Back atcha. This is the first cogent statement of considering when habeas corpus shouldn't apply that I've ever heard:
Insofar as the relevant Articles of Geneva dictate the treatment of prisoners, the assumption is that in order to get the benefit of that agreement, you must abide by it. That means that combatants fight as armies, wear some type of uniform that identifies them as a member of that army, and reciprocate in the treatment prescribed.
Yes, it's almost certain that the people we're fighting against will neither wear uniforms nor reciprocate. And I agree that that poses a serious dilemma for how best to offer soldiers the best protections and tools to win wars while fighting wars humanely (if such is possible). So while I agree that there's a dilemma there, I do think (and there I'd guess I'm in disagreement with you) that the moral, strategic, and even tactical benefits of torture/suspension of habeas corpus are dubious. By most intelligence officers' accounts that I've ever read torture's effectiveness is unproven in that it's difficult to know when you really get the truth out of people under duress. And habeas and recourse to justice have always been Morally it's a very slippery slope: after all, if there are times when you should use torture, when shouldn't you use torture? If enemy combatants shouldn't get habeas, what about civilian intelligence targets? What about inhabitants who are hostile to our aims, but have not done anything against us? What if they turn out to be innocent, as with the Canadian-Syrian guy? Lives are always at stake in war situations, often lots of lives. Once the Soviets legitimated torture, they never eradicated it from their military, and their "justice" system made China look transparent. Since throughout the Cold War we kept ourselves to a higher standard (with some exceptions for off-the-books intelligence type operations in African and Central American countries), we could honestly and defensibly say that we were more just, more humane and more free than the Soviets, and that the promise extended to anyone who worked with us. You can't be a Boy Scout in every situation, but holding ourselves to a higher standard has a lot of value.
Finally, torture can become a tactical liability. You obviously know better than me, but an important reason for army discipline is to keep people focused on winning battles and not devolving into counterproductive acts of revenge brought on by the horrors of war. Torture undermines this kind of discipline by legitimating acts of questionable value, and it also deeply undermines any moral case for the legitimacy of the war. I believe this is particularly import in situation like Iraq where substantial proportions of the population don't think our presence is legitimate. Likewise, without habeas, when innocent people are caught up in military operations (as they inevitably will be in a murky counterinsurgency situation), there's no check on the arbitrariness of detention. So it's much easier to get wrapped up in detentions based on likes, dislikes and accusations than if people get their day in court and go free when they're innocent.
I'm not saying that I'm your stereotypical "quiet, strong dude", but I've stared down some stereotypical bullies in exactly that type of situation.
I commend you for this - it's not easy to do. I had a specific experience where a strong, quiet dude physically stood up for me, and I've never forgotten it. I'd like to think I've stood up for people in more subtle ways, but never quite as directly as this guy.
It's easy to get caught up in feeling that it's wrong to imprison *any* person indefinitely without the prospect of a trial, but we are, in fact, talking about military prisoners, and the old way of doing things was typically to execute them (especially spies, saboteurs, and those engaging in war in such a way that they were easily mistaken for civilians). I'd say this is an improvement over that policy, from a human rights standpoint.
Tell that to the tens of millions of souls who died in World War 2, a segment of history that your argument leaps right over. Humanity worked out the Geneva Conventions (especially the Third) precisely about this and the issue of torture after that massive and horrible war made clear that any other way of dealing with humanitarian concerns in wars was brutal, stupid, and ineffective. In those days and the 50+ years that followed, we were the standard bearers for dealing fairly and humanely with all people engaged in conflict, and it was precisely those standards that made us the leader of the free world. We led honorably and by example when the chances of any given American civilian dying at foreign hands were probably 10000 times what they are today. I find it hard to believe that anyone can convince him or herself that the danger from some disaffected radicals comes anywhere near the kinds of threats we faced from the Axis powers or from the Soviet nuclear arsenal. Yet amazingly, the people who claim being afraid of some angry dudes in a cave is tougher than trying to build a safer world by balancing power with diplomacy still seem to get listened to.
The torture and the suspension of habeas corpus authorized by the Bush administration directly tread on the Geneva Conventions. Even when the kangaroo courts don't conflict with the letter of the law of those treaties, they sorely damage our reputation for fairness and transparency. Talk about making us unsafe: when we make people unwilling to trust our leadership, we have to resort to military force more and more. Don't get me wrong: military force is a necessary part of building security. But it can never supplant the need to win hearts and minds. Fair, humane, and transparent standards of law are what win us hearts and minds, and the sooner we restore them, the better we do at make the world and ourselves safe.
All of this is true broadly, without even making reference to the fact that many of the people in Gitmo are demonstrably neither terrorists nor enemy combatants. That they are in the "No-Habeas Zone" at all is a testament to how foolishly our government has neglected HUMINT in favor of whizbang technological solutions like Carnivore and WarrantlessWiretappingTM (sponsored by AT&T). If we had a decent set of informants, operatives, sympathizers and soldiers that spoke languages like Pashtun and Farsi, we'd have a hell of a lot better idea of who's on what team when we move into a country. Instead, because few in our military and intelligence apparatus speak the local language, we wander around taking people at their world and getting sucked into local conflicts and politics. We got bamboozled by Iran into taking out their enemy #1 one, now we're getting drawn into power struggles between Iraqi factions, we picked up a bunch of dudes in Afghanistan that got ratted on, and we detained and shipped off for torture lots of people that we didn't know anything about.
There's nothing tough-minded about torture or undemocratic no-habeas courts. It's just old-fashioned brutality. The toughest guy on the playground isn't the bully, it's that quiet, strong dude who sticks up for the little guy - even when the little guy is a pissant.
Look more closely at that (corrected) graph. In particularly, look at the year-on-year variability. The hot years in the 30's did indeed get very hot, but they were interspersed with cold years. No such thing happens in the late 90's and early 2000s - cold years in this latter period are all a lot warmer than almost any other cold years and in fact warmer than most years prior to 1930! This is another way of looking at what another poster was saying about ranking the 5 year running means, and is in fact the reason those running means are higher.
He launched a blog to attract attention to his research and created a website where he posted his manuscripts that had been rejected by Nature. But in early January of this year, he finally had a paper accepted into a real science journal--Geophysical Research Letters (GRL).
Decades of research have created a massive body of scientific literature on climate change, and thousands of new studies on the subject appear every year in different science journals. Yet, within weeks of publishing his first peer-reviewed study, McIntyre was profiled on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. The article ran 2209 words and was written by reporter Antonio Regalado.
Not content to be roundly rebuffed by the National Academy of Sciences (note that the first link is to Roger Pielke at Colorado, generally one of the most skeptical institutions about global warming), McIntyre goes on to throw around all kinds of baseless accusations about data.
As for the charges of closedness, I find them very hard to believe. Source code to many or most climate models is available to those wishing to run them for research: http://www.climateprediction.net/download/license. php
The problem is that people like McIntyre don't want to do any science - they want to find reasons to doubt science they don't like. It's typical manufacturing of doubt by way of quibbles. No surprises here: it's the exact MO of climate changes deniers and their network of megaphone-carriers. Criticizing someone's results is a valuable part of science, but it's only part, McIntyre doesn't go on to participate in the rest of the science - figuring out how to account for the criticism and improve the theories. He stops at "this theory's broke! That means all the work everyone's ever done is broke too! Let's all go to the seashore now!" That's what so frustrating to anyone who's ever been in science - it's disrespectful to science and cumbersome and annoying for scientists to deal with.
The good thing is that Linux, GNU, and Open Source development are moving along at a faster pace than Windows is and sooner or later it will begin to surpass other OSes and GUIs in features, stability, flexibility, future potential, etc (if it already hasn't). There are weak spots as all products have them. I think Open Source will respond better to enhancing those features faster than a monolithic monopoly ever could. Not to mention there are huge numbers of potential developers that will be creating prior art and even IP that companies such as Microsoft can only steal if they want to move ahead. That's a tremendous boom.
Wow, those are some big shoes to fill, and filling them rests on some pretty big ifs.
