Should a state employee be allowed to engage in political speech as part of their official capacity? Should a state employee be allowed to engage in political speech as part of their work hours? Should a state employee be allowed to engage in political speech over work email systems?
Calling the exercise of FOIA rights "abuse" when it is used on folk you happen to agree with is simply an assertion, not a fact.
Would it be permissible to hire a "professor", pay them a salary, and dedicate all of their time to attacking a single political party? Perhaps a political party that threatens the renumeration of professors? I understand this is an extreme example, but the "they should be allowed to think freely" loophole here seems to be big enough to drive a Mack truck through. Simply giving a job classification carte blanche on opacity of their official work communications, opens the door wide open to corruption and graft, really.
Put another way, what if, in his official work communications, there was an email that came from the Wisconsin Democrat Party, offering something in exchange for his blogging activities? Would that be an important bit of information the public should have a right to know? Is there *anything* you think he could have his emails that would be relevant to being transparent, anything at all?
Frankly, they shouldn't have to do an FOIA on this -> all non-privileged communications (say, non-student information related), should simply be, by default, posted publicly. Then we wouldn't be having this "harassment" talk anytime someone asked to exercise their rights to information.
Mod parent up. It makes all the difference when they're taking money from me involuntarily. Don't care which party, don't care what position they're taking, state employees cannot expect their work related stuff to be private. In the same way that my corporation monitors my emails, web browsing, and instant messaging, a state employee must be subject to the same kind of monitoring by their employer, the public.
There are certainly social issues where I'll align Democrat, and fiscal issues where I'll align Republican, but pretending, even for a moment, that you can take an idea, label it "Democrat" or "Republican", and somehow know *anything* useful about it without diving deeper, is an abdication of intellectual responsibility. In short:
Republicans: wrong on gay marriage Democrats: wrong on natural climate change Republicans: wrong on separation of church and state Democrats: wrong on affirmative action and civil rights Republicans: wrong on abortion Democrats: wrong on supporting public unions Republicans: wrong on the War on Drugs Democrats: wrong on 2nd amendment rights
I'm sure the list could go on, and my particular flavor will find more "wrongs" on the Democrat side. Other's mileage may vary. The important thing to note though, is the *ideas* matter, not the parties.
Umm, Climategate anyone? Or George McGovern's misguided advice on nutrition, which led to our low-fat/low calorie diet regime and USDA food recommendations that have increased carbohydrate consumption and chronic diseases like obesity, diabetes, cancer, and heart disease?
The Democrats have *always* been interfering with science, because any government intervention into science is by its very definition interference. Imagining the Republicans as "anti-science" and "anti-intellectual", and the Democrats as somehow "pro-science" and "pro-intellectual" is just as bad as stereotyping Democrats as the founders of the KKK, and Republicans as "the party of Lincoln". Both parties suck, and the naive belief that either of them is a "good guy" or "bad guy" fails to recognize what they really are -> politicians who will do anything to get elected again, with electoral bases that are biased, ugly and brutish.
That all being said, when you want to talk about a "big hoax", show me your falsifiable theory before asserting that the "science is settled."
Mod parent up. Even if we did agree on what the issues were, and even if we did agree on what the best course of action for these issues was, doesn't mean we would agree that government is the institution to tackle it.
"On a per unit of production basis, however, renewables had the largest subsidies with biofuels the highest at 5.1 cents per kilowatt hour, renewable energy for electricity generation at 5.0 cents per kilowatt-hour, nuclear energy at 1.7 cents per kilowatt hour, and fossil fuels at 0.8 cents per kilowatt hour.[xi] (See graph below.)The biofuels number is lower than actual because the calculation is based on taking the subsidies for the 8 countries and dividing by the total global biofuels production, rather than the biofuels production for just the 8 countries."
I'd like to see that graph in a per unit of energy delivered, rather than an absolute value...might be a better indicator of exactly how competitive each one is. If 12.2Billion of "traditional renewables" is only providing 1% of our energy, and 70.2Billion of petroleum is providing 99% of our energy, then the argument really can't be made that "traditional renewables" would be cheaper if we removed the petroleum tax breaks.
That all being said, government should be subsidizing *anything*. Artificial interventions into markets only make them less efficient.
The dichotomy is price. What we need are cheaper energy alternatives, and not "cheaper because we subsidize them" or "cheaper because we tax the crap out of others in the market".
