That sounds like a very deeply held faith there, Goaway:)
Take your time learning some humility, and realizing that you're human just like the rest of us -> that was really the point of TFA, even if you haven't gotten it yet. We're all in this together, and your cognitive dissonance is just as invisible to you as the cognitive dissonance you ascribe to others is in them.
It is a part of the human condition to believe that someone else's denial is categorically different than your denial. Learn a bit of humility, a bit of introspection, and perhaps you'll gain some wisdom by realizing that yes, it is about everybody, and you don't have any particular claim to being above the fray. Automatically assuming that the critique of the argument doesn't apply to you is in fact the proof that it does.
Peer review is a necessary part of modern science as it is the only way methodological issues can be raised so that alternate hypothesis can be proposed and tested.
Wrong. Modern science is more than possible without several select boards of peer reviewers used formally by journal publishers. Perhaps the fundamental you're trying to describe here is "reproducability", which yes, can be done by peers, but that's not the modern "peer review" institution we're talking about.
It's as if you're saying religion cannot exist without the priesthood.
Peer review weeds out much of the garbage where no one has looked at or critically examined research.
Like I said, peer review is simply a restriction upon publication. It is not a scientific validation of anything. Although it may be a helpful garbage check, it is neither a perfect one untainted by political motivation, nor is it a necessary one for real science to occur (although it certainly can help real science gain recognition).
If it can't stand up to peer review, usually there is a very good reason.
And there is nothing that should make us assume that that reason is a scientific one.
Mod parent up. People are people, whether they wear lab coats or priestly robes. One cannot critique faith in the church without being critical of their own faith in secular institutions.
Science is about a formalized logical method of forming beliefs based upon inductive support for deductive evidence. Peer review is also part of this process.
Peer review (as formalized by scientific journals gatekeeping their publishing) is not a necessary part of the process. The idea that somehow having an elite few "review" a paper makes it immune to the critique that it is an appeal to authority is false on its face.
Science is about creating falsifiable hypotheses to explain observations, engaging in more observations, and either modifying or discarding hypotheses.
When Phil Jones mentions that none of the peer reviewers of his papers ever asked for his raw data, it shines a bright light on exactly what peer review is, and what it isn't. It is *not* science. It *is* a way of restricting publishing. Let's not confuse the two.
I think part of the problem here is that the ability for a human to be quickly and effectively indoctrinated by their parents is a survival skill. Little johnny, who listens to his momma and stays away from the river because of the crocodiles, is going to grow up big and strong while little bob, who is a hair more skeptical, is gonna be reptile food. This kind of indoctrination happens in peer groups for adults too, with left-wing scientist after left-wing scientist believing in global warming caused by humans, and right-wing pundit after right-wing pundit believing that gays in the military will destroy morale. Most of both of those beliefs are based on peer pressure and bullshit.
The funny part is when those who label themselves as godless find an unfounded faith, and when those who label themselves as devout end up defending the scientific method. Truly baffling.
If science is an ideology, then two column accounting and engineering are ideologies.
Perhaps accounting isn't the best example for your point -> ever hear of GAAP? Accounting, deciding what is and isn't an asset or liability, or how to depreciate specific things, or what buckets to put certain expenses, is very very much an ideology.
I'd also make the assertion that engineering, in specific cases, often ends up being ideology, particularly in the realm of computer engineering, and all the various flavors of metrics and measurements and process that your freshly minted MBA will want to try out on his next programming team.
In the end, you're right, science is a tool, but many people who claim to be "following the science" are only doing so out of convenience, not because they've applied any of the methodology. Science is about falsifiability, and unless someone can tell you what kinds of observations they would accept as refutations of their theories, they're not doing science.
Maybe you have a different definition of rational?.
I think that's exactly the problem - taking the same dictionary definition of "rational", two different people, often two very intelligent people, can assign a position or topic into a different bucket. For some very intelligent people, AGW is "rational". For some other very intelligent people, AGW is "religious".
In the end, it seems to me that hypocrisy is an unfortunate feature of humanity, and for all the people who believe they are espousing a rational viewpoint, there are probably only a tiny minority who really are willing to change their mind.
The problem, of course, is that some people don't recognize their religious beliefs, be it about vaccinations causing autism, saturated fat causing heart disease, or CO2 emissions causing global warming. These people firmly see themselves as rational, when in fact they're being religious.
Science, strictly speaking, is the relentless application of skepticism. Once you close the door on your own mind, regardless if your position is in fact correct, you've started behaving in a religious manner. A person who believes that Lamarck can never be reconciled with Darwin, or that the "scientific consensus" on global warming can never be challenged is just as religious as any fundamentalist christian. Rational thought must begin with the understanding that you could be wrong about things you might think are very obvious.
Fork them. Those mother forkers have no forking idea about what the fork they are talking about. Any forking word can be used as an expletive, and if they can't forking take it, then they should forking close their eyes or move to a forking cave. Mother forking ice holes like them deserved to be forked with a rusty spoon up their bible.
