You asserted that climate models aren't a falsifiable methodology. But of course, they are. One needs only to examine the methodology described for the model and demonstrate where the model is inaccurate
Pretend for a moment you've got in your hands a GCM. You make a prediction for the CO2 and temperature of the globe for 2012, including error bars. Observations go beyond your error bars on either CO2 or temperature. Do you:
A) admit that the basis of your GCM has been falsified and AGW or CAGW is no longer true?
B) come up with an ad hoc special pleading to explain your discrepancy.
Be honest with yourself when you answer.
Of course, your difficulty is Tyndalls work, and proving your own hypothesis (that the impact of anthropogenic emissions is impossible to predict)
Again, I'm not making a hypothesis here for you to fight against - that's your own built strawman. I'm stating, very explicitly, that the null hypothesis that must be considered is that there is no causal relationship between CO2 and global average temperature. Tyndall's work does not simply scale up to a global level automatically - the assertion that there is a causal relationship must be held to strict scrutiny, and we start that scientific process by defining our falsifiable hypothesis statement.
Until you are willing to make a clear falsifiable hypothesis statement, and willing to admit its falsification if observations are made which go beyond the bounds of error in any of your specific predictions, you're not doing science.
When you've got a lot of people living next to an ocean made of a substance (water) that expands when it is heated, you clearly have a problem, although perhaps you could debate how bad a problem it is.
Unsupportable assertion - expanding water can be a good thing. The assertion that any expansion of water, no matter how minuscule, is a problem is completely unfounded.
"Null hypothesis" is not some sort of magic incantation you can intone to exempt your own favored hypothesis regarding what does or does not cause what from the normal requirements that a scientific theory be physically realistic and make testable predictions.
Are you listening to yourself? You're putting *your* faith in GCMs in the position of a magic incantation you can intone to exempt it from the requirements of a scientific theory! The null hypothesis is that there is no causal relationship for a given factor - it's not asserting that there are *other* causal relationships that may exist, it's simply asserting that for any given factor, we must begin our assumptions that there is *not* a relationship.
Make a testable prediction for what the CO2 and temperature level will be like next year, and include your error range. Will you admit your hypothesis of AGW or CAGW is false if you fail that prediction, or will you resort to ad hoc special pleadings?
If warming leads CO2, then there should evidence of a change in some other factor that influences the energy balance of the earth, such as the earth's orbit or energy output by the sun. If CO2 leads warming, then there must be introduction of CO2 from a new, temperature-indpedent source. Both predictions are satisfied when it comes to ancient and modern climate change.
Let's ask this question explicitly then - is the modern industrial era the only period of time that includes the introduction of CO2 from a temperature independent source? If not, can you cite an example in the historical record?
For example, in the modern era, we know that temperature is not increasing due to changes in the sun's output or the earth's orbit, because the sun's output has been measured and shown not to change.
False dichotomy - there are dozens of other factors that could be affecting temperature without resorting to the sun's output on specific wavelengths, or the earth's orbit.
With Solar Shades and Mirrors, or various other direct-control technologies that have been proposed and are entirely within our current capabilities -- yes, we probably could counteract every natural climate change driver.
All of humanity dedicating every last bit of production besides bare minimum food and shelter, working for the next thousand years, couldn't deploy a system that would counteract every single change in solar radiation, volcanic activity, or axial tilt of the earth. You're off by orders of magnitude here.
Weather control is very different from climate control.
Yes, *weather* is a simpler thing to control than climate, given the range of energies involved. When you can stop a Cat 4 hurricane dead in its tracks in a day, you just might be getting to the technological point where you could hope to control the climate. If you can't even handle one storm, there's no way you're going to be able to fight natural climate variation.
Already there on use of more efficient and renewable energy - heck, I already bike everywhere instead of drive, and there's very little that's more efficient than that.
Imagine for a moment every thing you use in your house and your work. Every bit of food, every bit of electricity, every bit of material.
