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User: WhiplashII

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  1. Re: P-hacking on Is Statistical Significance Significant? (npr.org) · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Worse than that, if you only publish one out of 20 studies, you are reporting noise.

  2. Re:The sunk cost of the network is going to HURT on Renewable Energy Reduces the Highest Electric Rates In the Nation (phys.org) · · Score: 1

    Actually it is not tax free. It counts as an improvement to the home, and so your (or our landlords) property taxes go up.

  3. As long as fingers are breakable, so will be encryption.

  4. Re:"Geoengineering" is an idiotic substitute on $200 Million Dollars a Year Could Reverse Climate Change, Says Wave Energy Pioneer (bbc.com) · · Score: 1

    So you seem to be saying that global warming is a critical issue, we will all die, must be stopped at any cost, BUT only with my preferred solution.

    Color me not convinced. If the issue was real, engineers would be making the solution recommendations not politicians, and the solution would be applied technology not taxes.

  5. Re:And In Other News... on Senate Confirms Former Coal Lobbyist Andrew Wheeler To Lead EPA (cnn.com) · · Score: 1, Insightful

    What did Obama say? Elections have consequences?

    It would be nice if no matter who got elected, things basically stayed the same. But if we can't have that, don't complain when the guys you don't like do things you don't like when elected.

    (Specifically, this is why rule by presidential fiat is awful. But it was no less awful under Obama.)

  6. Re:Many groups and approaches [Re:It is one study] on Extreme CO2 Levels Could Trigger Clouds 'Tipping Point' and 8C of Global Warming (carbonbrief.org) · · Score: 1

    They do suffer from confirmation bias, however. If my model says there will be no warming, and everyone else's model says there is warming, I "fix" my model until it agrees with everyone else.

    See this issue in action while Millikan et al calculates the electron's charge:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O...

  7. Re:Breaking news links on Amazon Prime Air Cargo Plane Crashes in Texas, Three Dead (weather.com) · · Score: 2

    I am a pilot - from what they are saying on the air, it sounds like they hit some turbulence that caused massive structural damage. If the pilots had been in a working cockpit, there would have been at least a broken transmission. No clicks means the pilots couldn't push the talk button (which is on the control wheel, where there hands would be anyway).

    Probably an in air breakup, nothing they could do. Hopefully they find the cause and prevent recurrence - unfortunately, accidents are often the way that new safety rules are created.

    (Condolences to all involved)

  8. Re:Total bullshit for higher power bills on Chicago Mayor Releases Roadmap For Transitioning To 100 Percent Renewable Energy By 2035 (pv-magazine-usa.com) · · Score: 1

    That really isn't necessary. I'm the condo president of one of the largest buildings in downtown Chicago. Every other year, we have an energy audit done on the building. We basically implement the plan that has the highest return. No coercion is required.

    The people that ran the building before it became a condo were not very good managers. Our first couple projects had a 180 day payback period! But now we are looking at payback periods of 15 years or so, which is still worth it if you finance the work.

    Good management will make building more efficient over time. Poor managers eventually get replaced by good managers, because the building is worth more to the good manager. There is no need to hold guns to peoples head in the name of the environment.

  9. I think they are missing that crime is not reported by police. Crime is reported by crime victims.

    Corollary: If you do not report a crime, the police will not work the crime. But I'd think that most people understand that issue.

  10. The fact that people break rules (and laws) does not mean we should not have them.

    Actually it very much means that! If you know a law will be widely disobeyed, it should never be passed. It degrades respect for the rule of law, and punishes those that obey laws.

    We should strive to have as few laws as we can, while keeping the field as level as possible. Unfortunately lawyers are horrible at making laws.

  11. Re:Livestream on Texas Lawmaker Wants To Ban Mobile Throttling In Disaster Areas (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 3, Insightful

    They should pass a law that all bandwidth must double during an emergency!

  12. Re:B..b..but... on 2018 Was Earth's Fourth-Hottest Year on Record: NOAA and NASA Report (cnbc.com) · · Score: 1

    1. Even gravity isn't settled: https://youtu.be/8RCG_4JG6Hg?t... (really, you should watch - if it pans out this as big as relativity - extraordinary claim require extraordinary proof of course)

    2. OK, but it is still annoying. And to be honest, I really think the politicians are driving most of the discord on this.

