The complexity of engineering made it a passion for Rube Goldberg, too, and this is what people are responding to here. To the average person's ears you're saying, "The [needless, gratuitous, egregious] complexity of the law makes it fun."
A lot of us suspect the law could be a good deal simpler (certainly true) but for the fact that the people who work in the feild actually enjoy the complexity. There's nothing wrong with enjoying stuff that's as complicated as it needs to be, but I know as a scientist and engineer who has been involved in patents in software and genomics, and as a businessperson who has done a good deal of his own legal work, that the law is more complex than it needs to be in any number of respects, and if more lawyers, judges and legislators hated complexity with a passion, rather than finding it "fun" we might have laws that are closer to the lower bound of possible complexity, rather than continually bumping up against (or soaring far beyond) the ceiling of complexity that is either practical or needful.
I am not saying the law can be "simple" in any absolute sense, merely that it can be simpler than it currently is, especially in the US (which compared to my native Canada is a nightmare), and if more people working with the law were simplicity-focused we would be better off than we are.
I think CEOs (and their families) of companies should be required to live downwind/downstream from their plants. Would make them think twice about cost vs pollution issues.
So that would be like farmers living where pesticide use creates the most birth defects, or the engineering staff on the Deepwater Horizon, who were the ones at risk if they incorrectly interpreted test results?
There's nothing much wrong with putting the decision makers at risk--it certainly can't hurt--but it won't even begin to solve the actual problems, and we know this with something approaching certainty from an abundance of empirical data, so the claim that "it would make them think twice about cost vs pollution issues" is demonstrably, trivially, empirically false.
That said, as of two years ago you couldn't buy a whole system (engine/nav/radar/battery/depth sounder etc) that used Cat-5 for less than $15,000.
Cat-5? I'd expect most systems today to be NMEA 2000 enabled, which is four-wire CAN-bus-based serial network, if memory serves (although admittedly I may be misremembering.)
Anybody who has access to the object's orbital parameters which show that this would have been with 100% certainty, impossible, please feel free to call me a paranoid freak at this point; but we are overdue an ELE (Extinction Level Event) by about 15 million years (I keep reading around the science journals about ELEs happening about every 50 million years, the last one was what? 65 million years ago (the K-T Event)?
"Overdue" is not a meaningful term in this case. We get about one large impact every 50 million years, but think about it statistically: a Poisson distribution with a mean of 1 has P(0) ~ 0.6, so even at 65 million years the odds are barely 50/50, and in any case, the events are uncorrelated so it doesn't matter how long ago the last one occurred.
When you wake up each morning the odds of you dying in an asteroid impact are the same: about one in a billion. Your odds of dying in a lightning strike or getting gored by a bull are quite a bit higher. Even getting killed in a terrorist attack has higher odds, and that's saying something.
So while evolution is true it is the root of all evil.
Anyone who has wittnessed the death of one of their children, as Darwin did, might well be tempted to agree with you (although not Darwin himself, as it happens, which I've always found very curious.)
We all yack about how wonderful evolutoin is, how miraculous that the ability to make imperfect copies is enough to create humans from bacteria, while ignoring that it reveals the universe as a horror story of unimaginable dreadfulness. Each and every one of us winners is backed by a vastly larger number of losers, many of whom died horribly, and that is absolutely necessary for the engines of evolution to keep turning.
This says nothing about the truth or falsity of the theory--it is obviously and necessarily true--but it may explain why some people find it unpalatable (although no anti-evolutionist has ever said this, to the best of my knowledge).
Does smoking pot as a teen lower your IQ, or are stupid teens more likely to smoke pot?
From the abstract; "Impairment was concentrated among adolescent-onset cannabis users, with more persistent use associated with greater decline. Further, cessation of cannabis use did not fully restore neuropsychological functioning among adolescent-onset cannabis users. Findings are suggestive of a neurotoxic effect of cannabis on the adolescent brain and highlight the importance of prevention and policy efforts targeting adolescents."
A randomized controlled trial is by far the best means of proving causality, but a strong dose-response curve is a good secondary indicator. In this case, the data don't seem to support the contention of the abstract very well. Here they are from Table 1 in the paper:
Persistence of regular cannabis use Never used | 242 | 38.84 | 99.84 (14.39) | 100.64 (15.25) | 0.05 Used, never regularly | 508 | 50.59 | 102.27 (13.59) | 101.24 (14.81) | â'0.07 Used regularly at 1 wave | 47 | 72.34 | 101.42 (14.41) | 98.45 (14.89) | â'0.20 Used regularly at 2 waves | 36 | 63.89 | 95.28 (10.74) | 93.26 (11.44) | â'0.13 Used regularly at 3+ waves | 41 | 78.05 | 96.00 (16.06) | 90.77 (13.88) | â'0.35
Where the columns are: MJ usage category, # of people in category, %male, Avg(SD) IQ at 7- 13 years old, Avg(SD) IQ at 38 years old, size of effect.
There are a couple of striking things: the percentage of males jumps markedly as the regularity of cannabis use goes up, and the initial IQ drops. So this study shows that young men with slighlty lower than average IQ are more likely to engage in regular cannabis use, and this may or may not result in a further decrease in their IQ over time.
Also, the numbers in the regular use categories are quite small: a few dozen.
I've not read the paper in detail, but superficially this looks exactly like the kind of research that led to hormone replacement therapy being touted as a good thing for post-menapausal women. Selection effects amongst the population of HRT users in the early days resulted in apparently dramatically improved health outcomes, whereas when applied to the general population the results were just the opposite.
While the data are plausibly suggestive that cannabis is bad for the adolescent brain, it is also plausibly suggestive that the lower-IQ male adolescent is more at risk for cannibis use and IQ decline.
A child doesn't exist for the first several months of pregnancy.
Although something exists through the first several months of pregnancy, and it is certainly alive and it is certainly human (what other species is it, if not human?)
This is just a fact, not an argument. An argument would be if I were to then introduce another premise--like, "And no human entity at any stage of its life-cycle should ever be killed for any reason"--and then drew a conclusion from that. That would be an argument.
The ordinary, uncontroversial fact that a human in the early stages of its life cycle exists immediately after pregnancy, and that entity is destroyed in the course of an abortion, should be the grounding for any argument on the morality and legality of abortion.
My own position is that the destruction of this human entity (I won't say "human being" because that comes loaded with all kinds of connotations that are not fulfilled by the fetus, so anyone who uses that kind of language is either confused or deliberately misleading) is entirely up to the person carrying it. She after all is in the position to have that entity's best interests at heart, far more than me or you or the Organs of the State or anyone else. If she believes the best thing to do is destroy that entity, that she should be free to do so.
Every human society has some means of disposing of the results of unwanted pregnancies, usually via some form of infanticide. Access to abortion is a vast improvement on this, putting the person who has the greatest knowledge and greatest interest in the matter in charge of the choice is the only reasonably optimal way of making the decision, and if anything in the matter should be considered a crime, it is having a child who is not wanted and will not be loved.
They are, in fact, an amoral bunch (notice their love of Ayn Rand) and their system of views is based on corporate culture.
