Actually, to be perfectly truthful, anthropogenic climate change isn't hardly a theory at all - it is a completely malleable supposition that provides no falsifiable hypothesis whatsoever. In order to be a scientific theory, one must have a hypothesis, and have specific, falsifiable predictions.
In the case of AGW, the "predictions" are legion - cold weather == global warming. warm weather == global warming. And the error bars are so ridiculously huge, they can always say that the observed data is "within the range of our predictions".
If someone really wants to build an AGW hypothesis, give us an example of data that would falsify your hypothesis instead of insisting that AGW is true until it is proven otherwise.
...carbohydrates. Prior to the adoption of a high-carb western diet, the Pima indians were just fine too. There's no mystery about why diabetes happens - trying to blame it on a genetic code is like asserting that smoking doesn't cause lung cancer, only a certain genetic code does.
That all being said, it doesn't sound like there was an malfeasance here, or particularly egregious profit motive -> if they were taking their DNA and creating patentable drugs with it, and making billions, I can understand, but simply exploring history doesn't seem like something that should be punished by some sort of civil fine.
I guess the real question here is do you hire a gardner to do 20 hours of work, or do you hire him to maintain 20 yards. If he gets all 20 done in 10 hours, does it matter how many hours it took him?
In the case of IT, I suppose the problem is that the skill level can vary so dramatically that you can have a "20 hour" task that takes some people 30 minutes, and other people 3 weeks. You certainly can't get away with paying someone for only twenty hours if they work 3 weeks in a row, but it should tell you something about how much you can expect out of them in the future.
FWIW, I think in the end coding and programming are more like art than like building widgets. Sometimes, epiphanies happen quickly, other times, not so much.
Bad article. Conflates fat food with high carbohydrate food. Bacon == good. Frosting, with sugar == bad.
The real addiction here is carbohydrate, and it's a pretty simple equation:
1) carbohydrates increase blood sugar levels; 2) blood sugar levels increase insulin levels; 3) insulin levels cause fat cells to hold on to fatty acids instead of cycling them through as usual; 4) with your fat cells stealing energy from your blood stream, your other cells start starving for energy; 5) starved for energy, your body becomes hungry, and you exhibit "addiction" behaviors.
Fat is good for you (trans-fat is not fat, it's frankenfood). Carbohydrates are the source of all evil and the cause of the "diseases of civilization", including obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, alzhiemers and other chronic diseases.
Stop eating carbohydrates. It's simple.
For a great hour and forty minute lecture on the topic, google "gary taubes berkeley".
So you've got two things in both sucrose and high fructose corn syrup -> glucose and fructose. The ratio in high fructose corn syrup is slightly more fructose.
There are two things that happen when you eat this poison. #1) the glucose raises insulin levels, which cause fat cells to stop releasing fat back into the bloodstream. #2) the fructose heads to the liver, where it causes the liver to package up more fat to move into the fat cells. The combination of stopping up the bathtub, and putting more water in, makes fat cells fatter and fatter.
Frankly, there probably isn't that much difference between a sucrose diet and a high fructose corn syrup diet. It looks like they found some signal in the noise, but the real killer is carbohydrates. Cut the carbs, and your fat cells stop behaving in a destructive manner (draining your body of calories and storing them away while the rest of your body starves).
Google for "gary taubes berkeley" for a very informative lecture on the subject.
Mod parent up. People have seemed to have missed the fact that insurance is gambling. For all the talk about health care, this bill is really about gambling, and it's a sucker bet.
Besides the question of constitutionality for "mandatory coverage" (forcing every living and breathing human being to gamble), it completely misunderstands the whole point of health insurance -> it's not designed to deal with chronic conditions, it's meant to deal with unforeseen catastrophic ones where we all have about the same (and very remote) odds. Health insurance can be reasonable when it covers things like getting into a car crash, or broken bones, but once you start turning it into a method for dealing with chronic issues (obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and other preventable "diseases of civilization" caused by carbohydrate intake), it becomes simply a method of redistributing wealth from people who are healthy to people who are unhealthy.
If the Democrat Party had wanted to reduce health care costs, they would have focused on the causes, not the symptoms. A broken health insurance system is ultimately a symptom of a cause - the cause being the low-fat/low-calorie dogma fed to us as nutritionally "healthy" by luminaries such as Michelle Obama, and the diseases it promotes. If they had just revised the food pyramid to cut out carbohydrates, you'd see dramatic decreases in chronic health conditions, and therefore dramatic decreases in chronic health costs. (Google "gary taubes berkeley" for an informative lecture on the whole carb thing.)