Read The Mythical Man-Month. One of the most cogent things Brooks has to say is about project coherency, best exemplified in the desktop world by Apple. What Macs give you above all, their primary value proposition, is coherency of design.
Coherency tends to be one of the weakest suits for many or most Open Source projects, especially those without a central entity to define the direction. The exceptions tend to be server or kernel-side: Apache, Linux Kernel, databases, etc, and I'd claim this is because there's a well-defined set of CS problems being solved there. KDE, which I use daily, has absolutely no coherency of design. That's why it does well as a testbed for new features, approaches, etc, but very poorly at consistency of experience.
Brooks' argument, which is pretty credible, is that coherency comes from having one or a few project architects and consistently returning to their vision. They absolutely need to spend a lot of their time listening to users and developers and reacting to their feedback, but ultimately someone's vision is what makes a codebase hang together. Con is saying that the architects of Linux are basically not that interested in the desktop experience on vanilla hardware, because they're most interested in more traditional CS questions that tend to play themselves out much more in the enterprise space than the desktop space. As a non-CS guy in the software development world, this really strikes a chord with me. The Linux desktop is built on very similar components to the Mac desktop, yet is worlds away in usability. And that's basically because a) nobody is defining, shepherding and advocating usability requirements at the OS level, and b) the desktop projects don't have a architect/requirements definer at all.
The rest of the article, and particularly the extravagant claims about success and failure are pretty much what you'd expect from a smart, non-CS, hardworking, disgruntled community member who has not been taken as seriously as he ought. The same dynamic pretty clearly played itself out in the climate change debate over the "hockey stick", where Mann et. al. were too dismissive of smart, hardworking, somewhat contrarian, non-climate science authors of counterclaims, McKitrick and McIntyre (M&M). Mann's work has withstood M&M's criticism well, and frankly M&M dropped the ball on some key items (like not properly modeling how various quantities vary with latitude - a big blooper in climate science) but the whole debate would have had less drama (and therefore been less ripe for political cherry-picking) had M&M not been seen to be marginalized by the climate science community. To me the lesson is not the technical merits of Con's solutions, but the lack of serious attention to his points about where the focus is in kernel development. That's the interesting part of this story, and one that Linus should really take to heart.
It's hard to know where to begin with this comment. Copyright is one of the key legal vehicles for controlling use and disposition of intellectual property. It happens to include the word copy, but this clearly does not limit it making copies. This is precisely what a license agreement is built on, including the GPL. You don't need a law degree to read through a couple license agreements and realize they rely on the copyright holders right to control the disposition of his or her work. Just read a couple...
That's funny; the current Republican president took an economy at the brink of recession and took it to booming in only a few years. I don't think it will take Democrats a decade to fix what isn't broken.
You have truly drunk the Kool-Aid. How many times has the administration revised its job creation numbers downward several weeks after their standard quarterly release? How many times have they played the same game with the deficit, leaving out of the calculations small things like a trillion dollars in "emergency" war spending they couldn't possibly have anticipated after being at war for longer than World War II, and thereafter releasing revising numbers on Friday afternoon before a holiday weekend or other times when the news cycle will bury the trash. And for that matter how much have the national deficit and debt changed under the Bush administration (hint: they didn't decrease)? How about trade deficit? Or even better, median wage? Or participation in the labor force? If Bush is your bar for economic stewardship, I've got some Enron stocks I think you might be interested in.
There are reasonable debates about the net effect of regulation and when and how it should be applied. There are reasonable debates about the proper level of deficit for a nation with sophisticated financial systems. There are even reasonable debates about whether and when to attack a Middle Eastern oil tyrant. But nothing this administration has ever done suggests a desire for anyone to openly debate anything it does. Instead, it obfuscates, lies, manipulates data, gives interviews to sycophantic news organizations (Jeff Gannon, prostitute-reporter anyone?), and then insists that black is white (like for starters, where the fsck are the WMDs we're supposed to be worried about in the iRack)? Even Reagan, whose approach I detested didn't engage in this kind of systematic mendaciousness and undermining of the integrity of government institutions. The Bushies are both crooked and nuts, and that should frighten you no matter where you lie on the political spectrum.
Not only that, but chances are extremely high that in the process of founding company B, you will need to raise money to make it run. Since the people from whom you're asking for money are not likely to be total dopes, they will ask you for equity covering the things you have of value (i.e. your patent). So if and when you get around to actually running company C, the investors in company C will hold claim to the patent as well as the business, having dispensed with the company A and B formalities. Be nice if it'd worked, tho...
You nailed it. In a broader sense I think it shows you how market change does and doesn't work. Linux ought to pose a lot of advantages - it's definitely cheaper up front, more maintainable, provides vendors with options, etc. So a hardware vendor can sell you Linux and keep more money than if they were selling you Windows. Clearly vendors don't all think that or they would have made many things work smoothly with Linux. This usually leads to an argument about support, training and TCO, and all those TCO arguments really boil down to the cost of managing change. Is the cost of changing from Windows more or less than what you'll save by being on Linux in a year, two years, 10 years? The answer most people come up with would have seemed to be more. Absent some new killer app or feature, it's awfully hard to make a case (and generally rather impolitic) that the investments made previously don't deserve re-investment. So Linux does just fine where little change is involved (Proprietary Unix -> Linux, nothing to Linux, etc.), but what can you do with Linux that you can't do with Windows that justifies the time and effort of change? So far, very few things that people en masse care about. Developers, scientists, tinkerers - sold, because for us there are plenty such killer features. Note that the open is doing quite well against closed in the DRM space because people en masse care about open in this arena. They just don't care about it with their OS, because on the margin the cost of the OS and the servers is less than the cost of change. And you can bet you bottom billion dollars that Microsoft spends a lot of effort tuning their price point against the costs of change.
The one counterweight I can see to this: Microsoft's and other proprietary vendors' heavy-handedness is probably what works mostly against them. That is, the numbers may favor taking the low-risk road for your OS and staying where you are. But despite the endless geek plaint against PHBs, many managers take their geeks' distrust as a data point - if your engineers strongly say that you should beware of a vendor because of lock-in, heavy-handedness and underwhelming delivery, that message starts to sink in. You can in fact translate that kind of thing into management-speak - it's about unearthing risks. And that's exactly what we've been seeing - open source is levelling the playing field in vendor relationships, even as it fails to make an adequate change for mass change away from Windows on the desktop.
In the US a large-scale analogy we have to this is land use and sprawl. Nobody really wants more sprawl, not even the people who live in it. I mean if you moved to the exurbs you probably went for some combination of cheaper land and lifestyle costs, more space, a little exposure to the natural environment, and privacy. If your community doesn't tame sprawl, all of those things will be either cut into or lost entirely: the nice big lot your house used to back up onto will be subdivided, increasing traffic and costs and decreasing privacy and exposure to nature. Yet to tame sprawl, you have to change your own land use - drive less, accept less space in the first place, pay more for a more carefully designed built environment etc. The momentum for sprawl is not that people believe in it, they simply don't want to change. This is how you end up driving from York PA to DC, despite 4 soul-sucking hours day commuting to and from work. Change is harder than continuity.
You hit the nail on the head. Most of this article is dressing up widely understood facets of open source in a trenchant tone and some vapors of controversy and acting like it's a brand new idea. Nothing to see here, folks...
I beg to differ on ales. In pilseners and belgians you may be reasonably correct, but in ales, the US is quickly standing up. Try a Troeg's or a Hop Devil (or locally here in Pittsburgh, its cousin Big Hop) for a little Pennsylvania flavor, an Arrogant Bastard or Boont Amber if you lean California-side, Hazed and Infused or Fat Tire in parts Coloradan, or especially a Dogfish Head 90 Minute in Delaware. Despite its macrobrew lineage, even Blue Moon is a decent happy hour refresher. American ales can hold their own anywhere these days.
