...except about something like catastrophic anthropogenic global warming:)
It's so funny that the left wing can be so insightful about certain things, but then engage in utter, mind blowing hypocrisy counter to their rational, reasoned argument.
The answer in this case is simple - make every damn scientific paper start with an intro section called "necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement". Too much speculative navel gazing and fuzzy study setup leaves the room open to fiction writing, rather than cold hard scientific scrutiny.
Remember, first and foremost, science is a way for us to prove ourselves *wrong* - it's a way of knocking down ideas, and only grudgingly giving acceptance to the ones that survive the contest. The best scientists ruthlessly try to find every possible hole in their ideas, rather than glossing over contradictory evidence or alternatives.
I'd assert that our air is cleaner than China's because we are per capita wealthier, and have the resources to "waste" on technology like catalytic converters, or other noxious emissions controls. The same can probably be said of the Cuyahoga, although unfortunately the noble impetus to clean the river expanded into an EPA used to punish the enemies of the state, while rewarding its cronies. As for the Triangle Shirtwaist factory, while certainly there were injustices, again, government overreach used the crisis to expand beyond the point of helping.
Like Clinton's abortion quip, government should be safe, legal and rare.
Big business is limited by people - in fact, if you consider dollars == votes, left to their own devices they're the most democratic systems that exist in the world.
Now, if you want to talk about anti trust and anti monopoly positions, perhaps there are reasonable arguments for those, but the idea that governments can do a better job than millions upon billions of individual making free choices on how to spend their resources is silly.
Actually, the big reason that businesses engage with politicians is not to unbalance the market, it is to make sure they have a nice friendly environment to do business in.
Look, libertarians look for nice friendly environments - big businesses on the other hand, don't just want a level playing field, they want a direct conduit into the halls of government to give themselves breaks, while giving their competition penalties. Make no doubt about it, in all your socialist european governments, big solar and big wind have been about market manipulation, destroying the natural petroleum sector while subsidizing their "renewable" sector, all at the cost of efficiency, value, and the taxpayer.
To imagine the bankrupt modern Europe as a model for the US is funny, but sad, since in fact there are many in the halls of power today in the US that honestly believe that we should go in that direction.
Corporations would do away with regulations, our air would be like China's,
Wait, you're saying that China is controlled by corporations, not by the Communist party, or other political figures?
As for the role of government, Bastiat got it right - the use of force in the defense of private property rights. Keep it to the bare minimum, with carefully circumscribed powers and responsibilities, and corruption is minimized.
The goal is determining the EFFECTS of climate change on NEBRASKA. If you eliminate non-cyclical effects from that study (whether or not they are anthropogenic) you eliminate some types of climate change from the study.
Wait wait, you're saying that warming temperatures say, caused by a sunspot cycle, are somehow different than warming temperatures due to some one-time, non-cyclical magnetic change in the sun?
Climate change is climate change. The assertion that somehow it has stopped being natural, and is now driven primarily by humans, much less that this influence is going to be catastrophic, is a political position, not a scientific one.
If you look at history, you'll see that the government can be a huge advocate for people against the corporate excess.
Damn, you majorly missed the sarc tags there:)
Corporations are *created* by governments, and *controlled* by governments - if there's any action against "excess", make no doubt, it's in order to increase government control of private enterprise:)
If they are restricted to studying the cyclical climate change they aren't going to be able to do a comprehensive evaluation.
Sure they can - all they have to do is show is that after accounting for all possible cycles, there's no way of explaining observations - they can *exclude* cyclical climate change as a driver...at least theoretically. Enumerating all the possible cycles is quite possibly an impossible task.
The really interesting point is that you can also see the shoe on the other foot - when grants are only given to people studying anthropogenic climate change, and they ignore natural climate change, aren't they also completely unable to do a comprehensive evaluation?
But again, that all being said, you can effectively squash the whole catastrophic anthropogenic global warming trope by simply insisting that scientific studies begin with a necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement.
My bet is that the scientists refusing to participate haven't written a single climate change paper that ever stated a necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement...although, I'm more than happy to be shown that I'm wrong by someone actually quoting their falsifiable hypothesis or hypotheses:)
1) big corporations don't exist - politicians exert control over small businesses, extorting money out of them for election funding, and giving favorable treatment to those who pay up, and penalties to those who don't
2) overwhelming government power doesn't exist - big corporations don't throw money at politicians, since they can make better investments that have better returns.
I'm afraid the root cause of the problems of corruption in government are *directly* related to the outsized power big government has - if government was limited, and could not tip the economic scales of the market in one direction or another to benefit their cronies, there would be no incentive for big business to take part in the election process.
