Funny, as an American, I see it the other way around. I have absolutely no problems with the US government spying on all our so-called "friends" out there, most of whom aren't lifting a finger for us, continue to abuse us, and then expect us to clean up the messes the leave. In fact, not only do I not have a problem with it, given Europe's history, I think it's the right and prudent thing to do.
But spot the difference between allowing police to track specific phones for investigations and the NSA recording all communications for everyone, forever.
Oh, there's indeed a big difference.
The US situation used to be that the only way to wiretap US citizens in the US was with a specific court order; the NSA and CIA were not permitted to do it. That was based on Constitutional protections. The uproar is over the NSA violating this.
European nations never had such protections in the first place. Many national security agencies in Europe have, for a long time, engaged in widespread monitoring and wiretapping, and they are allowed to under their laws. In addition, the legal protections from wiretapping and monitoring by police are also generally weaker in Europe than the US. Germany has been pretty bad in both of these areas (assuming you're from Germany). In addition, Germany after WWII additionally became subject to extensive monitoring by US intelligence, and rightfully so, and Germany has never even attempted to make an argument that this should stop.
Furthermore, countries in which stuff like this happens have no credibility in terms of privacy and limits on state power:
Many of the European nations complaining bitterly about US spying have extensive domestic spying and surveillance programs themselves, and they keep large databases on their citizens. I don't know about the situation in Iceland, and Iceland is a nice place, but I'd not jump to conclusions over it.
My point is that the people of both places are monitored and controlled to ensure no-one arises to power who seriously thinks either should be truly independent,
Controlled how? With America's secret mind control rays? Get real.
NZ and Australia are cozy with the US for one simple reason: it's economically beneficial. If NZ or Australia would like to be "truly independent", they could choose to become like North Korea. But if they want to take advantage of the global economic and political system that exists now, you need to play by its rules, and those rules were largely set by the US. They were set by the US because it filled the vacuum that European and Asian nations left when they self-destructed and their global systems (imperialism, colonialism, military domination, nationalism, closed borders) collapsed.
The outrage in the US is over the fact that the NSA and the president are trying to get around the letter and intent of the Constitution and the law. In many other countries, it's more a policy issue, not a question of legality.
I have not arrived at any conclusion of that sort. I was simply saying that the [secondary feedback] predictions of climate scientists are based on many assumptions and unknowns, and are not testable or reproducible.
So in fact, climate change is real and happening at a rate that compels us to act to prevent further harm if we can.
No, it means that the predictions "are based on many assumptions and unknowns, and are not testable or reproducible".
(a) Why have they consistently been accurate?
That's a misrepresentation of the results. Furthermore, many of the positive feedback mechanisms haven't been relevant to the predictions so far.
(b) Which feedback mechanism, precisely, is doubt? Clathrates? Water vapor? Oceanic CO2 concentration?
I didn't say they were "in doubt" (as in people are suggesting that they are wrong), I said they "are based on many assumptions and unknowns, and are not testable or reproducible". Most of those mechanisms are plausible, but they aren't proven to operate precisely as used in climate models, and many will likely turn out to be false, we just don't know yet which ones.
(c) Why is there a recorded history of scientists applying science to the calculation of feedback rates? When did this stop?
Merely "applying science" doesn't make something true reliable. You can "apply science" to make predictions from little data, and you will reach a valid conclusion, but not necessarily a sound one.
My point is that precisely - were we to ignore the net positive feedback, we would be left with dangerous levels of warming from GHG forcing alone.
No, I'm merely saying I believe it to have gotten warmer so far and that it will be getting warmer. It's not been shown to be "dangerous", and many of the so-called dangerous consequences aren't very dangerous in the first place.
People need to remember that sea levels have risen about 130m in just the last 20000 years (and go up and down by that amount about every 100000 years).
The article makes an interesting point, namely that there may be some additional sea level rise if temperatures go up again, but that's always been expected.
So climate feedbacks (in your mind) are an unknown? How then did you arrive at such a precise of climate feedbacks such that you can confidently assert that feedbacks are (a) a net negative and (b) sustainable in the longer term?
I have not arrived at any conclusion of that sort. I was simply saying that the predictions of climate scientists are based on many assumptions and unknowns, and are not testable or reproducible. This makes them fundamentally different from the predictions of nuclear science, which are based on a combination of widely repeatable experiments and first principles.