Now imagine that for all of that, the only transportation method used was the bicycle.
If it was truly the most efficient thing to do, wouldn't all transportation be by bicycle?
Yet nobody has been able to come up with such a model that does not predict a problem with future warming as a result of CO2 increase.
You're mixing things up there a bit, so let's be clear - there may be models which predict increased warming as a result of human CO2 releases. None of these models predicts that this is a *problem* - that's a subjective and speculative judgement.
Second of all, again, you're not fighting a competing model - you're fighting the null hypothesis that there is not a causal relationship between CO2 levels and temperature levels.
Again, it would be easy to disprove this: just show me a model that can hind cast and that does not predict future warming.
Because of the two-way relationship between temperature and CO2, the models predict that CO2 will lead when warming is initiated by increased release of CO2, and that it will lag when warming is initiated by other factors such as changes in solar radiance or changes in earth's orbit.
How does the CO2 know which one it is? You're asserting a tautology that is unfalsifiable.
For example, we say people get fat because they eat too much. This sounds plausible, but there's a fatal flaw here - we only know that they ate too much because they got fat. It's like having a restaurant fill up with people - it's because more people came in than left. It begs the real question, *why* did more people come in than leave?
Making the assumption that CO2 knows whether or not it was "released" by outgassing of the ocean because of temperature changes moderated by cloud cover, or if it was "released" by someone digging in the ground and burning tar sands is an unsupportable assumption.
Put another way, I'm assuming that you're asserting that humanity is the *first* time we ever "increased release of CO2", and therefore there is no historical record that could demonstrate CO2 leading temps rather than lagging. Is that your position?
Take a look at 2a (to exercise restraining or directing influence over).
If you want to claim that humans have, through their actions, been responsible for greater than 50% of the warming over the past 50 or 100 years or whatever timescale you choose, you are claiming that natural climate change has *not* been in control of that additional warming.
Take one of the models, tweak the the parameters in any physically plausible way that you please, and show that you can come up with a version of the model that is consistent with the known climate record, and which does not predict warming.
Here's the more interesting point - referring to McIntyre again (http://climateaudit.org/2007/12/01/tuning-gcms/) -
"One curious aspect of this result is that it is also well known [Houghton et al., 2001] that the same models that agree in simulating the anomaly in surface air temperature differ significantly in their predicted climate sensitivity."
If you can come up with half a dozen models that reasonably hind cast, and share fairly similar forecasts, but have *wildly* differing base assumptions about climate sensitivity, you've already shown that it is possible to have wildly different models spit out the same tuned results:)
Again, the fatal flaw with these models is that they brook no falsifiability - every observation of future climate can simply be dispensed with by an ad hoc special pleading. This isn't the path of science, this is the path of astrology. Obligatory Popper cite: http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/popper_falsification.html
"As for Adler, I was much impressed by a personal experience. Once, in 1919, I reported to him a case which to me did not seem particularly Adlerian, but which he found no difficulty in analyzing in terms of his theory of inferiority feelings, Although he had not even seen the child. Slightly shocked, I asked him how he could be so sure. "Because of my thousandfold experience," he replied; whereupon I could not help saying: "And with this new case, I suppose, your experience has become thousand-and-one-fold.""
These don't distinguish between "human emitted" and "natural" CO2, because that would be absurd.
A very key point - which makes reconciling the observed ice core record and CO2 lag of temperature difficult to refute. CO2 doesn't care where it came from, so to assume that it will drive temps now when it lagged temps before is a novel conclusion.
And again, there is no doubt about whether there is a correlation between average global temperature and CO2--the unequivocal answer is that there is a correlation and it is statistically significant, so the null hypothesis of no relationship is excluded.
While we have an unequivocal correlation, unfortunately it points *against* the idea of AGW - CO2 *lags* temperature changes by around 400 years in the historical record. The null hypothesis is that there is no causal relationship, remember:)
Now, perhaps if we had a 400 year record, say when we get to 2350, and we could compare a 400 year period of human industrial activity in CO2 and temperature, to a similar 400 year period in the ice core record, you could show something - but at this point, all we have is speculative models that have no observations which would falsify them.
