and what would I need a regex for? to filter something out of a huge list, instead of clicking the icon I put where I want it, in reach of the stuff it operates on?
Regexes do much more than just filtering stuff. You can also use them to do very complex text replacement. For example, when you need to crawl several web pages with common design for table data and dump it into CSV, for loops, regexes and wget are everything you need for the job.
of course, it depends on what you're actually doing with your computer, but I would be hard pressed to think of much I do regularly that wouldn't be slow like ass via the command line.
You'd be surprised.
and are you seriously meaning to imply that for example writing latex or postscript or even HTML is faster, even with auto-completion, than styling something in word with the mouse?
Writing it in Word the first time might be faster, but Word will drive you crazy when you try to restyle it. And Word doesn't allow you to include pregenerated and prestyled content (unless it's a copy-paste from another Word document). When you can generate 100 pages of your document just by running a single script, forget about using Word.
you do have a very, very good point, but you totally lose it with your "clicky filemanager" quip.
I've never said you're not supposed to ever use clicky file managers. There are a few instances where they are the best tool for the job...
a GUI isn't just about clicking, also about graphical meaning, vicinity, all sorts of things. and while you use the mouse, you're still free to use (simple) keyboard shortcuts, too;)
...but the main problem of GUI is that all you have is what the UI designer expected you to need. When you need just a little bit more, you're out of luck and you either have to find a whole new GUI app to do what you need, or you have to spend hours of furious clicking to do what could have been done by a one-liner in 10 seconds. Keyboard shortcuts don't cut it because they don't expand your toolset, they just make the limited set of tools faster to use. The power of command line is in combining simple tools to do difficult jobs. That's the one thing GUI can't do by design.
how would I even go about selecting text with the keyboard on a webpage?
Why do you need to select text in the first place?
in most cases, I can simply use apps without having to learn fuck all. they simply work as expected.
And that's the problem. People who try to do complicated stuff without learning even the complete basics always mess the job up horribly. They don't know how to do it right because they don't even know there IS a right way to do it.
the screen I am looking at now has LOTS of text and LOTS of input fields. a CLI is just a stripped down version of that.
Sorry to pop your bubble, but the number of input fields says nothing about how efficient something is. In GUI, you're stuck with what the designer gave you. In CLI, you're not.
Did the zip folder contain any files with the same name as files that were in the folder? When prompted for overwrite I presume you click no.
Bash solution:
1) unpack the zip file in a clean directory tmpdir
2) cd tmpdir; for f in *; do rm../$f; done
Oops. You just trashed any original files with conflicting names.
Big deal, just throw in if ! cmp -s $f../$f; then... in step 2. Unzip does ask before overwriting files unless it's run with -o. So the only files from the original directory you will trash are those that you still have in the archive. And if you really want perfection, nothing keeps you from pulling the list of files to delete by sorting them by creation date. It's about as fast in shell as it is in GUI. Modification date is useless because it's kept from the archive.
In the GUI, you set it to a thumbnail view, scroll down until you see camping pics, click the first, control click the last one, ah but you went to a car show in the middle of the trip, she won't want those, so you control click around that batch, and then individually... control click out a few bad shots, along with the candid shot you grabbed of your wife sunbathing, and take the jumbled highlighted set, right click, send to DVD, the burn data disc window pops up, and your done.
What's the bash solution?
Launch GUI image manager and use the right tool for the job. Unless you have the pictures tagged beforehand. In that case, you simply pull the list of files with the right set of tags and hand them over to the burning tool.
For some things the commandline is faster, but if you sit at the prompt and are wondering if there is a command to do X, there is no reliable way to discover it.
apropos X. It's not perfect, but it does the job most of the time.
I work on a helpdesk so I have to know Office and help people with it, Office 2007 is significantly easier to use from the point of view of a computer illiterate than Office 2003 by my observations.
That's true, but isn't that the biggest problem? Dumbing computers down to accomodate computer illiterates at all costs does more harm than good because it creates the notion that the illiterates already know everything they need to know and don't need to learn anything new.
Now let's take that challenge just one step further and add Bash (or some other popular UNIX shell). Force yourself to use it until you know filename/command substitutions like the back of your hand and eat regexps and loops for breakfast. Then try going back to whatever clicky file manager you like most. Personaly I believe almost everyone who bitches about command line being arcane and obsolete won't believe how they could live without it.