Indeed. And the denialist prediction of no net warming as a result of anthropogenic emissions implies a precise measure of feedback
Lucky then that I'm not a denialist. I think there will be (and has been) warming due to anthropogenic emissions. What's your point again?
Also, we don't live naturally. Natural humans don't spend most of their days indoors under artificial lighting doing entirely physically undemanding work.
Yeah, things were so much better when we worked out in the fields, got skin cancer, various infections, and died at age 50!
For nutrients to find their way into vegetables, they have to be in the ground first, and if they aren't there, then you don't get to eat them.
Where do you get this bullshit? Plants need sun, CO2, and mineral fertilizers, that's it. All the nutrients in them they make themselves.
Also, there are food deserts, places where getting actual real grown food is not practically possible, and fabricated food is the only type available. The concept is well known in the US.
Yeah, crazy people like you come up with crazy theories.
You were the one who pointed the finger at "global warming activists".
"Global warming activists" is an identity that many identify with. "Deniers" is a fictitious foe and straw man created by global warming activists.
We accept scientific theories only if they have stood numerous attempts at falsification"..? I know you didn't bother reading them, but they all support the idea that rapid climate change leads to high rates of extinction.
A lot of the references weren't scientific papers. The ones that were didn't prove what you said they proved. You just don't understand science or scientific papers. This statement also illustrates that:
However, in this case its not weird when you clearly didn't consider the study in good faith
In science, you don't consider studies in "good faith", you attack them and pick them apart. Science is supposed to be adversarial. And often only results that survive decades of attacks may begin to be considered sound.
A great many (if not most) scientific papers use just that term to claim that the data supports their theory.
Indeed, a great many scientific papers use the phrase. And they deliberately use "suggest" instead of "prove", "disprove" or "support" when the data isn't good enough to use those stronger phrases. "Suggests" is little more than the author's opinion.
That is not how science works, and I think its telling how you're been arguing here without references.
The way science works is through many repeated experiments and many different hypotheses being tested. We accept scientific theories only if they have stood numerous attempts at falsification. A single suggestive result based on a genetic analysis does not establish scientific truth or fact.
and I think its telling how you're been arguing here without references.
We're analyzing a reference you gave, and that reference doesn't show what you purport it to show because you apparently don't even know how to read a scientific paper. My references aren't relevant to pointing out that you can't even read yours.
Trolling for the denier position
I don't "deny" global warming; global warming is an established fact. I "deny" that there is sufficient evidence or agreement for negative consequences to warrant political and economic intervention.
Bullshit. Climate science is built upon well proven physical theories from multiple different branches of science. In fact, greenhouse theory itself is almost 200 years old (developed by Fourier in the 1820's). Climate models are not statistical, they are physical; similar to the fluid dynamics models used for airfoil development.
You are right that climate models are similar to computational fluid dynamics (although even more complex). CFD models are extensively validated, by running full simulations of entire airfoils and then comparing them with wind-tunnel experiments and flight tests using the same airfoils.
We can't do that for climate models because we can't repeatedly simulate the global climate under different conditions and compare the results with a "flight test". That's the crux of the problem: climate models are like CFD models (only more complicated), but they haven't been validated and can't be validated in a wind tunnel or flight test.
Specifics please. Whose experiments and data collections cannot be reproduced cannot be reproduced - Tyndall's? Arrhenius's?
Data collection: historical temperature records, historical CO2 records, sea level measurements, measurements predicting carbon release in response to temperature changes, etc.
Experiments: there are no experiments that can directly test global climate models at all; nuclear fission can be observed and reproduced in simple, independent desktop experiments around the world
Tyndall and Arrhenius just measured the basic greenhouse effect. That is only the trigger for global warming and by itself doesn't allow long term predictions; long term predictions involve feedback.
Has Anthony Watts created any new technologies? Roger Pielke? Andrew Bolt? Monkton? Old technology gets replaced with new technology all the time. Why is this suddenly a problem?
How is that relevant? Atomic scientists said "don't use the technology we created because it's dangerous". Climate scientist say "don't use fossil fuel combustion because it's dangerous". I'm just saying that the analogy doesn't work.
Soot is known to cause lots of harm because it contains carcinogens and particulate carbon.
There are several studies on the interaction of PLA particles with living tissue. PLA is a non-toxic, biocompatible, biodegradable polymer; it's almost certainly less harmful than soot.