Doubling CO2 will warm the planet 4-5C, more or less. That is a steady state solution based on lab data.
So, as I said, you've got no observations of actually *seeing* that happen. While I'm happy to entertain a hypothesis, and while lab experiments may be fun, extrapolating them out to the real world becomes a bit tricker.
Today's CO2 emissions will contribute to warming world for 100s, if not 1000s of years.
Hand waving. You've got no evidence for that, nor a falsifiable hypothesis statement to defend there.
Another example is putting a pot of water over a fire and proclaiming that the pot will never boil or even warm as it hasn't warmed much in the first minute.
Try this sometime - get a pot of water, and try to heat it with hot air over the top of the water. Pay extra attention to how much heat is necessary to raise the water by 1C:)
I'll refer to the Medieval Warm Period as an example of what kind of environment we might experience if current warming continues through 2100.
Of course, my assumptions about what 2100 will look like are probably much different than what your assumptions are, which is why this is such a sticky wicket. We may both agree in the simplest form of AGW, that there must be *some* positive effect, but until we put actual magnitudes on it, we're both just speculating:)
If my son was Jesus Christ, and I was an all powerful deity, I'd change the universe in a way that didn't require me to put him up on a cross for three days to let him die a slow and painful death. When you've got omnipotence, I raise the bar quite a bit higher.
Now, say my son was Jesus Christ, and I was a powerful deity, but only powerful enough to do stuff like burn bushes, call down with my voice, nuke cities that offended me, and heal the lame and blind. Imagine for a second that some even more powerful deity has set me up with a situation where in order to save billions of people from eternal fire I need to torture and kill my own son. I would hope that I would have the courage to stand up to this more powerful deity, and deny his commands, and refuse to play his game - I don't negotiate with terrorists.
Abraham believed that God could raise Isaac from the grave - it says so in Hebrews 11:19.
Then the moral of the story, that is, absolute loyalty to God, is really undone, isn't it? If Abraham knew it was all just a joke, going through the motions has no moral impact.
The very thing that you are calling EVIL is exactly what man did to Jesus Christ
Let's be clear - putting someone up on a cross and letting him slowly die over three days because he preached without a license *is* evil. Listening to a powerful benefactor who tells you to kill your child is *also* evil. I'm walking a consistent line here.
What was needed was for a human who came in the very same nature as Adam (not God), yet who lived a sinless life.
I don't know about you, but getting angry at money changers seemed like a sin:) I would imagine a sinless person walking in there and calmly explaining that they were being offensive and should leave:)
In any case, regardless of ones' beliefs about salvation springing forth from Jesus, it still doesn't make the willing murder of your own child a moral act. The ends simply do not justify the means.
You can argue that they are somehow built-in, but I tend to think morals are something we learn from our parents and surroundings, as evidenced by the rapid decline in morals in the last 20-50 years.
Actually, I'll argue that they're generally built in except in the case of sociopathic damaged brains, and that they can be overlaid or even overridden by cultural and social influence. Furthermore, I'd argue there's been a rapid incline of morals in the past 20-50 years, where we once thought it was sinful to marry outside of your race, or marry someone of the same sex, we've improved our understanding of morality and despite the human failings we see from time to time, society is on an upward slant.
You need to understand that the Bible was written for one purpose only - to teach US about GOD.
It's an awfully poor God that teaches mortals about himself through a book cobbled together over the years by various authors, with various points of view, in a handful of languages that need to be translated over and over again:) He could've just come down and explained it all to every one of us individually on our 12th birthday if he was all powerful:)
Trying to understand the Bible through the eyes of humanism wont get you very far.
