I've blocked them by the simple expedient of, when my browser flashes the message "Could not display content because your flash player is out of date. Update?" clicking "go away".
That's true... but what I've noticed is that far too often, the people who call themselves climate skeptics aren't skeptical at all; they are absolutely credulous-- to anything they hear that denies the reality of global warming. Garbage articles that could be debunked in two minutes of thinking get picked up and passed along with notes of "see? it's all a HOAX!"
Most people who are worried about climate change are absolutely credulous-- the read garbage articles that could be debunked in two minutes of thinking and they pass it along.
The "garbage" article that pretty much all the climate scientists refer doubters to is this one: http://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/...
Which part of this do you think can be "debunked in two minutes of thinking"?
You can tell that most people aren't looking at the science because of how cleanly opinion is divided along political lines. I'll bet I can guess which political side you favor, too.
OK. In American politics, my side is that I hate pretty much all the politicians. If there's a side that's pro-nuke, pro-solar, pro-space, pro-technology, and pro liberty in general, that's my side.
It would help if any of the climate models demonstrated some degree of predictive ability. The difference between model projections and reality have grown to ridiculous proportions.
Let's look at that. The very first numerical greenhouse effect model was Manabe and Wetherald 1967-- That's the classic, the model from which pretty much all current climate models stem. Since the paper was submitted in 1966, that's 50 years ago-- definitely long enough to see how well the prediction worked. They predicted that the climate sensitivity to CO2 (assuming constant relative humidity) was 2.3C. Comparing that to the actual carbon dioxide, for the rise from 320 ppm to 400 ppm (here) using the Arrhenius relation, we get 0.74C for the temperature rise from 1966 to 2015. The measured temperature rise (here) is 0.7C, with the error bars in the figure 0.1C.
Looks like not merely a good prediction, but an outstandingly accurate prediction.
For comparison, the current IPCC 5th Assessment report estimate of sensitivity is that it is the range 1.5C to 4.5C with "high confidence", so Manabe and Wetherald's value of 2.3 is still is the range of current estimates.
Except that "verifying models" step. None of the climate models are making better predictions than the null hypothesis,
About all I can say to that is "sorry, but you are wrong.".
or for that matter than the "lgw blindly asserting it's getting colder" model. Global temperatures have been remarkably steady for the past 19 years or so,
Sorry, but you are wrong. Here is the data from four groups on three different continents:
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/resea...
temperatures have not been "remarkably steady for the past 19 years or so" - they have been rising.
and while that's within the error bars for most of these models, it's better predicted by the null hypothesis, and within the error bars if you take any of these models and put a "-" in front on their predicted temperature change. So, yeah, the negative of the models predicts as well as the models right now.
Not an argument that they're all wrong, but an argument that there's no reason to think any particular one is right, either. The "science" part is ongoing, but hasn't verified any of the models.
Anyone that tells you the science is settled is not a scientist....
Science is settled, up until new measurements or better data or new models mean that the science needs to be revisited.
Gravity is pretty well settled science: nobody is suggesting that next week Earth's gravity might very well turn off tomorrow and we'll all float off into space. But if new measurements come in suggesting a new way to explain gravity, the science gets revised.
That's the way science works.
Right now there are no hypotheses for explaining the effect of atmospheric gasses on the thermal balance of the Earth that haven't been ruled out by measurements, except for the greenhouse effect, which indeed predicts human-emitted carbon dioxide (just like natural carbon dioxide) causes warming. Right now, until somebody comes up with a hypothesis that fits all the data that does not predict greenhouse warming, that will continue to be settled science. If new data, or new models, come by that casts doubt on what we currently know: well, at that point the science will not be settled.
It's a turn of phrase in this case, but we know that man's emissions cause some aspect of the climate change we're seeing.
"Some aspect" where the exact amount is undefined.
Over a time scale of years, natural variations dominate. Over a time scale of decades, there aren't any other hypotheses that can explain the observed rise in temperature-- all the other proposed explanations have been ruled out by data. So, the answer to the "exact amount" of "some aspect" is "the temperature rise on a scale of decades is due to human emissions."