In Czech republic, you'll mostly hear people putting orders like this (translated from Czech):
For beer: A small beer/a third of beer (both 0.30L), a beer (0.5L), a double (1L, the actual Czech noun "tuplák" is only used when referring to beer or the glass, the generic adjective meaning "double" is "dvojitý"). The glass for 0.5L beer is literally called "half-liter".
For wine: two deci (0.2L). Other sizes are usually given in "deci" (short for deciliter).
Liquor in general: shot (0.05L), small shot (0.02L)
I'm pretty certain that Windows 9 won't support any of my current hardware as 3 of my 4 machines are already too old to run Windows 7 and the remaining one can run it just barely. On the other hand, I'm even more certain that Linux 3.4 will run all of my hardware because my oldest machine was made before Linux 2.2 was released and it's still working fine running Linux 3.0. There's actually much higher chance that all of my hardware will die before Linux 3.4 comes out than that Linux developers will drop driver support for any of it by then.
Not only that, the US copyright law specifically states what kind of work can be a work for hire. There are 9 items on the list and stand-alone music recordings are not among them. So it doesn't matter how many times the recording contract says it's a work for hire (yes, they all do anyway), the law says it's not. Period.
Well, what do you call forcing the user to always work with administrator privileges because Microsoft didn't have balls to stand up to idiot developers 10 years ago? I call it throwing the whole security infrastructure out of the window.
No, Apple just sucks a little less than Microsoft because they had enough sense to build OSX on a Unix base. But that alone isn't enough to make me a Mac/iWhatever user.
Exploitable bugs are one thing. Building complete security infrastructure and then basically throwing it out the window and building another much weaker and completely superfluous one on top of it is quite another.
Let's see... The NT family of Windows has full security infrastructure based on user accounts and access privileges. However, that security infrastructure was completely turned off by default when Microsoft decided to merge the WinDOS family into Windows XP so that you could run legacy WinDOS software and software written by idiots without any additional setup. And now, starting with Vista, we've got yet another security infrustructure built on top of the first one which is supposed to emulate access restrictions inside otherwise unrestricted administrator account. Does that sound like a sane security design to you?
Actually, the last time Ubuntu was in Pwn2Own (2008), it was the only system that didn't get pwned. Oh, and see those Androids listed under Mobile Phones? That's Linux too. (Cue flame about Android not being Linux...)
"Mostly fixed"? Excuse me, but which company just recently made a big ugly hack to at least partially patch the huge security hole caused by stupidity of third-party software vendors whose software without any good reason requires administrator privileges to run?
I call BS. Your cited graph claims a forecast from 2000, but IPCC AR4 was from 2007. And did you note the huge error bars?
Tell me, what's the difference between hindcast and forecast when you run a computer simulation?
Huge error bars? I see 0.2 degrees in either direction up to 2000 and then it slowly fans out to 0.4 degrees in 2011. If there was just 0.4 degree cooling since 2000, it'd still drop out of the confidence interval.
My only response is that when you click through to clivebest.com, figure 1 doesn't look so impressive. BTW, what exactly was I supposed to see on the picture? Put the meaning of that graph into more specific terms.
Orbital mechanics are orders of magnitude simpler than weather and climate predictions. Newtonian Gravity is only 43 arcseconds off *per century* for predicting the orbit of Mercury, for example. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton's_law_of_universal_gravitation#Problems_with_Newton.27s_theory)
So? It's still just a model, a "toy" as you say. And what about electronics?
Perhaps you can suggest what useful information I can get if I knew that next year the global average temperature would be.01C greater than this year.
For instance, it might tell you which crop you want to sow next year if you're a farmer. If you can get a more localized prediction from the model, even better.
I'm not even sure what you're trying to say - you can keep anthropogenic CO2 in the models...heck, your models shouldn't even *care* where the CO2 came from (a human emitted molecule of CO2 doesn't have different spectral properties than a naturally emitted CO2 molecule).
Models don't care where CO2 came from, they only care about how much of it is in the atmosphere. And by "scratching anthropogenic CO2 out of the equation" I mean artificially setting CO2 variable to preindustrial levels. If what you claim is true, the correct model should show no difference in simulating current climate with preindustrial levels of CO2 and with actual historic levels. Current models show 2C temperature difference between those two runs with all other inputs exactly the same.