Of the things you mention, only a couple are really improvements as opposed to overdue fixes:
driver model - fixes a design flaw from Win32 display driver in User space - basically still a design flaw fix (clearly not as bad as drivers in general, b/c X still runs as root) UAC - fixes design flaws from Win32/Win95, suffers from various flaws in interaction with users new IP stack - fixes bad design flaws from Win32 and adds incremental improvement
New stuff SuperFetch - incremental and decent improvement in executable caching DX10 - potentially interesting library for graphics, comparable efforts existing under X and Mac Managed code for various parts of the API - distinct and innovative improvement, dunno if Mac does this Vector-driven graphics rendering - distinct and somewhat innovative improvement, Linux is lagging, but I believe Quartz does this UI changes - mostly cosmetic and some annoying, hard to really call this innovative.
Cancelled stuff WinFS - profoundly innovative - would have been well ahead of anyone else. Still arguably vaporware.
All in all, not a ground-breaking release, but it has some good incremental improvements. I'll confess that I'm annoyed by having to pay again to get a number of these key design issues fixed, and that's a big reason for me not to want to move to Vista.
Wrong. Most scientists (as far as I can tell, and leaving out the Al Gores and Michael Crichton's) seem to agree that the globe is warming. Many of them believe that humans are contributing, mainly to an acceleration of a natural increase.
This is why those of us with background in earth science find this so frustrating. The vast majority of the climate science community believes that humans are nearly certainly the most important contributor to current warming trends. Read the statement from the American Meteorological Society on climate change, or that of the National Academy of Sciences and other G8 nations' academies of science, or that of the American Geophysical Union. Or for the most recent views, read the IPCC 4th Asssessment Report. All of these groups and documents say the same thing: the Earth is complex and nonlinear, so while natural variability cannot be absolutely and totally ruled out, it is highly likely (90%+ likely, in the IPCC 4AR's own words) that human influence is the main contributor to climate change. That same sentence is in the first couple paragraphs of every one of these statements. So not only do a strong majority of practicing climate scientists believe climate change is happening, they also attribute recent changes to human activity. That's the consensus. There's room for improvement in a number of areas, but the basic diagnosis is agreed upon. Claims to the contrary are simply not factual, and those contrary claims causes people like me great frustration and on occasion I'll confess cause my to be a little vitriolic. Where there is less agreement is in predictions of the speed, magnitude and spatial variability of changes. The IPCC 4AR itself allows nearly an order of magnitude of total warming (2C to 10C). Even the best modelers aren't willing to say unequivocally the exact path warming will take. But the message is clear that it is happening, it is very likely to due to human influence, and it will have moderately severe to catastrophic consequences. All of the documents I mention also state that policy actions are needed immediately. These being academies of natural science, they generally leave to governments how best to balance economic and social concerns with the imperative to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Al Gore is not a climate scientist, but he does not make claims that contradict statements by major scientific societies (he does present claims such as projected sea level increases that themselves have not been endorsed by those societies - note again the difference between diagnostic and predictive claims). But Tim Ball repeatedly makes claims that contradict the statements of the professional societies of experts - without having done any research to substantiate his position! And the fact that he does this over and over, with nothign new to back up what he's saying, strongly suggests that - whatever his motivations are- he is not really evaluating the claims he's speaking against. So when people tell you he's not credible, they're totally right.
Before throwing your hat in with this guy, you might want to research his motivations. Also, he is a geographer, not a climatologist. Has written zero papers on climatology, has no experience in climatology.
Let's try a simple filter. Remove any articles that for sources primarily rely on Pat Michaels (professor of natural resources, not a climatologist), Tim Ball (professor of geology, not a climatologist), Richard Lindzen (he is in fact a climatologist, but his IRIS theory of cloud lensing has been pretty thoroughly rejected), anyone from AEI or Cato (neither of which do any research in earth science), Michael Crichton (novelist cum "journalist", no background in climate science), and Christopher Monckton (journalist, no background in climate science). You'll find that eliminates nearly all of the articles proclaiming both bias and unrecognized research, and generally leaves Roger Pielke Jr./the Promethus crew, Henrik Svenson, and a few others, plus people like Carl Wunsch, who still advocate a more "let's get even more certain" approach than say, Michael Mann.
As the parent says, in any grading of Tim Ball on the basis of his contribution to climate science, he comes up either ungraded or failing. Yet despite his total (and I do mean 100%) lack of participation in the field, he is quoted at least every couple months as a "climatologist" who has been "persecuted". Allow me to say clearly: if he has received death threats, this is certainly impermissible, reprehensible and should be prosecuted fully. But you'll find me a little unreceptive to such claims from him especially in the Telegraph. The Telegraph in particular loves to run the "climate dissent is being censored" story; they do one every couple months and it always sources the same people. I don't know whether they get encouragement from the usual funding suspects like ExxonMobil, AEI, etc., but neither the story nor the cast of characters ever changes. Since he and the stories seem to show on a regular cycle saying the same things and being mislabeled as an expert, you have to ask some hard questions about why they're there.
I'll admit that my tone was somewhat obnoxious, particularly in my original post, and I apologize for that tone. It is born of frustration at seeing the same cherry-picking and willful misunderstanding go on over and over. I've had this "back and forth" before, and it's not based on good science. If you were to say: hey, there's this cosmic ray paper that provides a possible mechanism to explain some of the warming presently attributed to GHGs, and therefore reduce the estimations of climate sensitivity to GHGs, I'd consider that a discussion, particularly given the challenges in modelling aerosols and clouds. But leading with prima facie false conspiracy theories about the media and scientific community and counterfactual claims about air temperature strongly suggests that you're more interested in latching on to a favorable subset of evidence than in a genuine scientific discussion. I don't know you, so if my estimation is overly cynical, sorry. But nothing you're saying suggests you're anything but a denier.
Ahem. While Svensmark's results are indeed interesting, you don't think that based on the results of a single lab experiment claiming that everyone else's assessment are wrong is a wee bit premature? This is yet another example of misusing results, and Svensmark should really be embarrassed about his tactics. Rather like how Pons and Fleischer reacted to their now-infamous results.
There are indeed plenty of interesting questions to ask and answer about global climate change, but somehow the anti-GW crowd always manages to seize on each new discovery as evidence of wrongness and wrongheadedness on the part of the climate science community about the diagnosis of anthropogenic warming. And the reason denialists don't like that diagnosis is not because of science (except maybe old-guarders like Lindzen), but because the policy implications don't line up neatly with this or that view of the world they have. There is no science in climate denialism, because the questions all flow from the answer - which must be that people are not responsible for warming - rather than vice-versa. As I said before, this is exactly the same as Intelligent Design, where the answer that God created the world begets a series questions to demonstrate this, rather than vice-versa.
Note that to get any of your above "questions" to line up with your chosen answer requires bringing together a misintepretation of data (localized Antarctic cooling is indeed happening but is in no way contradictory to current understanding of climate change) two allegations of conspiracy (the refusals to publish Svensmark's results AND the so-called lack of media coverage, despite that obvious fallacies in both conspiracy theories), an as-yet uncorroborated laboratory finding that's been inflated into a unjustified conclusion about climate change and a counterfactual claim (please, please look at the GISS data - when you don't incorrectly average in the vertical, the data does not show stabilized surface air temperatures, it shows a dramatic increase in surface air temperatures in all but a few places in the world - that's where the records for warmest years come from, and to the point of the child post below this, the issues about urban areas are directly address in the current IPCC assessment and do not have a substantial impact). This is what's so infuriating about this whack-a-mole game. Any single random potshot that happens to land is trumpeted as evidence that the whole can be shot to pieces. Every time you dig into one of these arguments, there's never reputable, reproduceable science behind it. There are plenty of open questions about climate change, but the ones you're trying to keep open have been closed. If you are really interested in the science, start asking questions about what the variability between model runs means for predictions (which, quite reasonably, are still at least a half an order of magnitude apart).
Twenty years ago, climate research became politicised in favour of one particular hypothesis, which redefined the subject as the study of the effect of greenhouse gases. As a result, the rebellious spirits essential for innovative and trustworthy science are greeted with impediments to their research careers.
Evidently the scientist in Mr. Caldwell and yourself feels no need to produce repeatable evidence for this claim. Show us the data, or quit repeating hearsay.