Ayn Rand was 100% pro-choice and denounced Ronald Reagan as being "unable to defend rights at all" because he did not defend a woman's right to end the life of her unwanted fetus. So be claiming that people on the Right have a "love of Ayn Rand" in a thread that is specifically devoted to how much people on the Right oppose women's rights is ironic, to say the least.
It's pretty hilarious that everyone on both the Right and Left are claiming that the Right has something to do with Ayn Rand, who was specifically and bluntly critical of corporate leaders who used pull with the government to beat their competition, which is the only possible meaning anyone who's been paying attention can impute to "their system of views based on corporate culture".
Go ahead and criticize the GOP or Rand--there is a great deal to criticize in both--but don't think they have anything to do with each other.
The far right keeps saying this, but it's simply not true. In England, everyone is covered by universal coverage. But many people buy supplemental health insurance because they want more of a premium plan with extra coverage/benefits. You can still have all the luxury health care you want. You are just going to have to pay extra for the luxury bits. Which all sounds quite reasonable. Stop spreading FUD.
Except in Canada, where the Canada Health Act effectively prohibits most Canadians from having supplementary health insurance for a wide range of procedures that are covered by their provincial health insurance. So if you need a knee replacement, say, you have three options: 1) wait for a year or more to get it via the universal system; 2) be well-connected in the health-care system and jump the queue (I've worked in the system and been assured this happens); 3) be one of the ultra-rich, like Belinda Stronach or Robert Bourassa, and skive off to the US to get it done, all the while smugly lecturing your social, political and economic inferiors on the virtues of the Canada Health Act.
Unfortunately, the reason why we have this crazy restriction is that we're living next to a nation with an entirely predatory health-care system, and there are quite legitimate concerns as to what the effect of a more open insurance market would be, despite most Canadians being in favour of it and most socialized systems being far more open to private insurance than ours is.
Exactly. The "bananas" you see in supermarkets are a genetic monstrosity; basically all clones of the same individual, thanks to human meddling over the last 7000 years. It doesn't get more GM than that. So, where do you draw the line?
At bananas, obviously.
"Where do you draw the line?" is a question that is only ever asked by people who don't actually have any argument but hope to distract people from that by pretending that we don't draw arbitrary yet strangely effective lines every single day.
But in this case, you've accidentally brought up one of the big legitimate issues with GM foods (the other one being the kinds of corporation that are involved in GM seed production): monoculture.
The modern Cavendish banana is a different variety than the one grown a hundred years ago (Gros Michel) thanks to a fungus that wiped out the previous variety, creating considerable economic hardship and disruption in banana-producing regions. Major banana producers then switched to the current variety, which is now under threat from a variant of the same fungus.
Since I don't want to support monoculture, I don't buy bananas. See how simple it is to draw the line?
While liquid sodium is no one's idea of a fun material to work with, there are a couple of things you're not quite accurate on.
The big one is why you think the coolant might be in contact with the control rods.
You also don't mention that the shutdown/restart cycle is much simple due to the relative lack of iodine poisoning, the amount of energy extracted from the fuel is much higher, and the amount of long-lived waste produced is much smaller.
There's also the point that materials and manufacturing have advanced just a bit in the past fifty years, so it's worth revisiting this question and seeing if we can't work out some of the wrinkles that made such a mess of things the last time this was investigated.
In the early years of nuclear development SFRs were in competition with existing technology, and the decision was made at least in part because the technological issues with thermal neutron reactors were already pretty much solved, mod the odd carbon core that caught fire, the unfortunate tendency to write themselves off due to plastic deformation of the core when there's a loss of power to the circulating pumps, hydrogen embrittlement issues, and so on.
During the mid-phase of nuclear technology development... no wait, I forgot. There really wasn't much of a mid-phase, was there? The first generation of reactors was built, then in the wake of Three Mile Island and eventually Chernobyl things came to a halt in many places. A small amount of research went on, but it was extremely modest compared to what was required to develop the new fuel cycles required to power the 21st century.
Strangely, no one anywhere who opposed nuclear power ever lifted a finger to develop viable replacement technology, or we wouldn't be having this discussion. I guess it's much easier to oppose than create, to prevent and destroy than to build.
This is genius! If corporations are people in the US, and churches are tax-exempt, and according to what James Randi says the religious lobby in the US is so strong that not even the IRS will go after churches, what's to stop a corporation's officers from declaring itself the head of a church--in its role as "corporate person"--and then carrying all of its economic activity out under the untaxed, unscrutinized auspices of that church?
Like autonomous and more expensive, although there's no need for them to be. Smart rocks will soon be almost as cheap as dumb rocks, if enough stupid people with technical educations are let loose.
For the people who feel like killing people is a good way to spend their time and use their education: please use plain language to describe what you do. "Method of engagement" is a coward's way of saying "means of killing people and destroying things."
Take the extra time to use the extra words that actually describe what you're using your incredibly sophisticated abilities for, and don't hide behind euphemisms like some prim Victorian virgin who doesn't have the guts to say she wants a good hard fucking.
If someone asked you to walk in a straight line over a constantly shifting floor, you would probably declare it impossible after a few tries and a couple of grazed knees.
Either that, or you're a sailor and have no difficulty walking a straight line over a constantly shifting deck, and think that this declaration is silly, as well as being an excellent example of the fallacy of composition: Penrose tilings have no globally repeating patterns so no globally straight glider path can exist, right?
Wrong: Penrose tilings are full of local order (thus the name "quasi-crystal" for naturally occurring structures with 5-fold local symmetries) and that creates the possibility that a sufficiently adaptive automaton that exists on a comparable scale to the local order (four or five tiles across, maybe up to ten) will be able to thread its way through the extremely rigidly defined deviations from perfect regularity to generate a straight course.
There are a couple of interesting things about this result that the New Sensationalist misses. One is: how come 4 states? Could this have anything to do with the five-dimensional regularity that Penrose tilings are based on? Another is: what about tilings with even less order? One could create a tiling that has no order whatsoever... would it still be possible to build a glider on it? Does the number of required states scale with the order parameter?
Look at the abstract. This isn't arguing about the accuracy of fractional degree measurements at individual weather stations: it is about > 3 sigma events over >10% of the Earth's surface, quite large changes and exactly the kind of thing that would be expected if more energy was being added to the atmosphere.
Exactly what you would expect on what basis? Climate models are notoriously inexact in their predictions, and lower-latitude effects of this magnitude have not to best of my knowledge been predicted in any detail by any strong GCM. The paper certainly doesn't cite any.
What the paper does do is ask, "How can we maximally mix politics with science so that we can convince people the global climate change is real and that governments therefore must enact a bunch of policies that we are ideologically committed to regardless of the climate situation?"
Every climate change denier is going to take this paper for exactly what it is: cherry picking data (the 1951-1981 baseline in particular) and special-pleading on hypotheses (assuming a Gaussian distribution of temperature anomalies over the long term) and invoking the author's favoured explanatory hypothesis for no other reason than it is their favoured explanatory hypothesis.
