You are only required to buy a GM car if you are alive. Don't want to buy a GM car? Don't live.
You are only required to buy Microsoft Windows if you are alive. Don't want to buy Microsoft Windows? Don't live.
You are only required to buy bacon if you are alive. Don't want to buy bacon? Don't live.
Once you get to the point where you're willing to force people to buy things just for being alive, there is no limit to the rationale. The whole point about health insurance is the distribution of costs -> it doesn't matter if you're perfectly healthy, never visit a doctor or an emergency room for your entire life, the reason why they want you in the pool is to subsidize other people. This distribution of costs argument can be applied to *anything*. It doesn't matter if you don't have a computer, your purchase of Microsoft Windows makes it more affordable for all the people who do have a computer. It doesn't matter if you can't drive, your purchase of a GM car makes it more affordable for all the other people who drive GM cars. It doesn't matter if you don't eat bacon, your purchase of bacon that you don't eat makes it more affordable for all the other people who do eat bacon.
...means you might want to stop laughing. With ObamaCare, if any single itty bitty part of it is deemed unconstitutional, the entire thing becomes null and void as a whole.
It's very likely that there are insurance company folks rolling on the floor laughing right now...
...it's actually all unconstitutional if one part of it is. This law lives and dies as a single beastie, and if any part of it is struck down, all of it is struck down. While technically not deeming other parts of it unconstitutional, they would need to be repackaged as a new bill before becoming law again.
Mod parent up - this is the most succinct and accurate analysis of the situation so far. We wouldn't be steamed at all if there wasn't some big marketing build-up to some "groundbreaking" discovery with hints of extraterrestrials. NASA was looking for a PR bump to get congresscritters into the mood to fund them more (or at least cut them less), and they took a 3rd rate paper, with 2nd rate review, and tried to make it into a 1st rate media event.
That an assertion, not a fact. There is no evidence at all that by driving up petroleum prices today and reducing consumption that we would avoid "fixing" anything in the future. This is a particularly weak assertion if the things we need to "fix" are non-catastrophic. That's a particularly poor strawman, and you know it:)
Now, for energy efficiency, I'm all for that, but remember, the more efficient we get, the more energy we use overall - we open up cheap energy to more people, who use it more efficiently, but more than make up for the "savings" the original energy users made.
catastrophic |katsträfik| adjective 1 involving or causing sudden great damage or suffering : a catastrophic earthquake.
involving a sudden and large-scale alteration in the state of something : the body undergoes catastrophic collapse toward the state of a black hole.
of or relating to geological catastrophism. 2 extremely unfortunate or unsuccessful : catastrophic mismanagement of the economy.
the losses were catastrophic: disastrous, calamitous, cataclysmic, apocalyptic, ruinous, tragic, fatal, dire, awful, terrible, dreadful.
Why should we be using less oil to prevent global warming that is not catastrophic? If sea levels aren't going to rise at dangerous rates, and if droughts and floods aren't going to get worse, what is the whole point of trying to keep plant food at less than 350 parts per million in the atmosphere?
Whether or not oil will run out anyway is besides the point - making heating oil more expensive for poor people in poor countries is catastrophic, and people pay for it with their lives.
You're misunderstanding again - being skeptical of a proposition (such as catastrophic anthropogenic global warming), does not mean you have a proposition to replace it with. The burden of proof lies with the affirmative.
Furthermore, no matter how many other theories you falsify, their falsification doesn't make your theory true. The strength of your theory of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming depends on first, it's ability to be falsified, and second, the failure of purposeful attempts to falsify it.
Fun fact, the person who should be trying hardest to falsify the theory is the one who came up with it:) That's science.
My assertion is that it's not science unless someone is putting forth a falsifiable hypothesis. This isn't "because I say so", this is simply the definition of the scientific method. Whether or not you believe that or not is up to you, but "you go first" is a non-argument, a childhood schoolyard taunt, not a rationale for refuting someone's assertion.
The skeptics aren't postulating an explanation for every observed variation in climate or temperature. The burden of proof is in the affirmative. Just because I'm saying that you can't predict the future doesn't mean that I'm saying that I can.