...that their study won't exclude natural climate change?
I mean, this just doesn't make sense from any other perspective - if they believe that they'll be vindicated, they'll do a bunch of studies on cyclical climate change, and find that modern climate excludes all cycles, and therefore must be driven by some "factor X".
What they really should do is this - insist that any study on climate change start off with a necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement. At that point it won't matter what political bent the scientists have, it'll simply stand or fall on its merits instead of on the basis of publicity, politics and press releases.
I suppose at that point, I'll be busy enjoying having a harem of all the most famous starlets of the past 200 years, and taking occasional trips in my time machine for fun around the early Babylonian period.
What will you do if God comes down from heaven in 5 weeks, and personally offers you a latte?
there is a lot of personal belief that goes in on top of the guidelines and established facts.
No doubt. And it is in the best interests of the insurance companies to promote beliefs that exaggerate risk to allow the charging of higher premiums, and the payout of fewer claims.
my software has helped to keep your premiums low.
Sounds like a wildly optimistic statement:) There's no particular reason to believe that you haven't encoded beliefs into your software that exaggerate risk, either by relying on dubious information (say, as in climate models that have no regional resolution, and even fail on the global metrics), or by discounting mitigations to risk.
Your software may have been used, but I doubt you can show that in its absence, premiums would be higher:)
Climate scientists can predict what warming we're likely to get, but why would you expect them to properly judge the economic effects?
Fair enough. We can predict warming (if for no other reason than rebound from the little ice age), and we have no idea whether this will be a net benefit or a net detriment. Unfortunately, prediction isn't what makes something science - astrologists make predictions, and heck, some of them even come true!:)
What we need is falsifiability - some set of observations, past, present or future, that would cause the true believers to give up the idea that human CO2 contributions are going to cause warming that will be catastrophic in any sense of the word. If we look *really* hard for those observations, and try our best to tear down our hypothesis, and *fail*, then maybe, just maybe, we're on the right path.
A warmer world may be better for us, or it may not be, and it will certainly disrupt things.
How would it be any more disruptive than any other climate change? Climate *always* changes, and to think we could *stop* it in its tracks, that somehow, by limiting ourselves we could appease the gods of chaos and weather, is hubris.
Also, what pause?
The pause that has meant that the world is neither significantly warmer or colder on the day of my childrens' birth than today:
It's like mother nature has a sense of humor - here I am, talking about how the climate always changes, and yet for both of my children, the temperature today isn't significantly different than the days they were born:)
Overstating the risk basically makes sense, if the entire industry has overstated the risk
Exactly. Put another way, *the entire industry* has an incentive to overstate the risk together.
I've little faith that anyone is bothering to undercut hurricane insurance because they *all* stand to gain if they keep up the charade that hurricanes are more likely now - taking advantage of popular opinion driven by our warmist friends:)
...to overstate risks, collect high premiums, and end up paying out little in claims.
This is true of *any* insurance scheme.
Calling upon the insurance industry to talk about risks of "climate change" (sigh, it *always* changes), is like asking tobacco lawyers if it's okay to smoke - their self interested answer is both obvious and inane.
Last I saw, the consensus was AGW, with "catastrophic" being a matter of conjecture.
I would gladly embrace that, except we're being told that AGW is a *problem* that must be solved, rather than merely a phenomenon that can be observed and studied. They cannot insist on policy changes to fight AGW unless they can assert that the fight is worth having - i.e., that the alternative would be *catastrophic*, defined not as a specific change in temperature, but in terms of say, economic damage, life loss, species diversity loss, or some other actual metric of *harm* (which would of course have to be weight against similar measures of *benefit*).
Honestly, history has shown a warmer world is better for the biosphere, and so has geography - our primary concentrations of biodiversity are in the tropics, not the poles.
I don't think anybody's going to stick to the theory if temperatures actually go down.
You're more optimistic than I am:) First they said 10 years would be the longest pause. Then 15. Then 17. Heck, the projections now are for at least a 20 year pause - and I don't see any true believers giving up the central conceit yet.
It can be neither proven nor disproven that God exists or that God created the universe.
My point exactly - without falsifiability, you have simply speculation and navel gazing. It can neither be proven nor disproven that *I* am the God that created the universe...or you, or anyone else, or any animal, or heck, any arbitrary set of iphones. Theists who posit the existence of Zeus, or Thor, or Allah, or any number of other fantastical constructs, are *factually* wrong - all they have is faith, because there can exist no evidence which would cause them to revisit their central conceit.