Why is it that we can find little obscure facts on the Internet so easily, yet can't find significant facts within a finite data set within our respective companies
I think I answered this in another comment, but the short answer is, we need google inside the corporate firewall. If you have a viable search engine, then it doesn't matter how knowledge is captured and maintained -> lord knows google hasn't forced anyone to adopt certain documentation best practices, they just slurp everything in and spit out relevant results. Having a good search engine can help mitigate the whole "knowledge base du jour" syndrome (although possibly replace it with a "search engine du jour" syndrome).
Anyway, I do understand that an internal search engine is not a trivial task, but I'd rather let each project team have their own little wikis, as long as I can go to one page, put in a search term, and get results from all of them.
My wet dream on this has always been building some sort of internal google for our company. I figure if we can get people to write *anything* down at all, no matter what form, be it a tweet, a blog post, a word doc, or some nasty power point, and if google actually indexed those thousands of pages, maybe, just maybe, we super-geek-techs could use our hax0rz skills at googling when we're doing production support.
Of course, I'm sure that the implementation of a good search engine across every possible document store our company uses is a seriously non-trivial task, but it just might help with the lack of structure problem.
When it comes to documentation, I think a basic rule of thumb is to document what people want, not what you think they need. Writing documentation as a single person effort is usually an exercise in misplaced imagination, but when you have someone *ask* you a specific question, and you answer it, you've actually built "quality" into the documentation creation process. All too often someone asks a dev for documentation, but they can't provide a single real example of a specific question they'd like the documentation to answer. "What is the physical architecture" is a useless question. "Give me a list of all the servers being used by App A, their IP addresses, netmasks and gateways" is a useful question.
The real PITA is when someone tries to come up with a template (because they assume that every project must have the same bits and pieces), and then everyone spends their time trying to explain why section 4.8.1 on mainframe batch programs isn't applicable to PHP apps.
The problem with the whole idea of "if we only had enough documentation and change control" is that it becomes a non-trivial event to actually read through the documentation. Let's take an imaginary system that's been in production for 5 years...assume every last drib and drab of change has been documented...now you've got a 2000 page document and several hundred change records that tell you *everything*. Except, when it comes right down to it, mastering that 2000 pages of documentation and all the changes made afterwards is a months if not years long project - hardly effective for dealing with production problems that need to be solved in minutes or hours.
The illusion being perpetrated here is that people are interchangeable, and if you just have enough documentation, you can replace Mr. Jones with 20 years of hands on experience with the system with Mr. Vishnu living in Bangalore (or even Mr. Smith in the next cube, for that matter), with a net cost savings.
Now, I'm not saying documentation is a bad thing -> lord knows, it helps to have a knowledge base you can search...but knowing what to search for is knowledge you only get by real world experience with maintaining a production system. This is not digging ditches, boys and girls, this is skilled, if not essentially artistic labor.
Not true. Russians have been going after deep oil since after world war II, and have a much higher success rate than their US competitors.
Life is made of hydrocarbons, and when packed down with a shit-ton of pressure, it forms coal and oil.
Bull pucky. Feel free to pressurize a dead fish to whatever level you want, and see if it magically becomes petroleum.
Some of the lighter forms of coal even show shapes that show it was at one point plant material.
Again, bull pucky. Lighter forms of coal may contain bits of plant, but that's not because coal is made out of plants -> it's because the plants got stuck in the tar or other materials that eventually solidified into coal. Go ahead, feel free to pressurize two cabbages to whatever level you want, and see if one magically becomes petroleum, and the other one remains unchanged.
A super volcano is devastating, but it takes weeks for the ash to spread globally
You're vastly underestimating the power of a super volcano, and wildly overestimating the power of nuclear weapons. How's this for a question -> do you know how many megatons of nukes have already been set off on planet earth?
Natural variation is accounted for in these models, a fact which you seem to be neglecting.
No it isn't. Certain non CO2 drivers are calculated, but all the remainder is assumed to be due to humans, rather than unknown natural drivers. This is the typical creationist "God of the Gaps".
There was no choice about it, I either did not go to college, or go into massive debt
That sounds like a choice to me.
I chose to make a future for myself, and sadly the only way to do that in america is to be born with well-off parents who build you a savings account, go into the military, or acquire a shit-ton of debt.
Your imagination seems very limited here -> there's plenty of future available to poor people, without well off parents, or the military, or debt, one simply must open one's eyes to the possibilities. It seems like you've made a choice, and have nothing but bitchy things to say about it, which makes me wonder what you're really angry at, your lack of imagination or the fact that you have to work hard for things you want.
Handy tip -> don't bitch about your prospects when you've got it better than 90% of the world population.
Seriously, I have been keeping tabs on Wattsupwiththat.com for a while, waiting for them to post anything at all that might actually help their point, but have found no such information.