"It can also be very worrying" if you believe that the CIA is hypnotically programming your brain through a radio receiver implanted in your tooth. That doesn't make it a rational worry.
I'm not judging you, just pointing out the facts: climate science involves positive feedback as an essential component (which anybody can verify, for example by looking at the IPCC report); your description of it is objectively wrong.
As for my "very short history", I have been on Slashdot nearly since the beginning, I just change UIDs about once a year. I think the cult of small UIDs is stupid (and if I believed in it, six digit UID would be laughable). If you did see my entire history, you'd also see that I used to be a fervent liberal (and registered Democrat until a few years ago). Once I started looking at one big liberal issue in detail (I forget what it was), I discovered that what had been presented as scientific fact was pure ideology, and from that point, I looked at the source materials on other liberal issues as well, and they all fell apart. Liberal ideology was as irrational and unscientific as conservative ideology.
So I can tell you with conviction that "you don't know what you're talking about" because I didn't know what I was talking about when I was a liberal.
Furthermore, my "talking points" as you call them, aren't from Fox news or conservative. I'm mostly libertarian, i.e. socially and economically liberal (in the traditional sense). Government, like medicine, should first do no harm, and both conservatives and liberals are doing a great deal of harm by overstating scientific and economic justifications for their policies.
However, the mechanisms are perfectly clear. Greenhouse gases make it warmer. People are increasing greenhouse gases at an alarming rate. Both of those statements are supported by experiment and data. Now, it just becomes a math problem.
You clearly don't understand the first thing about climate change. Positive feedback loops and economic models are an essential part of climate change predictions, and they are mostly guesswork. Furthermore, the potential consequences are also mostly guesswork.
The record shows that increased CO2 levels accompany periods of instability (e.g. rapid growth and reduction in glacier size) even if the trend tends toward warming.
We still have some of the lowest CO2 concentrations in earth's history right now, and our climate has been changing rapidly (in fact, oscillating wildly) for the past 7 million years or so. To stop these oscillations, CO2 concentrations would have to go up substantially.
The relevant phrase here isn't "caveats", the relevant phrase is "suggests". I'm sorry, but you're obviously too scientifically illiterate to even discuss this any further.
You didn't read/comprehend the article, and you have no concrete data to support your position.
No, I'm afraid you didn't comprehend the article and lack the background to interpret it.
You apparently don't even understand scientific writing: "Despite many caveats, our results suggest that adaptation to projected changes in the next 100 years would require rates that are largely unprecedented based on observed rates among vertebrate species." The phrasing "despite many caveats, our results suggest" doesn't mean "we have shown...", it means "if we make a whole bunch of other unsupported assumptions, maybe...".
Ah, the old 'allow industry to keep doing its thing because environmentalists are the real problem' spiel; A brilliant twist on denialism.
Ah, the classic left wing approach to trying to paint economics as good-people-vs-bad-corporations.
This isn't about "allowing industry" to do anything, it's about not destroying the global economy, the economy that we need to grow in order to be able to make the changes that we need to make in order to reduce population growth and carbon emissions.
Slashdot Mirror
Funny, as an American, I see it the other way around. I have absolutely no problems with the US government spying on all our so-called "friends" out there, most of whom aren't lifting a finger for us, continue to abuse us, and then expect us to clean up the messes the leave. In fact, not only do I not have a problem with it, given Europe's history, I think it's the right and prudent thing to do.
Fortunately, it's not what people believe that matters, but what's actually happening.
And who is going to challenge the current system? And are you really so naive to think that voters would go for any change? Why should they?
Oh, there's indeed a big difference.
The US situation used to be that the only way to wiretap US citizens in the US was with a specific court order; the NSA and CIA were not permitted to do it. That was based on Constitutional protections. The uproar is over the NSA violating this.
European nations never had such protections in the first place. Many national security agencies in Europe have, for a long time, engaged in widespread monitoring and wiretapping, and they are allowed to under their laws. In addition, the legal protections from wiretapping and monitoring by police are also generally weaker in Europe than the US. Germany has been pretty bad in both of these areas (assuming you're from Germany). In addition, Germany after WWII additionally became subject to extensive monitoring by US intelligence, and rightfully so, and Germany has never even attempted to make an argument that this should stop.