Furthermore, the models only show correlation, not causality, so no matter what the accuracy of a model, it cannot prove that CO2 drives temperature, rather than temperature drives CO2.
Wrong. Models don't show just correlation because unlike climate observations, we can run them as many times as we want with whatever inputs we want. If you fix all the parameters but one and then run the simulation several times for different values of that single parameter, differences in results are directly caused by changes of that single parameter.
Running a model is not the same as running an experiment. Run your model, then compare it to observations. Then, you've got two choices when you find discrepancies -> find an ad hoc special pleading, or revisit your premises.
What special pleading? Something like "our simulation mispredicted some inputs so the forecast results are off, but when we feed it the actual inputs, its hindcast is accurate"? I don't see any special pleading in that. If the inputs are garbage, there's no surprise that the results will be garbage too. And we still can't predict some climate inputs.
No it doesn't. Why can't the sun warm the poles more than the tropics due to cloud formation and albedo differences? You're making an assertion without substance there.
Because one square meter of ground at the Equator receives on average 3 times as much energy from Sun as one square meter of ground at 70 degrees latitude. Not to mention that ice and snow has much higher albedo than vegetation or bare land. If you wanted to level the field on albedo, you'd have to cover all of tropical land surface by clouds from dusk till dawn all year long.
The problem is that the shotgun approach of asserting, say, three dozen models, and then having actual measurements that have significant discrepancies with 75% of them, doesn't really say much. If your model isn't making predictions of any utility, and furthermore, cannot separate correlation from causality.
Not a single AGW model predicted the previous decade of lack of warming, and not a single AGW model can accurately hindcast all previous decades of climate.
Really? I'd say that IPCC AR4 did pretty well predicting the past decade.
Let's say I have a hypothesis that says that global climate change is caused by software piracy, and the predictions of that model I build show a strong correlation to our observed temperatures, within a huge range of error that I build into my model. Does my hypothesis hold? Sure, in the strictest sense of the word. Is my hypothesis really all that useful? Absolutely not.
The sad part, of course, is that so many people do see models as more than what they really are - they assume that these models represent evidence, when in reality, they're simply toys. Especially when you design them to withstand direct refutation by opening their error bars so wide that nearly *any* possible outcome is covered.
You're forgetting that range of error is the measure of how accurate your model is. If you can come up with a climate model which has much tighter confidence intervals than current AGW models but with real measurements still fitting in, you might win the Nobel Prize.
And another thing you're forgetting, one of those "toys" helped put man on the Moon and space probes in orbit of various planets in our solar system, hundreds of millions of kilometers away. Another one of those "toys" made it possible to build most of modern electronics, including the computer you're using right now. Those too are just inaccurate models. But they're accurate enough to be useful.
You're offering a false dichotomy. By constraining your imagination to only those factors in climate models, you prejudge the question (and frankly, you can tweak the model however you want, say by hard coding unjustified feedback from CO2 to H2O). The opposite of "Anthropogenic CO2 is primarily responsible for observed recent warming" is not "The Sun is primarily responsible for observed recent warming", it's "natural forces are primarily responsible for observed recent warming".
Who said anything about constraining imagination? For what it's worth, you're free to add any factor you want or a combination of factors as long as you can provide mathematical description of its effect and accurate measurements of the factor in action, including the number of active sea pirates.
But the thing is, if you scratch anthropogenic CO2 from the model and stick with just natural levels of CO2, whatever changes you do to the equations, you'll always be left with a gaping hole in the shape of anthropogenic CO2. No matter how much you try to make the model fit the past records, it won't be able to recreate or predict new events as well as AGW models do.
You cannot say "I assert human CO2 is responsible. To refute me, you must prove that something else is specifically responsible, otherwise, I win by default." The null hypothesis cannot be so cleverly avoided. Your placement of human CO2 on the pedestal of supernatural primacy that must be disproved, rather than in its proper place as a hypothesis that must compete against the primacy of natural climate change, is unjustifiable.