Really? And you didn't like the latest post on exaggerating ice loss by not providing context?
Using scary numbers like "200 km^3", instead of "0.007%" makes these kind of AGW propaganda pieces pretty obviously devoid of any real science. Tell me, what basic scientific principle is the author of this particular post missing?
Smoking, for example, is worse for your health than the low fat low calorie diet.
Actually, I think that's a debatable point. Low-fat/low-calorie/high-carbohydrate diets being preached to us by the government for the past 30 years have caused easily more deaths than smoking, since you get to lump in heart disease, cancer, diabetes and obesity underneath that whole category.
Not having to use DDT in our lattitude, sidestepping the issue of whether or not DDT is a miracle or a curse, is the smarter option.
Actually, we used DDT in all kinds of latitudes - thanks to DDT, we eradicated malaria in the US. So yes, if in fact malaria never existed in places like Siberia, perhaps they'd have a point...except it has existed in places as cold as Siberia:
Maybe you're not advocating doing nothing to prevent global warming and then fixing it with DDT.
Actually, I am advocating doing nothing to prevent global warming, and if I actually believed that CO2 emissions would cause global warming, I would advocate doing more, not less of it. That being said, I think it's pretty clear that malaria is not worsened by a warmer world - but I do think we should be using DDT as much as humanly possible in the pockets of poverty where malaria still exists (africa in particular).
So to be perfectly clear, I think there is debate on whether or not CO2 actually causes any appreciable warming outside the range of "normal" natural variation, and I think there is also debate as to the effects of any warming, regardless of its source. What frightens me is the idea of an ice age, or CO2 below 170ppm or thereabouts, which would pretty much shut down plant life on planet earth.
I think you got my point, though - our proposed interventions are often spectacular failures, and I'm very fearful of the very real negative effects making energy cost more would have on the poorest people on planet earth.
The nuclear arsonal of just a few superpowers could kill all life on earth. Instantly. No supervolcano can do that
Bull pucky. A supervolcano would easily out do every single warhead ever built by man, and even if every nuke went off at once, life would certainly go on.
Also, the seasons are caused by the tilt of the earth, not the sun. It may be summer up north, but in Aussiland it is fall, the beginning of winter.
So get rid of summer in one hemisphere. Whether because of axial tilt or solar output, natural variation in global climate far exceeds even the most outrageous projects of unfalsifiable climate models.
Oil is a combination of hundreds of different hydrocarbons of varying length and shape. Its most likely origin is from deposits of life that were burried by sedimentation and eventually compacted into coal or oil.
Its most likely origin is from methane created in the lower layers of the earth, percolating up through various levels of temperature and pressure, creating complex hydrocarbons. The idea that deposits of life somehow magically turn into petroleum is farcical.
What is not nice, is when we increase CO2 or Methane, because then the earth heats, and warmer oceans mean more H2O in the air, keeping it even warmer. However, clouds do help reflect some light.
Actually, the latest papers on the subject show that the cloud reflection effect acts as a negative feedback that far outweighs any increase of CO2 or methane. You've got your story right, but your conclusion wrong.
I am currently only struggling because Americans have decided that if I want to do something with my life I need to be absolutely perfect, and put myself in such heaploads of debt that it will take a good part of my life to pay off, or I could just pull the money out of my ass, or save up 10 dollars that don't go towards cost of living each month to put towards going to college, so that I could get a degree by the time I am 50.
You're struggling because you've chosen to put yourself in debt. There are plenty of community colleges and state universities that offer college educations for much less than some fancy dancy private four year college. And you're always welcome to join the military and get GI bill benefits for education, if you're not a total lard ass.
Please, if you are going to continue, consider the arguments out there, as I have looked at every single anti-global warming website and haven't found even the slightest reasonable argument against it
Well, you may have looked, but it's obvious you haven't understood anything. Check out http://surfacestations.org/http://wattsupwiththat.com/ and http://climateaudit.org/ - and please, further than just the front page, actually read the critiques and think about it. It's fairly obvious that politics of catastrophic AGW have been corrupting the science of global climate, and the religious fervor with which you defend the "consensus" view is an example of that.
What happens in hundreds of years by nature happens in a couple by man.
Bull pucky. Nature has all kinds of cataclysmic events that dwarf anything man could possibly do, including supervolcanoes, meteor impacts, not to mention the ridiculous insect biomass on the planet.
with the total heat that we get from the sun a day, even the slightest effect could add up very quickly with each passing day.
Except the sun doesn't hold constant, as you mentioned before. Our slightest effects, even added up, are dwarfed by natural variation that occurs at rates and scales must greater than we're capable of effecting.
Imagine this -> stop summer for a year. Imagine how impossible that would be for humans to accomplish.
Oil is definitely biogenic in origin, or wait, did god just put all the biological matter deep underground 5000 years ago for us to find?