There is no strong reason to expect that a 30-year baseline in the mid-20th century is in any way representative of normal climate variability over the past few thousand years, and many reasons to believe it is not. If you were to apply this baseline to the Little Ice Age or the Medieval Optimum you might equally well conclude that something was terribly amiss.
There is no reason to assume that long-term climate variability has a Gaussian distribution. Climate is full of nonlinear effects and mode shifts independently of human activity. We can see these mode shifts clearly in the past climate record, often resulting in sudden changes in temperature in specific locales over very short timescales.
There is REALLY no reason to assume that "simply because this is a larger change than we see in our 'natural' baseline it MUST be caused by humans." Anyone who accepts this argument should also accept the equally bogus arguments that if something is not explicable by current science it MUST be caused by God. This is purely religious thinking, in which the conceptual scheme of the reasoner is given vast and completely unjustified ontological weight.
There is some good science in what the authors are doing in this paper, but their blatant, unabashed attempt to politicize the science from the word go does tremendous damage to the reputation and neutrality of science. They aren't making any kind of case for extreme climate change: they are simply assuming it and asking, "How can we convince people it's real?" That's not science. It's politics, and politics of a kind usually played by the other side in the climate change debate.
The only thing that doesn't make sense is Iran's non-compliance if they're innocent
As I recall a very similar argument was used not too long ago regarding "weapons of mass destruction" in a country immediately adjacent to Iran. The argument was false then, and it is false now. Nation-states are not rational actors: they obfuscate and sabre-rattle for all kinds of reasons in pursuit of their often-misguided perceptions of their national interest.
Your quote from the IAEA is a nice bit of bait-and-switch. Iran is generally portrayed as actively pursuing nuclear weapons in a systematic way, and this is held up as an argument for bombing or invasion. Yet the best "evidence" you can come up with is a rather tepid statement that there was some systematic work that was terminated a decade ago, and some components of that work might still be ongoing.
That is a far, far cry from the kind of thing that is used to justify talk of bombing or invasion, and if you presented the average person with the (fairly plausible) claim, "Some elements of the Iranian scientific, military and engineering establishment may be doing work that could one day contribute to an Iranian nuclear weapons programme if they ever start one" you would not get anything like the same jingoistic response as you'd get from the wildly implausible claims, "Iran has an active nuclear weapons programme" or "Iran has been actively pursuing a nuclear weapons for the past 20 years."
The rest of your "argument" is just a zombie-like collection of straw people, score palpable hits against things I did not say and points I did not make.
Oh, and Iran took a long time building a power reactor because it wasn't a high priority for them. Take off your paranoia-goggles and you'll see how plausible that is.
It is not like it would be unprecedented for the chief of a government agency to outright lie about something like this.
Much like US and Israeli intelligence agencies are lying about the threat of an Iranian bomb, which the Iranians have no intention of building.
Why do I find this claim plausible? Because the Israelis in particular have been claiming that Iran has been trying to build a bomb for over 20 years, and Iran does not yet have the bomb. That would put the Iranians in Sidney Opera House territory in terms of how late their project is.
Building nuclear weapons is easy. It only took four years the very first time to design and build both uranium and plutonium bombs from scratch, and it was done by people whose resources were fantastically limited compared to even a moderately wealthy state like modern Iran. Iran has a per capita GDP of about $3600, which is about half of the US at the bottom of the Great Depression and 1/3 of what it was in the early '40's, and what can be bought for those dollars is light-years ahead of what could be had in 1942, so there are no significant economic or technological constraints on Iran today compared to the US 70 years ago.
But Iran doesn't have a bomb? Why not?
Iranians aren't stupid or uneducated or technologically backward. Why would it take them more than a few years to replicate a relatively simple piece of technology?
The most plausible explanation to my mind is that they are not working on building one. If they were, they would have it by now.
It is perfectly reasonable for an oil-producing country to create a significant civil nuclear program, as the example of Canada shows, so the fact that Iran has oil in no way implies that they don't need nuclear power.
None of this makes much sense, unless Iran is not working on building a bomb.
The claim that increasing atmospheric greenhouse gas levels in sufficient quantities will lead to an increased global mean temperature is not extraordinary
This is the controversial claim in the eyes of anyone who understands thermodynamics: is the doubling of CO2 sufficient to increase atmospheric heat content to a degree that will materially affect climate?
"Mean temperature" is a thermodynamically meaningless quantity, and in a mixed material like the atmosphere, which contains a variable amount of water, increased heat content could actually be associated with a decrease in temperature. The response of the climate system is not a one-dimensional "worse/better" thing, which is the way people who don't understand thermodynamics always report it.
There is general agreement that the CO2 humans have added to the atmosphere in the past 200 years has resulted in 1.6 W/m**2 additional power being trapped at the Earth's surface, comparable to the Sun's brightness increasing by about 0.1% or a decrease in the Earth's mean orbital radius of 0.06% (a quarter of the distance to the Moon, to give a sense of scale.)
Recent work on tree-ring density (published last week in a reputable journal) indicates orbital forcings in the past 2000 years that are up to four times the current anthropogenic forcing, and yet the polar bears somehow survived. This work could be wrong, but the anthropogenic effect is so small an input that many people find the claims that it will result in dramatic, run-away climatic instabilities implausible given it is very likely that there have been comparably-sized changes in climate forcings many times over the past ten thousand years due to centuries-long changes in ocean circulation, orbital dynamics, vegetation type and distribution, etc.
Therefore, the claim that an additional climate forcing on the order of 0.1% will be more than a somewhat costly inconvenience is controversial, and as a computational physicist I am depressingly aware of how fragile and complex climate models are. They are far, far more approximate than the financial models that produced the collapse of 2008.
Most of what you described concerns precision, not accuracy, which won't be known for another couple of decades.
Furthermore, 31 tunable unphysical parameters is 26 more than the number canonically required to make an elephant fly, and short-term integrations tell you very nearly nothing about the longer-term behaviour of the model.
As a some-time computational physicist I find accounts like yours disturbing and depressing. The few times I've dug deeply into GCMs what I've found has been no where close to sufficiently physical to support the weight of the conclusions people are putting on them.
My favourite was a quite well-regarded (now obsolete) model in the early 2000's that didn't conserve energy natively. Energy conservation was imposed by fixing up temperatures after each time step. If a student did that and claimed it was anything but an unphysical hack guaranteed to produce meaningless results over tens of thousands of time-steps for reasons that are obvious and well-known to anyone who has ever seriously engaged in computational physics, I would fail them.
I guess here's one question: how many people working on GCMs have worked on the modeling of a diverse set of physical systems? My impression is that the work is mostly being done by climatologists, not computational physicists, and as such the people creating the models have no idea how appallingly naive and optimistic many of their assumptions are. Those of us who've spent a lot of time on simpler systems and seen the astonishing results of apparently benign but mildly unphysical parameterizations are a lot more cautious.