I don't. I'm saying that right now, we have a pile of evidence as high as Empire State Building which points at anthropogenic CO2 as the main culprit as opposed to purely natural forces. A non-trivial part of this evidence are experiments which go along the lines of "what would the climate look like if we left anthropogenic CO2 out of the equation". And vast majority of those experiments come to the conclusion that it'd be completely different from what it looks like in reality.
Furthermore, why would you assert that we'd have higher warming in tropical regions if the sun was driving warming? The transfer of heat throughout the globe seems to have more to do with ocean currents - http://www.sciencemag.org/content/332/6033/1076.abstract
Ummm... because that's where the the most heat enters our atmosphere and where those ocean currents take heat from? If you don't pump more heat into ocean currents in tropical regions, where do they take the extra heat that they're supposed to deliver into polar regions?
That all being said, given the prediction of the CO2 hotspot, would you accept that the lack of such a hotspot represents a solid refutation of your hypothesis? http://sciencespeak.com/MissingSignature.pdf
I have a question for you: where did the purple region above 16km in the "no hotspot" picture come from? The patterns on page 8 list it under "an increase in non-water-vapor greenhouse gases" and there's no other cause of such cold pattern anywhere else in the list. As for the hotspot itself, the measurements are within confidence intervals of IPCC models (link taken from your article).
If you don't accept that as a solid refutation, are you willing to make other specific predictions about what kinds of patterns we could observe that would prove your hypothesis incorrect? I'm assuming you would have a longer list than "if the tropics warm more than the poles" - that seems like a pretty broad inclusionary criteria that doesn't logically lead to human CO2 based warming exclusively (especially if we could observe similar warming patterns before h
Pick any major factor in the climate model and ask the question what would be evidence that this particular factor is responsible for warming instead of CO2? Let's take for example solar forcing (more heat coming from the sun). If sun was responsible, we'd see much higher warming in tropical regions than in polar regions. If CO2 was responsible, we'd see the exact opposite. Now head to nasa.gov and see for yourself which of these two factors is responsible.
BTW, supernatural forces are not an acceptable scientific explanation for anything. If you can't show that it exists, it doesn't.
The argument doesn't backfire on semantics, it backfires on rationale. If any observation, over any time period, can be explained way with an ad hoc special pleading (energy inputs dropped, aerosols increased, undersea volcanic activity stalled, etc, etc, etc), then your hypothesis is not a very useful one.
This is where you're completely wrong. There isn't a single magic silver-bullet factor that beats all the others. The AGW model takes into account dozens of factors. Many of those factors may have significant impact on the result. The hypothesis holds as long as there's no significant discrepancy between results of the model and actual measurements. When you get a decade of cooling and the AGW model says that there's supposed to be a decade of cooling, there's nothing interesting to report.
I think that part of the problem here is that you think you're talking to scientific illiterates. If you can step back for a moment, and imagine that you just may be talking to someone who is very scientifically literate, and probably more educated and perhaps even more expert than you (say, Lindzen), then maybe you can start concentrating more on the problems you're having with rationale.
You've already proven elsewhere in the discussion that you have no idea what "statistically significant" means so excuse me if I don't take your word for it.
Well, they can't know for sure. You can't say an unknown factor will only have a minor effect...
Yes, they can't know for sure, but there's also no indication that they're wrong.
Makes sense if we consider some things:
- climate change up until now has been small. So we're "in the linear zone"
- some other effects may exist, especially if they kick in with a higher difference temperature (of course we know somethings from past ice ages, etc)
For example, we don't consider effects like ice thawing and reducing pressure over volcanic terrain. We can't quantify that.
Effects from smog, increased plant/algae consumption of CO2 because of higher concentrations, etc
Most things are only discovered when they happen effectively. Note: I'm not against reducing CO2 emissions, on the contrary.
We may not know the effect of these factors but it doesn't matter. We have pretty good picture what would have to happen for these factors to become important. And that won't happen for a long time.
As for plant CO2 consumption, experiments have shown that plants can consume higher amounts of CO2 only for a short period of time. After that, the rate drops a lot, even below the original level.
The point is that you're talking to scientific illiterates who'll try anything to prove that this particular field of science is one big conspiracy. If you don't word your arguments very carefully and pay attention to technical correctness, your argument might backfire on semantics.