On the other hand, as an atheist who doesn't believe that Zeus exists, I *do* specify a falsification criteria (have Zeus, with his mighty lightning bolt, come down and visit with me, turn into a swan, and talk me through Greek politics while we drink tea and he regularly breaks the laws of physics for me).
Science is not about indisputable evidence - it's about a method for reaching the truth, which requires falsifiability and a willingness to be wrong.
please get it through your thick head that not all science can be carried out through the classical scientific method.
Without falsifiability, it's simply not science. Without the scientific method, it's simply not science.
You seem to believe that "science" is a label you can simply apply to something to mean "true" - but that's not science at all. Science is a *process*, and falsifiability isn't optional.
No confusion at all - the first definition fits perfectly:
1. a particular principle, position, or policy taught or advocated, as of a religion or government
I purposely left off their examples, which are religious, although there is no reason that doctrine is inherently so.
So you omitted data that would have undermined your assertion?:)
From google ("define doctrine"):
doctrine däktrin/ noun 1. a belief or set of beliefs held and taught by a church, political party, or other group. "the doctrine of predestination" synonyms: creed, credo, dogma, belief, teaching, ideology; tenet, maxim, canon, principle, precept "the doctrine of the Trinity"
At the very least, when discussing things with lunatics, you can gain some empathy for their motivations and humanity.
Flipping on the "bozo bit" and deciding ahead of time that someone is a lunatic without a worthwhile point of view is a massive limitation of opportunities to learn new things.
Now, if you believe you've nothing left to learn about anything, great. If you've decided to teach your child never to ask "why", great. But for those who accept they may learn something, and for those who are willing to engage with their children and provide them a safe place to ask questions, even the silly ones, I think the world is a better place.
We hypothesize that within w years, if experimental conditions (particularly the output of human-produced CO2) are maintained, global average temperatures will rise by x, causing displacement of y people and a drop in worldwide agriculture of z.
A few problems with your hypothesis.
1) you've got no numbers for anything
2) you've got no units for "worldwide agriculture)
3) you've got no prediction for what happens with variations of anthropogenic CO2 (which do vary...although the trend in CO2 levels is completely unaffected by variation in anthropogenic CO2 emissions)
4) you haven't excluded natural causes for a rise in global average temperature.
More pointedly, you haven't specified any falsification criteria, even with your broad generalizations. Will you admit your central conceit is false if it takes w+1 years to reach the conditions you specify? Or if global temperatures only rise by x-1? Or if y-1 people are displaced, and worldwide agriculture only drops z-1?
Be specific on what observations would falsify your central conceit, and explain why the lack of those falsifications must lead us *only* to the conclusion you propose, rather than any number of alternatives.
Slashdot Mirror
Can you spell, S-O-L-Y-N-D-R-A? :)
Government interventions into free markets come without any accountability, and therefore create perverse incentives that destroy wealth.
Yes, in fact, Popper was right - falsification is the bedrock of science.
Without falsification, you simply have religion, no matter how fancy the lab coat you dress up in looks like :)
Just because you use maths doesn't mean it's not religion.
...except about something like catastrophic anthropogenic global warming :)
It's so funny that the left wing can be so insightful about certain things, but then engage in utter, mind blowing hypocrisy counter to their rational, reasoned argument.
The answer in this case is simple - make every damn scientific paper start with an intro section called "necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement". Too much speculative navel gazing and fuzzy study setup leaves the room open to fiction writing, rather than cold hard scientific scrutiny.
Remember, first and foremost, science is a way for us to prove ourselves *wrong* - it's a way of knocking down ideas, and only grudgingly giving acceptance to the ones that survive the contest. The best scientists ruthlessly try to find every possible hole in their ideas, rather than glossing over contradictory evidence or alternatives.
I'd assert that our air is cleaner than China's because we are per capita wealthier, and have the resources to "waste" on technology like catalytic converters, or other noxious emissions controls. The same can probably be said of the Cuyahoga, although unfortunately the noble impetus to clean the river expanded into an EPA used to punish the enemies of the state, while rewarding its cronies. As for the Triangle Shirtwaist factory, while certainly there were injustices, again, government overreach used the crisis to expand beyond the point of helping.
Like Clinton's abortion quip, government should be safe, legal and rare.
Big business is limited by people - in fact, if you consider dollars == votes, left to their own devices they're the most democratic systems that exist in the world.
Now, if you want to talk about anti trust and anti monopoly positions, perhaps there are reasonable arguments for those, but the idea that governments can do a better job than millions upon billions of individual making free choices on how to spend their resources is silly.