None of this is to say that GCMs haven't improved a lot in the past ten years and the really egregious errors have so far as I can tell mostly been fixed, or that we should cavalierly continue to dump gigatonnes of garbage into the air (I am in favour of market-based solutions to CO2 emissions, such as cap-and-trade.) But the results of GCMs are still not where I personally would like them to be as a driver of policy, and it worries me that they are being used by both business and governments as a guide to forward planning.
Spoken like someone who can't stand well-vetted core branches of philosophy to be polluted with nonsense, rather.
Ah, nothing like the smell of argument from authority.
As it happens I do know a little bit about epistemology, and I wandered in the nonsensical wilderness that passes for that "well-vetted (by whom?) core branch of philosophy" for many years before coming to my present understanding, which was not reached lightly.
Your very question/claim that Bayesian reasoning cannot be applied to a simple case such as an accusation of adultery merely demonstrates that you don't have a clue what you are talking about. Updating one's prior beliefs in a way that is consistent with them and new evidence is precisely what Bayes theorem--and nothing else--allows us to do.
That "and nothing else" is the result of mathematical deduction, by the way. You should study up on Jaynes' version of Cox's argument to see the majesty of it, and not simply get annoyed by the fact that it makes nonsense of most of pre-scientific epistemology. Claiming there are non-Bayesian ways of knowing that do not result in inconsistencies and contradictions is pretty much up there with claiming to be able to trisect the angle with nothing but straight edge and compass.
So here is a question: is using techniques of updating beliefs that will produce inconsistent, contradictory results evil? I think so, because it will lead to inconsistent, self-defeating behaviour. If I were to say, "You must use this way of knowing even though it will result in you ending up (at best) confused, dissatisfied and in a self-contradictory state of belief" I'd say that was a pretty vile way to treat a person.
With respect to the adultery claim, remember that if you are rational, you are not concerned with certainty (a certain belief is one that is resistant to any additional evidence, which is faith.) So the only question facing you with regard to an accusation of adultery is, "What is the posterior plausibility of the claim 'X is an adulterer"?" given the evidence of "Y says X is an adulterer".
This is a trivial application of Bayes' rule, and I leave it as an exercise for the interested student to work through it.
There is nothing inherently evil about Christianity or Islam.
Sure there is: they both require you to put non-Bayesian means ahead of Bayesian means as a way of knowing reality, and that is the root of all evil.
In the case of religions, scripture and ecclesiastical authority are the favoured non-Bayesian means. In the case of political organizations, party doctrine and ideology are the favoured non-Bayesian means.
Whenever anyone attempts to induce someone to abandon the only possible consistent way of knowing reality--Bayesian reasoning about systematic observations and controlled experiments--they are committing the most fundamental act of evil possible.
Unfortunately as usual the greenpeace and anti-GM rent-a-mod luddites are against it because... well I've no idea really
So what you're saying is, you haven't paid one bit of attention to this debate over the past decade or so. Weird that you feel compelled to post about it just so say you know nothing at all about it.
Just on the off chance you have some new-found ability to learn, here are the three major reasons people are against GM foods, in order of plausibility:
1) Health and safety. This is the one that gets the most attention because only stupid people (there are a lot of them) believe it and pro-GM people find it easy to refute.
2) Moral reasons. Ownership of seed grain, the slippery slope toward crops with the bio-terrorist "terminator gene", which will with certainty escape and contaminate entire crop systems, and so on, are legitimate concerns. Monstanto and other unequivocally evil organizations have spent quite a bit of money countering this through marketing and other lies.
3) Bio-diversity reasons. This is by far the strongest concern, and why I don't want to eat GM foods: because it would be supporting a very fragile monoculture that progressively undermines food security for me and everyone else.
Since you've told us all so clearly that you know nothing at all about GM foods and the controversy around them, I guess it's also reasonable to assume you know nothing about the well-documented effects of monocultures. The basic problem is that they are highly susceptible to parasites. Famous examples include the Irish potato famine and the world-wide collapse of the banana industry in the 1950's.
You should use your favourite search engine and learn a bit about the biodiversity issue, as it would stop you from looking like the trollish little pillock you come across as here.
The idea that we should start with two separate models, one for large scale and another for the small scale, is precisely the opposite of what science seeks to do, and is a severe mis-representation of science.
So much wrong with this it deserves two replies.
When modeling non-linear systems like the Earth's climate, multi-scale models are exactly what we do. Your analogy to a quasi-linear system like orbital mechanics is so completely wrong-headed as to be funny.
Furtheremore, there was actually a deeply serious debate in the orbital mechanics community in the late '80's as to whether the solar system was even stable. Due to extremely subtle defects in our models it appeared that our long-term integrations of orbits exhibited chaotic behaviour in the relevant mathematical sense... orbits were still "fairly" stable but acquired random phases and whatnot over time, and tiny changes in starting conditions in the early solar system resulted in substantially different orbital phases today.
This all turned out to be false, but it took a decade and some extremely careful mathematical and computational work to prove it.
Yet compared to modeling the climate the solar system is child's play.
So why do people like you believe climate models the way a fundamentalist believes the Bible? It can't be because of the quality of the science, nor your understanding of it, because while the science is good it is no-where near good enough to bear the weight of the conclusions you jump to.
The problem is that this isn't relevant to the social issue of global warming, and many "skeptics" will claim that it is relevant. Even if the change in temperature ends up being a blip on the radar in geological time, it only takes a few years of drought to decimate food stores and cause a world-wide pandemic. THIS is the issue that should be relevant to us these days, and I'm afraid that all these newly minted arm-chair scientists (more accurately described as big business apologists) are going to ensure that we delay action until it is too late.
Another thing I should say is that we have a very reliable model for showing that increased CO2 can cause warming on a small scale.
First off, your scare-mongering helps no one and nothing. The work presented in this paper includes the claim that past climate forcings have been up to four times as large as the current 1.6 W/m**2 that is due to antropogentic CO2 since 1760.
Let me repeat that for everyone who missed it: there have been extended periods--centuries--in the past that have experienced orbital climate forcings that are up to 6.4 W/m**2 as opposed to our current 1.6 W/m**2. The proxy temperature also shows sharp upward jumps of the kind that appear in the 20th century.
If you deny this, you are denying scientific evidence. Feel free to do so if that's what your politics dictate, but don't pretend you're defending science in the process.
It follows from this that the Earth's ecosystem, the polar bears, and so on, are capable of weathering the kind of thing we are doing to the world. This is what the science is telling us. Human economies may be more fragile. Or not.
Secondly, your claim that we have "a very reliable model" of the complex non-linear system that is the Earth's atmosphere and oceans is simply false. We have a set of more-or-less unphysical models that contain all the science we can find, but are still parameterized and approximated in ways that make computational physicists shudder. These models have not been developed by computational physicists but by climatologists, and that's a problem.
None of this is to say that we should go on dumping gigatonnes of garbage--including CO2--into the atmosphere. But this cherry-picking of the scientific results is about 10% as bad on the pro-AGW side as the anti-AGW side, and that's pretty damned bad. No matter who wins, science loses.
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For me, its a passion.
The complexity of engineering made it a passion for Rube Goldberg, too, and this is what people are responding to here. To the average person's ears you're saying, "The [needless, gratuitous, egregious] complexity of the law makes it fun."
