"No doubt, instances of cherry-picked and poorly-worded “gotcha” phrases will be pulled out of context. One example is worth mentioning quickly. Phil Jones in discussing the presentation of temperature reconstructions stated that “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.” The paper in question is the Mann, Bradley and Hughes (1998) Nature paper on the original multiproxy temperature reconstruction, and the ‘trick’ is just to plot the instrumental records along with reconstruction so that the context of the recent warming is clear. Scientists often use the term “trick” to refer to a “a good way to deal with a problem”, rather than something that is “secret”, and so there is nothing problematic in this at all. As for the ‘decline’, it is well known that Keith Briffa’s maximum latewood tree ring density proxy diverges from the temperature records after 1960 (this is more commonly known as the “divergence problem”–see e.g. the recent discussion in this paper) and has been discussed in the literature since Briffa et al in Nature in 1998 (Nature, 391, 678-682). Those authors have always recommend not using the post 1960 part of their reconstruction, and so while ‘hiding’ is probably a poor choice of words (since it is ‘hidden’ in plain sight), not using the data in the plot is completely appropriate, as is further research to understand why this happens."
Now, who drank what kool-aid and isn't facing which inconvenient facts?
Well, that's just wrong. You see a slight decrease if you draw a line from 1998 to 2008 because 1998 was the hottest year on record. Of course, to get this "cooling trend" you have to ignore all the data from before 1998 and all the data from 1999-2007 and 2009. Now who's being selective in the data they're using and drawing specious conclusions?
Also chaos theory applies to weather not climate. It's much like individual choice and economics.
Yes, if providing the data increases your liability for being investigated/sued. There's an awful lot of money and prejudice riding on the status quo. Those people will do nasty things to protect their monetary interests.
At least one of the climatologists was sued (the case was dismissed because the suit was groundless) because he released his data. That's not going to encourage others to share, now is it?
The point, I think is that they, they creationists, the flat earthers, the anti-vaccination groups, the moon landing conspiracy theorists, the alternative medicine crowd, the parapsychologists, and really anyone with a feeling of being persecuted just because they can't prove that anything they claim is true, is going to be trying to use this to undermine the rationalist and materialist foundations of science.
Given the anti-intellectual bias in much of popular culture, I'm not sure it will have much effect. It's going to be used to reinforce the faithful against facts and logic, but it may also be successfully used to recruit more people into the various cults of fantasy.
One of the biggest fudgings of the data was the removal of an inconvenient half millennium period that was up to 10 degrees warmer than the mean average.
That's crazy talk. Could you at least pretend you're not insane?
You might want to sing the praises of the Windows registry for the discussion on an issue that isn't caused by the registry. Now is not really the time or the place to try to convince people that a system that borks your computer because of a formatting error in a value string is a great idea.
"Easy to corrupt", "difficult to recover", and "doesn't scale well" are each a pretty good reason to dislike it. The current problem doesn't give me any confidence that the system is actually any better now.
I suspect that a decentralized power structure wouldn't be stable over time when attached to a monotheistic religion. I think that inevitably that organization would either migrate to an autarchal system, or splinter into multiple smaller autarchal systems.
The reason I think this is that if the ideal religion has a single being leading it, then it follows naturally that the expression of the religion in the real world should follow the example set by the religion.
Embracing the precepts of a religion has to have a certain effect on how its disciples expect the world to work. Monotheistic religions lend themselves to certain simplistic points of view. In particular, I think they implicitly encourage the view that there is a single right answer to every problem (WWJD). Now, if there is always a single right answer, then there is little need for collaborative leadership. The religion merely needs the best (most moral, pious, or whatever) person to decide what the right course of action is, and everyone else should do that simply because it's the right thing to do.
In the long run it seems inevitable that monotheistic religions will become autarchal systems which are easily corrupted from within.
Many people would say some organizational structures are better able to resist corruption than others. It's been my perception that (monotheistic) religion is particular vulnerable to corruption since it's trivially easy for the organization to be corrupted from the top down. In most cases the leader is expected to be the holiest of people and thus even questioning the leader can easily be cast as lack of faith in the entire religion.