Oh, and the total amount of warming we'll see is undefined..
Known to within current error bars of plus or minus fifty percent (3C per doubling, plus or minus 1.5. See http://www.ipcc.ch/publication... ). The largest uncertainty is how much carbon dioxide and methane we will emit in the future, not what the effect will be.
Oh, and the amount of warming that is harmful is undefined..
Yep. That needs more work, including better bounds on the definition of "harmful".
Oh, and the benefits to the world from a warmer climate are undefined.
Yep. That needs more work.
Oh, and the mechanism that triggers an ice age is undefined.
Nope. That was unknown years ago, but now is pretty well established to be Milankovitch variations.
Settled science: Energy is supplied to our planet from the sun. The entire planet loses energy to space. Our atmosphere dictates the rate at which this energy is lost.
Yep.
Not Settled Science: What is the rate at which this energy is lost,
That's extremely well known.
and what is the quantitative change to this rate when CO2 concentration is increased or decreased.
Error bars on that are currently a factor of plus or minus fifty percent.
Not Settled Science: What are all the effects, good and bad, that an increase of CO2 in our atmosphere will have.
Right. That is a much harder question than global average temperature, and the more detail you want, the more this question needs work.
Not Settled Science: Increased CO2 and a warmer atmosphere are a bad thing and should be prevented.
"bad" tends to be a judgement call-- you could call this an engineering trade-off, but it's not really a science question. And "should" is a social (which is to say, political) decision, not science at all.
Many of these questions are going to need to start with climate models, to answer things like "what will be the effect at different latitudes, what will be the effect on precipitation, what will be the effect on storms"
And those climate models have been created and are available as software. It's now just a question of applying them.
The global climate models are there, and are getting pretty well validated-- although you do know that the error bars are still plus or minus fifty percent, right? But the more you want fine-grained data, though, the more you're still going to need to do a lot more work.
"Overall, things are getting slightly warmer at a pace we know to within a factor of two"-- that's something we know. "Australia is getting hotter"-- that's slightly harder to say with certainty: Australia is not the world. "These detailed results will be the result"-- that's getting very hard to predict.
That's true... but what I've noticed is that far too often, the people who call themselves climate skeptics aren't skeptical at all; they are absolutely credulous-- to anything they hear that denies the reality of global warming. Garbage articles that could be debunked in two minutes of thinking get picked up and passed along with notes of "see? it's all a HOAX!"
One-sided skepticism isn't skepticism at all. Skepticism doesn't consist of "I don't care what you say, I won't believe it, but I'll believe anything the other guys say, no matter how goofy." If you want to say you're a skeptic: be equally skeptical of both sides.
Real science doesn't consist of repeated skepticism, in fact; that goes nowhere. Real science consists of getting better data and improving understanding.
No one in climate science is interested in answering those questions. It's all "X is caused by global climate change", where X can be literally anything,
If you read what actual climate scientists say, and not the hype in the press, they in fact don't say "It's all "X is caused by global climate change", where X can be literally anything,"
Over and over, they say things like, no particular storm can be attributed to global warming-- it's a long term global effect. Over and over and over. But the press likes disaster stories. They'll keep looking until they can find a way to write the story that makes it a disaster story, and bury the "other scientists caution that there's not enough data to attribute X to climate change" on page 2.
with pictures of polar bears in the background.
I've read a lot of papers by climate scientists, and never seen one with "pictures of polar bears in the background." I think I can safely say that if what you're reading has pictures of polar bears in the background, you're reading the popular press, and not a scientific paper. Even the paper (one paper-- count it, one) that talked about dead polar bears in the arctic didn't have pictures of polar bears in the background.
but there are still a heck of a lot of questions that need to be answered. "How Fast?" and "Will the extra CO2 help crops or weeds grow faster?" and "What can we do about it?" and "Will such-and-such course of action have enough effect to avoid such-and-such consequences?" We need those guys even more than we did before the original question was answered.