Explain methane atmospheres on moons like Titan. Complex hydrocarbons can be created as simple hydrocarbons percolate up through the earth's lower levels. The idea that we're burning the skeletons of ancient fish in our gas tanks is laughable.
in europe they pay as much as 8 bucks a gallon.
Cool, move to Europe and tell me how you like it:)
You really think that using up a finite resource as if there is an infinite amount of it, and no consequences, is just plain stupid.
It is not nearly as finite as you believe. The Peak Oil myth has been busted time and time again, and is just a libtard mirror of armageddon prophecies put forth by true believers for millennia.
If we are putting something harmful to a place into it, we are polluting
Except CO2 isn't harmful. Period. End of story. You'd need 50,000ppm before you hit toxicity, orders of magnitude above what we could possibly pump into the environment.
Start fighting the real greenhouse gas, dihydrogen monoxide, and tell me about pollution:)
also, I am not rich, atm I am struggling, so fuck you.
Looks like perhaps you've fucked yourself:) Maybe your life would be better if you didn't have people pushing carbon taxes destroying the economy and reducing your chances for employment and success.
The findings have been independently verified by scientists from across the world.
Doesn't it bother you when the CRU is found to have shoddy code with artificial adjustments inserted to create warming trends when none exist, and your supposedly independent scientists elsewhere get the same result? It seems much more likely that all of them are wrong, rather than to imagine that CRU cheated in just the right way to get the right answer:)
And again, you did hear Phil Jones admit that none of the people who ever peer reviewed his work EVER asked for his data, right? How could they possibly verify his results without his data?
You are aware that different researchers do their own research, right? And that research matches up.
Look, if I had three people weigh a rock, and they all figured it was 10 pounds, then I found out that one of them had been putting his thumb on the scale, and that without that thumb it would have weighed 5 pounds, should I believe that 10 pounds is the right answer, or 5 pounds?
I'll give you a hint, the answer isn't what you think it is.
In fact, creationists make up a significant portion of the denialist industry.
Which is the funniest thing since Family Guy. Who would've imagined that the supposedly godless liberal socialists would create a world religion based upon CO2 worship, and it would be the bible thumping creationists that were advocating for and defending the scientific method! It is incredible to me that this kind of hypocrisy is even possible -> it's like people who are anti-abortion but pro-death penalty (catholics being the one example of consistency on that issue).
Did you just pick your side on this issue because of who was on the other side? Or did you really think this one through?
You are saying that anything which can affect the climate is supernatural, therefore anyone who says that humans affect the climate believe in the supernatural.
I'm saying that anyone who believes that an ant can build and launch a space shuttle is expecting supernatural powers from the ant. And anyone who believes that 4.5 billion humans can possibly overwhelm the natural variations of global climate by the emission of a gas measured in parts per million is similarly attributing super natural powers where they simply do not exist.
I already told you what happened. I educated myself.
And apparently along with your education, you learned the skills to properly express yourself in detail:)
Seriously, what did you do to educate yourself? Read the IPCC AR4 cover to cover? Take Physics 101 and flunk it? If you were honestly a skeptic before reading something in particular, why not share that particular for other skeptics that might follow your lead?
Or are you just a bunch of fluff pretending to fall into a narrative which gives you unwarranted credibility?
I do agree that we are not the sole cause, but we are certainly one of the bigger players.
Well, now that I understand your position more clearly, I'll assert that I still disagree with that. I do agree that we have some input into the system, but we are certainly a relatively insignificant player compared to other variables. It's hubris to think that our manipulation of a trace gas measured in parts per million could possibly overwhelm natural cycles already in place. Now, no doubt we can make things uncomfortable for ourselves on a local level with SO2 and smog, but that's a whole different beastie than CO2.
Plus, those alternative energies are growing in popularity and shrinking in price every day, and better yet, they are mostly safe to produce and create new jobs which add to the market, as opposed to buying energy from our terrorist friends, who want us to be dead.
The problem is that they aren't shrinking in absolute price, they're shrinking in relative price, which still kicks the crap out of impoverished people. They're certainly not inherently safe to produce, and for every job they create they tend to destroy two or more jobs at the same time.
Now, as to our terrorist friends, we've stacked the deck against ourselves in three ways -> 1) we keep letting people convince us that peak oil is just around the corner, when oil is actually abiogenic in origin - this artificially raises prices. 2) we have limited our own exploitation of our own resources, providing a monopoly to our terrorist friends that they wouldn't have otherwise. 3) if we do move to more expensive energy locally, we destroy both our economy and our environment, because all of the products that now cost more to make in our country due to higher energy prices will simply be manufactured and assembled in places that do use cheap energy, undercutting any possible competition from people at home.
CO2 is a greenhouse gas. If we are putting it out of our industrial equipment and cars, we are polluting it.
The first assertion doesn't make the conclusion true. CO2 is a greenhouse gas. H2O is a greenhouse gas many times more powerful than CO2. You wouldn't assert that pure water is pollution, would you?