Look, libertarians look for nice friendly environments - big businesses on the other hand, don't just want a level playing field, they want a direct conduit into the halls of government to give themselves breaks, while giving their competition penalties. Make no doubt about it, in all your socialist european governments, big solar and big wind have been about market manipulation, destroying the natural petroleum sector while subsidizing their "renewable" sector, all at the cost of efficiency, value, and the taxpayer.
To imagine the bankrupt modern Europe as a model for the US is funny, but sad, since in fact there are many in the halls of power today in the US that honestly believe that we should go in that direction.
Wait, you're saying that China is controlled by corporations, not by the Communist party, or other political figures?
As for the role of government, Bastiat got it right - the use of force in the defense of private property rights. Keep it to the bare minimum, with carefully circumscribed powers and responsibilities, and corruption is minimized.
http://bastiat.org/en/the_law.html
Wait wait, you're saying that warming temperatures say, caused by a sunspot cycle, are somehow different than warming temperatures due to some one-time, non-cyclical magnetic change in the sun?
Climate change is climate change. The assertion that somehow it has stopped being natural, and is now driven primarily by humans, much less that this influence is going to be catastrophic, is a political position, not a scientific one.
Damn, you majorly missed the sarc tags there :)
Corporations are *created* by governments, and *controlled* by governments - if there's any action against "excess", make no doubt, it's in order to increase government control of private enterprise :)
Sure they can - all they have to do is show is that after accounting for all possible cycles, there's no way of explaining observations - they can *exclude* cyclical climate change as a driver...at least theoretically. Enumerating all the possible cycles is quite possibly an impossible task.
The really interesting point is that you can also see the shoe on the other foot - when grants are only given to people studying anthropogenic climate change, and they ignore natural climate change, aren't they also completely unable to do a comprehensive evaluation?
But again, that all being said, you can effectively squash the whole catastrophic anthropogenic global warming trope by simply insisting that scientific studies begin with a necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement.
My bet is that the scientists refusing to participate haven't written a single climate change paper that ever stated a necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement...although, I'm more than happy to be shown that I'm wrong by someone actually quoting their falsifiable hypothesis or hypotheses :)
Okay, so two thought experiments:
1) big corporations don't exist - politicians exert control over small businesses, extorting money out of them for election funding, and giving favorable treatment to those who pay up, and penalties to those who don't
2) overwhelming government power doesn't exist - big corporations don't throw money at politicians, since they can make better investments that have better returns.
I'm afraid the root cause of the problems of corruption in government are *directly* related to the outsized power big government has - if government was limited, and could not tip the economic scales of the market in one direction or another to benefit their cronies, there would be no incentive for big business to take part in the election process.
...that their study won't exclude natural climate change?
I mean, this just doesn't make sense from any other perspective - if they believe that they'll be vindicated, they'll do a bunch of studies on cyclical climate change, and find that modern climate excludes all cycles, and therefore must be driven by some "factor X".
What they really should do is this - insist that any study on climate change start off with a necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement. At that point it won't matter what political bent the scientists have, it'll simply stand or fall on its merits instead of on the basis of publicity, politics and press releases.
I suppose at that point, I'll be busy enjoying having a harem of all the most famous starlets of the past 200 years, and taking occasional trips in my time machine for fun around the early Babylonian period.
What will you do if God comes down from heaven in 5 weeks, and personally offers you a latte?
Tell me, which of the several dozen models that all disagree with each other have been falsified?
No doubt. And it is in the best interests of the insurance companies to promote beliefs that exaggerate risk to allow the charging of higher premiums, and the payout of fewer claims.
Sounds like a wildly optimistic statement :) There's no particular reason to believe that you haven't encoded beliefs into your software that exaggerate risk, either by relying on dubious information (say, as in climate models that have no regional resolution, and even fail on the global metrics), or by discounting mitigations to risk.
Your software may have been used, but I doubt you can show that in its absence, premiums would be higher :)
Fair enough. We can predict warming (if for no other reason than rebound from the little ice age), and we have no idea whether this will be a net benefit or a net detriment. Unfortunately, prediction isn't what makes something science - astrologists make predictions, and heck, some of them even come true! :)
What we need is falsifiability - some set of observations, past, present or future, that would cause the true believers to give up the idea that human CO2 contributions are going to cause warming that will be catastrophic in any sense of the word. If we look *really* hard for those observations, and try our best to tear down our hypothesis, and *fail*, then maybe, just maybe, we're on the right path.
How would it be any more disruptive than any other climate change? Climate *always* changes, and to think we could *stop* it in its tracks, that somehow, by limiting ourselves we could appease the gods of chaos and weather, is hubris.