And while the media usually find mavericks at least entertaining, in this case they often imagine that anyone who doubts the hypothesis of man-made global warming must be in the pay of the oil companies. As a result, some key discoveries in climate research go almost unreported.
Is that why a guy who assumed the title of State Climatologist so he could sow doubt about global warming appears on CNN at least an order of magnitude more often than one of NASA's most senior and respected scientists? That definitely sounds like a media cover-up to me. C'mon, man, if you're going to use the tobacco lobby's disinformation techniques, at least use them with some finesse so they aren't just flopping around in the open all exposed and gooey.
He saw from compilations of weather satellite data that cloudiness varies according to how many atomic particles are coming in from exploded stars. More cosmic rays, more clouds. The sun's magnetic field bats away many of the cosmic rays, and its intensification during the 20th century meant fewer cosmic rays, fewer clouds, and a warmer world. On the other hand the Little Ice Age was chilly because the lazy sun let in more cosmic rays, leaving the world cloudier and gloomier.
Clearly such mundane and well-researched explanations for warming as carbon-driven greenhouse effect must not be right, if far-fetched ideas like cosmic rays could be invoked to magically produce clouds that give us the explanation we hope is true. Who needs Occam's Razor when we've got Occam's Crazy Straw?!? As it happens, my father has spent years studying cosmic ray showers. His group, which works out of a ragtag lab called Los Alamos, is obvious unfamiliar with the power of Occam's Crazy Straw, so they have made no predictions of global temperature change whatsoever.
So one awkward question you can ask, when you're forking out those extra taxes for climate change, is "Why is east Antarctica getting colder?" It makes no sense at all if carbon dioxide is driving global warming. While you're at it, you might inquire whether Gordon Brown will give you a refund if it's confirmed that global warming has stopped. The best measurements of global air temperatures come from American weather satellites, and they show wobbles but no overall change since 1999.
Amazing - someone must have broken into your ISP and blocked: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/, because it shows exactly the opposite effect (strong increases in surface air temps, offset by cooling in the stratosphere). Of course those silly NASA scientists are morons compared with some cold-fusion type cranks in a Danish basement producing unpublicable results. And as has been explained here countless times (though sadly without use of Occam's Crazy Straw), the word "global" next to "warming" means "averaging all over the globe", and therefore local cooling is not only permitted, it's often expected.
You have done an amazing job researching and writing a book that incorporates absolutely no verifiable scientific fact, but relies exclusively on crackpots, unlikely theories, and misinterpretation of existing science, and you are to be roundly commended for your Herculean efforts. Move over Intelligent Design, there's a new pseudoscience in town.
Look, I agree that I didn't provide a link and that would have bolstered my case, but this:
Your quality of argument is low, implying that you are right by accident not analysis.
is taking a pretty big chance on who I happen to be. As it happens I do know a fair bit about climate sciences, having a master's in oceanography. Call my argument hasty or sloppy if you must, but you'd be better served to restrain claims about how I know what I know.
I was disagreeing wth the statement "this can be a big term". That claim has been evaluated based on the Mauna Loa time series. Note that the major vulcanism events (e.g. Mt Pinatubo) you describe have occured within the window of the time series, and have not notable changed carbon concentrations or the trends in those concentrations. I don't disagree that volcanic eruptions can have an important temporary effect, but they are not a "big term" in emissions or mesoscale or long-term climate change.
A weather presenter has every right to an opposing view but whilst a member of that organisation s/he should be clear their view is personal and unpublished.
Thanks you, very well put. This AMS has published a statement in support of anthropogenic influence climate change, and many meteorologist speak in direct contradiction to that statement. In that vein, if you read the post on Dr. Cullen's blog, she's got a different message. She's saying that meteorologists are not bothering to understand what scientific organizations, including their own are saying about climate change, and instead are speculating based on what they hear elsewhere (and hence end up repeating assertions that are not scientifically sound). That's an issue of basic credibility - every scientist making claims about the state of scientific understanding of an issue needs to be well grounded in the literature and consensus of the community. Meteorologists are not doing this, yet they are assuming the mantle of climate scientists. That's deeply irresponsible, and if it occurred in another field would indeed be subject to sanction, much like you analogy of a surgeon not washing his or her hands. Really, read her post - she's put it much better than me, and it's not aimed as censorship at all.
As for how the loaded word censorship got introduced here, note that this press release is really from James Inhofe's office (Morano is Inhofe's communications director). http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Marc_Mo rano
Inhofe has consistently misrepresented the evidence for climate change and included testimony from non-experts. So whatever the merits of whether and how meteorologists should be permitted to publicly disagree with the science endorsed by their organizations, this press release (and its histrionics about censorship) does not originate from the climate science community - it originates from a Senator with a track record of scientific disinformation. Know thy sources and their modus operandi.
Also, there is the random "background noise" of vulcanism. This can be a big term. In the last couple of centuries we've seen at least one event that lost our planeet an entire summer, and for a while entirely overwhelmed any possible human effect. A few big volcanoes randomly going off could make the most hysterical predicitons of arts-graduate Greens look like a rainy afternoon.
Disinformation alert! This has been thoroughly investigated, and is not true. Check out the time series of atmospheric CO2 from Mauna Loa. While it's true that vulcanism can have a strong effect by putting aerosols into the atmosphere (i.e., short-term global dimming), it's been pretty clearly demonstrated that volcanic contribution is only at about 1/50 of the atmospheric CO2 increase lately. On a decadal or century scale, volcano emissions are not a major contributor to global warming. Please delete this disinformation from your storage units.
Well put. One of the worst failures of models of climate change has been the reaction of sea and land ice to warming. And the failure has been that the predictions were too conservative. Yet, shockingly, there hasn't been a media outcry about how the models were all wrong and melting could well be happening faster than we think.
The question of whether the ocean is a source or sink of carbon is an important one for carbon balance, and to be honest was the source of a lot of my discomfort several years ago with the conclusion that warming is primarily anthropogenic. However, the magnitude of the flux either way had already been constrained to indicate that there was no way that ocean could be providing enough carbon to account for the increases seen in the atmosphere. And:
clear observations of the oceanic uptake of carbon have been around for a decade now. So much so, that there's substantial concern about collapse of populations of coral and certain phytoplankton.
That's my principal problem with the "skeptics". The questions that "skeptics" ask, have either been asked and answered (as in oceanic carbon signal or changes in solar irradiance), or they represent unpromising avenues of inquiry motivated not by overall interest in advancing the status of the field, but in blocking progress towards more certainty and preserving doubt.
What you see from Pat Michaels is not healthy scientific skepticism anymore, it is paid disinformation. What you see from Richard Lindzen and William Gray is probably more cranky personal contrarianiness than shilling, but it is also not oriented towards helping science move forward and resolve genuine doubts.
There are still real problems with global climate models, which is why there's not much consensus on what warming will happen where, when, or even the magnitude of the warming by 2100 (2C to 10C is a pretty big range!). But there is no doubt that human activities are an important contributor to climate change.
First a caveat: though I did get a masters degree in physical oceanography, I'm not a practicing climate scientist. I do think my experience qualifies as exposure to the climate science community.
I've ready Kevin Vranes' blog before, and I don't entirely agree with him. I think he's got a point, but where I believe he falls down is the following. Vranes acts like climate science is, and ought to be treated like any other field, say, astrophysics. Lots of people want to know the answer to astrophysical questions, and the whole dark matter vs. modified gravity is a great example of a set of people who are concerned by how quickly a theory (dark matter) has been accepted. That skepticism is great, and an essential part of science. But there are limits to where skepticism should be applied. Should modified gravity people go back and challenge all of quantum electrodynamics?