You come off more as a conceited dumb ass whose responses rely mostly on misconstruing what others say to fit your warped reality.
And you, dear lady, come across as a gentleman and a scholar who while caring and concerned, is completely misguided and misinformed:)
Also, I am not saying that all things were constant, I am saying that you can not make an argument that a single factor out of many is the only possible reason for anything.
Okay, so then you oppose the idea that humans are going to be the sole cause of catastrophic global warming due to their CO2 emissions? Maybe I'm not hearing you right.
It may sound crazy, but you seem like a nutjob, so let me explain. Cheap energy means that corporations can produce more for less, and make more profit.
When corporations can produce more for less, and make more profit, consumers can buy more for less, and have a higher standard of living. Cheap energy is certainly a quite bit better for the poor than the alternative of expensive energy, don't you agree?
CO2 is plant food, but it is also pollution.
It's not pollution, period. I might agree with you on all the sulfides and nitrates and nitrites, but simply put, more CO2 is a good thing for life on this planet, no questions asked.
Now, think for a moment about your irrational fears of doubling, or quadrupling CO2 in the global to...gasp...1300ppm! Less than 1/4 of OHS concern levels (however those got calculated):)
Still want to consider CO2 as pollution? Maybe your next target should be dihydrogen monoxide:)
Then you'll really enjoy Gary Taubes -> he was David in the Lion's den during his lecture, and was the most anti-Berkeley thing you could imagine coming out of there:)
Now if you were to say if all other things were held constant, and the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere had different effects over time, then we can deduce it is an irrelevant factor. This is, however, NOT the case. So the idea that people are causing global warming is indeed a falsifiable hypothesis.
I'm sorry, but you're talking out of both sides of your mouth here. On the one hand, ice core records showing CO2 decreases at the same time as temperature increases falsify the idea of CO2 driving warming..."all things held constant". But then you're assuming that during the period of the industrial revolution when humans started pumping CO2 into the air, that "all things held constant" -> which plainly isn't the case, since everything has continued to change apart from human activity (sunspots, PDO, ENSO, etc, etc).
I do however hate pollution, as it literally stinks
Calling CO2 pollution is like calling dihydrogen monoxide pollution. CO2 is plant food.
Even if we haven't, the reasons we think we caused it should be stopped anyways, so that us and our children can breath clean air and drink clean water, live in a more efficient and cheap world, doing more with less.
Fail. Cheap energy pulls people out of poverty, and gives them the technology to enjoy the clean water and air you currently enjoy. Getting rid of cheap energy by blaming an upcoming armageddon on CO2 causes real harm right now to people who are much worse off than you are.
Or maybe we should just dump shit-tons of CO2, nitrous oxides and sulfides into the atmosphere of our cities,
You're conflating real pollution with plant food. That's clearly unjustified.
Slashdot Mirror
That sounds like a very deeply held faith there, Goaway :)
Take your time learning some humility, and realizing that you're human just like the rest of us -> that was really the point of TFA, even if you haven't gotten it yet. We're all in this together, and your cognitive dissonance is just as invisible to you as the cognitive dissonance you ascribe to others is in them.
One day you just might get it :)
The lady doth protest too much.
It is a part of the human condition to believe that someone else's denial is categorically different than your denial. Learn a bit of humility, a bit of introspection, and perhaps you'll gain some wisdom by realizing that yes, it is about everybody, and you don't have any particular claim to being above the fray. Automatically assuming that the critique of the argument doesn't apply to you is in fact the proof that it does.
Wrong. Modern science is more than possible without several select boards of peer reviewers used formally by journal publishers. Perhaps the fundamental you're trying to describe here is "reproducability", which yes, can be done by peers, but that's not the modern "peer review" institution we're talking about.
It's as if you're saying religion cannot exist without the priesthood.
Like I said, peer review is simply a restriction upon publication. It is not a scientific validation of anything. Although it may be a helpful garbage check, it is neither a perfect one untainted by political motivation, nor is it a necessary one for real science to occur (although it certainly can help real science gain recognition).
And there is nothing that should make us assume that that reason is a scientific one.
Question authority.
Ah, the "I know you are but what am I" response :)
Everybody should realize the article is about them. Even you :)
Mod parent up. People are people, whether they wear lab coats or priestly robes. One cannot critique faith in the church without being critical of their own faith in secular institutions.
Peer review (as formalized by scientific journals gatekeeping their publishing) is not a necessary part of the process. The idea that somehow having an elite few "review" a paper makes it immune to the critique that it is an appeal to authority is false on its face.
Science is about creating falsifiable hypotheses to explain observations, engaging in more observations, and either modifying or discarding hypotheses.
When Phil Jones mentions that none of the peer reviewers of his papers ever asked for his raw data, it shines a bright light on exactly what peer review is, and what it isn't. It is *not* science. It *is* a way of restricting publishing. Let's not confuse the two.