Even if everything can be corrupted, but it might useful to look at how easily corrupted different organizational structures are.
Of course, if the U.S. Government were to fail to break Microsoft up again, then Microsoft might get away with giant fines that are less than the revenue they would generate from dominating the online advertising industry.
I'm not even sure that right now, if Microsoft blocked Google, that they'd lose a significant minority of their customers. In the end, most people are still suffering from application lock-in. I think it's primarily Microsoft's fear of legal reprisals that keeps them honest in this case, public backlash would be harsh but probably ultimately ineffectual.
Sorry, Climate "Skeptics" are using the data from NASA GIS incorrectly. As I specifically said, 1934 is in the U.S. top ten warmest years, but not the global top ten. If you don't believe me go look for yourself:
Of course, that's because it is "Us or Them". These are people who have been under attack for years because they keep telling people what most of them don't want to hear.
I happen to agree that the lesser of evils would have been to release the information, but frankly, I understand why these researchers would do as little as they can to support the people who treat them like criminals. If you thought climate skeptics were giant assholes who cheat and lie and ridicule you and your work in public, would you want to help them?
I suspect the vast majority of people would have to honestly answer that question with "no".
Exactly, Canada's already paying the costs of climate change, the U.S. is likely seeing similar damage but, you know, that type of talk wasn't tolerated under the old boss.
Interestingly enough, some people have pointed that warmer temperatures may have been good for parts of Antartica because the warmer termperatures have allowed more precipitation to fall and thus the ice mass has increased as the temperature down there rises. This, of course, is not a trend that continues forever.
Umm. I hardly think that's the point of getting your data out into the cloud. It might be a big side effect of doing that, but I think the point of getting your data into the cloud is something along the lines of reducing hardware expenditures and increasing availability to your data.
To me it still appears that Google is engaged in self-defence. Microsoft is still a predatory monopoly, and they've been very vocal about wanting to ruin Google, under those circumstances it's only common sense for a business to prepare for a war. They need their own browser and their own OS in case Microsoft goes squirrely and decides to simply block access to *.google.* in their browser or OS. They could do so, and while they'd get sued to kingdom come, Google would be bankrupt before the legal battle was over and it's doubtful that Microsoft would get fined anywhere near the amount of money they'd end up making off that move. That's the reality of Google. They are living on the edge of Microsoft's fear of legal reprisals.
I'm not sure it's so much standard of living as the amount of support given to new parents. The United States has, I think, the worst support for parents out of any country in the developed world. Given that a new mother in the U.S. is only guaranteed to keep her job for up to 12 weeks, and that time is completely unpaid, and that she only gets that protection if she works for a company with at least 50 employees, it appears to be actually financially difficult for the middle class in the United States to have children.
A new mother faces two undesirable choices: pay expensive child care fees, quit her job and stay home to raise the children. In either case the mother is probably facing a substancial reduction in disposable income until the child is old enough to participate in the education system. If we believe economics works, then it's quite obvious why that study would show what you said, particularly in the United States.
At the low end, a mother loses little in the way of income, at the high end the mother has more resources to support her through the period of reduced income or increased expenses.
That's somewhat true. It has been a colder, possibly "a lot" depending on what you think "a lot" is. It really hasn't been that much warmer a few degrees maybe as little as 4 degrees, and when it was actually warmer was millions of years ago, and that time correlates with one of the big extinction events where millions of species died off. I think the fossil record shows around 90-95% of all ocean life died from warming in the oceans.
As I understand it, we're on track to see that before the end of the century, and it will not be pretty. It would probably mean war and famine and death on a scale we've never seen before.
I think you're a little fired up and reading stuff into my comment that's not there. I'm not convinced that carbon credits will do much good. The theory is that credits will attach a cost to carbon emissions (of which there is currently none) and thus drive emissions down by forcing companies to pay for those emissions. How effective that is remains to be seen, however, carbon credits actually seem to represent the compromise solution rather than the ideal for either side and thus are susceptible the exploitation you mentioned.