The mere fact that the grandparent was willing to say that all climate science is unreliable and poor science (which is what really cheesed me off, truth be told), is indicative of the amount of pressure and meddling that have already been brought to bear on climate science. Nobody has said that the dark matter folks have done bad science or are biased or are creating a climate of fear. I certainly can and do accept the notion that there are substantial problems yet to be resolved with GCMs, and that the path to and timescale of changes is not all that well-established. Hell, even the IPCC can't reduce the uncertainty on the magnitude of increase in global mean temperature (between +2C and +10C is nearly an order of magnitude!). How often does a guy from a smaller entity in climate science, with some sort of State Climatologist title nobody really knows where it came from, need to go on TV to tell you that all other scientists are peddling bunk before you conclude that the entire process has been severely strained? Or the fact that in spite of clear statements of consensus on diagnosis (human activities are an importabt part of warming) and quite clear statements on the uncertainty of prognosis (when and how warming will occur), a senator convenes hearing after hearing to attack the diagnosis - does this constitute a strain on the scientific process?
And yes, there has doubtless been more yelling and screaming than talking calmly in the service of getting the diagnosis paid its due attention. If I were in the shoes of some of the yellers, I'd have private doubts about doing that too (although I might well also have doubts about having understated the risks in an effort to appear restrained). But the demands of those who have sought to challenge the diagnosis have always been to table the issue until everything is well-known, which is, as Vranes points out, anathema to good policymaking. Is it really incumbent upon a scientist to give up and go back to the cool still space of academia when that kind of thing happens?
There is a serious funding problem in Climate Science because a lot of organizations are afraid to fund "Skeptics" because of the backlash it will cause from environmental groups; many radical enviromental groups will do everything in their power to destroy the reptuation of someone who disagrees with them (this is typical of a lot of lobby groups regardless of the issue).
At risk of being labeled a knee-jerk skeptic-basher, can you please, please, pretty please source this? This is a very broad and strong allegation, so if you're going to level it, source it clearly. Like specific groups and specific threats and specific scientists. You can take or leave the Union of Concerned Scientists' viewpoint that association with oil money makes you an unreliable scientist or a shill - I happen to think that's a complex issue and I don't quite know where I stand on it. But at least they've laid out their case with specific claims about which specific people did what. The claim that "some scientists won't publish for fear of retribution from environmental
Can you please offer some real-life experience that backs up any of those assertions? Note: what you read on Free Republic does not count as experience.
I have a degree in physical oceanography, and I can tell you with absolute certainty that you are wrong on this as the deniers i the lies bought from them. The whole time I was in graduate school, I held the point of view that anthropogenic effects could not be separated from natural variability. While people didn't agree with me, I was never disparaged, and nobody even thought of trying to link my work to that. At the time, there were a lot of challenges to be made to important conclusions like Mann's, and modelling was much less well developed. There are still important uncertainties, but the open scientific process has worked, and it has confirmed the findings about anthropogenic climate change. I have been obligated to change my point of view by the increasing body of evidence here.
There is no controversy. There is no doubt. There are some claims which are not fully supported - e.g., how exactly anthropenic warming will affect hurricane formation is not clear, but the most of the basic physical mechanisms are pretty well undertand (if not the second order problems like interaction between wind shear and sea surface temperature), but when they are made and answered within the context of scientific debate (e.g. Kerry Emmanuel's paper), they have tended to confirm the magnitude of risks. Part of the reason scientists are pissed and have begun publishing reports like this is that they resent the endless meddling in the process by these oil-funded "think tanks".
The problem the denialists have is not bias, it is that they are trying to challenge an increasingly established body of science with loopier and loopier ideas. This is similiar to the small but active community of denialists who claim that cold fusion is being suppressed - they more evidence thatemerges against it, the more they turn to whiny claims of bias of crazy counterarguments. Trying to make improbable criticisms stick is never a good strategy for funding. Any responsible grant administrator will consider the question of, say, the meaning of correlation between atmospheric CO2 and temperature as an approximately closed question. There are of course caveats and valid criticisms to any particular paper using those correlations, but the basic science is considered fairly well established. It might be nice if there was so much funding just lying around that the correlation could be subjected to nearly endless testing, but it can't. It's had its day in scientific debate, and barring some truly innovative method or a new framework that raises new concerns, the question is settled. The denialists have provided none of this (barring Lindzen's loony IRIS theory), yet they continue to whine and moan about how their lack of good ideas and unwillingness to accepted results of good work is not in fact petty obstinacy (or more likely outright bought loyalty), but is some kind of noble keeper of the flame movement. That's self-flattering bullshit, and an insult to serious scientists everywhere. Climate science has a healthy scientific process - like anything else, it could probably use improvement in some areas. But to suggest that the whole field of climate science is fundamentally unsound is breathtakingly arrogant and small-minded.
So until you have something real to the conversation, do us the favor of keeping your unfounded slander in your mom's basement next to your teddy bear and anime girlfriend.
Thank you for answering the only interesting and verifiable assertion in that article. The blathering about "it's good vs. it's not good enough" because it does or doesn't have this or that feature is pointless and long past stale, but the assertion that the development enthusiasm and speed have weakened deserve serious attention.
Your point is true about gradual architectural features and fixes, there's been quite a lot of improvment in those areas, as well as some neat individual projects. But in defense of the article I have definitely been struck by the big gap between the grand rhetoric around KDE4 and the evidently very limited progress. It's pretty hard not to take a dim view when you read that the Appeal and Plasma projects are a UI revolution that will anchor KDE4, and then dig to find out what's going on and discover that all that's been done is a few hacks to Kicker. It's hard to avoid concluding that there's either a resource problem or a discipline problem there.
This assertion is just an assertion, but I think it's worth actually asking some questions about what can be done to get more resources and direction to these projects.
Slashdot Mirror
Finally, torture can become a tactical liability. You obviously know better than me, but an important reason for army discipline is to keep people focused on winning battles and not devolving into counterproductive acts of revenge brought on by the horrors of war. Torture undermines this kind of discipline by legitimating acts of questionable value, and it also deeply undermines any moral case for the legitimacy of the war. I believe this is particularly import in situation like Iraq where substantial proportions of the population don't think our presence is legitimate. Likewise, without habeas, when innocent people are caught up in military operations (as they inevitably will be in a murky counterinsurgency situation), there's no check on the arbitrariness of detention. So it's much easier to get wrapped up in detentions based on likes, dislikes and accusations than if people get their day in court and go free when they're innocent.I commend you for this - it's not easy to do. I had a specific experience where a strong, quiet dude physically stood up for me, and I've never forgotten it. I'd like to think I've stood up for people in more subtle ways, but never quite as directly as this guy.
The torture and the suspension of habeas corpus authorized by the Bush administration directly tread on the Geneva Conventions. Even when the kangaroo courts don't conflict with the letter of the law of those treaties, they sorely damage our reputation for fairness and transparency. Talk about making us unsafe: when we make people unwilling to trust our leadership, we have to resort to military force more and more. Don't get me wrong: military force is a necessary part of building security. But it can never supplant the need to win hearts and minds. Fair, humane, and transparent standards of law are what win us hearts and minds, and the sooner we restore them, the better we do at make the world and ourselves safe.
All of this is true broadly, without even making reference to the fact that many of the people in Gitmo are demonstrably neither terrorists nor enemy combatants. That they are in the "No-Habeas Zone" at all is a testament to how foolishly our government has neglected HUMINT in favor of whizbang technological solutions like Carnivore and WarrantlessWiretappingTM (sponsored by AT&T). If we had a decent set of informants, operatives, sympathizers and soldiers that spoke languages like Pashtun and Farsi, we'd have a hell of a lot better idea of who's on what team when we move into a country. Instead, because few in our military and intelligence apparatus speak the local language, we wander around taking people at their world and getting sucked into local conflicts and politics. We got bamboozled by Iran into taking out their enemy #1 one, now we're getting drawn into power struggles between Iraqi factions, we picked up a bunch of dudes in Afghanistan that got ratted on, and we detained and shipped off for torture lots of people that we didn't know anything about.
There's nothing tough-minded about torture or undemocratic no-habeas courts. It's just old-fashioned brutality. The toughest guy on the playground isn't the bully, it's that quiet, strong dude who sticks up for the little guy - even when the little guy is a pissant.