I live in a human world, not a world of immortal deities. If the Bible can't be looked at from a human perspective, then it's not very applicable to human life:)
Bravo! That was the most insightful and interesting defense of Lot I've ever come across!:)
That all being said, Lot loses points for deciding to take up in a neighborhood where marauding gay rape mobs were a typical occurrence - I've always said, if your neighborhood sucks, start walking and don't stop until it stops sucking.:)
So, even with the half-dozen parameters that are left to tune the model to the observed climate, perturbations are not tuned, so they can still be falsified.
With a half-dozen parameters open for tweaking, I can make a model do whatever I want:)
When the observed temperature falls outside the error bars, the model is most likely incorrect.
Okay, so out of the several dozen GCMs that we have, how many of them have observed temperatures fallen outside the error bars, and do you consider them falsified? Taken a step further, how many of them, while hind-casting, disagree with observed temperatures, and do you consider them falsified? Lastly, for those falsified, *what* are you willing to assert is falsified - the entire basis, or simply a fudge factor here or there?
This must apply doubly to denialists, who don't even have a working alternative model.
Again, you're not competing against another model, you're competing against the null hypothesis of no causal relationship between human generated CO2 and average global temperature. Redefining the null hypothesis is an interesting trick, but it's not science.
You first need to understand that CO2 both leads and lags temperature change, with different delays. Higher temperatures can lead to higher CO2, and higher CO2 will lead to higher temperatures. Right now, it is clear that CO2 is leading.
By what criteria do you decide, over any given time period, that CO2 is leading or lagging? You're making an assertion here that isn't explained.
If you can properly explain the glacial cycles without assuming 3C effect on doubling CO2,, for instance.
That makes no sense at all - the null hypothesis is that there is no relationship between any given factor and glacial cycles. Changing the null hypothesis to "double CO2 means +3C" is a clever argument, but not a convincing one.
How about this - make a prediction about what the glacier cover on say, the whole of greenland, will be in 10 years. If you're off by 1% will you consider your hypothesis falsified? 10%? 50%? 100%? Until you're willing to specify *observations* (not simply other models) that will falsify your hypothesis, you're not playing the science game.
1) even if additional CO2 doesn't make much of a difference, I'll assert that any difference it makes is positive (since the same thing could really be said about the most simplistic formulation of AGW - yes, additional CO2 has a positive temp impact, even if it's only.000001C/century);
The "null hypothesis" specifically refers to the hypothesis of no change
No, it means no relationship. The AGW/CAGW hypothesis asserts that there is a causal relationship between human emitted CO2 and global average temperature. The null hypothesis is that there is no such relationship, and that temperature can change independent of the CO2 (i.e., temperature fluctuates by natural mechanisms, and is not tied to human CO2).
As for your flaws, you still have many you haven't overcome. And that is how I refute your refutation;)
Ah, perfection, the ever elusive goal:) Just give me enough time and I'll get to them:)
The promise of that powerful benefactor was enough to know that even if Abraham Kill Isaac, then he would be brought back to life.
Even if I knew that slitting my son's throat and letting him bleed to death would be undone by some powerful benefactor (and even if my son was all cool with it), there is a basic human impulse which makes us recoil from the thought. Call it some pre-programmed genetic morality, or the work of some higher soul, it is there and it exists.
The problem with your explanation though, is that it denies the central premise of the story - loyalty. If Abraham knew that everything was going to be all right, and that his son would be restored, or that God would back out at the last minute, he's not really showing the virtue of loyalty at all - he's just going through the motions. It only becomes a story extolling the virtue of loyalty and faith when Abraham doesn't know for sure what the outcome is - he demonstrates that he is willing to kill his son, and have him be dead forever and ever, which tell us just how loyal he was.
My argument is that loyalty to a powerful benefactor is not a virtue greater than the inherent protective nature we hold for our children, and to make that choice is at best amoral and at worst immoral.
