000-.html), intended to be used to regulate actually dangerous emissions, to regulate CO2.
Enough links? =)
>>And the point of my modified salem hypothesis was that computer science isn't really all that closely related to the radiative physics of the atmosphere.
Out of curiosity, what do you think half of climate science is? It's computer modeling. Of what? Of the atmosphere, land, and oceans.
But my point remains that I wasn't standing on that as an expert, merely that I'd gone to the effort to educate myself on the issue. I'm a firm believer in doing primary research for oneself.
>>No, but I disagree with your assessment that Real Climate are bullshitting deceitful hacks, for reasons that I've explained at length in my article.
What article? And I do read everything Real Climate.org posts on their blog, so it's not like I think they're entirely composed of shit, merely that they stand on the wrong side of the facts sometimes, because of their political alignment, and I call them on it. For example, they defended the mistakes Al Gore made in an Inconvenient Truth, saying in essence that it was more important to get people talking about global warming than it was to get the facts right. This is the kind of stuff that irritates me about the site, along side of their heavy handed censorship of posts.
>>But I also disagree that "the IPCC has done a good enough job discrediting themselves
I just re-read AR1 recently (http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/publications_and_data_reports.htm#1), and it predicts a 0.3C rise per decade (or between 0.2C and 0.5C per decade). But if you look at the temperature graph (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Satellite_Temperatures.png), it is right on the lower boundary 0.2C per decade.
In other words, that graph that I linked to appears to be correct - that world temps are matching the lower bound of predictions, which is ~60% of their "best guess" for predictions. Perhaps "discrediting" is a bit too strong, but the data matches the graph and analysis that I linked to, so I think it's a reasonable accurate statement.
But what really sets me off are the people that cut off temperature graphs right when the temperatures were rising the sharpest. Al Gore (I know, I know) did it. In his movie, he got on a little electric lift to show how high temperatures would be if that trend continued. However, temperatures have remained higher than average, but not steeply increasing, in the last decade.
But when you look at the main page for AGW on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming) take a look at the very first graph you see. It just beckons the reader to continue the line on up. It's not like we haven't had a decade to put some new graphs together or something.
Do you agree or disagree that this is misleading?
The problem is, if you don't know that someone has put asphalt around your temperature station, how on Earth can you expect to correct for it accurately? They attempt to correct the data just using statistics, without actually sending people out to inspect the stations. That's why I called bullshit.
In any event, with the move to satellite temperature recording, the debate will become increasingly irrelevant.
>>Another example of the modified salem hypothesis.
Did I mention it to begin with? No. So don't get angry when you bash on someone for not having graduate credentials in a related field, and they turn out to. I wasn't bragging, and if you read my original post, I'm encouraging people to do their own research instead of just reading what they should believe online. I can't believe anyone would disagree with that.
FWIW, I believe in AGW, and think it's a serious problem. Does that sound like a crackpot creationist to you? No? Oh, I guess you don't fucking know what you're talking about, do you?
What I was taking issue with was the notion that because scientists know science, they can design economic and political systems just as well. This is clearly a flawed point of view, but one the OP clearly subscribed to.
Note to people who don't understand sarcasm: The EPA and others have begun pushing to label CO2 as a poison.
This is the ridiculous stance that I am parodying here. CO2 is not a poison. Unless you consider everything a poison, if you breathe nothing but.
>>Considering your other comment (which is wrong), it's probably not necessary for you to answer this question.
I was being sarcastic. Labeling CO2 as a poison is one of the most stupid recent advancements in the debate over global warming.
>>When you say "research" do you mean enrolling in graduate physics courses at an accredited university to learn about the radiative physics of the atmosphere?
I have a Master's degree in computer science; my master's thesis was on the modeling of seawater. But beyond that, I actually do my own research, and know how to eliminate crackpot theories better than Al Gore, who uncritically reported several false stories in an Inconvenient Truth.
>>Keep in mind that all the creationists I've seen are convinced that they understand evolution better than 97% of evolutionary biologists.
Consider that 97% of climate scientists think they can run an economy better than anyone else. Then become scared when they point to Kyoto as a model for the future.
>>100 hours? Please. It takes a lifetime to get the kind of knowledge required to be an expert in any field.
Why are you trying to actively not learn? It's puzzling.
Global warming is actually fairly simple to understand (in a certain sense). A certain amount of wattage comes in, a certain amount goes back out - if there's an inequality, the earth will become warmer or cooler by a certain amount (called the climate sensitivity). The complexity comes from trying to model a chaotic system (increased heat results in increased clouds which results in increased albedo), but the basics are fairly easy.
Since you trust the simplified opinions of experts, here's an analogy for you:
If you eat an extra slice of pie a day, you'll probably get fatter. If you have more CO2 in the atmosphere, the planet will probably get warmer. The exact details of how much are complicated.
>>I'm not an expert in a relevant field to understand fully this issue, and chances are neither are you.
Spend a few hundred hours researching the issue, and you can be qualified to comment, too. None of the issues surrounding energy production and global warming aren't particularly hard to understand - the only reason it is so time consuming is that figuring out who is bullshitting on which point of contention takes a while.