I think part of the problem here is that the ability for a human to be quickly and effectively indoctrinated by their parents is a survival skill. Little johnny, who listens to his momma and stays away from the river because of the crocodiles, is going to grow up big and strong while little bob, who is a hair more skeptical, is gonna be reptile food. This kind of indoctrination happens in peer groups for adults too, with left-wing scientist after left-wing scientist believing in global warming caused by humans, and right-wing pundit after right-wing pundit believing that gays in the military will destroy morale. Most of both of those beliefs are based on peer pressure and bullshit.
The funny part is when those who label themselves as godless find an unfounded faith, and when those who label themselves as devout end up defending the scientific method. Truly baffling.
Perhaps accounting isn't the best example for your point -> ever hear of GAAP? Accounting, deciding what is and isn't an asset or liability, or how to depreciate specific things, or what buckets to put certain expenses, is very very much an ideology.
I'd also make the assertion that engineering, in specific cases, often ends up being ideology, particularly in the realm of computer engineering, and all the various flavors of metrics and measurements and process that your freshly minted MBA will want to try out on his next programming team.
In the end, you're right, science is a tool, but many people who claim to be "following the science" are only doing so out of convenience, not because they've applied any of the methodology. Science is about falsifiability, and unless someone can tell you what kinds of observations they would accept as refutations of their theories, they're not doing science.
I think that's exactly the problem - taking the same dictionary definition of "rational", two different people, often two very intelligent people, can assign a position or topic into a different bucket. For some very intelligent people, AGW is "rational". For some other very intelligent people, AGW is "religious".
In the end, it seems to me that hypocrisy is an unfortunate feature of humanity, and for all the people who believe they are espousing a rational viewpoint, there are probably only a tiny minority who really are willing to change their mind.
I know, since I'm one of the few :)
The problem, of course, is that some people don't recognize their religious beliefs, be it about vaccinations causing autism, saturated fat causing heart disease, or CO2 emissions causing global warming. These people firmly see themselves as rational, when in fact they're being religious.
Science, strictly speaking, is the relentless application of skepticism. Once you close the door on your own mind, regardless if your position is in fact correct, you've started behaving in a religious manner. A person who believes that Lamarck can never be reconciled with Darwin, or that the "scientific consensus" on global warming can never be challenged is just as religious as any fundamentalist christian. Rational thought must begin with the understanding that you could be wrong about things you might think are very obvious.
Fork them. Those mother forkers have no forking idea about what the fork they are talking about. Any forking word can be used as an expletive, and if they can't forking take it, then they should forking close their eyes or move to a forking cave. Mother forking ice holes like them deserved to be forked with a rusty spoon up their bible.
Fork this.
I think I answered this in another comment, but the short answer is, we need google inside the corporate firewall. If you have a viable search engine, then it doesn't matter how knowledge is captured and maintained -> lord knows google hasn't forced anyone to adopt certain documentation best practices, they just slurp everything in and spit out relevant results. Having a good search engine can help mitigate the whole "knowledge base du jour" syndrome (although possibly replace it with a "search engine du jour" syndrome).
Anyway, I do understand that an internal search engine is not a trivial task, but I'd rather let each project team have their own little wikis, as long as I can go to one page, put in a search term, and get results from all of them.
My wet dream on this has always been building some sort of internal google for our company. I figure if we can get people to write *anything* down at all, no matter what form, be it a tweet, a blog post, a word doc, or some nasty power point, and if google actually indexed those thousands of pages, maybe, just maybe, we super-geek-techs could use our hax0rz skills at googling when we're doing production support.
Of course, I'm sure that the implementation of a good search engine across every possible document store our company uses is a seriously non-trivial task, but it just might help with the lack of structure problem.
When it comes to documentation, I think a basic rule of thumb is to document what people want, not what you think they need. Writing documentation as a single person effort is usually an exercise in misplaced imagination, but when you have someone *ask* you a specific question, and you answer it, you've actually built "quality" into the documentation creation process. All too often someone asks a dev for documentation, but they can't provide a single real example of a specific question they'd like the documentation to answer. "What is the physical architecture" is a useless question. "Give me a list of all the servers being used by App A, their IP addresses, netmasks and gateways" is a useful question.
The real PITA is when someone tries to come up with a template (because they assume that every project must have the same bits and pieces), and then everyone spends their time trying to explain why section 4.8.1 on mainframe batch programs isn't applicable to PHP apps.
The problem with the whole idea of "if we only had enough documentation and change control" is that it becomes a non-trivial event to actually read through the documentation. Let's take an imaginary system that's been in production for 5 years...assume every last drib and drab of change has been documented...now you've got a 2000 page document and several hundred change records that tell you *everything*. Except, when it comes right down to it, mastering that 2000 pages of documentation and all the changes made afterwards is a months if not years long project - hardly effective for dealing with production problems that need to be solved in minutes or hours.