This bill is going to slow down the economy further, and make health care more expensive and unattainable, period. It may make some people feel good about transferring wealth from the healthy to the unhealthy, and warm the cockles of those who believe in equality of outcomes, but it's inevitably a poor tool for handling our real health issues.
Taking the reckless assertion of causality train one step further, since we know that obesity is directly controlled by carbohydrate intake, we can now make the statement that TV obviously causes children to eat carbohydrates, and computers don't.
For those unfamiliar with the Kreb's Cycle, and the direct causation of obesity by carbohydrate intake, it works like this:
-only one hormone causes fat cells to accumulate fat, rather than to process fatty acids normally both from and to the bloodstream - insulin
-only one thing causes an increase of insulin levels - blood sugar
-only one thing causes an increase of blood sugar - carbohydrate intake
Usually, your fat cells process fatty acids, taking them in and then pushing them back out into the bloodstream. Under the condition of insulin resistance, the fat cells behave in an abnormal manner, and steal energy from the bloodstream, but don't release it back in. This causes the starvation of other cells. So when you see a 400 pound fat man eating a pizza like he's starving, it's because his muscle cells are being starved by his out of control fat cells.
1) I used the right word here - the *rates* of increase and decrease in historical times dwarf what we've experienced over the last 150 years. And you're right, rate is important.
2) Quick question - could you fit 6 billion humans on the island of Oahu? Although it may seem like a big number to you, we're really just a fraction of the biomass of the insect kingdom - why wouldn't the even larger number of resource using insects be more damaging to the planet?
3) CO2 is measured in the atmosphere in parts per million. CO2 is a trace gas. Even natural global climate change deniers accept these two facts.
4) Having a "ton of physical evidence" doesn't mean anything for a theory. Having ZERO contradictory evidence does (and note, the natural global climate change deniers have worked hard to keep the contradictory evidence from coming to light as seen in ClimateGate). What global warming promoters need to do is come up with a theory that is falsifiable, not one that is simply supported by arbitrary cherry picked data.
So to answer your two questions:
1) It is happening, and it's natural 2) There is nothing we can do except work towards improving the standards of living of people so they can better adapt to changing conditions.
Seriously though, how does tripe like shilly's get modded +5?
If there's nothing in the theory that is contradicted by either more rain and snowstorms, or less rain and snowstorms, it's not a very useful theory.
How would natural global climate change deniers be able to tell that any given change in rain or snowstorms were due to CO2 concentrations, or just to natural variability?
The real problem, it seems, is that they've developed an untestable theory, similar to the theory of the One, Great, All Knowing, All Seeing, All Powerful God who happens to be Completely Invisible and Unobservable by any Scientific Means.
It's easy to have a theory that can't be tested. Google for "church of the flying spaghetti monster".
Is there any precision to these predictions of "more snowfall in certain areas"? Do they define the areas? Any sort of time frame?
This is just basic science, mate. Saying that "some unknown day in the future in some unknown place on the planet, we'll get more snowfall" isn't a prediction of anything - it's astrological fortune telling of the highest degree.
Be more specific. Which global warming model predicted massive blizzards in the northern hemisphere in 2010? Point to the source code if available.
Hurting the pocket book can be the difference between life and death for millions of people in poverty, especially in Africa.
Insofar as gleeful mocking, that's par for the course when you make an idiot out of yourself by pushing pseudo-science. Real science means a falsifiable hypothesis, not a group of a hundred "models", of which one may have predicted more snow, another predicted less snow, then claiming your predictions are right no matter what happens.
I just can't believe that natural global climate change deniers have had such a lock on the public discourse for so long.
You've got it backwards - people who seek to demonstrate that anthropogenic climate change IS happening are much closer to scenario 2 than scenario 1. Natural Climate Change deniers/denialists/skeptics are arguing the affirmative in this case, and simply accepting them blindly based on models and anecdotal evidence cherry picked by anyone from GISS to the WWF is a disservice.
We've got a paleoclimate record that shows incredible variation in CO2 and temperature, rates of increase and decrease that overwhelm anything we've seen in modern times, but we're supposed to believe that just because of little old us, and a trace gas measured in parts per million, we're going to suddenly walk outside of the bounds of the negative feedbacks that exist? We've got millions of years of Natural Climate Change, and at most, 150 years of proposed AGW.
Which hypothesis am I supposed to be more critical of again?