Slashdot Mirror
and what would I need a regex for? to filter something out of a huge list, instead of clicking the icon I put where I want it, in reach of the stuff it operates on?
Regexes do much more than just filtering stuff. You can also use them to do very complex text replacement. For example, when you need to crawl several web pages with common design for table data and dump it into CSV, for loops, regexes and wget are everything you need for the job.
of course, it depends on what you're actually doing with your computer, but I would be hard pressed to think of much I do regularly that wouldn't be slow like ass via the command line.
You'd be surprised.
and are you seriously meaning to imply that for example writing latex or postscript or even HTML is faster, even with auto-completion, than styling something in word with the mouse?
Writing it in Word the first time might be faster, but Word will drive you crazy when you try to restyle it. And Word doesn't allow you to include pregenerated and prestyled content (unless it's a copy-paste from another Word document). When you can generate 100 pages of your document just by running a single script, forget about using Word.
you do have a very, very good point, but you totally lose it with your "clicky filemanager" quip.
I've never said you're not supposed to ever use clicky file managers. There are a few instances where they are the best tool for the job...
a GUI isn't just about clicking, also about graphical meaning, vicinity, all sorts of things. and while you use the mouse, you're still free to use (simple) keyboard shortcuts, too ;)
...but the main problem of GUI is that all you have is what the UI designer expected you to need. When you need just a little bit more, you're out of luck and you either have to find a whole new GUI app to do what you need, or you have to spend hours of furious clicking to do what could have been done by a one-liner in 10 seconds. Keyboard shortcuts don't cut it because they don't expand your toolset, they just make the limited set of tools faster to use. The power of command line is in combining simple tools to do difficult jobs. That's the one thing GUI can't do by design.
how would I even go about selecting text with the keyboard on a webpage?
Why do you need to select text in the first place?
in most cases, I can simply use apps without having to learn fuck all. they simply work as expected.
And that's the problem. People who try to do complicated stuff without learning even the complete basics always mess the job up horribly. They don't know how to do it right because they don't even know there IS a right way to do it.
the screen I am looking at now has LOTS of text and LOTS of input fields. a CLI is just a stripped down version of that.
Sorry to pop your bubble, but the number of input fields says nothing about how efficient something is. In GUI, you're stuck with what the designer gave you. In CLI, you're not.
You're missing the point: The lack of incentives for computer illiterates to learn.
Did the zip folder contain any files with the same name as files that were in the folder? When prompted for overwrite I presume you click no.
Bash solution:
1) unpack the zip file in a clean directory tmpdir 2) cd tmpdir; for f in *; do rm ../$f; done
Oops. You just trashed any original files with conflicting names.
Big deal, just throw in if ! cmp -s $f ../$f; then ... in step 2. Unzip does ask before overwriting files unless it's run with -o. So the only files from the original directory you will trash are those that you still have in the archive. And if you really want perfection, nothing keeps you from pulling the list of files to delete by sorting them by creation date. It's about as fast in shell as it is in GUI. Modification date is useless because it's kept from the archive.
In the GUI, you set it to a thumbnail view, scroll down until you see camping pics, click the first, control click the last one, ah but you went to a car show in the middle of the trip, she won't want those, so you control click around that batch, and then individually... control click out a few bad shots, along with the candid shot you grabbed of your wife sunbathing, and take the jumbled highlighted set, right click, send to DVD, the burn data disc window pops up, and your done.
What's the bash solution?
Launch GUI image manager and use the right tool for the job. Unless you have the pictures tagged beforehand. In that case, you simply pull the list of files with the right set of tags and hand them over to the burning tool.
For some things the commandline is faster, but if you sit at the prompt and are wondering if there is a command to do X, there is no reliable way to discover it.
apropos X. It's not perfect, but it does the job most of the time.
I work on a helpdesk so I have to know Office and help people with it, Office 2007 is significantly easier to use from the point of view of a computer illiterate than Office 2003 by my observations.
That's true, but isn't that the biggest problem? Dumbing computers down to accomodate computer illiterates at all costs does more harm than good because it creates the notion that the illiterates already know everything they need to know and don't need to learn anything new.