For example, the issues surrounding bad station data is rather complex. RC.org hand-waves the issue, saying that they have "taken it into their calculations", but on this issue, it seems obvious that RC.org is bullshitting.
>>science is not a political process even when the conclusions polarizes people along political lines.
Not true. These are scientists trying to dip their toes into the political waters with this, so of course it's political. They're not arguing about facts or anything, they're proposing societal change, and honestly, they're probably out of their league here.
Case in point: Kyoto was one of the worst designed treaties ever written. It is "cap and trade", but would result in no CO2 reductions, only a transfer of money from America to Eastern Europe. Why? The CO2 levels were set at pre-USSR collapse levels, so all the Eastern Bloc countries have a massive amount of "credits" to sell to countries who therefore don't need to reduce levels at all.
I'm not singling you out for this, but it's really very dangerous when people give up on trying to research issues for themselves, and rely on what they hear from a single source as fact. Whether it be Fox News, or HuffPo, or "scientists", I've never once been happy with a single perspective on a problem.
Its weird that I am not allowed to drop rubbish in the street but disposing of some types of effluent in the atmosphere which we all need to breathe is perfectly okay.
Speak power to truth, comrade!
The "effluent" CO2 coming out of your body in every breath certainly needs to be regulated. In the future, when my "carbon zero" plan is adopted, all people must wear CO2 rebreathers as they go about their daily business - or be "cap and taxed", if you know what I mean. The guillotine is a carbon-neutral device, my friend!
Together we shall end this imperialist capitalist pig pollution chemical weapon! Death to CO2!
Given a large enough sample of different races, you will find equality of outcome, unless the race is inferior (are you arguing that?) or the there is institutionalized unfairness towards them (which is what I'm arguing.)
That's a false dichotomy. Or, in other words, the truth is neither of the above. My family (strongly conservative) has been working with poor black kids in education for the past decade, turning them into academic badasses, so I know what I'm talking about here.
The unfairness toward, say, black students is not institutionalized. As I've said above, there's actually an institutionalized bias FOR minority students. As long as you're not an Asian - there's a definite bias against Asians, but they do so well anyway they're not considered minorities by companies like Microsoft.
The main problems are threefold: 1) Poverty, 2) Culture, 3) Expectation.
You could argue that poverty is an institutionalized bias against them because property taxes and thus school funding is lower in poor neighborhoods - but that's why we have Title I and similar programs to make up funding shortfalls. You could also blame poverty on the poor academic outcomes, but the truth is a bit more complicated than that - it has to do more with culture than poverty.
A Chinese factory owner, who lost everything in the Cultural Revolution, was tortured, etc., and finally managed to escape by bribing the border guards with every last dollar he had, still has his culture of success. When he gets to America, he has less money than anyone else, and yet his kids grow up to be successful (an accountant, real estate agent, VP of a large bank, etc.) and THEIR kids become pharmacists, UCLA business school grads, etc. And if this sounds specific, it is because it is the story of my wife's family. Never forget the horrors of communism.
An established poor working class family, however, has much lower expectations than a poor family that comes with expectations of success. The culture is also heavily biased against the poor black kid. I went to school in the ghetto (which is why we returned there) - kids are absorbing the cultures and expectations and biasing themselves against success. So all of the institutionalized biases FOR them don't help. It doesn't matter how many opportunities exist when the kids themselves consider professional athlete or rapper as their only career options. While it's trite to blame Ludacris for the failures of poor black youth, it's certainly a significant part of the problem. Whatever you adopt as your identity for yourself becomes the most powerful factor guiding your life.
When you show them instead that they can become academic badasses, it turns them around for life, and they can take advantages of all the opportunities just waiting for them.
>>The pope != international community.
Uh, the RCC was the closest thing to an international body back in those days. I'm not sure anyone else could have pulled together the multinational force needed to invade the middle east.
>>I consistently said that Christians today believe their own involvement to have been unjust
Indeed, and this is a shame, since accounting for differences in place and time (which you have to do, you just can't get away from it), it was a just intervention. The Muslims HAD actually been spreading their religion by the sword, and began butchering Christians on their way to pilgrimages in Jerusalem. There was a need for a UN intervention, certainly. And lest you think I'm being religion-ist, I think there was a similar need against the nominally Christian Khanates as well. They posed as grave a risk to Western Europe as the Muslims did.
The really interesting point here is that this was generally accepted in the US in the 1950s and earlier (I've read books from the time), but the PC crowd has introduced a bias into the textbooks, making the Muslims look like the nation on the defensive, being invaded by evil empire-builders. The reality is a lot more complex than that, and the current textbooks are even worse at simplifying the situation than the 1950s era ones were.
There's simply no excuse for whitewashing Islamic expansionism and what can be nicely called "human rights violations" and trying to dump it all on the Christian nations at the time by judging just their actions by modern day morality.
If you want a thesis statement for what I'm saying, there it is.
>>Quite frankly, there were hardly any wars that were ever just anywhere in the world prior to the end of the Victorian age. Remember- pacifist.
The problem with pacifism is that it allows evil to go unchecked. As much as I sympathize as a fellow protestant against the excesses of the Catholic church, you owe your freedom today to the tremendous Catholic sacrifices made at Vienna, Malta, and Poitiers.