Except CO2 won't cause your liver to shut down, kill your brain cells, or lose your hair. It's plant food. It makes forests grow, and encourages life and biodiversity.
I can't wait until you find out about dihydrogen monoxide, and what a pollutant it is.
This begs the question, what did they actually agree with? Which particular model? What specific theory? Simply saying that a large group of people agreed with a generally worded theory with no predictions is missing the point a bit.
What I would really be much more interested in seeing is a consensus statement on what would falsify the theory of AGW. Then we'll know they're all talking about the same theory. Until then, they're simply stating a belief system, not science.
Of course, you do give the important caveat that you cannot appeal to authority as proof, which is appreciated. I believe it's pretty clear from the data that the overwhelming consensus opinion of the scientific community about AGW was wrong, and we're now seeing people struggle with the end of their belief system. Scientists at heart will take this in stride, and NGW (natural global warming) deniers will have a much more difficult time coping.
You've completely ignored the point. Simply claiming that global warming is based on global averages over decades does not answer the question -> what would falsify your hypothesis?
Maybe I can give you a suggestion -> if the global average (a pernicious concept, but we'll run with it) decreases over two decades, while CO2 continues to rise, would that falsify your hypothesis?
You mention glacial loss, but that's also local, not global - many glaciers are in fact advancing, and to date, I haven't heard anyone say they've got any dataset that represents every glacier in the world. Do you mean global average glacial loss, and do you have any data that represents the global average of all glacier retreat and advance?
If warming causes snow, and 1998 was the warmest year on record, why weren't there blizzards in 1998 on the east coast?
I think the problem you have is that if warming can cause increased snow fall and reduced snow fall, then the same could be said about cooling. How do you differentiate between the two hypotheses?
You mention Antarctica, which is interesting, since the claim there is that the ice is receding...but according to your theory, it should actually be expanding due to increased snow fall. Again, another "heads I win tails you lose" proposition.
Still haven't seen a single warmer posit what evidence would falsify their hypothesis.
So you have a model that proves nothing, but you still want us to believe that its accurate?
You're strictly correct in saying that nothing will ever prove a scientific theory, but in order to be a rigorously good scientific theory, it must be falsifiable. Please be specific about what data points either in the past or in the future would falsify your theory.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, to be perfectly truthful, anthropogenic climate change isn't hardly a theory at all - it is a completely malleable supposition that provides no falsifiable hypothesis whatsoever. In order to be a scientific theory, one must have a hypothesis, and have specific, falsifiable predictions.
In the case of AGW, the "predictions" are legion - cold weather == global warming. warm weather == global warming. And the error bars are so ridiculously huge, they can always say that the observed data is "within the range of our predictions".
If someone really wants to build an AGW hypothesis, give us an example of data that would falsify your hypothesis instead of insisting that AGW is true until it is proven otherwise.
...carbohydrates. Prior to the adoption of a high-carb western diet, the Pima indians were just fine too. There's no mystery about why diabetes happens - trying to blame it on a genetic code is like asserting that smoking doesn't cause lung cancer, only a certain genetic code does.
That all being said, it doesn't sound like there was an malfeasance here, or particularly egregious profit motive -> if they were taking their DNA and creating patentable drugs with it, and making billions, I can understand, but simply exploring history doesn't seem like something that should be punished by some sort of civil fine.
I guess the real question here is do you hire a gardner to do 20 hours of work, or do you hire him to maintain 20 yards. If he gets all 20 done in 10 hours, does it matter how many hours it took him?
In the case of IT, I suppose the problem is that the skill level can vary so dramatically that you can have a "20 hour" task that takes some people 30 minutes, and other people 3 weeks. You certainly can't get away with paying someone for only twenty hours if they work 3 weeks in a row, but it should tell you something about how much you can expect out of them in the future.
FWIW, I think in the end coding and programming are more like art than like building widgets. Sometimes, epiphanies happen quickly, other times, not so much.
Bad article. Conflates fat food with high carbohydrate food. Bacon == good. Frosting, with sugar == bad.
The real addiction here is carbohydrate, and it's a pretty simple equation:
1) carbohydrates increase blood sugar levels;
2) blood sugar levels increase insulin levels;
3) insulin levels cause fat cells to hold on to fatty acids instead of cycling them through as usual;
4) with your fat cells stealing energy from your blood stream, your other cells start starving for energy;
5) starved for energy, your body becomes hungry, and you exhibit "addiction" behaviors.