As for the "Carbon Billionaire"? No, not really odd at all. It's Al Gore's detractors who are claiming he could be become a "Carbon Billionaire" and it is a transparent ad hominem attack. It doesn't strike me as at all odd that a wealthy man who advocates for environmental reform would invest his own money in companies whose products would promote environmental reform. Al Gore is not even close to having a "lock on the market", and the media I pay attention to usually mention it at the start and end of any segment about Al Gore.
You can usually tell the difference between a denialist and a true skeptic by the way they act. A Denialist only subjects things he disagrees with to scrutiny. A real skeptic is also be skeptical about arguments that support his views. Usually this comes out in hypocritical standards of evidence where one side is expected to meet a much higher standard of proof than the other. Usually it's just easier to assume that people who agree with you are right.
In the current debate, you can often see people who claim that one fact disproves anthropogenic global warming, while the international consensus of tens of thousands of individual scientists trained in the field who have spent decades studying the issue is ignored.
And yes that means it's really hard to be a skeptic against AGW, because there's a lot of evidence to support it, and most of the "evidence" against it is comprised of conspiracy theories or discredited evidence.
Um, actually there haven't been any such papers. Not for a long time. The papers that do appear get rejected because of fundamental errors in methodology. They get rejected because they're just not very good.
Of course, I supposed you would expect the internal physics community to distribute papers that claimed to prove that gravity didn't really exist written by an english major, or that the speed of light was actually 182 miles per hour written by a discredited biologist.
Slashdot Mirror
See, this is why I don't trust the "AGW Denial movement", because far too often I see people posting things are that at best, flat out wrong:
As posted on Real Climate.
"No doubt, instances of cherry-picked and poorly-worded “gotcha” phrases will be pulled out of context. One example is worth mentioning quickly. Phil Jones in discussing the presentation of temperature reconstructions stated that “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.” The paper in question is the Mann, Bradley and Hughes (1998) Nature paper on the original multiproxy temperature reconstruction, and the ‘trick’ is just to plot the instrumental records along with reconstruction so that the context of the recent warming is clear. Scientists often use the term “trick” to refer to a “a good way to deal with a problem”, rather than something that is “secret”, and so there is nothing problematic in this at all. As for the ‘decline’, it is well known that Keith Briffa’s maximum latewood tree ring density proxy diverges from the temperature records after 1960 (this is more commonly known as the “divergence problem”–see e.g. the recent discussion in this paper) and has been discussed in the literature since Briffa et al in Nature in 1998 (Nature, 391, 678-682). Those authors have always recommend not using the post 1960 part of their reconstruction, and so while ‘hiding’ is probably a poor choice of words (since it is ‘hidden’ in plain sight), not using the data in the plot is completely appropriate, as is further research to understand why this happens."
Now, who drank what kool-aid and isn't facing which inconvenient facts?
Well, that's just wrong. You see a slight decrease if you draw a line from 1998 to 2008 because 1998 was the hottest year on record. Of course, to get this "cooling trend" you have to ignore all the data from before 1998 and all the data from 1999-2007 and 2009. Now who's being selective in the data they're using and drawing specious conclusions?
Also chaos theory applies to weather not climate. It's much like individual choice and economics.
Yes, if providing the data increases your liability for being investigated/sued. There's an awful lot of money and prejudice riding on the status quo. Those people will do nasty things to protect their monetary interests.
At least one of the climatologists was sued (the case was dismissed because the suit was groundless) because he released his data. That's not going to encourage others to share, now is it?
The point, I think is that they, they creationists, the flat earthers, the anti-vaccination groups, the moon landing conspiracy theorists, the alternative medicine crowd, the parapsychologists, and really anyone with a feeling of being persecuted just because they can't prove that anything they claim is true, is going to be trying to use this to undermine the rationalist and materialist foundations of science.
Given the anti-intellectual bias in much of popular culture, I'm not sure it will have much effect. It's going to be used to reinforce the faithful against facts and logic, but it may also be successfully used to recruit more people into the various cults of fantasy.
1) Weather is a chaotic system, climate is not.
2) Weather is to individual choice, as climatology is to economics.