Look more closely at that (corrected) graph. In particularly, look at the year-on-year variability. The hot years in the 30's did indeed get very hot, but they were interspersed with cold years. No such thing happens in the late 90's and early 2000s - cold years in this latter period are all a lot warmer than almost any other cold years and in fact warmer than most years prior to 1930! This is another way of looking at what another poster was saying about ranking the 5 year running means, and is in fact the reason those running means are higher.
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2007/08/global_wa
Not to mention that Steve McIntyre isn't exactly a "blogger".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_McIntyre
He published a series of papers critical of Michael Mann's "hockey stick" paleoclimate analysis, though in typical fashion for the skeptic crowd not in those nasty old peer-review journals, but rather in an un-refereed energy journal. And then, due to the unbelievable media bias against unscientific quibbling with science: Not content to be roundly rebuffed by the National Academy of Sciences (note that the first link is to Roger Pielke at Colorado, generally one of the most skeptical institutions about global warming), McIntyre goes on to throw around all kinds of baseless accusations about data.
As for the charges of closedness, I find them very hard to believe. Source code to many or most climate models is available to those wishing to run them for research:
http://www.climateprediction.net/download/license
The problem is that people like McIntyre don't want to do any science - they want to find reasons to doubt science they don't like. It's typical manufacturing of doubt by way of quibbles. No surprises here: it's the exact MO of climate changes deniers and their network of megaphone-carriers. Criticizing someone's results is a valuable part of science, but it's only part, McIntyre doesn't go on to participate in the rest of the science - figuring out how to account for the criticism and improve the theories. He stops at "this theory's broke! That means all the work everyone's ever done is broke too! Let's all go to the seashore now!" That's what so frustrating to anyone who's ever been in science - it's disrespectful to science and cumbersome and annoying for scientists to deal with.
Read The Mythical Man-Month. One of the most cogent things Brooks has to say is about project coherency, best exemplified in the desktop world by Apple. What Macs give you above all, their primary value proposition, is coherency of design.
Coherency tends to be one of the weakest suits for many or most Open Source projects, especially those without a central entity to define the direction. The exceptions tend to be server or kernel-side: Apache, Linux Kernel, databases, etc, and I'd claim this is because there's a well-defined set of CS problems being solved there. KDE, which I use daily, has absolutely no coherency of design. That's why it does well as a testbed for new features, approaches, etc, but very poorly at consistency of experience.
Brooks' argument, which is pretty credible, is that coherency comes from having one or a few project architects and consistently returning to their vision. They absolutely need to spend a lot of their time listening to users and developers and reacting to their feedback, but ultimately someone's vision is what makes a codebase hang together. Con is saying that the architects of Linux are basically not that interested in the desktop experience on vanilla hardware, because they're most interested in more traditional CS questions that tend to play themselves out much more in the enterprise space than the desktop space. As a non-CS guy in the software development world, this really strikes a chord with me. The Linux desktop is built on very similar components to the Mac desktop, yet is worlds away in usability. And that's basically because a) nobody is defining, shepherding and advocating usability requirements at the OS level, and b) the desktop projects don't have a architect/requirements definer at all.
The rest of the article, and particularly the extravagant claims about success and failure are pretty much what you'd expect from a smart, non-CS, hardworking, disgruntled community member who has not been taken as seriously as he ought. The same dynamic pretty clearly played itself out in the climate change debate over the "hockey stick", where Mann et. al. were too dismissive of smart, hardworking, somewhat contrarian, non-climate science authors of counterclaims, McKitrick and McIntyre (M&M). Mann's work has withstood M&M's criticism well, and frankly M&M dropped the ball on some key items (like not properly modeling how various quantities vary with latitude - a big blooper in climate science) but the whole debate would have had less drama (and therefore been less ripe for political cherry-picking) had M&M not been seen to be marginalized by the climate science community. To me the lesson is not the technical merits of Con's solutions, but the lack of serious attention to his points about where the focus is in kernel development. That's the interesting part of this story, and one that Linus should really take to heart.
It's hard to know where to begin with this comment. Copyright is one of the key legal vehicles for controlling use and disposition of intellectual property. It happens to include the word copy, but this clearly does not limit it making copies. This is precisely what a license agreement is built on, including the GPL. You don't need a law degree to read through a couple license agreements and realize they rely on the copyright holders right to control the disposition of his or her work. Just read a couple...
You have truly drunk the Kool-Aid. How many times has the administration revised its job creation numbers downward several weeks after their standard quarterly release? How many times have they played the same game with the deficit, leaving out of the calculations small things like a trillion dollars in "emergency" war spending they couldn't possibly have anticipated after being at war for longer than World War II, and thereafter releasing revising numbers on Friday afternoon before a holiday weekend or other times when the news cycle will bury the trash. And for that matter how much have the national deficit and debt changed under the Bush administration (hint: they didn't decrease)? How about trade deficit? Or even better, median wage? Or participation in the labor force? If Bush is your bar for economic stewardship, I've got some Enron stocks I think you might be interested in.
There are reasonable debates about the net effect of regulation and when and how it should be applied. There are reasonable debates about the proper level of deficit for a nation with sophisticated financial systems. There are even reasonable debates about whether and when to attack a Middle Eastern oil tyrant. But nothing this administration has ever done suggests a desire for anyone to openly debate anything it does. Instead, it obfuscates, lies, manipulates data, gives interviews to sycophantic news organizations (Jeff Gannon, prostitute-reporter anyone?), and then insists that black is white (like for starters, where the fsck are the WMDs we're supposed to be worried about in the iRack)? Even Reagan, whose approach I detested didn't engage in this kind of systematic mendaciousness and undermining of the integrity of government institutions. The Bushies are both crooked and nuts, and that should frighten you no matter where you lie on the political spectrum.
Not only that, but chances are extremely high that in the process of founding company B, you will need to raise money to make it run. Since the people from whom you're asking for money are not likely to be total dopes, they will ask you for equity covering the things you have of value (i.e. your patent). So if and when you get around to actually running company C, the investors in company C will hold claim to the patent as well as the business, having dispensed with the company A and B formalities. Be nice if it'd worked, tho...
You nailed it. In a broader sense I think it shows you how market change does and doesn't work. Linux ought to pose a lot of advantages - it's definitely cheaper up front, more maintainable, provides vendors with options, etc. So a hardware vendor can sell you Linux and keep more money than if they were selling you Windows. Clearly vendors don't all think that or they would have made many things work smoothly with Linux. This usually leads to an argument about support, training and TCO, and all those TCO arguments really boil down to the cost of managing change. Is the cost of changing from Windows more or less than what you'll save by being on Linux in a year, two years, 10 years? The answer most people come up with would have seemed to be more. Absent some new killer app or feature, it's awfully hard to make a case (and generally rather impolitic) that the investments made previously don't deserve re-investment. So Linux does just fine where little change is involved (Proprietary Unix -> Linux, nothing to Linux, etc.), but what can you do with Linux that you can't do with Windows that justifies the time and effort of change? So far, very few things that people en masse care about. Developers, scientists, tinkerers - sold, because for us there are plenty such killer features. Note that the open is doing quite well against closed in the DRM space because people en masse care about open in this arena. They just don't care about it with their OS, because on the margin the cost of the OS and the servers is less than the cost of change. And you can bet you bottom billion dollars that Microsoft spends a lot of effort tuning their price point against the costs of change.
The one counterweight I can see to this: Microsoft's and other proprietary vendors' heavy-handedness is probably what works mostly against them. That is, the numbers may favor taking the low-risk road for your OS and staying where you are. But despite the endless geek plaint against PHBs, many managers take their geeks' distrust as a data point - if your engineers strongly say that you should beware of a vendor because of lock-in, heavy-handedness and underwhelming delivery, that message starts to sink in. You can in fact translate that kind of thing into management-speak - it's about unearthing risks. And that's exactly what we've been seeing - open source is levelling the playing field in vendor relationships, even as it fails to make an adequate change for mass change away from Windows on the desktop.