I certainly understand the selfish self interest model for preserving things we like - NIMBY and all that...but I've met many a tree hugging hippie that really does believe that evolutionary processes are responsible for the beauty of nature as we know it today, and simultaneously wants desperately to stop it from continuing on and ruining their alabama tree snake.
Obviously you're not an example of that particular brand of tree hugging hippie, but I assure you they exist:)
Wow, cool reference - although possibly not as airtight as the press release:
“It’s at least plausible that the 3.2 billion year old oil we found did in fact have an abiotic origin.” — Roger Buick, 2008 (Buick was one of the authors of the paper you referenced)
As for adding to the total CO2 in the atmosphere, I'll argue one that it's not really an "outside source" (that would be more like shipping CO2 from the planet Venus), it's part of the terrestrial carbon cycle. Now, the point could be made that somehow we're significantly disrupting the carbon cycle, but given the comparable amount of CO2 processed by say, insects versus the entirety of humanity and all of its activities including farming, I don't see us as being particularly significant.
Second, it seems that rainforests love the CO2 we're dumping:
You can argue as to whether we control it intentionally or unintentionally, but the general warmist trope is that more that 50% of climate change in the past 50-100 years was caused by human activity.
If you don't want me to attack strawmen, why don't you start off with a falsifiable hypothesis of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming you'd like to defend?
So - you don't have a theory as to why the climate is changing in a way that is unexplained by natural change
You're trying to avoid the null hypothesis again - you don't have a falsifiable theory showing that any specific fraction of climate change over the past 50 years is not natural.
If you think the models are wrong you need to create a more accurate model and publish the results.
You keep beating that drum, pretending that in the absence of a competing model, the null hypothesis must be *your* hypothesis. Until you can realize the impotence of that argument, your understanding of the issue isn't going to increase.
Slashdot Mirror
Pretend for a moment you've got in your hands a GCM. You make a prediction for the CO2 and temperature of the globe for 2012, including error bars. Observations go beyond your error bars on either CO2 or temperature. Do you:
A) admit that the basis of your GCM has been falsified and AGW or CAGW is no longer true?
B) come up with an ad hoc special pleading to explain your discrepancy.
Be honest with yourself when you answer.
Again, I'm not making a hypothesis here for you to fight against - that's your own built strawman. I'm stating, very explicitly, that the null hypothesis that must be considered is that there is no causal relationship between CO2 and global average temperature. Tyndall's work does not simply scale up to a global level automatically - the assertion that there is a causal relationship must be held to strict scrutiny, and we start that scientific process by defining our falsifiable hypothesis statement.
Until you are willing to make a clear falsifiable hypothesis statement, and willing to admit its falsification if observations are made which go beyond the bounds of error in any of your specific predictions, you're not doing science.
Unsupportable assertion - expanding water can be a good thing. The assertion that any expansion of water, no matter how minuscule, is a problem is completely unfounded.
Are you listening to yourself? You're putting *your* faith in GCMs in the position of a magic incantation you can intone to exempt it from the requirements of a scientific theory! The null hypothesis is that there is no causal relationship for a given factor - it's not asserting that there are *other* causal relationships that may exist, it's simply asserting that for any given factor, we must begin our assumptions that there is *not* a relationship.
Make a testable prediction for what the CO2 and temperature level will be like next year, and include your error range. Will you admit your hypothesis of AGW or CAGW is false if you fail that prediction, or will you resort to ad hoc special pleadings?
Let's ask this question explicitly then - is the modern industrial era the only period of time that includes the introduction of CO2 from a temperature independent source? If not, can you cite an example in the historical record?
False dichotomy - there are dozens of other factors that could be affecting temperature without resorting to the sun's output on specific wavelengths, or the earth's orbit.
All of humanity dedicating every last bit of production besides bare minimum food and shelter, working for the next thousand years, couldn't deploy a system that would counteract every single change in solar radiation, volcanic activity, or axial tilt of the earth. You're off by orders of magnitude here.