    3. Micheal Mann (the actual scientist writing many of those papers, and the actual gatekeeper of what gets published) was the one testifying to congress.

    4. I actually don't visit any "denialist" web sites other than Judith Carrie's site on occasion when someone else points things out to me. I read the source data, which you obviously haven't. I can't believe you linked to the IPCC reports! Those are the specific ones that have been falsified!

    From the 1992 IPCC report titled "Climate Change: The IPCC 1990 and 1992 Assessments", in the "Policymaker Summary of Working Group I", page 74 there are charts showing predicted temperature rises, and discusses several options for dealing with CO2. The temperature anomaly in 2018 is given as about 1.7 in "business as usual", and 1.5 for their different scenarios. The actual temperature anomaly for 2018 was about 1.4, less than all those mitigation scenarios that did not happen.

    On page 81, sea level rise predictions were made. 2018 was supposed to have a sea level of 15 cm compared to 1990. The actual value was 8 cm.

    I could go on. Obviously, you have not read the reports. (I was trying to find the slide where they have the error bars on the prediction results, that is the one I was referring to, but I don't want to spend the time on it. We are now well outside the error bars.)

    I don't argue against good science. I do argue against bad science. I am willing to accept the anthropomorphic catastrophic global warming hypothesis once the verifiable facts outweigh the certainty that I am being lied to. When I catch someone lying to me, I have to severely discount what they say. Because if they could have proven it without lies, they probably would have.

  13. Re:Data [Re:B..b..but...] on 2018 Was Earth's Fourth-Hottest Year on Record: NOAA and NASA Report (cnbc.com) · · Score: 1

    Um, that is not temperature, that is see ice. Google "global average temperature", and use the NASA data (I believe). I'm pretty sure I gave a link to the source data in this thread somewhere.

  14. Re:B..b..but... on 2018 Was Earth's Fourth-Hottest Year on Record: NOAA and NASA Report (cnbc.com) · · Score: 1

    Look, I'm not arguing in favor or against. I am saying that the current temperature does not prove anything.

    By the way, your argument seems to imply that deforestation may be more significant than CO2. Does that make you a denier, or is that OK as long as you still blame the humans?

  15. Re:B..b..but... on 2018 Was Earth's Fourth-Hottest Year on Record: NOAA and NASA Report (cnbc.com) · · Score: 1

    That is a strange question. Do I dispute that we "KNOW" it? Yes. It is wrong in at least the hundredth decimal point. We likely will never know all there is to know about it.

    I believe what you are trying to imply is that if you believe that CO2 can absorb IR energy then the case is closed and global warming is going to kill us all.

    For more clarity, here is what I believe:

    1) The science isn't settled. Gravity isn't settled! If someone says that the science is settled, they are merely trying to cut off debate which implies that their position is weak.
    2) Whenever a politician starts quoting science to me, I am far less likely to believe the science is grounded in reality.
    3) When a "leading scientist" (Michael Mann) goes in front of congress and tries to prove his case by showing two charts that look similar, only when examined closely the similarity is artificially created by using different color scales, I severely discount any work product from his team or anyone related to his team.
    4) When you review the previous reports by the teams in question (the IPCC reports) that are now old enough to have predictions about current events, and current data values are now almost exclusively outside the predicted confidence interval, the theory is wrong. You can't just adjust some parameters to save it, because you can always adjust parameters to save any theory. At this point, the bar to prove that they know what they are doing should be extremely high in anyone's mind that has been paying attention.

    My predictions:

    1) It is extremely unlikely that global warming will be more than a minor nuisance to humans in the future. Technology is increasing far faster than the possible danger, and we will be able to continue to improve life for everyone on the planet.
    2) CO2 will eventually be found to have some effect on world temperature, but not a driving force. There are much stronger greenhouse effects in play, and cloud feedback could throw the whole CO2 effects out of the window, for example.

  16. Re:B..b..but... on 2018 Was Earth's Fourth-Hottest Year on Record: NOAA and NASA Report (cnbc.com) · · Score: 3, Insightful

    BTW, according to NOAA satellites, 2019 was the 14th hottest year and 2018 was the 23rd hottest year.

    http://www.drroyspencer.com/la...