It's likely that "any number of things that would have prevented this" all include a non-zero cost.
Mod parent up. If the cost is the occasional environmental disaster, and the benefit is modern civilization that can support the food and energy needs of a growing population, thank you very much, but I'll choose modern civilization.
More people have died in the past 30 years because of a lack of cheap energy than from any environmental disaster caused by the petroleum industry.
Well, we did think about this sooner, but thanks the Ancel Keys, and his 7 countries study (that ignored data from another dozen or so countries that confounded his hypothesis), we've mistakenly pushed the low-fat/semi-starvation dogma for the past 40 years.
The simple fact of the matter is that the chronic diseases of civilization are caused by high insulin levels in humans, and the primary driver of those insulin levels is carbohydrate intake.
Just measure carbohydrate intake. That correlates with all of the "diseases of civilization", like obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, alzheimer's and other chronic diseases.
Amen brother. After discovering the truth about low-carb, and realizing that I had come to a revelation that the USDA and it's damn food pyramid and the vegans wanted to keep me from, I suddenly, as an atheist, realized what it meant to feel like an evangelical christian. I had the "Good Book" (Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes), I wanted to save people, and I feel the impulse to spread the "Good Word" to nearly *anyone* I come into contact with. I can only imagine that I'm as annoying as the evangelicals who occasionally try to argue with me about theology, but I now know how they *feel*. It's an empathy that I hope has made me more patient with the God zealots, even if it probably annoys the shit out of anyone who hasn't experienced that kind of spiritual revelation.
Ah, good point, global warming has definitely eradicated skepticism and engendered true belief in the best of scientists...it's almost like believing in God...or Santa Claus....:)
You've missed the boat again - the point certainly isn't the same at all. If the local conditions in the arctic are due to changes in currents that are *not* due to changes in average global water temperature, then frankly, it doesn't matter if the average air, land or sea temp is rising or falling - the *local distribution* is what matters.
Your vacuous hand waving here is hardly evidence of any sort of understanding on your part at all. But frankly, that has more to do with your lack of any clear statement of a falsifiable hypothesis, which you still haven't been able to express. Without a clear statement of a falsifiable hypothesis, you can simply make assertions with unspoken assumptions, and feel like you're somehow superior to the unwashed masses. Bully for you:)
As a simple thought experiment for you, imagine your house held at an average temperature of 72F. Every room, every nook, every cranny, *could* be at exactly 72F to make this average true. Now freeze one small closet to -50F, and raise the temperature everywhere else so that the average rises by 2F. You've now got a room that has a bunch of ice in it, where none had existed before, even though the average temperature is rising.
So exactly *how* do we blithely assert that a rising average temperature means that we will have less ice in our house?
We're not talking about predictions, my friend - anyone can make those, without any science whatsoever (Nostrodamus, for example). The essential procedure of science is to make a *falsifiable hypothesis*. Don't tell me what you *think* the temperature is going to be in 30 or 300 years, tell me what kinds of temperature and CO2 observations would *refute* your hypothesis.
Taking your list of papers that made predictions, say, oh, one of them got it right on the money. Does that mean all the others that were not as close have automatically been falsified? Looking through those failed predictions, alongside the ones that didn't fail, *what have we ruled out*? If the AGW trope holds simply because *any* prediction made on its basis comes true, we're not practicing science at all.
In any case, if there is no falsifiable hypothesis statement you accept without question, is there any particular falsifiable hypothesis statement that you would consider most acceptable to you? Even simpler, *can you name a single falsifiable hypothesis regarding AGW at all*? I think perhaps the retardation you're implying on my part is a bit of projection on your part:)
1) whether or not peak oil is coming depends greatly on whether or not things like abiogenic petroleum pan out - call that an open question;
2) define "excess" - sounds like a statement loaded with assumptions, e.g., is the CO2 you just breathed out "excess"?;
3) frankly, I'm not sure how humanity will cope with the next ice age, but I certainly believe we're too small to avoid it through terraforming (assuming that CO2 based terraforming would do anything at all). If we're lucky, we'll learn how to efficiently exploit every last little pocket of biomass to support the continued expansion of our species, and if that means letting other species go extinct, so be it. Hopefully by then we'll have solved the whole stable fusion problem, or figured out how to produce enough nuclear energy to make ice-age lands "arable" through the application of technology. Perhaps if we end up with a Coruscant type of paved planet, we'll manage:)
Re:Climate is what you expect...
on
Bastardi's Wager
·
· Score: 1
You've made my point exactly -> arctic ice is a function of local conditions, as is *anything* that's important to life -> what matters are local conditions, not global averages, and here is no reason to believe that a change in global average will have a predictable effect on any given local conditions, including both ice volume and ice extent.