Climate scientists aren't qualified to answer most of those questions; you need to hire economists and agronomists.
Many of these questions are going to need to start with climate models, to answer things like "what will be the effect at different latitudes, what will be the effect on precipitation, what will be the effect on storms"
From bitter experience, I'll put in a word for the value of picking software that multiple other people use rather than picking what optimally fits your needs.
Software that is popular with the most users is also the software that is least likely to be orphaned, leaving you to either keep obsolete machines running or else having to migrate some obscure data format into some different form.
Also, the most popular software is more likely to have the most annoying features "corrected" because so many users complain. (not to mention it has the most people posting work-arounds on the web for the things that don't work.)
My uncle is 6'2 and flew reconnaissance F4 Phantoms in Viet Nam. Just what is the height constraint?
http://work.chron.com/air-forc... states:
Pilots have to meet the Air Force’s height, weight and physical conditioning requirements. They must be 64 to 77 inches tall when standing, and 34 to 40 inches tall when sitting...
77 inches is 6 foot 5 inches, so looks like your uncle made it with three inches to spare.
If there's a 30% chance that someone will fall within the designated "average" range
Why would you assume there's only a 30% chance of that someone would fall within the middle 30 per cent of the range?
What the author said was:
...the “average pilot,” which Daniels generously defined as someone whose measurements were within the middle 30 per cent of the range of values for each dimension.
Depends on what you mean by "middle 30%". I assume that this meant "the range of values within which 30% of the population falls." I suppose it could, alternately, be interpreted as meaning "a pilot whose measurement falls at a value of the average plus or minus 15%."-- that is, if the average height is, say, 60 inches, the "middle 30%" means height of 60 inches plus or minus 15 inches.
" an example from the 1950s US Air Force where the "myth of the average resulted in a generation of planes that almost no pilots could reliably fly, and which killed as many as 17 pilots in a single day"
Did I miss the part of the story that explains HOW it managed to kill 17 pilots in one day?
No, you didn't miss it because it wasn't there.
The definition of a "myth" is a good story that didn't really happen. This seems to cover this alleged airplane: it's a nice myth, but don't expect it to be real.
I mean, if we were surprised by how much water Pluto has, and Mars has recently changed in our opinion several times too, how we can pretend we're measuring the potential atmospheres or compositions of just about anything outside the solar system with any degree of accuracy?
The answer is, we haven't. There are proposals to measure atmospheres of exoplanets, but except for very exceptional cases, we haven't.
There was never any question that Pluto had large amounts of water ice. All the small bodies we've seen in the outer solar system have-- and Uranus and Neptune are pretty much made of water-- so it's not a surprise Pluto has water ice. The only question is whether the water ice was buried under other stuff.
If you are saying it's only 3% of the universe, you must be including dark matter. But that's not an element.
Planets don't, in general, contain dark matter, so the abundance of hydrogen relative to dark matter isn't really relevant to the amount of water found on Pluto and other solar system objects.
We see it happening in America, too. Lately there have been a small number of cases of black youth violently attacking police officers, typically after being confronted for some crime these youth had committed, and then the police officers do the only reasonable thing and defend themselves using their guns. Not wanting to be falsely accused of being "racist" by the "social justice" supporters
The recent outrage is about police shooting unarmed black youths. In many cases, shooting them in the back.
Here's the video of the one in Chicago that everybody's upset about. As you can see, the teenager was shot in the back while running AWAY from the police. He was unarmed. https://www.dnainfo.com/chicag...
Here's another one: the guy had a gun... but the police had already taken it away and had him face down on the ground. Then shot him when he was face down on the ground and unresisting: http://www.courthousenews.com/...
And here's one where the video shows that they shot an unarmed man who was face down with his hands handcuffed behind him... then the video shows them planting a gun on him.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3367933/Shocking-video-shows-cops-planting-gun-shooting-handcuffed-man-23-dead-execution.html http://www.alternet.org/civil-...