Now let's take that challenge just one step further and add Bash (or some other popular UNIX shell). Force yourself to use it until you know filename/command substitutions like the back of your hand and eat regexps and loops for breakfast. Then try going back to whatever clicky file manager you like most. Personaly I believe almost everyone who bitches about command line being arcane and obsolete won't believe how they could live without it.
Celsius just takes two arbitrary points for water and divides by 100.
Fahrenheit did pretty much the same thing. But you can measure everything in Kelvins if you want to.
In Czech republic, you'll mostly hear people putting orders like this (translated from Czech):
I'm pretty certain that Windows 9 won't support any of my current hardware as 3 of my 4 machines are already too old to run Windows 7 and the remaining one can run it just barely. On the other hand, I'm even more certain that Linux 3.4 will run all of my hardware because my oldest machine was made before Linux 2.2 was released and it's still working fine running Linux 3.0. There's actually much higher chance that all of my hardware will die before Linux 3.4 comes out than that Linux developers will drop driver support for any of it by then.
Not only that, the US copyright law specifically states what kind of work can be a work for hire. There are 9 items on the list and stand-alone music recordings are not among them. So it doesn't matter how many times the recording contract says it's a work for hire (yes, they all do anyway), the law says it's not. Period.
Mod parent up. The major labels tried to push music recordings on the list in the late 90s as a "spelling correction" but it didn't work out in the end because the public found out and it caused a huge uproar among artists.
Well, what do you call forcing the user to always work with administrator privileges because Microsoft didn't have balls to stand up to idiot developers 10 years ago? I call it throwing the whole security infrastructure out of the window.
No, Apple just sucks a little less than Microsoft because they had enough sense to build OSX on a Unix base. But that alone isn't enough to make me a Mac/iWhatever user.
Exploitable bugs are one thing. Building complete security infrastructure and then basically throwing it out the window and building another much weaker and completely superfluous one on top of it is quite another.
Let's see... The NT family of Windows has full security infrastructure based on user accounts and access privileges. However, that security infrastructure was completely turned off by default when Microsoft decided to merge the WinDOS family into Windows XP so that you could run legacy WinDOS software and software written by idiots without any additional setup. And now, starting with Vista, we've got yet another security infrustructure built on top of the first one which is supposed to emulate access restrictions inside otherwise unrestricted administrator account. Does that sound like a sane security design to you?
Actually, the last time Ubuntu was in Pwn2Own (2008), it was the only system that didn't get pwned. Oh, and see those Androids listed under Mobile Phones? That's Linux too. (Cue flame about Android not being Linux...)
"Mostly fixed"? Excuse me, but which company just recently made a big ugly hack to at least partially patch the huge security hole caused by stupidity of third-party software vendors whose software without any good reason requires administrator privileges to run?
I call BS. Your cited graph claims a forecast from 2000, but IPCC AR4 was from 2007. And did you note the huge error bars?
Tell me, what's the difference between hindcast and forecast when you run a computer simulation?
Huge error bars? I see 0.2 degrees in either direction up to 2000 and then it slowly fans out to 0.4 degrees in 2011. If there was just 0.4 degree cooling since 2000, it'd still drop out of the confidence interval.
Let's hear your response to this: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/06/09/comparing-ipcc-1990-predictions-with-2011-data/
My only response is that when you click through to clivebest.com, figure 1 doesn't look so impressive. BTW, what exactly was I supposed to see on the picture? Put the meaning of that graph into more specific terms.
Orbital mechanics are orders of magnitude simpler than weather and climate predictions. Newtonian Gravity is only 43 arcseconds off *per century* for predicting the orbit of Mercury, for example. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton's_law_of_universal_gravitation#Problems_with_Newton.27s_theory)
So? It's still just a model, a "toy" as you say. And what about electronics?
Perhaps you can suggest what useful information I can get if I knew that next year the global average temperature would be .01C greater than this year.
For instance, it might tell you which crop you want to sow next year if you're a farmer. If you can get a more localized prediction from the model, even better.
I'm not even sure what you're trying to say - you can keep anthropogenic CO2 in the models...heck, your models shouldn't even *care* where the CO2 came from (a human emitted molecule of CO2 doesn't have different spectral properties than a naturally emitted CO2 molecule).