Question though -> if both ice volume and extent increased in a given year, and temps and CO2 kept going up, would that be the nail in the coffin for AGW?
How do you figure that the change in temperature would only last 1000 years? Does that mean that no matter if we keep pumping more and more CO2 into the atmosphere over the next 1000 years, doubling it, and perhaps doubling it a few more times, it'll just stop increasing temperature?
I think all too often, statements like the ones you're making have just way too many unspoken assumptions involved.
Yes, science does give us ways of testing a hypothesis involving causality. However, AGW is not a testable scientific hypothesis (at least nobody has ever actually stated it as such) that would determine causality. Given the complexity of the climate system, it's actually quite incredibly difficult to demonstrate causality, especially for any one given factor. In some cases, it's simple - we know solar cycles and output are causes, not effects (since we've got no mechanism for the earth affecting the sun). For CO2, there's no reason to believe that causality couldn't go either way (CO2 rising in *reaction* to temperature, rather than vice versa).
As an example, I'll refer you to Gary Taubes, author of "Why we get fat" and "Good Calories, Bad Calories". We've always thought that exercise causes one to lose weight -> in fact, the causality there is most likely reversed, with a low weight causing the impulse to exercise. Taubes' refutation of the "calories-in/calories-out" hypothesis of weight gain/loss is particularly interesting, and relates very nicely to the AGW hype:
Slashdot Mirror
Should a state employee be allowed to engage in political speech as part of their official capacity? Should a state employee be allowed to engage in political speech as part of their work hours? Should a state employee be allowed to engage in political speech over work email systems?
Calling the exercise of FOIA rights "abuse" when it is used on folk you happen to agree with is simply an assertion, not a fact.
Would it be permissible to hire a "professor", pay them a salary, and dedicate all of their time to attacking a single political party? Perhaps a political party that threatens the renumeration of professors? I understand this is an extreme example, but the "they should be allowed to think freely" loophole here seems to be big enough to drive a Mack truck through. Simply giving a job classification carte blanche on opacity of their official work communications, opens the door wide open to corruption and graft, really.
Put another way, what if, in his official work communications, there was an email that came from the Wisconsin Democrat Party, offering something in exchange for his blogging activities? Would that be an important bit of information the public should have a right to know? Is there *anything* you think he could have his emails that would be relevant to being transparent, anything at all?
Frankly, they shouldn't have to do an FOIA on this -> all non-privileged communications (say, non-student information related), should simply be, by default, posted publicly. Then we wouldn't be having this "harassment" talk anytime someone asked to exercise their rights to information.
Mod parent up. It makes all the difference when they're taking money from me involuntarily. Don't care which party, don't care what position they're taking, state employees cannot expect their work related stuff to be private. In the same way that my corporation monitors my emails, web browsing, and instant messaging, a state employee must be subject to the same kind of monitoring by their employer, the public.
Isn't that a problem with Democrat ideas too?
There are certainly social issues where I'll align Democrat, and fiscal issues where I'll align Republican, but pretending, even for a moment, that you can take an idea, label it "Democrat" or "Republican", and somehow know *anything* useful about it without diving deeper, is an abdication of intellectual responsibility. In short:
Republicans: wrong on gay marriage
Democrats: wrong on natural climate change
Republicans: wrong on separation of church and state
Democrats: wrong on affirmative action and civil rights
Republicans: wrong on abortion
Democrats: wrong on supporting public unions
Republicans: wrong on the War on Drugs
Democrats: wrong on 2nd amendment rights
I'm sure the list could go on, and my particular flavor will find more "wrongs" on the Democrat side. Other's mileage may vary. The important thing to note though, is the *ideas* matter, not the parties.
Umm, Climategate anyone? Or George McGovern's misguided advice on nutrition, which led to our low-fat/low calorie diet regime and USDA food recommendations that have increased carbohydrate consumption and chronic diseases like obesity, diabetes, cancer, and heart disease?