Yes, *weather* is a simpler thing to control than climate, given the range of energies involved. When you can stop a Cat 4 hurricane dead in its tracks in a day, you just might be getting to the technological point where you could hope to control the climate. If you can't even handle one storm, there's no way you're going to be able to fight natural climate variation.
Imagine for a moment every thing you use in your house and your work. Every bit of food, every bit of electricity, every bit of material.
Now imagine that for all of that, the only transportation method used was the bicycle.
If it was truly the most efficient thing to do, wouldn't all transportation be by bicycle?
You're mixing things up there a bit, so let's be clear - there may be models which predict increased warming as a result of human CO2 releases. None of these models predicts that this is a *problem* - that's a subjective and speculative judgement.
Second of all, again, you're not fighting a competing model - you're fighting the null hypothesis that there is not a causal relationship between CO2 levels and temperature levels.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/09/18/trenberths-missing-heat-look-to-the-deep/
Apparently we now predict periods of cooling during warming "hiatus" :)
Again, though, it's not models we're fighting against - it's the null hypothesis of no causal relationship.
How does the CO2 know which one it is? You're asserting a tautology that is unfalsifiable.
For example, we say people get fat because they eat too much. This sounds plausible, but there's a fatal flaw here - we only know that they ate too much because they got fat. It's like having a restaurant fill up with people - it's because more people came in than left. It begs the real question, *why* did more people come in than leave?
Making the assumption that CO2 knows whether or not it was "released" by outgassing of the ocean because of temperature changes moderated by cloud cover, or if it was "released" by someone digging in the ground and burning tar sands is an unsupportable assumption.
Put another way, I'm assuming that you're asserting that humanity is the *first* time we ever "increased release of CO2", and therefore there is no historical record that could demonstrate CO2 leading temps rather than lagging. Is that your position?
So you're now asserting that if we unintentionally control the climate, we're somehow not controlling the climate?
Words have meaning, and I'm not sure if you're clear on what "control" means. Here's some cheerful help:
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/control
Take a look at 2a (to exercise restraining or directing influence over).
If you want to claim that humans have, through their actions, been responsible for greater than 50% of the warming over the past 50 or 100 years or whatever timescale you choose, you are claiming that natural climate change has *not* been in control of that additional warming.
Here's the more interesting point - referring to McIntyre again (http://climateaudit.org/2007/12/01/tuning-gcms/) -
"One curious aspect of this result is that it is also well known [Houghton et al., 2001] that the same models that agree in simulating the anomaly in surface air temperature differ significantly in their predicted climate sensitivity."
If you can come up with half a dozen models that reasonably hind cast, and share fairly similar forecasts, but have *wildly* differing base assumptions about climate sensitivity, you've already shown that it is possible to have wildly different models spit out the same tuned results :)
Again, the fatal flaw with these models is that they brook no falsifiability - every observation of future climate can simply be dispensed with by an ad hoc special pleading. This isn't the path of science, this is the path of astrology. Obligatory Popper cite: http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/popper_falsification.html
"As for Adler, I was much impressed by a personal experience. Once, in 1919, I reported to him a case which to me did not seem particularly Adlerian, but which he found no difficulty in analyzing in terms of his theory of inferiority feelings, Although he had not even seen the child. Slightly shocked, I asked him how he could be so sure. "Because of my thousandfold experience," he replied; whereupon I could not help saying: "And with this new case, I suppose, your experience has become thousand-and-one-fold.""
A very key point - which makes reconciling the observed ice core record and CO2 lag of temperature difficult to refute. CO2 doesn't care where it came from, so to assume that it will drive temps now when it lagged temps before is a novel conclusion.
While we have an unequivocal correlation, unfortunately it points *against* the idea of AGW - CO2 *lags* temperature changes by around 400 years in the historical record. The null hypothesis is that there is no causal relationship, remember :)
Now, perhaps if we had a 400 year record, say when we get to 2350, and we could compare a 400 year period of human industrial activity in CO2 and temperature, to a similar 400 year period in the ice core record, you could show something - but at this point, all we have is speculative models that have no observations which would falsify them.