Furthermore, countries in which stuff like this happens have no credibility in terms of privacy and limits on state power:
http://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/abhoeren-von-linken-abgeordneten-friedrich-verteidigt-spitzelei-als-fruehwarnsystem-a-811570.html
Many of the European nations complaining bitterly about US spying have extensive domestic spying and surveillance programs themselves, and they keep large databases on their citizens. I don't know about the situation in Iceland, and Iceland is a nice place, but I'd not jump to conclusions over it.
Controlled how? With America's secret mind control rays? Get real.
NZ and Australia are cozy with the US for one simple reason: it's economically beneficial. If NZ or Australia would like to be "truly independent", they could choose to become like North Korea. But if they want to take advantage of the global economic and political system that exists now, you need to play by its rules, and those rules were largely set by the US. They were set by the US because it filled the vacuum that European and Asian nations left when they self-destructed and their global systems (imperialism, colonialism, military domination, nationalism, closed borders) collapsed.
Their constitutions/laws generally have fewer restrictions than US laws, and NSA-like spying has been commonplace in Europe.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/how_they_do_it/2006/02/wiretapping_europeanstyle.html
The outrage in the US is over the fact that the NSA and the president are trying to get around the letter and intent of the Constitution and the law. In many other countries, it's more a policy issue, not a question of legality.
No, it means that the predictions "are based on many assumptions and unknowns, and are not testable or reproducible".
That's a misrepresentation of the results. Furthermore, many of the positive feedback mechanisms haven't been relevant to the predictions so far.
I didn't say they were "in doubt" (as in people are suggesting that they are wrong), I said they "are based on many assumptions and unknowns, and are not testable or reproducible". Most of those mechanisms are plausible, but they aren't proven to operate precisely as used in climate models, and many will likely turn out to be false, we just don't know yet which ones.
Merely "applying science" doesn't make something true reliable. You can "apply science" to make predictions from little data, and you will reach a valid conclusion, but not necessarily a sound one.
No, I'm merely saying I believe it to have gotten warmer so far and that it will be getting warmer. It's not been shown to be "dangerous", and many of the so-called dangerous consequences aren't very dangerous in the first place.
People need to remember that sea levels have risen about 130m in just the last 20000 years (and go up and down by that amount about every 100000 years).
The article makes an interesting point, namely that there may be some additional sea level rise if temperatures go up again, but that's always been expected.
I have not arrived at any conclusion of that sort. I was simply saying that the predictions of climate scientists are based on many assumptions and unknowns, and are not testable or reproducible. This makes them fundamentally different from the predictions of nuclear science, which are based on a combination of widely repeatable experiments and first principles.
Lucky then that I'm not a denialist. I think there will be (and has been) warming due to anthropogenic emissions. What's your point again?
Roundup isn't a "biohazard". It's not even all that toxic.
Yeah, things were so much better when we worked out in the fields, got skin cancer, various infections, and died at age 50!
Where do you get this bullshit? Plants need sun, CO2, and mineral fertilizers, that's it. All the nutrients in them they make themselves.
Yeah, crazy people like you come up with crazy theories.
"Global warming activists" is an identity that many identify with. "Deniers" is a fictitious foe and straw man created by global warming activists.
A lot of the references weren't scientific papers. The ones that were didn't prove what you said they proved. You just don't understand science or scientific papers. This statement also illustrates that:
In science, you don't consider studies in "good faith", you attack them and pick them apart. Science is supposed to be adversarial. And often only results that survive decades of attacks may begin to be considered sound.
Indeed, a great many scientific papers use the phrase. And they deliberately use "suggest" instead of "prove", "disprove" or "support" when the data isn't good enough to use those stronger phrases. "Suggests" is little more than the author's opinion.
The way science works is through many repeated experiments and many different hypotheses being tested. We accept scientific theories only if they have stood numerous attempts at falsification. A single suggestive result based on a genetic analysis does not establish scientific truth or fact.
We're analyzing a reference you gave, and that reference doesn't show what you purport it to show because you apparently don't even know how to read a scientific paper. My references aren't relevant to pointing out that you can't even read yours.
I don't "deny" global warming; global warming is an established fact. I "deny" that there is sufficient evidence or agreement for negative consequences to warrant political and economic intervention.