The pause that has meant that the world is neither significantly warmer or colder on the day of my childrens' birth than today:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/wti/from:1998/plot/wti/from:1998/trend
It's like mother nature has a sense of humor - here I am, talking about how the climate always changes, and yet for both of my children, the temperature today isn't significantly different than the days they were born :)
Exactly. Put another way, *the entire industry* has an incentive to overstate the risk together.
I've little faith that anyone is bothering to undercut hurricane insurance because they *all* stand to gain if they keep up the charade that hurricanes are more likely now - taking advantage of popular opinion driven by our warmist friends :)
...to overstate risks, collect high premiums, and end up paying out little in claims.
This is true of *any* insurance scheme.
Calling upon the insurance industry to talk about risks of "climate change" (sigh, it *always* changes), is like asking tobacco lawyers if it's okay to smoke - their self interested answer is both obvious and inane.
I would gladly embrace that, except we're being told that AGW is a *problem* that must be solved, rather than merely a phenomenon that can be observed and studied. They cannot insist on policy changes to fight AGW unless they can assert that the fight is worth having - i.e., that the alternative would be *catastrophic*, defined not as a specific change in temperature, but in terms of say, economic damage, life loss, species diversity loss, or some other actual metric of *harm* (which would of course have to be weight against similar measures of *benefit*).
Honestly, history has shown a warmer world is better for the biosphere, and so has geography - our primary concentrations of biodiversity are in the tropics, not the poles.
You're more optimistic than I am :) First they said 10 years would be the longest pause. Then 15. Then 17. Heck, the projections now are for at least a 20 year pause - and I don't see any true believers giving up the central conceit yet.
Show me your necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement if you want to be considered something other than a cult.
The fact that you believe that your cult is scientific does not make it so :)
My point exactly - without falsifiability, you have simply speculation and navel gazing. It can neither be proven nor disproven that *I* am the God that created the universe...or you, or anyone else, or any animal, or heck, any arbitrary set of iphones. Theists who posit the existence of Zeus, or Thor, or Allah, or any number of other fantastical constructs, are *factually* wrong - all they have is faith, because there can exist no evidence which would cause them to revisit their central conceit.
On the other hand, as an atheist who doesn't believe that Zeus exists, I *do* specify a falsification criteria (have Zeus, with his mighty lightning bolt, come down and visit with me, turn into a swan, and talk me through Greek politics while we drink tea and he regularly breaks the laws of physics for me).
Science is not about indisputable evidence - it's about a method for reaching the truth, which requires falsifiability and a willingness to be wrong.
Without falsifiability, it's simply not science. Without the scientific method, it's simply not science.
You seem to believe that "science" is a label you can simply apply to something to mean "true" - but that's not science at all. Science is a *process*, and falsifiability isn't optional.
No confusion at all - the first definition fits perfectly:
1. a particular principle, position, or policy taught or advocated, as of a religion or government
So you omitted data that would have undermined your assertion? :)
From google ("define doctrine"):
doctrine
däktrin/
noun
1.
a belief or set of beliefs held and taught by a church, political party, or other group.
"the doctrine of predestination"
synonyms: creed, credo, dogma, belief, teaching, ideology; tenet, maxim, canon, principle, precept
"the doctrine of the Trinity"
At the very least, when discussing things with lunatics, you can gain some empathy for their motivations and humanity.
Flipping on the "bozo bit" and deciding ahead of time that someone is a lunatic without a worthwhile point of view is a massive limitation of opportunities to learn new things.
Now, if you believe you've nothing left to learn about anything, great. If you've decided to teach your child never to ask "why", great. But for those who accept they may learn something, and for those who are willing to engage with their children and provide them a safe place to ask questions, even the silly ones, I think the world is a better place.
A few problems with your hypothesis.
1) you've got no numbers for anything
2) you've got no units for "worldwide agriculture)
3) you've got no prediction for what happens with variations of anthropogenic CO2 (which do vary...although the trend in CO2 levels is completely unaffected by variation in anthropogenic CO2 emissions)
4) you haven't excluded natural causes for a rise in global average temperature.
More pointedly, you haven't specified any falsification criteria, even with your broad generalizations. Will you admit your central conceit is false if it takes w+1 years to reach the conditions you specify? Or if global temperatures only rise by x-1? Or if y-1 people are displaced, and worldwide agriculture only drops z-1?
Be specific on what observations would falsify your central conceit, and explain why the lack of those falsifications must lead us *only* to the conclusion you propose, rather than any number of alternatives.