The illusion being perpetrated here is that people are interchangeable, and if you just have enough documentation, you can replace Mr. Jones with 20 years of hands on experience with the system with Mr. Vishnu living in Bangalore (or even Mr. Smith in the next cube, for that matter), with a net cost savings.
Now, I'm not saying documentation is a bad thing -> lord knows, it helps to have a knowledge base you can search...but knowing what to search for is knowledge you only get by real world experience with maintaining a production system. This is not digging ditches, boys and girls, this is skilled, if not essentially artistic labor.
Simply put, people matter more than process.
Not true. Russians have been going after deep oil since after world war II, and have a much higher success rate than their US competitors.
Actually, I think that's a debatable point. Low-fat/low-calorie/high-carbohydrate diets being preached to us by the government for the past 30 years have caused easily more deaths than smoking, since you get to lump in heart disease, cancer, diabetes and obesity underneath that whole category.
Actually, we used DDT in all kinds of latitudes - thanks to DDT, we eradicated malaria in the US. So yes, if in fact malaria never existed in places like Siberia, perhaps they'd have a point...except it has existed in places as cold as Siberia:
http://climateaudit.org/2005/08/30/mosquitos-malaria-and-the-ipcc-consensus/
Actually, I am advocating doing nothing to prevent global warming, and if I actually believed that CO2 emissions would cause global warming, I would advocate doing more, not less of it. That being said, I think it's pretty clear that malaria is not worsened by a warmer world - but I do think we should be using DDT as much as humanly possible in the pockets of poverty where malaria still exists (africa in particular).
So to be perfectly clear, I think there is debate on whether or not CO2 actually causes any appreciable warming outside the range of "normal" natural variation, and I think there is also debate as to the effects of any warming, regardless of its source. What frightens me is the idea of an ice age, or CO2 below 170ppm or thereabouts, which would pretty much shut down plant life on planet earth.
I think you got my point, though - our proposed interventions are often spectacular failures, and I'm very fearful of the very real negative effects making energy cost more would have on the poorest people on planet earth.
Bull pucky. A supervolcano would easily out do every single warhead ever built by man, and even if every nuke went off at once, life would certainly go on.
So get rid of summer in one hemisphere. Whether because of axial tilt or solar output, natural variation in global climate far exceeds even the most outrageous projects of unfalsifiable climate models.
Its most likely origin is from methane created in the lower layers of the earth, percolating up through various levels of temperature and pressure, creating complex hydrocarbons. The idea that deposits of life somehow magically turn into petroleum is farcical.
Actually, the latest papers on the subject show that the cloud reflection effect acts as a negative feedback that far outweighs any increase of CO2 or methane. You've got your story right, but your conclusion wrong.
You're struggling because you've chosen to put yourself in debt. There are plenty of community colleges and state universities that offer college educations for much less than some fancy dancy private four year college. And you're always welcome to join the military and get GI bill benefits for education, if you're not a total lard ass.
Well, you may have looked, but it's obvious you haven't understood anything. Check out http://surfacestations.org/ http://wattsupwiththat.com/ and http://climateaudit.org/ - and please, further than just the front page, actually read the critiques and think about it. It's fairly obvious that politics of catastrophic AGW have been corrupting the science of global climate, and the religious fervor with which you defend the "consensus" view is an example of that.
Bull pucky. Nature has all kinds of cataclysmic events that dwarf anything man could possibly do, including supervolcanoes, meteor impacts, not to mention the ridiculous insect biomass on the planet.
Except the sun doesn't hold constant, as you mentioned before. Our slightest effects, even added up, are dwarfed by natural variation that occurs at rates and scales must greater than we're capable of effecting.
Imagine this -> stop summer for a year. Imagine how impossible that would be for humans to accomplish.
Explain methane atmospheres on moons like Titan. Complex hydrocarbons can be created as simple hydrocarbons percolate up through the earth's lower levels. The idea that we're burning the skeletons of ancient fish in our gas tanks is laughable.
Cool, move to Europe and tell me how you like it :)
It is not nearly as finite as you believe. The Peak Oil myth has been busted time and time again, and is just a libtard mirror of armageddon prophecies put forth by true believers for millennia.
Except CO2 isn't harmful. Period. End of story. You'd need 50,000ppm before you hit toxicity, orders of magnitude above what we could possibly pump into the environment.
Start fighting the real greenhouse gas, dihydrogen monoxide, and tell me about pollution :)
Looks like perhaps you've fucked yourself :) Maybe your life would be better if you didn't have people pushing carbon taxes destroying the economy and reducing your chances for employment and success.
Doesn't it bother you when the CRU is found to have shoddy code with artificial adjustments inserted to create warming trends when none exist, and your supposedly independent scientists elsewhere get the same result? It seems much more likely that all of them are wrong, rather than to imagine that CRU cheated in just the right way to get the right answer :)
And again, you did hear Phil Jones admit that none of the people who ever peer reviewed his work EVER asked for his data, right? How could they possibly verify his results without his data?