You just have to do what they did: Contact all the same stations that originally observed the data, ask them for their raw data, and rebuild the CRU's raw data set.
Except they don't know all the stations that they contacted. They simply don't have a list of the sources of all their raw data, which means their starting point simply cannot be recreated- there is missing information.
Now, if they had a definitive list of all the stations they ever got data from, and all the values they threw away, or adjusted, you might have something there, but if you're trying to claim that it is reconstructable given the lack of that information, you're just being disingenuous.
The CRU is under no obligation (and it may even be illegal for them) to redistribute the raw data without the permission of the scientific entities that collected the data in the first place.
I'd make the strong claim that *anyone* doing this kind of important analysis is under an incredibly strong moral obligation to preserve the specific raw data they collect, so that we don't have to "just trust them" that they didn't make unfounded and arbitrary adjustments (ever read the HARRY_README.TXT?). Whether or not they had permission from outside sources is an indictment of their negotiations with the outside sources (not to mention, Phil Jones was more than happy to share raw data with friends, but not "enemies").
The fact of the matter is that CRU put a black stain upon the whole foundation of trust many of us had for the scientific institutions that have been clamoring alarm bells for the past 20 years. Without even *basic* version control, and a solid archive of the specific raw data they used, we have no way to validate their results.
"In a statement on its website, the CRU said: “We do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (quality controlled and homogenised) data.”"
Yes, you can try to weasel out of that by saying that the original data still exists, somewhere unidentified in the ether, where it was originally collected from, but without knowing exactly what data was used as an input to the CRU dataset, it's like saying "the sand we used to build that sandcastle that got washed away is still somewhere on the beach" - good luck reconstructing that sandcastle with the exact same sand grains used the first time.
Even more alarming is the constant, unattributed adjustments that regularly happen to the other temperature records like GISS:
Except when the result is confirmed by other scientists working independently, utilizing different methods of analysis. Which is the case here.
Negative ghost rider. Science doesn't work by "reconfirmation" - it works by attempts at falsification. If your theory is "all swans are white", then finding 10,000, or 100,000, or a million swans doesn't make your theory any better. Trying *really* hard to find just *one* black swan is what really counts.
How many scientists in the AGW business have *tried* to falsify their hypothesis? How many of them have looked for data that would confound their theory? How many have ever said, "if you observe X, Y, and Z, I'm wrong"?
If people filter the data with a specific theory in mind, and inject bias into their adjustments, they do themselves a severe disservice.
The *really* valuable work here is having a theory that can be falsified by observation, which is, unfortunately, greatly lacking in the field of climate research and climate change. You'll hear the weasel words, "these observations are consistent with" all the time. What they don't say is that *any* observations would be consistent with their predictions. Regional cooling? Consistent. Regional warming? Consistent. The error bars are so expansively huge, you'd be hard pressed to find *any* data that would falsify it.
Having a theory that is consistent with all conceivable observations is *not* a sign of strength of that theory, mind you.
Now, on top of all that, we've got people who have made careers off of this hype, who *threw away their raw data*. No kidding. No joke. No troll. They did their massaging, kept their massaged records, and threw out the raw data. With no traceability to the raw data, and no explanation for any of their quite possibly justified adjustments to the data, we've got works of extreme ambiguity out there.
If you're going to do the world a favor on the whole climate change deal, collect the raw data, preserve it, and be very clear about the rationale and justification for *every* single adjustment you make to it.
You'll see a span of about 1.2C from 1983 to 1997 (low point to high point).
Considering that we managed to survive a 1.2C change in less than 20 years, why would I believe that a 2C change over 100 years is going to harm me or my children or my grandchildren?
Since this is a modest change, I expect to see modest economic and social fallout from it.
I guess it depends on how much you price them - a penny per year for the entire carbon emissions of the US might be negligible, but a penny per exhaled breath of CO2 might be entirely devastating. The devil here is in the details on how much you want to slow down economic growth, or more particularly, how much economic slowdown can you justify against the risk. With a nebulous idea of real risk involved, any arbitrary point chosen is likely to be way off.
The fallout from a 2 degrees C change (which is a best-case scenario, including immediate action) is highly likely to harm your kids. Also, it will kill other people's kids.