The Democrats have *always* been interfering with science, because any government intervention into science is by its very definition interference. Imagining the Republicans as "anti-science" and "anti-intellectual", and the Democrats as somehow "pro-science" and "pro-intellectual" is just as bad as stereotyping Democrats as the founders of the KKK, and Republicans as "the party of Lincoln". Both parties suck, and the naive belief that either of them is a "good guy" or "bad guy" fails to recognize what they really are -> politicians who will do anything to get elected again, with electoral bases that are biased, ugly and brutish.
That all being said, when you want to talk about a "big hoax", show me your falsifiable theory before asserting that the "science is settled."
Mod parent up. Even if we did agree on what the issues were, and even if we did agree on what the best course of action for these issues was, doesn't mean we would agree that government is the institution to tackle it.
http://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/2010/11/23/global-fossil-fuel-and-renewable-subsidies/
"On a per unit of production basis, however, renewables had the largest subsidies with biofuels the highest at 5.1 cents per kilowatt hour, renewable energy for electricity generation at 5.0 cents per kilowatt-hour, nuclear energy at 1.7 cents per kilowatt hour, and fossil fuels at 0.8 cents per kilowatt hour.[xi] (See graph below.)The biofuels number is lower than actual because the calculation is based on taking the subsidies for the 8 countries and dividing by the total global biofuels production, rather than the biofuels production for just the 8 countries."
I'd like to see that graph in a per unit of energy delivered, rather than an absolute value...might be a better indicator of exactly how competitive each one is. If 12.2Billion of "traditional renewables" is only providing 1% of our energy, and 70.2Billion of petroleum is providing 99% of our energy, then the argument really can't be made that "traditional renewables" would be cheaper if we removed the petroleum tax breaks.
That all being said, government should be subsidizing *anything*. Artificial interventions into markets only make them less efficient.
The dichotomy is price. What we need are cheaper energy alternatives, and not "cheaper because we subsidize them" or "cheaper because we tax the crap out of others in the market".
It's likely that "any number of things that would have prevented this" all include a non-zero cost.
I've always suspected that if Gore had orchestrated the Iraq War Part Deux, the dems would have been hawks, and the repubs would have been doves.
Politics isn't about core values, it's about what team you're on.
Mod parent up. If the cost is the occasional environmental disaster, and the benefit is modern civilization that can support the food and energy needs of a growing population, thank you very much, but I'll choose modern civilization.
More people have died in the past 30 years because of a lack of cheap energy than from any environmental disaster caused by the petroleum industry.
Well, we did think about this sooner, but thanks the Ancel Keys, and his 7 countries study (that ignored data from another dozen or so countries that confounded his hypothesis), we've mistakenly pushed the low-fat/semi-starvation dogma for the past 40 years.
The simple fact of the matter is that the chronic diseases of civilization are caused by high insulin levels in humans, and the primary driver of those insulin levels is carbohydrate intake.
Cites: Gary Taubes, "Good Calories, Bad Calories" - you can find a summary here: http://webcast.berkeley.edu/event_details.php?webcastid=21216
Just measure carbohydrate intake. That correlates with all of the "diseases of civilization", like obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, alzheimer's and other chronic diseases.
Amen brother. After discovering the truth about low-carb, and realizing that I had come to a revelation that the USDA and it's damn food pyramid and the vegans wanted to keep me from, I suddenly, as an atheist, realized what it meant to feel like an evangelical christian. I had the "Good Book" (Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes), I wanted to save people, and I feel the impulse to spread the "Good Word" to nearly *anyone* I come into contact with. I can only imagine that I'm as annoying as the evangelicals who occasionally try to argue with me about theology, but I now know how they *feel*. It's an empathy that I hope has made me more patient with the God zealots, even if it probably annoys the shit out of anyone who hasn't experienced that kind of spiritual revelation.
Ah, good point, global warming has definitely eradicated skepticism and engendered true belief in the best of scientists...it's almost like believing in God...or Santa Claus....:)
So the Holocene Optimum and Medieval Warm Period coincided with mass extinctions?
It's bad enough that global warming causes acne, dry mouth, nausea and erectile dysfunction...you mean it causes mass extinctions now too?
Wow!
You've missed the boat again - the point certainly isn't the same at all. If the local conditions in the arctic are due to changes in currents that are *not* due to changes in average global water temperature, then frankly, it doesn't matter if the average air, land or sea temp is rising or falling - the *local distribution* is what matters.