You are right that climate models are similar to computational fluid dynamics (although even more complex). CFD models are extensively validated, by running full simulations of entire airfoils and then comparing them with wind-tunnel experiments and flight tests using the same airfoils.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_fluid_dynamics
We can't do that for climate models because we can't repeatedly simulate the global climate under different conditions and compare the results with a "flight test". That's the crux of the problem: climate models are like CFD models (only more complicated), but they haven't been validated and can't be validated in a wind tunnel or flight test.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_feedback
One of the key advocates: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_E._Hansen
Data collection: historical temperature records, historical CO2 records, sea level measurements, measurements predicting carbon release in response to temperature changes, etc.
Experiments: there are no experiments that can directly test global climate models at all; nuclear fission can be observed and reproduced in simple, independent desktop experiments around the world
Tyndall and Arrhenius just measured the basic greenhouse effect. That is only the trigger for global warming and by itself doesn't allow long term predictions; long term predictions involve feedback.
How is that relevant? Atomic scientists said "don't use the technology we created because it's dangerous". Climate scientist say "don't use fossil fuel combustion because it's dangerous". I'm just saying that the analogy doesn't work.
Soot is known to cause lots of harm because it contains carcinogens and particulate carbon.
There are several studies on the interaction of PLA particles with living tissue. PLA is a non-toxic, biocompatible, biodegradable polymer; it's almost certainly less harmful than soot.
"It can also be very worrying" if you believe that the CIA is hypnotically programming your brain through a radio receiver implanted in your tooth. That doesn't make it a rational worry.
I'm not judging you, just pointing out the facts: climate science involves positive feedback as an essential component (which anybody can verify, for example by looking at the IPCC report); your description of it is objectively wrong.
As for my "very short history", I have been on Slashdot nearly since the beginning, I just change UIDs about once a year. I think the cult of small UIDs is stupid (and if I believed in it, six digit UID would be laughable). If you did see my entire history, you'd also see that I used to be a fervent liberal (and registered Democrat until a few years ago). Once I started looking at one big liberal issue in detail (I forget what it was), I discovered that what had been presented as scientific fact was pure ideology, and from that point, I looked at the source materials on other liberal issues as well, and they all fell apart. Liberal ideology was as irrational and unscientific as conservative ideology.
So I can tell you with conviction that "you don't know what you're talking about" because I didn't know what I was talking about when I was a liberal.
Furthermore, my "talking points" as you call them, aren't from Fox news or conservative. I'm mostly libertarian, i.e. socially and economically liberal (in the traditional sense). Government, like medicine, should first do no harm, and both conservatives and liberals are doing a great deal of harm by overstating scientific and economic justifications for their policies.
You clearly don't understand the first thing about climate change. Positive feedback loops and economic models are an essential part of climate change predictions, and they are mostly guesswork. Furthermore, the potential consequences are also mostly guesswork.
We still have some of the lowest CO2 concentrations in earth's history right now, and our climate has been changing rapidly (in fact, oscillating wildly) for the past 7 million years or so. To stop these oscillations, CO2 concentrations would have to go up substantially.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleoclimatology
early atomic scientists:
- developed sound physical theories that any theoretical theorist could verify from first principles and a few key experiments
- proved that their theories worked in a series of repeatable experiments
- implemented their technologies as practical devices
- worried that the technology they themselves developed might be used for bad
climate scientists:
- make extrapolations involving tons of assumptions and unknowns
- their experiments and data collections cannot be reproduced
- haven't created any new technologies
- try to stop people from using other people's technologies
And the European propaganda machine is also doing very well, telling citizens "don't worry about our wiretapping, at least we aren't America!"
The relevant phrase here isn't "caveats", the relevant phrase is "suggests". I'm sorry, but you're obviously too scientifically illiterate to even discuss this any further.
Exposure to liquids can cause poisoning, and exposure to solids can cause bullet wounds. We should avoid all liquids and solids, just to be sure.
No, I'm afraid you didn't comprehend the article and lack the background to interpret it.
You apparently don't even understand scientific writing: "Despite many caveats, our results suggest that adaptation to projected changes in the next 100 years would require rates that are largely unprecedented based on observed rates among vertebrate species." The phrasing "despite many caveats, our results suggest" doesn't mean "we have shown...", it means "if we make a whole bunch of other unsupported assumptions, maybe...".
Ah, the classic left wing approach to trying to paint economics as good-people-vs-bad-corporations.
This isn't about "allowing industry" to do anything, it's about not destroying the global economy, the economy that we need to grow in order to be able to make the changes that we need to make in order to reduce population growth and carbon emissions.