    Personally, I think the satellite data set is better - it is harder to mess with, avoids the problems of only measuring near humans, and measures more of the system in question.

    But again, none of this really says anything about proving CO2 based AGW.

  17. Re:B..b..but... on 2018 Was Earth's Fourth-Hottest Year on Record: NOAA and NASA Report (cnbc.com) · · Score: 2

    Sort of - this is where the real dragons lay.

    If you take a chaotic process and average it, you get noise out. So it has not been demonstrated that averaging out the weather (almost certainly a chaotic process) produces anything of value.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

    It is an open question weather (sic ;}) simulations of Earth's climate have any value at all. All averaging values together does is send the signal through a low pass filter. That, by itself, is not enough to say it has any relevance to anything.

  18. Re:B..b..but... on 2018 Was Earth's Fourth-Hottest Year on Record: NOAA and NASA Report (cnbc.com) · · Score: 1, Insightful

    As I stated in a prior post, this has been true for most years for the last 200 years or so. "It is warmer" does not provide evidence for CO2 based AGW, since it has been getting warmer for at least 200 years.

  19. Re:B..b..but... on 2018 Was Earth's Fourth-Hottest Year on Record: NOAA and NASA Report (cnbc.com) · · Score: 2, Interesting

    This is not a statistically valid way to confirm CO2 based global warming. For example, according to human measurements that I have access to:

    Members of the class of years in the "five hottest years on record"
    * Every year from 1850-1855
    * Every year from 1866-1870
    * Every year from 1877-1878
    * Every year from 1887-1888
    * Every year from 1896-1897
    * Every year from 1913-1914
    * 1921
    * Every year from 1926-1928
    * Every year from 1936-1944
    etc, etc
    The global temperature appears to have had a positive slope for at least 200 years. If anything, that falsifies CO2 based global warming because there was warming before there was abnormally high CO2. So the warming trend of the last 200 years should raise the bar for confirming CO2 based warming, not be used as evidence. (As in, you need more than "it is warmer", because "it will be warmer" was the best guess prior to any thought of CO2 base warming)

  20. Re:It's just Winter on Frozen Train Tracks? Set 'Em on Fire (theatlantic.com) · · Score: 1

    Um, no. -50 in Chicago is news. Coldest weather in all time for those days, coldest in many decades overall.

    https://chicago.curbed.com/201...

  21. Re:Who writes this shit? on Worrying Rise in Global CO2 Forecast for 2019 (theguardian.com) · · Score: 1

    You obviously haven't read the science...

    The equator roughly speaking stays the same. What happens is that cold areas get a little warmer.

    So net expected migration would be away from the equator because the rest of the world gets a little nicer, not because the equator gets worse. (Except for flooding, which the jury is still out on)

  22. Re:Remember Comrade on Worrying Rise in Global CO2 Forecast for 2019 (theguardian.com) · · Score: 1

    This - go and read the original IPCC reports. They are online, you can download them for yourself.

    Almost every prediction made has been falsified. The temperature is nowhere near what they predicted, way outside the 99% confidence interval. And yet they are right this time?

    Let me know when they are consistently right. At this point, they will need to make a lot of correct predictions in a row - after all, random chance should make them right half the time anyway.

  23. Re:Who cares? on Trump Offered NASA Unlimited Funding To Put People on Mars by 2020, Report Says (nymag.com) · · Score: 2, Insightful

    OK, but he could say "there is a caravan of people coming, which amounts to an army threatening invasion, and the easiest way to deal with it is a wall."

    That would be within his purview and emergency powers, at least close enough that it would likely pass supreme court review (in the current court, of course).

    Just because you don't want something to happen doesn't mean it won't.

  24. Re:Melanoma is also possible without sun on There's No Such Thing as a Safe Tan (theconversation.com) · · Score: 1

    Indeed, it appears that the most dangerous forms of skin cancer are not typically caused by the sun. Sun induced cancers tend to be easy to treat.

    Sorry to hear about your father-in-law.

  25. Re:Tanning on There's No Such Thing as a Safe Tan (theconversation.com) · · Score: 1

    By the way, all the recent studies are showing that vitamin D supplements to not give health benefits. It looks like the sun exposure was causing the benefits, so taking away the exposure and replacing it with supplements doesn't work.

    https://www.outsideonline.com/...