A lot of us suspect the law could be a good deal simpler (certainly true) but for the fact that the people who work in the feild actually enjoy the complexity. There's nothing wrong with enjoying stuff that's as complicated as it needs to be, but I know as a scientist and engineer who has been involved in patents in software and genomics, and as a businessperson who has done a good deal of his own legal work, that the law is more complex than it needs to be in any number of respects, and if more lawyers, judges and legislators hated complexity with a passion, rather than finding it "fun" we might have laws that are closer to the lower bound of possible complexity, rather than continually bumping up against (or soaring far beyond) the ceiling of complexity that is either practical or needful.
I am not saying the law can be "simple" in any absolute sense, merely that it can be simpler than it currently is, especially in the US (which compared to my native Canada is a nightmare), and if more people working with the law were simplicity-focused we would be better off than we are.
I think CEOs (and their families) of companies should be required to live downwind/downstream from their plants. Would make them think twice about cost vs pollution issues.
So that would be like farmers living where pesticide use creates the most birth defects, or the engineering staff on the Deepwater Horizon, who were the ones at risk if they incorrectly interpreted test results?
There's nothing much wrong with putting the decision makers at risk--it certainly can't hurt--but it won't even begin to solve the actual problems, and we know this with something approaching certainty from an abundance of empirical data, so the claim that "it would make them think twice about cost vs pollution issues" is demonstrably, trivially, empirically false.
That said, as of two years ago you couldn't buy a whole system (engine/nav/radar/battery/depth sounder etc) that used Cat-5 for less than $15,000.
Cat-5? I'd expect most systems today to be NMEA 2000 enabled, which is four-wire CAN-bus-based serial network, if memory serves (although admittedly I may be misremembering.)
Anybody who has access to the object's orbital parameters which show that this would have been with 100% certainty, impossible, please feel free to call me a paranoid freak at this point; but we are overdue an ELE (Extinction Level Event) by about 15 million years (I keep reading around the science journals about ELEs happening about every 50 million years, the last one was what? 65 million years ago (the K-T Event)?
"Overdue" is not a meaningful term in this case. We get about one large impact every 50 million years, but think about it statistically: a Poisson distribution with a mean of 1 has P(0) ~ 0.6, so even at 65 million years the odds are barely 50/50, and in any case, the events are uncorrelated so it doesn't matter how long ago the last one occurred.
When you wake up each morning the odds of you dying in an asteroid impact are the same: about one in a billion. Your odds of dying in a lightning strike or getting gored by a bull are quite a bit higher. Even getting killed in a terrorist attack has higher odds, and that's saying something.
So while evolution is true it is the root of all evil.
Anyone who has wittnessed the death of one of their children, as Darwin did, might well be tempted to agree with you (although not Darwin himself, as it happens, which I've always found very curious.)
We all yack about how wonderful evolutoin is, how miraculous that the ability to make imperfect copies is enough to create humans from bacteria, while ignoring that it reveals the universe as a horror story of unimaginable dreadfulness. Each and every one of us winners is backed by a vastly larger number of losers, many of whom died horribly, and that is absolutely necessary for the engines of evolution to keep turning.
This says nothing about the truth or falsity of the theory--it is obviously and necessarily true--but it may explain why some people find it unpalatable (although no anti-evolutionist has ever said this, to the best of my knowledge).
Does smoking pot as a teen lower your IQ, or are stupid teens more likely to smoke pot?
From the abstract; "Impairment was concentrated among adolescent-onset cannabis users, with more persistent use associated with greater decline. Further, cessation of cannabis use did not fully restore neuropsychological functioning among adolescent-onset cannabis users. Findings are suggestive of a neurotoxic effect of cannabis on the adolescent brain and highlight the importance of prevention and policy efforts targeting adolescents."
A randomized controlled trial is by far the best means of proving causality, but a strong dose-response curve is a good secondary indicator. In this case, the data don't seem to support the contention of the abstract very well. Here they are from Table 1 in the paper:
Persistence of regular cannabis use
Never used | 242 | 38.84 | 99.84 (14.39) | 100.64 (15.25) | 0.05
Used, never regularly | 508 | 50.59 | 102.27 (13.59) | 101.24 (14.81) | â'0.07
Used regularly at 1 wave | 47 | 72.34 | 101.42 (14.41) | 98.45 (14.89) | â'0.20
Used regularly at 2 waves | 36 | 63.89 | 95.28 (10.74) | 93.26 (11.44) | â'0.13
Used regularly at 3+ waves | 41 | 78.05 | 96.00 (16.06) | 90.77 (13.88) | â'0.35
Where the columns are: MJ usage category, # of people in category, %male, Avg(SD) IQ at 7- 13 years old, Avg(SD) IQ at 38 years old, size of effect.
There are a couple of striking things: the percentage of males jumps markedly as the regularity of cannabis use goes up, and the initial IQ drops. So this study shows that young men with slighlty lower than average IQ are more likely to engage in regular cannabis use, and this may or may not result in a further decrease in their IQ over time.
Also, the numbers in the regular use categories are quite small: a few dozen.
I've not read the paper in detail, but superficially this looks exactly like the kind of research that led to hormone replacement therapy being touted as a good thing for post-menapausal women. Selection effects amongst the population of HRT users in the early days resulted in apparently dramatically improved health outcomes, whereas when applied to the general population the results were just the opposite.
While the data are plausibly suggestive that cannabis is bad for the adolescent brain, it is also plausibly suggestive that the lower-IQ male adolescent is more at risk for cannibis use and IQ decline.
A child doesn't exist for the first several months of pregnancy.
Although something exists through the first several months of pregnancy, and it is certainly alive and it is certainly human (what other species is it, if not human?)
This is just a fact, not an argument. An argument would be if I were to then introduce another premise--like, "And no human entity at any stage of its life-cycle should ever be killed for any reason"--and then drew a conclusion from that. That would be an argument.
The ordinary, uncontroversial fact that a human in the early stages of its life cycle exists immediately after pregnancy, and that entity is destroyed in the course of an abortion, should be the grounding for any argument on the morality and legality of abortion.
My own position is that the destruction of this human entity (I won't say "human being" because that comes loaded with all kinds of connotations that are not fulfilled by the fetus, so anyone who uses that kind of language is either confused or deliberately misleading) is entirely up to the person carrying it. She after all is in the position to have that entity's best interests at heart, far more than me or you or the Organs of the State or anyone else. If she believes the best thing to do is destroy that entity, that she should be free to do so.
Every human society has some means of disposing of the results of unwanted pregnancies, usually via some form of infanticide. Access to abortion is a vast improvement on this, putting the person who has the greatest knowledge and greatest interest in the matter in charge of the choice is the only reasonably optimal way of making the decision, and if anything in the matter should be considered a crime, it is having a child who is not wanted and will not be loved.
They are, in fact, an amoral bunch (notice their love of Ayn Rand) and their system of views is based on corporate culture.