Exactly how would that harm my kids? If today was 2C warmer, they probably wouldn't even notice. Asserting that it will harm my kids is complete speculation. Asserting that it will kill other people's kids is also pure speculation.
Simply guessing about potential natural disasters in the far future (hurricanes, floods, fires, earthquakes, droughts, cold snaps, heat waves), and asserting that they can all be attributed to average global temperature is a real stretch.
For bonus points, tell me what the current average temperature of the planet is today, and what the spread between high average and low average is over the course of a year.
I was referring to everything (which includes, but is not limited to, CO2.)
Which I think is your mistake - including CO2 in the list of "bad" things drives you to some odd situations when you consider the past history of the earth. I'll grant you that there is no precedent for the nuclear waste from breeder reactors in the history of the planet. But atmospheric changes, on the other hand have been variant in all kinds of ways in the past. Conflating the two just isn't proper, and I argue, is a radical departure from common sense.
Sorry, I wasn't sure whether or not to call them "plants" or "algae" or "oxygen-producing cyanobacteria" - I'll be sure to be more specific next time:)
I have a question though - why do you have any expectation that your children will do fine if we *don't* keep this up? There is so much uncertainty to weather, climate and the environment, isn't it dangerous to assume that we've got a solid lock on the most dangerous thing to our children? If the whole CO2 issue is really just a minor player, and we spend all of our effort mitigating that, but later find out that, say, eating grains and cereals is going to lead to the extinction of humanity, aren't we misjudging risk and misallocating resources? Kinda like wearing a full crash suit and parachute whenever you walk to the kitchen, but driving drunk without a seatbelt at 120mph - spend too much time worrying about low probability, low risk items, and you'll miss out on the high probability, high risk items.
For my kids, I'm more worried about whether or not they get a decent education, find true love, and become self-sufficient, than whether or not a 2C change in temperature over the next 100 years will somehow cause them to spontaneously combust.
Those plants didn't bury nuclear waste. Those plants didn't dump toxic substances into water supplies, nor did they create landfills.
The point is that those plants dramatically altered the composition of the atmosphere by adding something that hadn't been there before. The point is that various animals have dramatically altered the planet by doing something that would not have happened if they weren't there. If "environmentalism" means fighting to preserve the status quo, doesn't this mean that the "environmentalist" POV depends solely on arbitrarily picking a status quo?
Also, how am I a "radical environmentalist"?
You stated "I recognize we can't dump shit into rivers and into the air for all eternity with no side effects". The implication here is that if we all disappeared, and had no further environmental impact, that somehow things would be "better" - either the status quo would be preserved, or the "natural" course of the earth would go on unhindered (begging the question as to whether or not we know what that natural course would be, or whether it would be better or worse by any specific definition of morality).
Now maybe, you didn't mean "shit" literally, and maybe you didn't mean that CO2 was equivalent to "shit" - you and I might agree on nuclear waste in rivers, and radioactive clouds of dust in the air as "bad". But if I read it right the first time, and your assertion is that "we can't put CO2 into the air for all eternity with no side effects", I think you are making a pretty radical leap. We could just have easily insisted that prehistoric plant life not put O2 into the air for all eternity with no side effects.
Silly question Pojut - how would your statement reflect in terms of other life forms? Would you go back into previous geologic eras, and apply this radical environmentalism logic against say, mammals versus dinosaurs? O2 spewing plants changing the atmosphere?
At what point did you start believing that we could all disappear, and never dump a single bit of shit into rivers or the air, and *the world would stay exactly the same*, or *the world would take a predictable course which we're otherwise altering*?
Please feel free to discredit their *arguments*, and restrain yourself from simply attacking their character because they disagree with you:) If you find a single one of those arguments to be unbiased and honest, you can thank me for opening up your worldview:)
Oh, and regarding my typo of "5 years" instead of "25 years", I must admit, I'm chagrined that I made the same type of mistake that the IPCC made:)
Slashdot Mirror
How about:
You are only required to buy a GM car if you are alive. Don't want to buy a GM car? Don't live.
You are only required to buy Microsoft Windows if you are alive. Don't want to buy Microsoft Windows? Don't live.
You are only required to buy bacon if you are alive. Don't want to buy bacon? Don't live.