In the US a large-scale analogy we have to this is land use and sprawl. Nobody really wants more sprawl, not even the people who live in it. I mean if you moved to the exurbs you probably went for some combination of cheaper land and lifestyle costs, more space, a little exposure to the natural environment, and privacy. If your community doesn't tame sprawl, all of those things will be either cut into or lost entirely: the nice big lot your house used to back up onto will be subdivided, increasing traffic and costs and decreasing privacy and exposure to nature. Yet to tame sprawl, you have to change your own land use - drive less, accept less space in the first place, pay more for a more carefully designed built environment etc. The momentum for sprawl is not that people believe in it, they simply don't want to change. This is how you end up driving from York PA to DC, despite 4 soul-sucking hours day commuting to and from work. Change is harder than continuity.
You hit the nail on the head. Most of this article is dressing up widely understood facets of open source in a trenchant tone and some vapors of controversy and acting like it's a brand new idea. Nothing to see here, folks...
I beg to differ on ales. In pilseners and belgians you may be reasonably correct, but in ales, the US is quickly standing up. Try a Troeg's or a Hop Devil (or locally here in Pittsburgh, its cousin Big Hop) for a little Pennsylvania flavor, an Arrogant Bastard or Boont Amber if you lean California-side, Hazed and Infused or Fat Tire in parts Coloradan, or especially a Dogfish Head 90 Minute in Delaware. Despite its macrobrew lineage, even Blue Moon is a decent happy hour refresher. American ales can hold their own anywhere these days.
Of the things you mention, only a couple are really improvements as opposed to overdue fixes:
driver model - fixes a design flaw from Win32
display driver in User space - basically still a design flaw fix (clearly not as bad as drivers in general, b/c X still runs as root)
UAC - fixes design flaws from Win32/Win95, suffers from various flaws in interaction with users
new IP stack - fixes bad design flaws from Win32 and adds incremental improvement
New stuff
SuperFetch - incremental and decent improvement in executable caching
DX10 - potentially interesting library for graphics, comparable efforts existing under X and Mac
Managed code for various parts of the API - distinct and innovative improvement, dunno if Mac does this
Vector-driven graphics rendering - distinct and somewhat innovative improvement, Linux is lagging, but I believe Quartz does this
UI changes - mostly cosmetic and some annoying, hard to really call this innovative.
Cancelled stuff
WinFS - profoundly innovative - would have been well ahead of anyone else. Still arguably vaporware.
All in all, not a ground-breaking release, but it has some good incremental improvements. I'll confess that I'm annoyed by having to pay again to get a number of these key design issues fixed, and that's a big reason for me not to want to move to Vista.
Al Gore is not a climate scientist, but he does not make claims that contradict statements by major scientific societies (he does present claims such as projected sea level increases that themselves have not been endorsed by those societies - note again the difference between diagnostic and predictive claims). But Tim Ball repeatedly makes claims that contradict the statements of the professional societies of experts - without having done any research to substantiate his position! And the fact that he does this over and over, with nothign new to back up what he's saying, strongly suggests that - whatever his motivations are- he is not really evaluating the claims he's speaking against. So when people tell you he's not credible, they're totally right.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_ball
http://sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Tim_Ball
Let's try a simple filter. Remove any articles that for sources primarily rely on Pat Michaels (professor of natural resources, not a climatologist), Tim Ball (professor of geology, not a climatologist), Richard Lindzen (he is in fact a climatologist, but his IRIS theory of cloud lensing has been pretty thoroughly rejected), anyone from AEI or Cato (neither of which do any research in earth science), Michael Crichton (novelist cum "journalist", no background in climate science), and Christopher Monckton (journalist, no background in climate science). You'll find that eliminates nearly all of the articles proclaiming both bias and unrecognized research, and generally leaves Roger Pielke Jr./the Promethus crew, Henrik Svenson, and a few others, plus people like Carl Wunsch, who still advocate a more "let's get even more certain" approach than say, Michael Mann.
As the parent says, in any grading of Tim Ball on the basis of his contribution to climate science, he comes up either ungraded or failing. Yet despite his total (and I do mean 100%) lack of participation in the field, he is quoted at least every couple months as a "climatologist" who has been "persecuted". Allow me to say clearly: if he has received death threats, this is certainly impermissible, reprehensible and should be prosecuted fully. But you'll find me a little unreceptive to such claims from him especially in the Telegraph. The Telegraph in particular loves to run the "climate dissent is being censored" story; they do one every couple months and it always sources the same people. I don't know whether they get encouragement from the usual funding suspects like ExxonMobil, AEI, etc., but neither the story nor the cast of characters ever changes. Since he and the stories seem to show on a regular cycle saying the same things and being mislabeled as an expert, you have to ask some hard questions about why they're there.
I'll admit that my tone was somewhat obnoxious, particularly in my original post, and I apologize for that tone. It is born of frustration at seeing the same cherry-picking and willful misunderstanding go on over and over. I've had this "back and forth" before, and it's not based on good science. If you were to say: hey, there's this cosmic ray paper that provides a possible mechanism to explain some of the warming presently attributed to GHGs, and therefore reduce the estimations of climate sensitivity to GHGs, I'd consider that a discussion, particularly given the challenges in modelling aerosols and clouds. But leading with prima facie false conspiracy theories about the media and scientific community and counterfactual claims about air temperature strongly suggests that you're more interested in latching on to a favorable subset of evidence than in a genuine scientific discussion. I don't know you, so if my estimation is overly cynical, sorry. But nothing you're saying suggests you're anything but a denier.
Ahem. While Svensmark's results are indeed interesting, you don't think that based on the results of a single lab experiment claiming that everyone else's assessment are wrong is a
wee bit premature? This is yet another example of misusing results, and Svensmark should really be embarrassed about his tactics. Rather like how Pons and Fleischer reacted to their now-infamous results.
There are indeed plenty of interesting questions to ask and answer about global climate change, but somehow the anti-GW crowd always manages to seize on each new discovery as evidence of wrongness and wrongheadedness on the part of the climate science community about the diagnosis of anthropogenic warming. And the reason denialists don't like that diagnosis is not because of science (except maybe old-guarders like Lindzen), but because the policy implications don't line up neatly with this or that view of the world they have. There is no science in climate denialism, because the questions all flow from the answer - which must be that people are not responsible for warming - rather than vice-versa. As I said before, this is exactly the same as Intelligent Design, where the answer that God created the world begets a series questions to demonstrate this, rather than vice-versa.
Note that to get any of your above "questions" to line up with your chosen answer requires bringing together a misintepretation of data (localized Antarctic cooling is indeed happening but is in no way contradictory to current understanding of climate change) two allegations of conspiracy (the refusals to publish Svensmark's results AND the so-called lack of media coverage, despite that obvious fallacies in both conspiracy theories), an as-yet uncorroborated laboratory finding that's been inflated into a unjustified conclusion about climate change and a counterfactual claim (please, please look at the GISS data - when you don't incorrectly average in the vertical, the data does not show stabilized surface air temperatures, it shows a dramatic increase in surface air temperatures in all but a few places in the world - that's where the records for warmest years come from, and to the point of the child post below this, the issues about urban areas are directly address in the current IPCC assessment and do not have a substantial impact). This is what's so infuriating about this whack-a-mole game. Any single random potshot that happens to land is trumpeted as evidence that the whole can be shot to pieces. Every time you dig into one of these arguments, there's never reputable, reproduceable science behind it. There are plenty of open questions about climate change, but the ones you're trying to keep open have been closed. If you are really interested in the science, start asking questions about what the variability between model runs means for predictions (which, quite reasonably, are still at least a half an order of magnitude apart).
You have done an amazing job researching and writing a book that incorporates absolutely no verifiable scientific fact, but relies exclusively on crackpots, unlikely theories, and misinterpretation of existing science, and you are to be roundly commended for your Herculean efforts. Move over Intelligent Design, there's a new pseudoscience in town.
I was disagreeing wth the statement "this can be a big term". That claim has been evaluated based on the Mauna Loa time series. Note that the major vulcanism events (e.g. Mt Pinatubo) you describe have occured within the window of the time series, and have not notable changed carbon concentrations or the trends in those concentrations. I don't disagree that volcanic eruptions can have an important temporary effect, but they are not a "big term" in emissions or mesoscale or long-term climate change.