Ayn Rand was 100% pro-choice and denounced Ronald Reagan as being "unable to defend rights at all" because he did not defend a woman's right to end the life of her unwanted fetus. So be claiming that people on the Right have a "love of Ayn Rand" in a thread that is specifically devoted to how much people on the Right oppose women's rights is ironic, to say the least.
It's pretty hilarious that everyone on both the Right and Left are claiming that the Right has something to do with Ayn Rand, who was specifically and bluntly critical of corporate leaders who used pull with the government to beat their competition, which is the only possible meaning anyone who's been paying attention can impute to "their system of views based on corporate culture".
Go ahead and criticize the GOP or Rand--there is a great deal to criticize in both--but don't think they have anything to do with each other.
The far right keeps saying this, but it's simply not true. In England, everyone is covered by universal coverage. But many people buy supplemental health insurance because they want more of a premium plan with extra coverage/benefits. You can still have all the luxury health care you want. You are just going to have to pay extra for the luxury bits. Which all sounds quite reasonable. Stop spreading FUD.
Except in Canada, where the Canada Health Act effectively prohibits most Canadians from having supplementary health insurance for a wide range of procedures that are covered by their provincial health insurance. So if you need a knee replacement, say, you have three options: 1) wait for a year or more to get it via the universal system; 2) be well-connected in the health-care system and jump the queue (I've worked in the system and been assured this happens); 3) be one of the ultra-rich, like Belinda Stronach or Robert Bourassa, and skive off to the US to get it done, all the while smugly lecturing your social, political and economic inferiors on the virtues of the Canada Health Act.
Unfortunately, the reason why we have this crazy restriction is that we're living next to a nation with an entirely predatory health-care system, and there are quite legitimate concerns as to what the effect of a more open insurance market would be, despite most Canadians being in favour of it and most socialized systems being far more open to private insurance than ours is.
Exactly. The "bananas" you see in supermarkets are a genetic monstrosity; basically all clones of the same individual, thanks to human meddling over the last 7000 years. It doesn't get more GM than that. So, where do you draw the line?
At bananas, obviously.
"Where do you draw the line?" is a question that is only ever asked by people who don't actually have any argument but hope to distract people from that by pretending that we don't draw arbitrary yet strangely effective lines every single day.
But in this case, you've accidentally brought up one of the big legitimate issues with GM foods (the other one being the kinds of corporation that are involved in GM seed production): monoculture.
The modern Cavendish banana is a different variety than the one grown a hundred years ago (Gros Michel) thanks to a fungus that wiped out the previous variety, creating considerable economic hardship and disruption in banana-producing regions. Major banana producers then switched to the current variety, which is now under threat from a variant of the same fungus.
Since I don't want to support monoculture, I don't buy bananas. See how simple it is to draw the line?
While liquid sodium is no one's idea of a fun material to work with, there are a couple of things you're not quite accurate on.
The big one is why you think the coolant might be in contact with the control rods.
You also don't mention that the shutdown/restart cycle is much simple due to the relative lack of iodine poisoning, the amount of energy extracted from the fuel is much higher, and the amount of long-lived waste produced is much smaller.
There's also the point that materials and manufacturing have advanced just a bit in the past fifty years, so it's worth revisiting this question and seeing if we can't work out some of the wrinkles that made such a mess of things the last time this was investigated.
In the early years of nuclear development SFRs were in competition with existing technology, and the decision was made at least in part because the technological issues with thermal neutron reactors were already pretty much solved, mod the odd carbon core that caught fire, the unfortunate tendency to write themselves off due to plastic deformation of the core when there's a loss of power to the circulating pumps, hydrogen embrittlement issues, and so on.
During the mid-phase of nuclear technology development... no wait, I forgot. There really wasn't much of a mid-phase, was there? The first generation of reactors was built, then in the wake of Three Mile Island and eventually Chernobyl things came to a halt in many places. A small amount of research went on, but it was extremely modest compared to what was required to develop the new fuel cycles required to power the 21st century.
Strangely, no one anywhere who opposed nuclear power ever lifted a finger to develop viable replacement technology, or we wouldn't be having this discussion. I guess it's much easier to oppose than create, to prevent and destroy than to build.
I first read this as "Corporate priesthood"!
This is genius! If corporations are people in the US, and churches are tax-exempt, and according to what James Randi says the religious lobby in the US is so strong that not even the IRS will go after churches, what's to stop a corporation's officers from declaring itself the head of a church--in its role as "corporate person"--and then carrying all of its economic activity out under the untaxed, unscrutinized auspices of that church?
but over WIFI and more expensive?
Like autonomous and more expensive, although there's no need for them to be. Smart rocks will soon be almost as cheap as dumb rocks, if enough stupid people with technical educations are let loose.
For the people who feel like killing people is a good way to spend their time and use their education: please use plain language to describe what you do. "Method of engagement" is a coward's way of saying "means of killing people and destroying things."
Take the extra time to use the extra words that actually describe what you're using your incredibly sophisticated abilities for, and don't hide behind euphemisms like some prim Victorian virgin who doesn't have the guts to say she wants a good hard fucking.
The New Sensationalist article starts out:
If someone asked you to walk in a straight line over a constantly shifting floor, you would probably declare it impossible after a few tries and a couple of grazed knees.
Either that, or you're a sailor and have no difficulty walking a straight line over a constantly shifting deck, and think that this declaration is silly, as well as being an excellent example of the fallacy of composition: Penrose tilings have no globally repeating patterns so no globally straight glider path can exist, right?
Wrong: Penrose tilings are full of local order (thus the name "quasi-crystal" for naturally occurring structures with 5-fold local symmetries) and that creates the possibility that a sufficiently adaptive automaton that exists on a comparable scale to the local order (four or five tiles across, maybe up to ten) will be able to thread its way through the extremely rigidly defined deviations from perfect regularity to generate a straight course.
There are a couple of interesting things about this result that the New Sensationalist misses. One is: how come 4 states? Could this have anything to do with the five-dimensional regularity that Penrose tilings are based on? Another is: what about tilings with even less order? One could create a tiling that has no order whatsoever... would it still be possible to build a glider on it? Does the number of required states scale with the order parameter?
Jesus Christ I wish I had mod points for this. I'm sitting at my desk trying not to laugh so hard I fall over!
Look at the abstract. This isn't arguing about the accuracy of fractional degree measurements at individual weather stations: it is about > 3 sigma events over >10% of the Earth's surface, quite large changes and exactly the kind of thing that would be expected if more energy was being added to the atmosphere.
Exactly what you would expect on what basis? Climate models are notoriously inexact in their predictions, and lower-latitude effects of this magnitude have not to best of my knowledge been predicted in any detail by any strong GCM. The paper certainly doesn't cite any.
What the paper does do is ask, "How can we maximally mix politics with science so that we can convince people the global climate change is real and that governments therefore must enact a bunch of policies that we are ideologically committed to regardless of the climate situation?"
Every climate change denier is going to take this paper for exactly what it is: cherry picking data (the 1951-1981 baseline in particular) and special-pleading on hypotheses (assuming a Gaussian distribution of temperature anomalies over the long term) and invoking the author's favoured explanatory hypothesis for no other reason than it is their favoured explanatory hypothesis.