Once you get to the point where you're willing to force people to buy things just for being alive, there is no limit to the rationale. The whole point about health insurance is the distribution of costs -> it doesn't matter if you're perfectly healthy, never visit a doctor or an emergency room for your entire life, the reason why they want you in the pool is to subsidize other people. This distribution of costs argument can be applied to *anything*. It doesn't matter if you don't have a computer, your purchase of Microsoft Windows makes it more affordable for all the people who do have a computer. It doesn't matter if you can't drive, your purchase of a GM car makes it more affordable for all the other people who drive GM cars. It doesn't matter if you don't eat bacon, your purchase of bacon that you don't eat makes it more affordable for all the other people who do eat bacon.
This dog don't hunt.
...means you might want to stop laughing. With ObamaCare, if any single itty bitty part of it is deemed unconstitutional, the entire thing becomes null and void as a whole.
It's very likely that there are insurance company folks rolling on the floor laughing right now...
...it's actually all unconstitutional if one part of it is. This law lives and dies as a single beastie, and if any part of it is struck down, all of it is struck down. While technically not deeming other parts of it unconstitutional, they would need to be repackaged as a new bill before becoming law again.
Mod parent up - this is the most succinct and accurate analysis of the situation so far. We wouldn't be steamed at all if there wasn't some big marketing build-up to some "groundbreaking" discovery with hints of extraterrestrials. NASA was looking for a PR bump to get congresscritters into the mood to fund them more (or at least cut them less), and they took a 3rd rate paper, with 2nd rate review, and tried to make it into a 1st rate media event.
That an assertion, not a fact. There is no evidence at all that by driving up petroleum prices today and reducing consumption that we would avoid "fixing" anything in the future. This is a particularly weak assertion if the things we need to "fix" are non-catastrophic. That's a particularly poor strawman, and you know it :)
Now, for energy efficiency, I'm all for that, but remember, the more efficient we get, the more energy we use overall - we open up cheap energy to more people, who use it more efficiently, but more than make up for the "savings" the original energy users made.
catastrophic |katsträfik|
adjective
1 involving or causing sudden great damage or suffering : a catastrophic earthquake.
involving a sudden and large-scale alteration in the state of something : the body undergoes catastrophic collapse toward the state of a black hole.
of or relating to geological catastrophism.
2 extremely unfortunate or unsuccessful : catastrophic mismanagement of the economy.
catastrophic
adjective
the losses were catastrophic: disastrous, calamitous, cataclysmic, apocalyptic, ruinous, tragic, fatal, dire, awful, terrible, dreadful.
Why should we be using less oil to prevent global warming that is not catastrophic? If sea levels aren't going to rise at dangerous rates, and if droughts and floods aren't going to get worse, what is the whole point of trying to keep plant food at less than 350 parts per million in the atmosphere?
Whether or not oil will run out anyway is besides the point - making heating oil more expensive for poor people in poor countries is catastrophic, and people pay for it with their lives.
So then, is your position that we have man-made global warming, and this warming is going to be benign?
Unless AGW is going to be catastrophic, there's no reason to try to mitigate it.
If you want fewer straw men, stake out a real position for yourself instead of having me define you :)
You're misunderstanding again - being skeptical of a proposition (such as catastrophic anthropogenic global warming), does not mean you have a proposition to replace it with. The burden of proof lies with the affirmative.
Furthermore, no matter how many other theories you falsify, their falsification doesn't make your theory true. The strength of your theory of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming depends on first, it's ability to be falsified, and second, the failure of purposeful attempts to falsify it.
Fun fact, the person who should be trying hardest to falsify the theory is the one who came up with it :) That's science.
My assertion is that it's not science unless someone is putting forth a falsifiable hypothesis. This isn't "because I say so", this is simply the definition of the scientific method. Whether or not you believe that or not is up to you, but "you go first" is a non-argument, a childhood schoolyard taunt, not a rationale for refuting someone's assertion.
Seriously, your best argument is "you go first"?
The skeptics aren't postulating an explanation for every observed variation in climate or temperature. The burden of proof is in the affirmative. Just because I'm saying that you can't predict the future doesn't mean that I'm saying that I can.