Your vacuous hand waving here is hardly evidence of any sort of understanding on your part at all. But frankly, that has more to do with your lack of any clear statement of a falsifiable hypothesis, which you still haven't been able to express. Without a clear statement of a falsifiable hypothesis, you can simply make assertions with unspoken assumptions, and feel like you're somehow superior to the unwashed masses. Bully for you :)
As a simple thought experiment for you, imagine your house held at an average temperature of 72F. Every room, every nook, every cranny, *could* be at exactly 72F to make this average true. Now freeze one small closet to -50F, and raise the temperature everywhere else so that the average rises by 2F. You've now got a room that has a bunch of ice in it, where none had existed before, even though the average temperature is rising.
So exactly *how* do we blithely assert that a rising average temperature means that we will have less ice in our house?
We're not talking about predictions, my friend - anyone can make those, without any science whatsoever (Nostrodamus, for example). The essential procedure of science is to make a *falsifiable hypothesis*. Don't tell me what you *think* the temperature is going to be in 30 or 300 years, tell me what kinds of temperature and CO2 observations would *refute* your hypothesis.
Taking your list of papers that made predictions, say, oh, one of them got it right on the money. Does that mean all the others that were not as close have automatically been falsified? Looking through those failed predictions, alongside the ones that didn't fail, *what have we ruled out*? If the AGW trope holds simply because *any* prediction made on its basis comes true, we're not practicing science at all.
In any case, if there is no falsifiable hypothesis statement you accept without question, is there any particular falsifiable hypothesis statement that you would consider most acceptable to you? Even simpler, *can you name a single falsifiable hypothesis regarding AGW at all*? I think perhaps the retardation you're implying on my part is a bit of projection on your part :)
1) whether or not peak oil is coming depends greatly on whether or not things like abiogenic petroleum pan out - call that an open question;
2) define "excess" - sounds like a statement loaded with assumptions, e.g., is the CO2 you just breathed out "excess"?;
3) frankly, I'm not sure how humanity will cope with the next ice age, but I certainly believe we're too small to avoid it through terraforming (assuming that CO2 based terraforming would do anything at all). If we're lucky, we'll learn how to efficiently exploit every last little pocket of biomass to support the continued expansion of our species, and if that means letting other species go extinct, so be it. Hopefully by then we'll have solved the whole stable fusion problem, or figured out how to produce enough nuclear energy to make ice-age lands "arable" through the application of technology. Perhaps if we end up with a Coruscant type of paved planet, we'll manage :)
My pleasure as well, bunratty :)
You've made my point exactly -> arctic ice is a function of local conditions, as is *anything* that's important to life -> what matters are local conditions, not global averages, and here is no reason to believe that a change in global average will have a predictable effect on any given local conditions, including both ice volume and ice extent.
Question though -> if both ice volume and extent increased in a given year, and temps and CO2 kept going up, would that be the nail in the coffin for AGW?
How do you figure that the change in temperature would only last 1000 years? Does that mean that no matter if we keep pumping more and more CO2 into the atmosphere over the next 1000 years, doubling it, and perhaps doubling it a few more times, it'll just stop increasing temperature?
I think all too often, statements like the ones you're making have just way too many unspoken assumptions involved.
Can you parrot a single expert climatologist's falsifiable hypothesis? Or do you simply accept that they have one without question?
1) You've got no basis for your assertion that disaster awaits, or any sort of mitigation would prevent it;
2) Your accusation that I'd move the goalposts in 30 years is premature, and could just as well apply to your position.
Yes, science does give us ways of testing a hypothesis involving causality. However, AGW is not a testable scientific hypothesis (at least nobody has ever actually stated it as such) that would determine causality. Given the complexity of the climate system, it's actually quite incredibly difficult to demonstrate causality, especially for any one given factor. In some cases, it's simple - we know solar cycles and output are causes, not effects (since we've got no mechanism for the earth affecting the sun). For CO2, there's no reason to believe that causality couldn't go either way (CO2 rising in *reaction* to temperature, rather than vice versa).
As an example, I'll refer you to Gary Taubes, author of "Why we get fat" and "Good Calories, Bad Calories". We've always thought that exercise causes one to lose weight -> in fact, the causality there is most likely reversed, with a low weight causing the impulse to exercise. Taubes' refutation of the "calories-in/calories-out" hypothesis of weight gain/loss is particularly interesting, and relates very nicely to the AGW hype:
http://webcast.berkeley.edu/event_details.php?webcastid=21216