One of the biggest fudgings of the data was the removal of an inconvenient half millennium period that was up to 10 degrees warmer than the mean average.
That's crazy talk. Could you at least pretend you're not insane?
You might want to sing the praises of the Windows registry for the discussion on an issue that isn't caused by the registry.
Now is not really the time or the place to try to convince people that a system that borks your computer because of a formatting error in a value string is a great idea.
"Easy to corrupt", "difficult to recover", and "doesn't scale well" are each a pretty good reason to dislike it. The current problem doesn't give me any confidence that the system is actually any better now.
I suspect that a decentralized power structure wouldn't be stable over time when attached to a monotheistic religion. I think that inevitably that organization would either migrate to an autarchal system, or splinter into multiple smaller autarchal systems.
The reason I think this is that if the ideal religion has a single being leading it, then it follows naturally that the expression of the religion in the real world should follow the example set by the religion.
Embracing the precepts of a religion has to have a certain effect on how its disciples expect the world to work. Monotheistic religions lend themselves to certain simplistic points of view. In particular, I think they implicitly encourage the view that there is a single right answer to every problem (WWJD). Now, if there is always a single right answer, then there is little need for collaborative leadership. The religion merely needs the best (most moral, pious, or whatever) person to decide what the right course of action is, and everyone else should do that simply because it's the right thing to do.
In the long run it seems inevitable that monotheistic religions will become autarchal systems which are easily corrupted from within.
Many people would say some organizational structures are better able to resist corruption than others. It's been my perception that (monotheistic) religion is particular vulnerable to corruption since it's trivially easy for the organization to be corrupted from the top down. In most cases the leader is expected to be the holiest of people and thus even questioning the leader can easily be cast as lack of faith in the entire religion.
Even if everything can be corrupted, but it might useful to look at how easily corrupted different organizational structures are.
Possibly. That is the risk they would be taking.
Of course, if the U.S. Government were to fail to break Microsoft up again, then Microsoft might get away with giant fines that are less than the revenue they would generate from dominating the online advertising industry.
I'm not even sure that right now, if Microsoft blocked Google, that they'd lose a significant minority of their customers. In the end, most people are still suffering from application lock-in. I think it's primarily Microsoft's fear of legal reprisals that keeps them honest in this case, public backlash would be harsh but probably ultimately ineffectual.
Sorry, Climate "Skeptics" are using the data from NASA GIS incorrectly. As I specifically said, 1934 is in the U.S. top ten warmest years, but not the global top ten. If you don't believe me go look for yourself:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/
Of course, that's because it is "Us or Them". These are people who have been under attack for years because they keep telling people what most of them don't want to hear.
I happen to agree that the lesser of evils would have been to release the information, but frankly, I understand why these researchers would do as little as they can to support the people who treat them like criminals. If you thought climate skeptics were giant assholes who cheat and lie and ridicule you and your work in public, would you want to help them?
I suspect the vast majority of people would have to honestly answer that question with "no".
Exactly, Canada's already paying the costs of climate change, the U.S. is likely seeing similar damage but, you know, that type of talk wasn't tolerated under the old boss.
http://www.thestar.com/sciencetech/article/730922--global-warming-challenging-northern-infrastructure-report
Interestingly enough, some people have pointed that warmer temperatures may have been good for parts of Antartica because the warmer termperatures have allowed more precipitation to fall and thus the ice mass has increased as the temperature down there rises. This, of course, is not a trend that continues forever.
If we are at the 1934 levels of average global temperature then why are none of the 1930s in the top ten warmest years? http://www.nicholas.duke.edu/thegreengrok/2008temps
If global temperatures have been record for the last 150 years why are of the top 10 years from the last dozen years?
Apparently, 2009 is going to make it into the top 10.
http://www.zeenews.com/news581998.html
Also, the year 1934 isn't in the global top 10, it is in the U.S. top 10 warmest years.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/1934-hottest-year-on-record.htm
Umm. I hardly think that's the point of getting your data out into the cloud. It might be a big side effect of doing that, but I think the point of getting your data into the cloud is something along the lines of reducing hardware expenditures and increasing availability to your data.