So, as I said, you've got no observations of actually *seeing* that happen. While I'm happy to entertain a hypothesis, and while lab experiments may be fun, extrapolating them out to the real world becomes a bit tricker.
Hand waving. You've got no evidence for that, nor a falsifiable hypothesis statement to defend there.
Try this sometime - get a pot of water, and try to heat it with hot air over the top of the water. Pay extra attention to how much heat is necessary to raise the water by 1C :)
I'll refer to the Medieval Warm Period as an example of what kind of environment we might experience if current warming continues through 2100.
Of course, my assumptions about what 2100 will look like are probably much different than what your assumptions are, which is why this is such a sticky wicket. We may both agree in the simplest form of AGW, that there must be *some* positive effect, but until we put actual magnitudes on it, we're both just speculating :)
If my son was Jesus Christ, and I was an all powerful deity, I'd change the universe in a way that didn't require me to put him up on a cross for three days to let him die a slow and painful death. When you've got omnipotence, I raise the bar quite a bit higher.
Now, say my son was Jesus Christ, and I was a powerful deity, but only powerful enough to do stuff like burn bushes, call down with my voice, nuke cities that offended me, and heal the lame and blind. Imagine for a second that some even more powerful deity has set me up with a situation where in order to save billions of people from eternal fire I need to torture and kill my own son. I would hope that I would have the courage to stand up to this more powerful deity, and deny his commands, and refuse to play his game - I don't negotiate with terrorists.
Then the moral of the story, that is, absolute loyalty to God, is really undone, isn't it? If Abraham knew it was all just a joke, going through the motions has no moral impact.
Let's be clear - putting someone up on a cross and letting him slowly die over three days because he preached without a license *is* evil. Listening to a powerful benefactor who tells you to kill your child is *also* evil. I'm walking a consistent line here.
I don't know about you, but getting angry at money changers seemed like a sin :) I would imagine a sinless person walking in there and calmly explaining that they were being offensive and should leave :)
In any case, regardless of ones' beliefs about salvation springing forth from Jesus, it still doesn't make the willing murder of your own child a moral act. The ends simply do not justify the means.
Actually, I'll argue that they're generally built in except in the case of sociopathic damaged brains, and that they can be overlaid or even overridden by cultural and social influence. Furthermore, I'd argue there's been a rapid incline of morals in the past 20-50 years, where we once thought it was sinful to marry outside of your race, or marry someone of the same sex, we've improved our understanding of morality and despite the human failings we see from time to time, society is on an upward slant.
It's an awfully poor God that teaches mortals about himself through a book cobbled together over the years by various authors, with various points of view, in a handful of languages that need to be translated over and over again :) He could've just come down and explained it all to every one of us individually on our 12th birthday if he was all powerful :)
I live in a human world, not a world of immortal deities. If the Bible can't be looked at from a human perspective, then it's not very applicable to human life :)
Bravo! That was the most insightful and interesting defense of Lot I've ever come across! :)
That all being said, Lot loses points for deciding to take up in a neighborhood where marauding gay rape mobs were a typical occurrence - I've always said, if your neighborhood sucks, start walking and don't stop until it stops sucking. :)
With a half-dozen parameters open for tweaking, I can make a model do whatever I want :)
http://climateaudit.org/2007/12/01/tuning-gcms/
Okay, so out of the several dozen GCMs that we have, how many of them have observed temperatures fallen outside the error bars, and do you consider them falsified? Taken a step further, how many of them, while hind-casting, disagree with observed temperatures, and do you consider them falsified? Lastly, for those falsified, *what* are you willing to assert is falsified - the entire basis, or simply a fudge factor here or there?
Again, you're not competing against another model, you're competing against the null hypothesis of no causal relationship between human generated CO2 and average global temperature. Redefining the null hypothesis is an interesting trick, but it's not science.