Models don't care where CO2 came from, they only care about how much of it is in the atmosphere. And by "scratching anthropogenic CO2 out of the equation" I mean artificially setting CO2 variable to preindustrial levels. If what you claim is true, the correct model should show no difference in simulating current climate with preindustrial levels of CO2 and with actual historic levels. Current models show 2C temperature difference between those two runs with all other inputs exactly the same.
Furthermore, the models only show correlation, not causality, so no matter what the accuracy of a model, it cannot prove that CO2 drives temperature, rather than temperature drives CO2.
Wrong. Models don't show just correlation because unlike climate observations, we can run them as many times as we want with whatever inputs we want. If you fix all the parameters but one and then run the simulation several times for different values of that single parameter, differences in results are directly caused by changes of that single parameter.
Running a model is not the same as running an experiment. Run your model, then compare it to observations. Then, you've got two choices when you find discrepancies -> find an ad hoc special pleading, or revisit your premises.
What special pleading? Something like "our simulation mispredicted some inputs so the forecast results are off, but when we feed it the actual inputs, its hindcast is accurate"? I don't see any special pleading in that. If the inputs are garbage, there's no surprise that the results will be garbage too. And we still can't predict some climate inputs.
No it doesn't. Why can't the sun warm the poles more than the tropics due to cloud formation and albedo differences? You're making an assertion without substance there.
Because one square meter of ground at the Equator receives on average 3 times as much energy from Sun as one square meter of ground at 70 degrees latitude. Not to mention that ice and snow has much higher albedo than vegetation or bare land. If you wanted to level the field on albedo, you'd have to cover all of tropical land surface by clouds from dusk till dawn all year long.
The problem is that the shotgun approach of asserting, say, three dozen models, and then having actual measurements that have significant discrepancies with 75% of them, doesn't really say much. If your model isn't making predictions of any utility, and furthermore, cannot separate correlation from causality.
Not a single AGW model predicted the previous decade of lack of warming, and not a single AGW model can accurately hindcast all previous decades of climate.
Really? I'd say that IPCC AR4 did pretty well predicting the past decade.
Let's say I have a hypothesis that says that global climate change is caused by software piracy, and the predictions of that model I build show a strong correlation to our observed temperatures, within a huge range of error that I build into my model. Does my hypothesis hold? Sure, in the strictest sense of the word. Is my hypothesis really all that useful? Absolutely not.
The sad part, of course, is that so many people do see models as more than what they really are - they assume that these models represent evidence, when in reality, they're simply toys. Especially when you design them to withstand direct refutation by opening their error bars so wide that nearly *any* possible outcome is covered.
You're forgetting that range of error is the measure of how accurate your model is. If you can come up with a climate model which has much tighter confidence intervals than current AGW models but with real measurements still fitting in, you might win the Nobel Prize.
And another thing you're forgetting, one of those "toys" helped put man on the Moon and space probes in orbit of various planets in our solar system, hundreds of millions of kilometers away. Another one of those "toys" made it possible to build most of modern electronics, including the computer you're using right now. Those too are just inaccurate models. But they're accurate enough to be useful.
You're offering a false dichotomy. By constraining your imagination to only those factors in climate models, you prejudge the question (and frankly, you can tweak the model however you want, say by hard coding unjustified feedback from CO2 to H2O). The opposite of "Anthropogenic CO2 is primarily responsible for observed recent warming" is not "The Sun is primarily responsible for observed recent warming", it's "natural forces are primarily responsible for observed recent warming".
Who said anything about constraining imagination? For what it's worth, you're free to add any factor you want or a combination of factors as long as you can provide mathematical description of its effect and accurate measurements of the factor in action, including the number of active sea pirates.
But the thing is, if you scratch anthropogenic CO2 from the model and stick with just natural levels of CO2, whatever changes you do to the equations, you'll always be left with a gaping hole in the shape of anthropogenic CO2. No matter how much you try to make the model fit the past records, it won't be able to recreate or predict new events as well as AGW models do.
You cannot say "I assert human CO2 is responsible. To refute me, you must prove that something else is specifically responsible, otherwise, I win by default." The null hypothesis cannot be so cleverly avoided. Your placement of human CO2 on the pedestal of supernatural primacy that must be disproved, rather than in its proper place as a hypothesis that must compete against the primacy of natural climate change, is unjustifiable.