Name a single one, and give me their "if you observe X, Y and Z I'm wrong" quote.
The climategate inquiries were hardly independent, and have been critiqued as fairly shallow whitewashes in detail:
http://thegwpf.org/gwpf-reports/1531-the-climategate-inquries.html
If you're not willing to see, it doesn't matter if you look.
Except they don't know all the stations that they contacted. They simply don't have a list of the sources of all their raw data, which means their starting point simply cannot be recreated- there is missing information.
Now, if they had a definitive list of all the stations they ever got data from, and all the values they threw away, or adjusted, you might have something there, but if you're trying to claim that it is reconstructable given the lack of that information, you're just being disingenuous.
I'd make the strong claim that *anyone* doing this kind of important analysis is under an incredibly strong moral obligation to preserve the specific raw data they collect, so that we don't have to "just trust them" that they didn't make unfounded and arbitrary adjustments (ever read the HARRY_README.TXT?). Whether or not they had permission from outside sources is an indictment of their negotiations with the outside sources (not to mention, Phil Jones was more than happy to share raw data with friends, but not "enemies").
The fact of the matter is that CRU put a black stain upon the whole foundation of trust many of us had for the scientific institutions that have been clamoring alarm bells for the past 20 years. Without even *basic* version control, and a solid archive of the specific raw data they used, we have no way to validate their results.
The raw data, in the climategate case, is not available:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6936328.ece
"In a statement on its website, the CRU said: “We do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (quality controlled and homogenised) data.”"
Yes, you can try to weasel out of that by saying that the original data still exists, somewhere unidentified in the ether, where it was originally collected from, but without knowing exactly what data was used as an input to the CRU dataset, it's like saying "the sand we used to build that sandcastle that got washed away is still somewhere on the beach" - good luck reconstructing that sandcastle with the exact same sand grains used the first time.
Even more alarming is the constant, unattributed adjustments that regularly happen to the other temperature records like GISS:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/06/28/nasa-giss-adjustments-galore-rewriting-climate-history/
Some basic version control needs to be implemented for both the raw and adjusted data. If google does that, they'll be doing everyone a big favor.
Negative ghost rider. Science doesn't work by "reconfirmation" - it works by attempts at falsification. If your theory is "all swans are white", then finding 10,000, or 100,000, or a million swans doesn't make your theory any better. Trying *really* hard to find just *one* black swan is what really counts.
How many scientists in the AGW business have *tried* to falsify their hypothesis? How many of them have looked for data that would confound their theory? How many have ever said, "if you observe X, Y, and Z, I'm wrong"?
If people filter the data with a specific theory in mind, and inject bias into their adjustments, they do themselves a severe disservice.
The *really* valuable work here is having a theory that can be falsified by observation, which is, unfortunately, greatly lacking in the field of climate research and climate change. You'll hear the weasel words, "these observations are consistent with" all the time. What they don't say is that *any* observations would be consistent with their predictions. Regional cooling? Consistent. Regional warming? Consistent. The error bars are so expansively huge, you'd be hard pressed to find *any* data that would falsify it.
Having a theory that is consistent with all conceivable observations is *not* a sign of strength of that theory, mind you.
Now, on top of all that, we've got people who have made careers off of this hype, who *threw away their raw data*. No kidding. No joke. No troll. They did their massaging, kept their massaged records, and threw out the raw data. With no traceability to the raw data, and no explanation for any of their quite possibly justified adjustments to the data, we've got works of extreme ambiguity out there.
If you're going to do the world a favor on the whole climate change deal, collect the raw data, preserve it, and be very clear about the rationale and justification for *every* single adjustment you make to it.
Sounds great, but is the climate data going to be massaged first to make the early 20th century colder, and the late 20th century warmer?
As an example of monthly variation of global temperature, see:
http://www.junkscience.com/MSU_Temps/UAHMSUglobe-m.html
You'll see a span of about 1.2C from 1983 to 1997 (low point to high point).
Considering that we managed to survive a 1.2C change in less than 20 years, why would I believe that a 2C change over 100 years is going to harm me or my children or my grandchildren?