Fat is good for you (trans-fat is not fat, it's frankenfood). Carbohydrates are the source of all evil and the cause of the "diseases of civilization", including obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, alzhiemers and other chronic diseases.
Stop eating carbohydrates. It's simple.
For a great hour and forty minute lecture on the topic, google "gary taubes berkeley".
So you've got two things in both sucrose and high fructose corn syrup -> glucose and fructose. The ratio in high fructose corn syrup is slightly more fructose.
There are two things that happen when you eat this poison. #1) the glucose raises insulin levels, which cause fat cells to stop releasing fat back into the bloodstream. #2) the fructose heads to the liver, where it causes the liver to package up more fat to move into the fat cells. The combination of stopping up the bathtub, and putting more water in, makes fat cells fatter and fatter.
Frankly, there probably isn't that much difference between a sucrose diet and a high fructose corn syrup diet. It looks like they found some signal in the noise, but the real killer is carbohydrates. Cut the carbs, and your fat cells stop behaving in a destructive manner (draining your body of calories and storing them away while the rest of your body starves).
Google for "gary taubes berkeley" for a very informative lecture on the subject.
Mod parent up. People have seemed to have missed the fact that insurance is gambling. For all the talk about health care, this bill is really about gambling, and it's a sucker bet.
Besides the question of constitutionality for "mandatory coverage" (forcing every living and breathing human being to gamble), it completely misunderstands the whole point of health insurance -> it's not designed to deal with chronic conditions, it's meant to deal with unforeseen catastrophic ones where we all have about the same (and very remote) odds. Health insurance can be reasonable when it covers things like getting into a car crash, or broken bones, but once you start turning it into a method for dealing with chronic issues (obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and other preventable "diseases of civilization" caused by carbohydrate intake), it becomes simply a method of redistributing wealth from people who are healthy to people who are unhealthy.
If the Democrat Party had wanted to reduce health care costs, they would have focused on the causes, not the symptoms. A broken health insurance system is ultimately a symptom of a cause - the cause being the low-fat/low-calorie dogma fed to us as nutritionally "healthy" by luminaries such as Michelle Obama, and the diseases it promotes. If they had just revised the food pyramid to cut out carbohydrates, you'd see dramatic decreases in chronic health conditions, and therefore dramatic decreases in chronic health costs. (Google "gary taubes berkeley" for an informative lecture on the whole carb thing.)
This bill is going to slow down the economy further, and make health care more expensive and unattainable, period. It may make some people feel good about transferring wealth from the healthy to the unhealthy, and warm the cockles of those who believe in equality of outcomes, but it's inevitably a poor tool for handling our real health issues.
Taking the reckless assertion of causality train one step further, since we know that obesity is directly controlled by carbohydrate intake, we can now make the statement that TV obviously causes children to eat carbohydrates, and computers don't.
For those unfamiliar with the Kreb's Cycle, and the direct causation of obesity by carbohydrate intake, it works like this:
-only one hormone causes fat cells to accumulate fat, rather than to process fatty acids normally both from and to the bloodstream - insulin
-only one thing causes an increase of insulin levels - blood sugar
-only one thing causes an increase of blood sugar - carbohydrate intake
Usually, your fat cells process fatty acids, taking them in and then pushing them back out into the bloodstream. Under the condition of insulin resistance, the fat cells behave in an abnormal manner, and steal energy from the bloodstream, but don't release it back in. This causes the starvation of other cells. So when you see a 400 pound fat man eating a pizza like he's starving, it's because his muscle cells are being starved by his out of control fat cells.
1) I used the right word here - the *rates* of increase and decrease in historical times dwarf what we've experienced over the last 150 years. And you're right, rate is important.
2) Quick question - could you fit 6 billion humans on the island of Oahu? Although it may seem like a big number to you, we're really just a fraction of the biomass of the insect kingdom - why wouldn't the even larger number of resource using insects be more damaging to the planet?
3) CO2 is measured in the atmosphere in parts per million. CO2 is a trace gas. Even natural global climate change deniers accept these two facts.
4) Having a "ton of physical evidence" doesn't mean anything for a theory. Having ZERO contradictory evidence does (and note, the natural global climate change deniers have worked hard to keep the contradictory evidence from coming to light as seen in ClimateGate). What global warming promoters need to do is come up with a theory that is falsifiable, not one that is simply supported by arbitrary cherry picked data.
So to answer your two questions:
1) It is happening, and it's natural
2) There is nothing we can do except work towards improving the standards of living of people so they can better adapt to changing conditions.