Slashdot Mirror
I've blocked them by the simple expedient of, when my browser flashes the message "Could not display content because your flash player is out of date. Update?" clicking "go away".
That's true... but what I've noticed is that far too often, the people who call themselves climate skeptics aren't skeptical at all; they are absolutely credulous-- to anything they hear that denies the reality of global warming. Garbage articles that could be debunked in two minutes of thinking get picked up and passed along with notes of "see? it's all a HOAX!"
Most people who are worried about climate change are absolutely credulous-- the read garbage articles that could be debunked in two minutes of thinking and they pass it along.
The "garbage" article that pretty much all the climate scientists refer doubters to is this one: http://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/... Which part of this do you think can be "debunked in two minutes of thinking"?
You can tell that most people aren't looking at the science because of how cleanly opinion is divided along political lines. I'll bet I can guess which political side you favor, too.
OK. In American politics, my side is that I hate pretty much all the politicians. If there's a side that's pro-nuke, pro-solar, pro-space, pro-technology, and pro liberty in general, that's my side.
It would help if any of the climate models demonstrated some degree of predictive ability. The difference between model projections and reality have grown to ridiculous proportions.
Let's look at that. The very first numerical greenhouse effect model was Manabe and Wetherald 1967-- That's the classic, the model from which pretty much all current climate models stem. Since the paper was submitted in 1966, that's 50 years ago-- definitely long enough to see how well the prediction worked. They predicted that the climate sensitivity to CO2 (assuming constant relative humidity) was 2.3C. Comparing that to the actual carbon dioxide, for the rise from 320 ppm to 400 ppm (here) using the Arrhenius relation, we get 0.74C for the temperature rise from 1966 to 2015. The measured temperature rise (here) is 0.7C, with the error bars in the figure 0.1C.
Looks like not merely a good prediction, but an outstandingly accurate prediction.
For comparison, the current IPCC 5th Assessment report estimate of sensitivity is that it is the range 1.5C to 4.5C with "high confidence", so Manabe and Wetherald's value of 2.3 is still is the range of current estimates.
Nope.
Except that "verifying models" step. None of the climate models are making better predictions than the null hypothesis,
About all I can say to that is "sorry, but you are wrong.".
or for that matter than the "lgw blindly asserting it's getting colder" model. Global temperatures have been remarkably steady for the past 19 years or so,
Sorry, but you are wrong. Here is the data from four groups on three different continents: http://www.giss.nasa.gov/resea... temperatures have not been "remarkably steady for the past 19 years or so" - they have been rising. and while that's within the error bars for most of these models, it's better predicted by the null hypothesis, and within the error bars if you take any of these models and put a "-" in front on their predicted temperature change. So, yeah, the negative of the models predicts as well as the models right now.
Not an argument that they're all wrong, but an argument that there's no reason to think any particular one is right, either. The "science" part is ongoing, but hasn't verified any of the models.
Science is settled, up until new measurements or better data or new models mean that the science needs to be revisited.
Gravity is pretty well settled science: nobody is suggesting that next week Earth's gravity might very well turn off tomorrow and we'll all float off into space. But if new measurements come in suggesting a new way to explain gravity, the science gets revised.
That's the way science works.
Right now there are no hypotheses for explaining the effect of atmospheric gasses on the thermal balance of the Earth that haven't been ruled out by measurements, except for the greenhouse effect, which indeed predicts human-emitted carbon dioxide (just like natural carbon dioxide) causes warming. Right now, until somebody comes up with a hypothesis that fits all the data that does not predict greenhouse warming, that will continue to be settled science. If new data, or new models, come by that casts doubt on what we currently know: well, at that point the science will not be settled.
It's a turn of phrase in this case, but we know that man's emissions cause some aspect of the climate change we're seeing.
"Some aspect" where the exact amount is undefined.
Over a time scale of years, natural variations dominate. Over a time scale of decades, there aren't any other hypotheses that can explain the observed rise in temperature-- all the other proposed explanations have been ruled out by data. So, the answer to the "exact amount" of "some aspect" is "the temperature rise on a scale of decades is due to human emissions."