I guess it depends on how much you price them - a penny per year for the entire carbon emissions of the US might be negligible, but a penny per exhaled breath of CO2 might be entirely devastating. The devil here is in the details on how much you want to slow down economic growth, or more particularly, how much economic slowdown can you justify against the risk. With a nebulous idea of real risk involved, any arbitrary point chosen is likely to be way off.
Exactly how would that harm my kids? If today was 2C warmer, they probably wouldn't even notice. Asserting that it will harm my kids is complete speculation. Asserting that it will kill other people's kids is also pure speculation.
Simply guessing about potential natural disasters in the far future (hurricanes, floods, fires, earthquakes, droughts, cold snaps, heat waves), and asserting that they can all be attributed to average global temperature is a real stretch.
For bonus points, tell me what the current average temperature of the planet is today, and what the spread between high average and low average is over the course of a year.
Which I think is your mistake - including CO2 in the list of "bad" things drives you to some odd situations when you consider the past history of the earth. I'll grant you that there is no precedent for the nuclear waste from breeder reactors in the history of the planet. But atmospheric changes, on the other hand have been variant in all kinds of ways in the past. Conflating the two just isn't proper, and I argue, is a radical departure from common sense.
Sorry, I wasn't sure whether or not to call them "plants" or "algae" or "oxygen-producing cyanobacteria" - I'll be sure to be more specific next time :)
I have a question though - why do you have any expectation that your children will do fine if we *don't* keep this up? There is so much uncertainty to weather, climate and the environment, isn't it dangerous to assume that we've got a solid lock on the most dangerous thing to our children? If the whole CO2 issue is really just a minor player, and we spend all of our effort mitigating that, but later find out that, say, eating grains and cereals is going to lead to the extinction of humanity, aren't we misjudging risk and misallocating resources? Kinda like wearing a full crash suit and parachute whenever you walk to the kitchen, but driving drunk without a seatbelt at 120mph - spend too much time worrying about low probability, low risk items, and you'll miss out on the high probability, high risk items.
For my kids, I'm more worried about whether or not they get a decent education, find true love, and become self-sufficient, than whether or not a 2C change in temperature over the next 100 years will somehow cause them to spontaneously combust.
The point is that those plants dramatically altered the composition of the atmosphere by adding something that hadn't been there before. The point is that various animals have dramatically altered the planet by doing something that would not have happened if they weren't there. If "environmentalism" means fighting to preserve the status quo, doesn't this mean that the "environmentalist" POV depends solely on arbitrarily picking a status quo?
You stated "I recognize we can't dump shit into rivers and into the air for all eternity with no side effects". The implication here is that if we all disappeared, and had no further environmental impact, that somehow things would be "better" - either the status quo would be preserved, or the "natural" course of the earth would go on unhindered (begging the question as to whether or not we know what that natural course would be, or whether it would be better or worse by any specific definition of morality).
Now maybe, you didn't mean "shit" literally, and maybe you didn't mean that CO2 was equivalent to "shit" - you and I might agree on nuclear waste in rivers, and radioactive clouds of dust in the air as "bad". But if I read it right the first time, and your assertion is that "we can't put CO2 into the air for all eternity with no side effects", I think you are making a pretty radical leap. We could just have easily insisted that prehistoric plant life not put O2 into the air for all eternity with no side effects.
Silly question Pojut - how would your statement reflect in terms of other life forms? Would you go back into previous geologic eras, and apply this radical environmentalism logic against say, mammals versus dinosaurs? O2 spewing plants changing the atmosphere?
At what point did you start believing that we could all disappear, and never dump a single bit of shit into rivers or the air, and *the world would stay exactly the same*, or *the world would take a predictable course which we're otherwise altering*?
Sure.
Here's one specific one:
http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/trc.html
And here's a whole list:
http://petesplace-peter.blogspot.com/2008/04/peer-reviewed-articles-skeptical-of-man.html
Please feel free to discredit their *arguments*, and restrain yourself from simply attacking their character because they disagree with you :) If you find a single one of those arguments to be unbiased and honest, you can thank me for opening up your worldview :)
Oh, and regarding my typo of "5 years" instead of "25 years", I must admit, I'm chagrined that I made the same type of mistake that the IPCC made :)
http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2010/01/16/glaciergate-ipcc/