Look, if I had three people weigh a rock, and they all figured it was 10 pounds, then I found out that one of them had been putting his thumb on the scale, and that without that thumb it would have weighed 5 pounds, should I believe that 10 pounds is the right answer, or 5 pounds?
I'll give you a hint, the answer isn't what you think it is.
Which is the funniest thing since Family Guy. Who would've imagined that the supposedly godless liberal socialists would create a world religion based upon CO2 worship, and it would be the bible thumping creationists that were advocating for and defending the scientific method! It is incredible to me that this kind of hypocrisy is even possible -> it's like people who are anti-abortion but pro-death penalty (catholics being the one example of consistency on that issue).
Did you just pick your side on this issue because of who was on the other side? Or did you really think this one through?
Apparently not all humans :)
Ah, argumentum ad linkium. Here's one for you, and please, read all the posts and comments:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/
I'm saying that anyone who believes that an ant can build and launch a space shuttle is expecting supernatural powers from the ant. And anyone who believes that 4.5 billion humans can possibly overwhelm the natural variations of global climate by the emission of a gas measured in parts per million is similarly attributing super natural powers where they simply do not exist.
And apparently along with your education, you learned the skills to properly express yourself in detail :)
Seriously, what did you do to educate yourself? Read the IPCC AR4 cover to cover? Take Physics 101 and flunk it? If you were honestly a skeptic before reading something in particular, why not share that particular for other skeptics that might follow your lead?
Or are you just a bunch of fluff pretending to fall into a narrative which gives you unwarranted credibility?
Well, now that I understand your position more clearly, I'll assert that I still disagree with that. I do agree that we have some input into the system, but we are certainly a relatively insignificant player compared to other variables. It's hubris to think that our manipulation of a trace gas measured in parts per million could possibly overwhelm natural cycles already in place. Now, no doubt we can make things uncomfortable for ourselves on a local level with SO2 and smog, but that's a whole different beastie than CO2.
The problem is that they aren't shrinking in absolute price, they're shrinking in relative price, which still kicks the crap out of impoverished people. They're certainly not inherently safe to produce, and for every job they create they tend to destroy two or more jobs at the same time.
Now, as to our terrorist friends, we've stacked the deck against ourselves in three ways -> 1) we keep letting people convince us that peak oil is just around the corner, when oil is actually abiogenic in origin - this artificially raises prices. 2) we have limited our own exploitation of our own resources, providing a monopoly to our terrorist friends that they wouldn't have otherwise. 3) if we do move to more expensive energy locally, we destroy both our economy and our environment, because all of the products that now cost more to make in our country due to higher energy prices will simply be manufactured and assembled in places that do use cheap energy, undercutting any possible competition from people at home.
The first assertion doesn't make the conclusion true. CO2 is a greenhouse gas. H2O is a greenhouse gas many times more powerful than CO2. You wouldn't assert that pure water is pollution, would you?
And you, dear lady, come across as a gentleman and a scholar who while caring and concerned, is completely misguided and misinformed :)
Okay, so then you oppose the idea that humans are going to be the sole cause of catastrophic global warming due to their CO2 emissions? Maybe I'm not hearing you right.
When corporations can produce more for less, and make more profit, consumers can buy more for less, and have a higher standard of living. Cheap energy is certainly a quite bit better for the poor than the alternative of expensive energy, don't you agree?
It's not pollution, period. I might agree with you on all the sulfides and nitrates and nitrites, but simply put, more CO2 is a good thing for life on this planet, no questions asked.
Ah, wikipedia.
Now, think for a moment about your irrational fears of doubling, or quadrupling CO2 in the global to...gasp...1300ppm! Less than 1/4 of OHS concern levels (however those got calculated) :)
Still want to consider CO2 as pollution? Maybe your next target should be dihydrogen monoxide :)
Then you'll really enjoy Gary Taubes -> he was David in the Lion's den during his lecture, and was the most anti-Berkeley thing you could imagine coming out of there :)
I'm sorry, but you're talking out of both sides of your mouth here. On the one hand, ice core records showing CO2 decreases at the same time as temperature increases falsify the idea of CO2 driving warming..."all things held constant". But then you're assuming that during the period of the industrial revolution when humans started pumping CO2 into the air, that "all things held constant" -> which plainly isn't the case, since everything has continued to change apart from human activity (sunspots, PDO, ENSO, etc, etc).
Calling CO2 pollution is like calling dihydrogen monoxide pollution. CO2 is plant food.
Fail. Cheap energy pulls people out of poverty, and gives them the technology to enjoy the clean water and air you currently enjoy. Getting rid of cheap energy by blaming an upcoming armageddon on CO2 causes real harm right now to people who are much worse off than you are.
You're conflating real pollution with plant food. That's clearly unjustified.