As for how the loaded word censorship got introduced here, note that this press release is really from James Inhofe's office (Morano is Inhofe's communications director).
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Marc_M
Inhofe has consistently misrepresented the evidence for climate change and included testimony from non-experts. So whatever the merits of whether and how meteorologists should be permitted to publicly disagree with the science endorsed by their organizations, this press release (and its histrionics about censorship) does not originate from the climate science community - it originates from a Senator with a track record of scientific disinformation. Know thy sources and their modus operandi.
Well put. One of the worst failures of models of climate change has been the reaction of sea and land ice to warming. And the failure has been that the predictions were too conservative. Yet, shockingly, there hasn't been a media outcry about how the models were all wrong and melting could well be happening faster than we think.
The question of whether the ocean is a source or sink of carbon is an important one for carbon balance, and to be honest was the source of a lot of my discomfort several years ago with the conclusion that warming is primarily anthropogenic. However, the magnitude of the flux either way had already been constrained to indicate that there was no way that ocean could be providing enough carbon to account for the increases seen in the atmosphere. And:
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/94/16/8308
clear observations of the oceanic uptake of carbon have been around for a decade now. So much so, that there's substantial concern about collapse of populations of coral and certain phytoplankton.
That's my principal problem with the "skeptics". The questions that "skeptics" ask, have either been asked and answered (as in oceanic carbon signal or changes in solar irradiance), or they represent unpromising avenues of inquiry motivated not by overall interest in advancing the status of the field, but in blocking progress towards more certainty and preserving doubt.
What you see from Pat Michaels is not healthy scientific skepticism anymore, it is paid disinformation. What you see from Richard Lindzen and William Gray is probably more cranky personal contrarianiness than shilling, but it is also not oriented towards helping science move forward and resolve genuine doubts.
There are still real problems with global climate models, which is why there's not much consensus on what warming will happen where, when, or even the magnitude of the warming by 2100 (2C to 10C is a pretty big range!). But there is no doubt that human activities are an important contributor to climate change.
I've ready Kevin Vranes' blog before, and I don't entirely agree with him. I think he's got a point, but where I believe he falls down is the following. Vranes acts like climate science is, and ought to be treated like any other field, say, astrophysics. Lots of people want to know the answer to astrophysical questions, and the whole dark matter vs. modified gravity is a great example of a set of people who are concerned by how quickly a theory (dark matter) has been accepted. That skepticism is great, and an essential part of science. But there are limits to where skepticism should be applied. Should modified gravity people go back and challenge all of quantum electrodynamics?
The mere fact that the grandparent was willing to say that all climate science is unreliable and poor science (which is what really cheesed me off, truth be told), is indicative of the amount of pressure and meddling that have already been brought to bear on climate science. Nobody has said that the dark matter folks have done bad science or are biased or are creating a climate of fear. I certainly can and do accept the notion that there are substantial problems yet to be resolved with GCMs, and that the path to and timescale of changes is not all that well-established. Hell, even the IPCC can't reduce the uncertainty on the magnitude of increase in global mean temperature (between +2C and +10C is nearly an order of magnitude!). How often does a guy from a smaller entity in climate science, with some sort of State Climatologist title nobody really knows where it came from, need to go on TV to tell you that all other scientists are peddling bunk before you conclude that the entire process has been severely strained? Or the fact that in spite of clear statements of consensus on diagnosis (human activities are an importabt part of warming) and quite clear statements on the uncertainty of prognosis (when and how warming will occur), a senator convenes hearing after hearing to attack the diagnosis - does this constitute a strain on the scientific process?
And yes, there has doubtless been more yelling and screaming than talking calmly in the service of getting the diagnosis paid its due attention. If I were in the shoes of some of the yellers, I'd have private doubts about doing that too (although I might well also have doubts about having understated the risks in an effort to appear restrained). But the demands of those who have sought to challenge the diagnosis have always been to table the issue until everything is well-known, which is, as Vranes points out, anathema to good policymaking. Is it really incumbent upon a scientist to give up and go back to the cool still space of academia when that kind of thing happens?
At risk of being labeled a knee-jerk skeptic-basher, can you please, please, pretty please source this? This is a very broad and strong allegation, so if you're going to level it, source it clearly. Like specific groups and specific threats and specific scientists. You can take or leave the Union of Concerned Scientists' viewpoint that association with oil money makes you an unreliable scientist or a shill - I happen to think that's a complex issue and I don't quite know where I stand on it. But at least they've laid out their case with specific claims about which specific people did what. The claim that "some scientists won't publish for fear of retribution from environmental
Can you please offer some real-life experience that backs up any of those assertions? Note: what you read on Free Republic does not count as experience.
I have a degree in physical oceanography, and I can tell you with absolute certainty that you are wrong on this as the deniers i the lies bought from them. The whole time I was in graduate school, I held the point of view that anthropogenic effects could not be separated from natural variability. While people didn't agree with me, I was never disparaged, and nobody even thought of trying to link my work to that. At the time, there were a lot of challenges to be made to important conclusions like Mann's, and modelling was much less well developed. There are still important uncertainties, but the open scientific process has worked, and it has confirmed the findings about anthropogenic climate change. I have been obligated to change my point of view by the increasing body of evidence here.
There is no controversy. There is no doubt. There are some claims which are not fully supported - e.g., how exactly anthropenic warming will affect hurricane formation is not clear, but the most of the basic physical mechanisms are pretty well undertand (if not the second order problems like interaction between wind shear and sea surface temperature), but when they are made and answered within the context of scientific debate (e.g. Kerry Emmanuel's paper), they have tended to confirm the magnitude of risks. Part of the reason scientists are pissed and have begun publishing reports like this is that they resent the endless meddling in the process by these oil-funded "think tanks".
The problem the denialists have is not bias, it is that they are trying to challenge an increasingly established body of science with loopier and loopier ideas. This is similiar to the small but active community of denialists who claim that cold fusion is being suppressed - they more evidence thatemerges against it, the more they turn to whiny claims of bias of crazy counterarguments. Trying to make improbable criticisms stick is never a good strategy for funding. Any responsible grant administrator will consider the question of, say, the meaning of correlation between atmospheric CO2 and temperature as an approximately closed question. There are of course caveats and valid criticisms to any particular paper using those correlations, but the basic science is considered fairly well established. It might be nice if there was so much funding just lying around that the correlation could be subjected to nearly endless testing, but it can't. It's had its day in scientific debate, and barring some truly innovative method or a new framework that raises new concerns, the question is settled. The denialists have provided none of this (barring Lindzen's loony IRIS theory), yet they continue to whine and moan about how their lack of good ideas and unwillingness to accepted results of good work is not in fact petty obstinacy (or more likely outright bought loyalty), but is some kind of noble keeper of the flame movement. That's self-flattering bullshit, and an insult to serious scientists everywhere. Climate science has a healthy scientific process - like anything else, it could probably use improvement in some areas. But to suggest that the whole field of climate science is fundamentally unsound is breathtakingly arrogant and small-minded.
So until you have something real to the conversation, do us the favor of keeping your unfounded slander in your mom's basement next to your teddy bear and anime girlfriend.
Thank you for answering the only interesting and verifiable assertion in that article. The blathering about "it's good vs. it's not good enough" because it does or doesn't have this or that feature is pointless and long past stale, but the assertion that the development enthusiasm and speed have weakened deserve serious attention.
Your point is true about gradual architectural features and fixes, there's been quite a lot of improvment in those areas, as well as some neat individual projects. But in defense of the article I have definitely been struck by the big gap between the grand rhetoric around KDE4 and the evidently very limited progress. It's pretty hard not to take a dim view when you read that the Appeal and Plasma projects are a UI revolution that will anchor KDE4, and then dig to find out what's going on and discover that all that's been done is a few hacks to Kicker. It's hard to avoid concluding that there's either a resource problem or a discipline problem there.
This assertion is just an assertion, but I think it's worth actually asking some questions about what can be done to get more resources and direction to these projects.