To me it still appears that Google is engaged in self-defence. Microsoft is still a predatory monopoly, and they've been very vocal about wanting to ruin Google, under those circumstances it's only common sense for a business to prepare for a war. They need their own browser and their own OS in case Microsoft goes squirrely and decides to simply block access to *.google.* in their browser or OS. They could do so, and while they'd get sued to kingdom come, Google would be bankrupt before the legal battle was over and it's doubtful that Microsoft would get fined anywhere near the amount of money they'd end up making off that move. That's the reality of Google. They are living on the edge of Microsoft's fear of legal reprisals.
I'm not sure it's so much standard of living as the amount of support given to new parents. The United States has, I think, the worst support for parents out of any country in the developed world. Given that a new mother in the U.S. is only guaranteed to keep her job for up to 12 weeks, and that time is completely unpaid, and that she only gets that protection if she works for a company with at least 50 employees, it appears to be actually financially difficult for the middle class in the United States to have children.
A new mother faces two undesirable choices: pay expensive child care fees, quit her job and stay home to raise the children. In either case the mother is probably facing a substancial reduction in disposable income until the child is old enough to participate in the education system. If we believe economics works, then it's quite obvious why that study would show what you said, particularly in the United States.
At the low end, a mother loses little in the way of income, at the high end the mother has more resources to support her through the period of reduced income or increased expenses.
The story you were looking for was "1999 climate model wrong: Global temperatures increasing faster then predicted".
Too late. Or were thinking of someone other than businessmen, politicians, bankers and religious figures?
That's somewhat true. It has been a colder, possibly "a lot" depending on what you think "a lot" is. It really hasn't been that much warmer a few degrees maybe as little as 4 degrees, and when it was actually warmer was millions of years ago, and that time correlates with one of the big extinction events where millions of species died off. I think the fossil record shows around 90-95% of all ocean life died from warming in the oceans.
As I understand it, we're on track to see that before the end of the century, and it will not be pretty. It would probably mean war and famine and death on a scale we've never seen before.
I think you're a little fired up and reading stuff into my comment that's not there. I'm not convinced that carbon credits will do much good. The theory is that credits will attach a cost to carbon emissions (of which there is currently none) and thus drive emissions down by forcing companies to pay for those emissions. How effective that is remains to be seen, however, carbon credits actually seem to represent the compromise solution rather than the ideal for either side and thus are susceptible the exploitation you mentioned.
As for the "Carbon Billionaire"? No, not really odd at all. It's Al Gore's detractors who are claiming he could be become a "Carbon Billionaire" and it is a transparent ad hominem attack. It doesn't strike me as at all odd that a wealthy man who advocates for environmental reform would invest his own money in companies whose products would promote environmental reform. Al Gore is not even close to having a "lock on the market", and the media I pay attention to usually mention it at the start and end of any segment about Al Gore.
If you refuse to see something you've been shown, has it been shown?
You can usually tell the difference between a denialist and a true skeptic by the way they act. A Denialist only subjects things he disagrees with to scrutiny. A real skeptic is also be skeptical about arguments that support his views. Usually this comes out in hypocritical standards of evidence where one side is expected to meet a much higher standard of proof than the other. Usually it's just easier to assume that people who agree with you are right.
In the current debate, you can often see people who claim that one fact disproves anthropogenic global warming, while the international consensus of tens of thousands of individual scientists trained in the field who have spent decades studying the issue is ignored.
And yes that means it's really hard to be a skeptic against AGW, because there's a lot of evidence to support it, and most of the "evidence" against it is comprised of conspiracy theories or discredited evidence.
Um, actually there haven't been any such papers. Not for a long time. The papers that do appear get rejected because of fundamental errors in methodology. They get rejected because they're just not very good.
Of course, I supposed you would expect the internal physics community to distribute papers that claimed to prove that gravity didn't really exist written by an english major, or that the speed of light was actually 182 miles per hour written by a discredited biologist.
It's actually a no-win situation, you see.
If Al Gore invests in green technology he's "in it for the money" and if he doesn't he "doesn't practice what he preaches".