There is no strong reason to expect that a 30-year baseline in the mid-20th century is in any way representative of normal climate variability over the past few thousand years, and many reasons to believe it is not. If you were to apply this baseline to the Little Ice Age or the Medieval Optimum you might equally well conclude that something was terribly amiss.
There is no reason to assume that long-term climate variability has a Gaussian distribution. Climate is full of nonlinear effects and mode shifts independently of human activity. We can see these mode shifts clearly in the past climate record, often resulting in sudden changes in temperature in specific locales over very short timescales.
There is REALLY no reason to assume that "simply because this is a larger change than we see in our 'natural' baseline it MUST be caused by humans." Anyone who accepts this argument should also accept the equally bogus arguments that if something is not explicable by current science it MUST be caused by God. This is purely religious thinking, in which the conceptual scheme of the reasoner is given vast and completely unjustified ontological weight.
There is some good science in what the authors are doing in this paper, but their blatant, unabashed attempt to politicize the science from the word go does tremendous damage to the reputation and neutrality of science. They aren't making any kind of case for extreme climate change: they are simply assuming it and asking, "How can we convince people it's real?" That's not science. It's politics, and politics of a kind usually played by the other side in the climate change debate.
The only thing that doesn't make sense is Iran's non-compliance if they're innocent
As I recall a very similar argument was used not too long ago regarding "weapons of mass destruction" in a country immediately adjacent to Iran. The argument was false then, and it is false now. Nation-states are not rational actors: they obfuscate and sabre-rattle for all kinds of reasons in pursuit of their often-misguided perceptions of their national interest.
Your quote from the IAEA is a nice bit of bait-and-switch. Iran is generally portrayed as actively pursuing nuclear weapons in a systematic way, and this is held up as an argument for bombing or invasion. Yet the best "evidence" you can come up with is a rather tepid statement that there was some systematic work that was terminated a decade ago, and some components of that work might still be ongoing.
That is a far, far cry from the kind of thing that is used to justify talk of bombing or invasion, and if you presented the average person with the (fairly plausible) claim, "Some elements of the Iranian scientific, military and engineering establishment may be doing work that could one day contribute to an Iranian nuclear weapons programme if they ever start one" you would not get anything like the same jingoistic response as you'd get from the wildly implausible claims, "Iran has an active nuclear weapons programme" or "Iran has been actively pursuing a nuclear weapons for the past 20 years."
The rest of your "argument" is just a zombie-like collection of straw people, score palpable hits against things I did not say and points I did not make.
Oh, and Iran took a long time building a power reactor because it wasn't a high priority for them. Take off your paranoia-goggles and you'll see how plausible that is.
It is not like it would be unprecedented for the chief of a government agency to outright lie about something like this.
Much like US and Israeli intelligence agencies are lying about the threat of an Iranian bomb, which the Iranians have no intention of building.
Why do I find this claim plausible? Because the Israelis in particular have been claiming that Iran has been trying to build a bomb for over 20 years, and Iran does not yet have the bomb. That would put the Iranians in Sidney Opera House territory in terms of how late their project is.
Building nuclear weapons is easy. It only took four years the very first time to design and build both uranium and plutonium bombs from scratch, and it was done by people whose resources were fantastically limited compared to even a moderately wealthy state like modern Iran. Iran has a per capita GDP of about $3600, which is about half of the US at the bottom of the Great Depression and 1/3 of what it was in the early '40's, and what can be bought for those dollars is light-years ahead of what could be had in 1942, so there are no significant economic or technological constraints on Iran today compared to the US 70 years ago.
But Iran doesn't have a bomb? Why not?
Iranians aren't stupid or uneducated or technologically backward. Why would it take them more than a few years to replicate a relatively simple piece of technology?
The most plausible explanation to my mind is that they are not working on building one. If they were, they would have it by now.
It is perfectly reasonable for an oil-producing country to create a significant civil nuclear program, as the example of Canada shows, so the fact that Iran has oil in no way implies that they don't need nuclear power.
None of this makes much sense, unless Iran is not working on building a bomb.
The claim that increasing atmospheric greenhouse gas levels in sufficient quantities will lead to an increased global mean temperature is not extraordinary
This is the controversial claim in the eyes of anyone who understands thermodynamics: is the doubling of CO2 sufficient to increase atmospheric heat content to a degree that will materially affect climate?
"Mean temperature" is a thermodynamically meaningless quantity, and in a mixed material like the atmosphere, which contains a variable amount of water, increased heat content could actually be associated with a decrease in temperature. The response of the climate system is not a one-dimensional "worse/better" thing, which is the way people who don't understand thermodynamics always report it.
There is general agreement that the CO2 humans have added to the atmosphere in the past 200 years has resulted in 1.6 W/m**2 additional power being trapped at the Earth's surface, comparable to the Sun's brightness increasing by about 0.1% or a decrease in the Earth's mean orbital radius of 0.06% (a quarter of the distance to the Moon, to give a sense of scale.)
Recent work on tree-ring density (published last week in a reputable journal) indicates orbital forcings in the past 2000 years that are up to four times the current anthropogenic forcing, and yet the polar bears somehow survived. This work could be wrong, but the anthropogenic effect is so small an input that many people find the claims that it will result in dramatic, run-away climatic instabilities implausible given it is very likely that there have been comparably-sized changes in climate forcings many times over the past ten thousand years due to centuries-long changes in ocean circulation, orbital dynamics, vegetation type and distribution, etc.
Therefore, the claim that an additional climate forcing on the order of 0.1% will be more than a somewhat costly inconvenience is controversial, and as a computational physicist I am depressingly aware of how fragile and complex climate models are. They are far, far more approximate than the financial models that produced the collapse of 2008.
Most of what you described concerns precision, not accuracy, which won't be known for another couple of decades.
Furthermore, 31 tunable unphysical parameters is 26 more than the number canonically required to make an elephant fly, and short-term integrations tell you very nearly nothing about the longer-term behaviour of the model.
As a some-time computational physicist I find accounts like yours disturbing and depressing. The few times I've dug deeply into GCMs what I've found has been no where close to sufficiently physical to support the weight of the conclusions people are putting on them.
My favourite was a quite well-regarded (now obsolete) model in the early 2000's that didn't conserve energy natively. Energy conservation was imposed by fixing up temperatures after each time step. If a student did that and claimed it was anything but an unphysical hack guaranteed to produce meaningless results over tens of thousands of time-steps for reasons that are obvious and well-known to anyone who has ever seriously engaged in computational physics, I would fail them.
I guess here's one question: how many people working on GCMs have worked on the modeling of a diverse set of physical systems? My impression is that the work is mostly being done by climatologists, not computational physicists, and as such the people creating the models have no idea how appallingly naive and optimistic many of their assumptions are. Those of us who've spent a lot of time on simpler systems and seen the astonishing results of apparently benign but mildly unphysical parameterizations are a lot more cautious.