Oh, and the total amount of warming we'll see is undefined..
Known to within current error bars of plus or minus fifty percent (3C per doubling, plus or minus 1.5. See http://www.ipcc.ch/publication... ). The largest uncertainty is how much carbon dioxide and methane we will emit in the future, not what the effect will be.
Oh, and the amount of warming that is harmful is undefined..
Yep. That needs more work, including better bounds on the definition of "harmful".
Oh, and the benefits to the world from a warmer climate are undefined.
Yep. That needs more work.
Oh, and the mechanism that triggers an ice age is undefined.
Nope. That was unknown years ago, but now is pretty well established to be Milankovitch variations.
Settled science: Energy is supplied to our planet from the sun. The entire planet loses energy to space. Our atmosphere dictates the rate at which this energy is lost.
Yep.
Not Settled Science: What is the rate at which this energy is lost,
That's extremely well known.
and what is the quantitative change to this rate when CO2 concentration is increased or decreased.
Error bars on that are currently a factor of plus or minus fifty percent.
Not Settled Science: What are all the effects, good and bad, that an increase of CO2 in our atmosphere will have.
Right. That is a much harder question than global average temperature, and the more detail you want, the more this question needs work.
Not Settled Science: Increased CO2 and a warmer atmosphere are a bad thing and should be prevented.
"bad" tends to be a judgement call-- you could call this an engineering trade-off, but it's not really a science question. And "should" is a social (which is to say, political) decision, not science at all.
So tell me, what do yuo consider science?
Taking data, analyzing data, making models, verifying models, refining models, taking more data, taking more data.
All the stuff that climate scientists actually do, and climate deniers don't.
And those climate models have been created and are available as software. It's now just a question of applying them.
The global climate models are there, and are getting pretty well validated-- although you do know that the error bars are still plus or minus fifty percent, right? But the more you want fine-grained data, though, the more you're still going to need to do a lot more work.
"Overall, things are getting slightly warmer at a pace we know to within a factor of two"-- that's something we know. "Australia is getting hotter"-- that's slightly harder to say with certainty: Australia is not the world. "These detailed results will be the result"-- that's getting very hard to predict.
The devil is in the details.
Science is based in SKEPTICISM and PROOF.
That's true... but what I've noticed is that far too often, the people who call themselves climate skeptics aren't skeptical at all; they are absolutely credulous-- to anything they hear that denies the reality of global warming. Garbage articles that could be debunked in two minutes of thinking get picked up and passed along with notes of "see? it's all a HOAX!"
One-sided skepticism isn't skepticism at all. Skepticism doesn't consist of "I don't care what you say, I won't believe it, but I'll believe anything the other guys say, no matter how goofy." If you want to say you're a skeptic: be equally skeptical of both sides.
Real science doesn't consist of repeated skepticism, in fact; that goes nowhere. Real science consists of getting better data and improving understanding.
No one in climate science is interested in answering those questions. It's all "X is caused by global climate change", where X can be literally anything,
If you read what actual climate scientists say, and not the hype in the press, they in fact don't say "It's all "X is caused by global climate change", where X can be literally anything," Over and over, they say things like, no particular storm can be attributed to global warming-- it's a long term global effect. Over and over and over. But the press likes disaster stories. They'll keep looking until they can find a way to write the story that makes it a disaster story, and bury the "other scientists caution that there's not enough data to attribute X to climate change" on page 2.
with pictures of polar bears in the background.
I've read a lot of papers by climate scientists, and never seen one with "pictures of polar bears in the background." I think I can safely say that if what you're reading has pictures of polar bears in the background, you're reading the popular press, and not a scientific paper. Even the paper (one paper-- count it, one) that talked about dead polar bears in the arctic didn't have pictures of polar bears in the background.
Climate scientists aren't qualified to answer most of those questions; you need to hire economists and agronomists.