I don't. I'm saying that right now, we have a pile of evidence as high as Empire State Building which points at anthropogenic CO2 as the main culprit as opposed to purely natural forces. A non-trivial part of this evidence are experiments which go along the lines of "what would the climate look like if we left anthropogenic CO2 out of the equation". And vast majority of those experiments come to the conclusion that it'd be completely different from what it looks like in reality.
Furthermore, why would you assert that we'd have higher warming in tropical regions if the sun was driving warming? The transfer of heat throughout the globe seems to have more to do with ocean currents - http://www.sciencemag.org/content/332/6033/1076.abstract
Ummm... because that's where the the most heat enters our atmosphere and where those ocean currents take heat from? If you don't pump more heat into ocean currents in tropical regions, where do they take the extra heat that they're supposed to deliver into polar regions?
That all being said, given the prediction of the CO2 hotspot, would you accept that the lack of such a hotspot represents a solid refutation of your hypothesis? http://sciencespeak.com/MissingSignature.pdf
I have a question for you: where did the purple region above 16km in the "no hotspot" picture come from? The patterns on page 8 list it under "an increase in non-water-vapor greenhouse gases" and there's no other cause of such cold pattern anywhere else in the list. As for the hotspot itself, the measurements are within confidence intervals of IPCC models (link taken from your article).
If you don't accept that as a solid refutation, are you willing to make other specific predictions about what kinds of patterns we could observe that would prove your hypothesis incorrect? I'm assuming you would have a longer list than "if the tropics warm more than the poles" - that seems like a pretty broad inclusionary criteria that doesn't logically lead to human CO2 based warming exclusively (especially if we could observe similar warming patterns before h
Pick any major factor in the climate model and ask the question what would be evidence that this particular factor is responsible for warming instead of CO2? Let's take for example solar forcing (more heat coming from the sun). If sun was responsible, we'd see much higher warming in tropical regions than in polar regions. If CO2 was responsible, we'd see the exact opposite. Now head to nasa.gov and see for yourself which of these two factors is responsible.
BTW, supernatural forces are not an acceptable scientific explanation for anything. If you can't show that it exists, it doesn't.
The argument doesn't backfire on semantics, it backfires on rationale. If any observation, over any time period, can be explained way with an ad hoc special pleading (energy inputs dropped, aerosols increased, undersea volcanic activity stalled, etc, etc, etc), then your hypothesis is not a very useful one.
This is where you're completely wrong. There isn't a single magic silver-bullet factor that beats all the others. The AGW model takes into account dozens of factors. Many of those factors may have significant impact on the result. The hypothesis holds as long as there's no significant discrepancy between results of the model and actual measurements. When you get a decade of cooling and the AGW model says that there's supposed to be a decade of cooling, there's nothing interesting to report.
I think that part of the problem here is that you think you're talking to scientific illiterates. If you can step back for a moment, and imagine that you just may be talking to someone who is very scientifically literate, and probably more educated and perhaps even more expert than you (say, Lindzen), then maybe you can start concentrating more on the problems you're having with rationale.
You've already proven elsewhere in the discussion that you have no idea what "statistically significant" means so excuse me if I don't take your word for it.
Well, they can't know for sure. You can't say an unknown factor will only have a minor effect...
Yes, they can't know for sure, but there's also no indication that they're wrong.
Makes sense if we consider some things: - climate change up until now has been small. So we're "in the linear zone" - some other effects may exist, especially if they kick in with a higher difference temperature (of course we know somethings from past ice ages, etc)
For example, we don't consider effects like ice thawing and reducing pressure over volcanic terrain. We can't quantify that. Effects from smog, increased plant/algae consumption of CO2 because of higher concentrations, etc
Most things are only discovered when they happen effectively. Note: I'm not against reducing CO2 emissions, on the contrary.
We may not know the effect of these factors but it doesn't matter. We have pretty good picture what would have to happen for these factors to become important. And that won't happen for a long time.
As for plant CO2 consumption, experiments have shown that plants can consume higher amounts of CO2 only for a short period of time. After that, the rate drops a lot, even below the original level.
The point is that you're talking to scientific illiterates who'll try anything to prove that this particular field of science is one big conspiracy. If you don't word your arguments very carefully and pay attention to technical correctness, your argument might backfire on semantics.