None of this is to say that GCMs haven't improved a lot in the past ten years and the really egregious errors have so far as I can tell mostly been fixed, or that we should cavalierly continue to dump gigatonnes of garbage into the air (I am in favour of market-based solutions to CO2 emissions, such as cap-and-trade.) But the results of GCMs are still not where I personally would like them to be as a driver of policy, and it worries me that they are being used by both business and governments as a guide to forward planning.
Spoken like someone who can't stand well-vetted core branches of philosophy to be polluted with nonsense, rather.
Ah, nothing like the smell of argument from authority.
As it happens I do know a little bit about epistemology, and I wandered in the nonsensical wilderness that passes for that "well-vetted (by whom?) core branch of philosophy" for many years before coming to my present understanding, which was not reached lightly.
Your very question/claim that Bayesian reasoning cannot be applied to a simple case such as an accusation of adultery merely demonstrates that you don't have a clue what you are talking about. Updating one's prior beliefs in a way that is consistent with them and new evidence is precisely what Bayes theorem--and nothing else--allows us to do.
That "and nothing else" is the result of mathematical deduction, by the way. You should study up on Jaynes' version of Cox's argument to see the majesty of it, and not simply get annoyed by the fact that it makes nonsense of most of pre-scientific epistemology. Claiming there are non-Bayesian ways of knowing that do not result in inconsistencies and contradictions is pretty much up there with claiming to be able to trisect the angle with nothing but straight edge and compass.
So here is a question: is using techniques of updating beliefs that will produce inconsistent, contradictory results evil? I think so, because it will lead to inconsistent, self-defeating behaviour. If I were to say, "You must use this way of knowing even though it will result in you ending up (at best) confused, dissatisfied and in a self-contradictory state of belief" I'd say that was a pretty vile way to treat a person.
With respect to the adultery claim, remember that if you are rational, you are not concerned with certainty (a certain belief is one that is resistant to any additional evidence, which is faith.) So the only question facing you with regard to an accusation of adultery is, "What is the posterior plausibility of the claim 'X is an adulterer"?" given the evidence of "Y says X is an adulterer".
This is a trivial application of Bayes' rule, and I leave it as an exercise for the interested student to work through it.
There is nothing inherently evil about Christianity or Islam.
Sure there is: they both require you to put non-Bayesian means ahead of Bayesian means as a way of knowing reality, and that is the root of all evil.
In the case of religions, scripture and ecclesiastical authority are the favoured non-Bayesian means. In the case of political organizations, party doctrine and ideology are the favoured non-Bayesian means.
Whenever anyone attempts to induce someone to abandon the only possible consistent way of knowing reality--Bayesian reasoning about systematic observations and controlled experiments--they are committing the most fundamental act of evil possible.
Unfortunately as usual the greenpeace and anti-GM rent-a-mod luddites are against it because ... well I've no idea really
So what you're saying is, you haven't paid one bit of attention to this debate over the past decade or so. Weird that you feel compelled to post about it just so say you know nothing at all about it.
Just on the off chance you have some new-found ability to learn, here are the three major reasons people are against GM foods, in order of plausibility:
1) Health and safety. This is the one that gets the most attention because only stupid people (there are a lot of them) believe it and pro-GM people find it easy to refute.
2) Moral reasons. Ownership of seed grain, the slippery slope toward crops with the bio-terrorist "terminator gene", which will with certainty escape and contaminate entire crop systems, and so on, are legitimate concerns. Monstanto and other unequivocally evil organizations have spent quite a bit of money countering this through marketing and other lies.
3) Bio-diversity reasons. This is by far the strongest concern, and why I don't want to eat GM foods: because it would be supporting a very fragile monoculture that progressively undermines food security for me and everyone else.
Since you've told us all so clearly that you know nothing at all about GM foods and the controversy around them, I guess it's also reasonable to assume you know nothing about the well-documented effects of monocultures. The basic problem is that they are highly susceptible to parasites. Famous examples include the Irish potato famine and the world-wide collapse of the banana industry in the 1950's.
You should use your favourite search engine and learn a bit about the biodiversity issue, as it would stop you from looking like the trollish little pillock you come across as here.
The idea that we should start with two separate models, one for large scale and another for the small scale, is precisely the opposite of what science seeks to do, and is a severe mis-representation of science.
So much wrong with this it deserves two replies.
When modeling non-linear systems like the Earth's climate, multi-scale models are exactly what we do. Your analogy to a quasi-linear system like orbital mechanics is so completely wrong-headed as to be funny.
Furtheremore, there was actually a deeply serious debate in the orbital mechanics community in the late '80's as to whether the solar system was even stable. Due to extremely subtle defects in our models it appeared that our long-term integrations of orbits exhibited chaotic behaviour in the relevant mathematical sense... orbits were still "fairly" stable but acquired random phases and whatnot over time, and tiny changes in starting conditions in the early solar system resulted in substantially different orbital phases today.
This all turned out to be false, but it took a decade and some extremely careful mathematical and computational work to prove it.
Yet compared to modeling the climate the solar system is child's play.
So why do people like you believe climate models the way a fundamentalist believes the Bible? It can't be because of the quality of the science, nor your understanding of it, because while the science is good it is no-where near good enough to bear the weight of the conclusions you jump to.
The problem is that this isn't relevant to the social issue of global warming, and many "skeptics" will claim that it is relevant. Even if the change in temperature ends up being a blip on the radar in geological time, it only takes a few years of drought to decimate food stores and cause a world-wide pandemic. THIS is the issue that should be relevant to us these days, and I'm afraid that all these newly minted arm-chair scientists (more accurately described as big business apologists) are going to ensure that we delay action until it is too late.
Another thing I should say is that we have a very reliable model for showing that increased CO2 can cause warming on a small scale.
First off, your scare-mongering helps no one and nothing. The work presented in this paper includes the claim that past climate forcings have been up to four times as large as the current 1.6 W/m**2 that is due to antropogentic CO2 since 1760.
Let me repeat that for everyone who missed it: there have been extended periods--centuries--in the past that have experienced orbital climate forcings that are up to 6.4 W/m**2 as opposed to our current 1.6 W/m**2. The proxy temperature also shows sharp upward jumps of the kind that appear in the 20th century.
If you deny this, you are denying scientific evidence. Feel free to do so if that's what your politics dictate, but don't pretend you're defending science in the process.
It follows from this that the Earth's ecosystem, the polar bears, and so on, are capable of weathering the kind of thing we are doing to the world. This is what the science is telling us. Human economies may be more fragile. Or not.
Secondly, your claim that we have "a very reliable model" of the complex non-linear system that is the Earth's atmosphere and oceans is simply false. We have a set of more-or-less unphysical models that contain all the science we can find, but are still parameterized and approximated in ways that make computational physicists shudder. These models have not been developed by computational physicists but by climatologists, and that's a problem.
None of this is to say that we should go on dumping gigatonnes of garbage--including CO2--into the atmosphere. But this cherry-picking of the scientific results is about 10% as bad on the pro-AGW side as the anti-AGW side, and that's pretty damned bad. No matter who wins, science loses.