Many of these questions are going to need to start with climate models, to answer things like "what will be the effect at different latitudes, what will be the effect on precipitation, what will be the effect on storms"
Software that is popular with the most users is also the software that is least likely to be orphaned, leaving you to either keep obsolete machines running or else having to migrate some obscure data format into some different form.
Also, the most popular software is more likely to have the most annoying features "corrected" because so many users complain. (not to mention it has the most people posting work-arounds on the web for the things that don't work.)
My uncle is 6'2 and flew reconnaissance F4 Phantoms in Viet Nam. Just what is the height constraint?
http://work.chron.com/air-forc... states:
Pilots have to meet the Air Force’s height, weight and physical conditioning requirements. They must be 64 to 77 inches tall when standing, and 34 to 40 inches tall when sitting...
77 inches is 6 foot 5 inches, so looks like your uncle made it with three inches to spare.
If there's a 30% chance that someone will fall within the designated "average" range
Why would you assume there's only a 30% chance of that someone would fall within the middle 30 per cent of the range?
What the author said was:
...the “average pilot,” which Daniels generously defined as someone whose measurements were within the middle 30 per cent of the range of values for each dimension.
Depends on what you mean by "middle 30%". I assume that this meant "the range of values within which 30% of the population falls." I suppose it could, alternately, be interpreted as meaning "a pilot whose measurement falls at a value of the average plus or minus 15%."-- that is, if the average height is, say, 60 inches, the "middle 30%" means height of 60 inches plus or minus 15 inches.
Did I miss the part of the story that explains HOW it managed to kill 17 pilots in one day?
No, you didn't miss it because it wasn't there.
The definition of a "myth" is a good story that didn't really happen. This seems to cover this alleged airplane: it's a nice myth, but don't expect it to be real.
Whooosh!
I mean, if we were surprised by how much water Pluto has, and Mars has recently changed in our opinion several times too, how we can pretend we're measuring the potential atmospheres or compositions of just about anything outside the solar system with any degree of accuracy?
The answer is, we haven't. There are proposals to measure atmospheres of exoplanets, but except for very exceptional cases, we haven't.
There was never any question that Pluto had large amounts of water ice. All the small bodies we've seen in the outer solar system have-- and Uranus and Neptune are pretty much made of water-- so it's not a surprise Pluto has water ice. The only question is whether the water ice was buried under other stuff.
After all, hydrogen is by far the most common element in the universe, and oxygen and carbon are also relatively common.
Hydrogen is only around 3% of the universe, and growing scarcer all the time.
Two different things. Hydrogen comprises 75% by mass of the elements in the universe. http://www.webelements.com/per...
If you are saying it's only 3% of the universe, you must be including dark matter. But that's not an element.
Planets don't, in general, contain dark matter, so the abundance of hydrogen relative to dark matter isn't really relevant to the amount of water found on Pluto and other solar system objects.
We see it happening in America, too. Lately there have been a small number of cases of black youth violently attacking police officers, typically after being confronted for some crime these youth had committed, and then the police officers do the only reasonable thing and defend themselves using their guns. Not wanting to be falsely accused of being "racist" by the "social justice" supporters
The recent outrage is about police shooting unarmed black youths. In many cases, shooting them in the back.
Here's the video of the one in Chicago that everybody's upset about. As you can see, the teenager was shot in the back while running AWAY from the police. He was unarmed.
https://www.dnainfo.com/chicag...
Here's another one: the guy had a gun... but the police had already taken it away and had him face down on the ground. Then shot him when he was face down on the ground and unresisting:
http://www.courthousenews.com/...
And here's one where the video shows that they shot an unarmed man who was face down with his hands handcuffed behind him... then the video shows them planting a gun on him.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3367933/Shocking-video-shows-cops-planting-gun-shooting-handcuffed-man-23-dead-execution.html
http://www.alternet.org/civil-...
Yeah, I get pretty tired of the angry rants.
While many lament the seeming lack of quality, in-depth journalism today, a Gawker article
Ok, stopped reading here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gawker_Media
If nobody is willing to pay for it, it doesn't happen.
Cool! It will be great to see some winged spacecraft again!