By what criteria do you decide, over any given time period, that CO2 is leading or lagging? You're making an assertion here that isn't explained.
That makes no sense at all - the null hypothesis is that there is no relationship between any given factor and glacial cycles. Changing the null hypothesis to "double CO2 means +3C" is a clever argument, but not a convincing one.
How about this - make a prediction about what the glacier cover on say, the whole of greenland, will be in 10 years. If you're off by 1% will you consider your hypothesis falsified? 10%? 50%? 100%? Until you're willing to specify *observations* (not simply other models) that will falsify your hypothesis, you're not playing the science game.
Two points:
1) even if additional CO2 doesn't make much of a difference, I'll assert that any difference it makes is positive (since the same thing could really be said about the most simplistic formulation of AGW - yes, additional CO2 has a positive temp impact, even if it's only .000001C/century);
2) evidence shows that it does have a big impact: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/09/29/plants-gobbling-up-co2-45-more-than-thought/
No, it means no relationship. The AGW/CAGW hypothesis asserts that there is a causal relationship between human emitted CO2 and global average temperature. The null hypothesis is that there is no such relationship, and that temperature can change independent of the CO2 (i.e., temperature fluctuates by natural mechanisms, and is not tied to human CO2).
Ah, perfection, the ever elusive goal :) Just give me enough time and I'll get to them :)
Even if I knew that slitting my son's throat and letting him bleed to death would be undone by some powerful benefactor (and even if my son was all cool with it), there is a basic human impulse which makes us recoil from the thought. Call it some pre-programmed genetic morality, or the work of some higher soul, it is there and it exists.
The problem with your explanation though, is that it denies the central premise of the story - loyalty. If Abraham knew that everything was going to be all right, and that his son would be restored, or that God would back out at the last minute, he's not really showing the virtue of loyalty at all - he's just going through the motions. It only becomes a story extolling the virtue of loyalty and faith when Abraham doesn't know for sure what the outcome is - he demonstrates that he is willing to kill his son, and have him be dead forever and ever, which tell us just how loyal he was.
My argument is that loyalty to a powerful benefactor is not a virtue greater than the inherent protective nature we hold for our children, and to make that choice is at best amoral and at worst immoral.
I certainly understand the selfish self interest model for preserving things we like - NIMBY and all that...but I've met many a tree hugging hippie that really does believe that evolutionary processes are responsible for the beauty of nature as we know it today, and simultaneously wants desperately to stop it from continuing on and ruining their alabama tree snake.
Obviously you're not an example of that particular brand of tree hugging hippie, but I assure you they exist :)
Wow, cool reference - although possibly not as airtight as the press release:
“It’s at least plausible that the 3.2 billion year old oil we found did in fact have an abiotic origin.” — Roger Buick, 2008 (Buick was one of the authors of the paper you referenced)
As for adding to the total CO2 in the atmosphere, I'll argue one that it's not really an "outside source" (that would be more like shipping CO2 from the planet Venus), it's part of the terrestrial carbon cycle. Now, the point could be made that somehow we're significantly disrupting the carbon cycle, but given the comparable amount of CO2 processed by say, insects versus the entirety of humanity and all of its activities including farming, I don't see us as being particularly significant.
Second, it seems that rainforests love the CO2 we're dumping:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/09/29/plants-gobbling-up-co2-45-more-than-thought/
You can argue as to whether we control it intentionally or unintentionally, but the general warmist trope is that more that 50% of climate change in the past 50-100 years was caused by human activity.
If you don't want me to attack strawmen, why don't you start off with a falsifiable hypothesis of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming you'd like to defend?
You're trying to avoid the null hypothesis again - you don't have a falsifiable theory showing that any specific fraction of climate change over the past 50 years is not natural.
You keep beating that drum, pretending that in the absence of a competing model, the null hypothesis must be *your* hypothesis. Until you can realize the impotence of that argument, your understanding of the issue isn't going to increase.