Seriously though, how does tripe like shilly's get modded +5?
If there's nothing in the theory that is contradicted by either more rain and snowstorms, or less rain and snowstorms, it's not a very useful theory.
How would natural global climate change deniers be able to tell that any given change in rain or snowstorms were due to CO2 concentrations, or just to natural variability?
The real problem, it seems, is that they've developed an untestable theory, similar to the theory of the One, Great, All Knowing, All Seeing, All Powerful God who happens to be Completely Invisible and Unobservable by any Scientific Means.
It's easy to have a theory that can't be tested. Google for "church of the flying spaghetti monster".
Is there any precision to these predictions of "more snowfall in certain areas"? Do they define the areas? Any sort of time frame?
This is just basic science, mate. Saying that "some unknown day in the future in some unknown place on the planet, we'll get more snowfall" isn't a prediction of anything - it's astrological fortune telling of the highest degree.
Be more specific. Which global warming model predicted massive blizzards in the northern hemisphere in 2010? Point to the source code if available.
Hurting the pocket book can be the difference between life and death for millions of people in poverty, especially in Africa.
Insofar as gleeful mocking, that's par for the course when you make an idiot out of yourself by pushing pseudo-science. Real science means a falsifiable hypothesis, not a group of a hundred "models", of which one may have predicted more snow, another predicted less snow, then claiming your predictions are right no matter what happens.
I just can't believe that natural global climate change deniers have had such a lock on the public discourse for so long.
You've got it backwards - people who seek to demonstrate that anthropogenic climate change IS happening are much closer to scenario 2 than scenario 1. Natural Climate Change deniers/denialists/skeptics are arguing the affirmative in this case, and simply accepting them blindly based on models and anecdotal evidence cherry picked by anyone from GISS to the WWF is a disservice.
We've got a paleoclimate record that shows incredible variation in CO2 and temperature, rates of increase and decrease that overwhelm anything we've seen in modern times, but we're supposed to believe that just because of little old us, and a trace gas measured in parts per million, we're going to suddenly walk outside of the bounds of the negative feedbacks that exist? We've got millions of years of Natural Climate Change, and at most, 150 years of proposed AGW.
Which hypothesis am I supposed to be more critical of again?
Except CO2 won't cause your liver to shut down, kill your brain cells, or lose your hair. It's plant food. It makes forests grow, and encourages life and biodiversity.
I can't wait until you find out about dihydrogen monoxide, and what a pollutant it is.
This begs the question, what did they actually agree with? Which particular model? What specific theory? Simply saying that a large group of people agreed with a generally worded theory with no predictions is missing the point a bit.
What I would really be much more interested in seeing is a consensus statement on what would falsify the theory of AGW. Then we'll know they're all talking about the same theory. Until then, they're simply stating a belief system, not science.
Of course, you do give the important caveat that you cannot appeal to authority as proof, which is appreciated. I believe it's pretty clear from the data that the overwhelming consensus opinion of the scientific community about AGW was wrong, and we're now seeing people struggle with the end of their belief system. Scientists at heart will take this in stride, and NGW (natural global warming) deniers will have a much more difficult time coping.
You've completely ignored the point. Simply claiming that global warming is based on global averages over decades does not answer the question -> what would falsify your hypothesis?
Maybe I can give you a suggestion -> if the global average (a pernicious concept, but we'll run with it) decreases over two decades, while CO2 continues to rise, would that falsify your hypothesis?
You mention glacial loss, but that's also local, not global - many glaciers are in fact advancing, and to date, I haven't heard anyone say they've got any dataset that represents every glacier in the world. Do you mean global average glacial loss, and do you have any data that represents the global average of all glacier retreat and advance?
If warming causes snow, and 1998 was the warmest year on record, why weren't there blizzards in 1998 on the east coast? I think the problem you have is that if warming can cause increased snow fall and reduced snow fall, then the same could be said about cooling. How do you differentiate between the two hypotheses? You mention Antarctica, which is interesting, since the claim there is that the ice is receding...but according to your theory, it should actually be expanding due to increased snow fall. Again, another "heads I win tails you lose" proposition. Still haven't seen a single warmer posit what evidence would falsify their hypothesis.
So you have a model that proves nothing, but you still want us to believe that its accurate? You're strictly correct in saying that nothing will ever prove a scientific theory, but in order to be a rigorously good scientific theory, it must be falsifiable. Please be specific about what data points either in the past or in the future would falsify your theory.