To sum it up, Provo gave up millions of dollars a year in revenue for the opportunity to have Google come to town and charge them for the same Internet that they already had for free while simultaneously offending all business owners by kicking them off the network and sticking them with the bill.
Sure they did. According to this story, Provo was paying over $3 million annually just in debt service on this fiber (called "iProvo") and losing money on the service even ignoring those bond payments. It might have had "millions of dollars a year in revenue", but it was a net loss.
Google now owns the $40M fiber network that they paid $1 for
Sounds like iProvo was such a money sink that Provo would have paid someone to take it on - even ignoring the bonds. That's not the sign of a $40 million asset, but of a considerable liability.
And modern America carries out illegal assasinations
Not of democratically elected leaders which is what was originally claimed. I consider your claim mostly accurate while I consider the original AC claim to be mostly inaccurate.
Argentina has at least an arguable claim that the land was occupied and that the settlement is illegal.
Even I have an arguable claim on the Falkland Islands. Just because something is arguable, doesn't mean it is worth arguing. And this is a case where Argentina argued it and killed more than 600 Argentinians in the process.
Because it wasn't clear at the time that your viewpoint wasn't grounded in reality. For example, there aren't peasants in the developed world; CEOs often start off on the same social level as the engineers; and there's no "unfair advantage" here.
If only the tech workers of the world had a touch more self and class-consciousness, they'd be able to see that, often, management is actively working against their interests.
Why do you think the problem is that people can't "see"? Especially, when these actions are both blatantly obvious and widely talked about?
At some point, you have to decide what is more important, prosecuting imaginary class warfare or the things you want to do, like say raising a family or having a life. My take is that most people don't care what management does as long as the checks clear the bank.
And all of that silicon is bounded with other elements. It takes considerable energy and infrastructure to separate and purify silicon. If you can make a really cheap panel though, it does allow for some interesting feedback effects (say using the cheap power you just made to make even cheaper panels).
The fundamental problem is the assumption that one gets over the infection. For example, that's not true with HIV or Hepatitis C, viruses that tend to stick around for life once one gets infected. Second, Facebook has the distinction that the "infection" has value (including network effects). So Facebook has to burden the user enough to negate that value. If they don't do that, then the incentive to get "cured" doesn't exist.
In order for your premise to be correct the conspiracy to distort climate science has to include most of the governments of the world that are supporting those thousands of climate scientists and it's a conspiracy that has held together for several decades without falling apart. That's just not a reasonable premise in my view.
What "thousands of climate scientists"? There are several critical parts that don't have thousands of scientists to control. The big one is paleoclimate data, its aggregation and interpretation. Further, there's huge revenue streams at stake. This is a huge conflict of interest for the governments who also fund the climate science.
Besides the satellite temperature records largely agree with the surface temperature records so that doesn't really help you.
"Largely agree" over insignificant time scales, let us recall.
Got any evidence for that or is it just speculation on your part? I can provide evidence but you probably won't believe it because it's from those conspiring climate scientists.
That is a problem. When data doesn't distinguish between two important hypotheses, then it's not evidence. If you actually have evidence that distinguishes between your alleged hypothesis and my implied one, then please post it.
I guess the problem I have with your attitude is that you think so many climate scientists are willing have their reputations destroyed for the sake of political gain.
I don't know why you think that's a problem with my attitude rather than with the climate scientists in question.
Nobody "measures" a global mean temperature.
Satellites do though not necessarily at the Earth's surface. Everything else is an estimate.
Regarding your last point, the difference in global temperatures between the depths of the Little Ice Age and the mid-20th Century was about 1 degree C. Add another 1 or 2C on top of that and you would expect some pretty drastic changes.
Unless the difference between the Little Ice Age and the mid-20th Century was more than 1 C.
Only if you completely ignore modern accounting practices.
and current projections say it will continue to be fine into the 2030's
Even if that were true, and it's not, you still have that the world will move on past the 2030s.
The only current problem with Social Security is that the government has to start paying back all of the money they borrowed from the SS Trust Fund and spent but that's not SS's problem.
Unless the US government does so by inflating the dollar, particularly in a way that doesn't reflect in the CPI. Then it becomes an SS problem.
Let us recall that you wrote:
And how many denialers would be alive then? "Having to act now" is only one component of a scam. The other component is to promise payback later, and run away with the money without delivering.
Now, we see why I was concerned. You manage to rationalize something as shoddy as US Social Security. There will always be an excuse why the climate change fixes don't work. Maybe Big Oil, the denialisters, or the Koch brothers are deliberately sabotaging our civilization with mental failwaves, maybe China and India refuse to do what's good for them (and become the next superpowers by doing so!), maybe it's just worst than we feared, but we just can't see that missing heat.
My view is that we're already starting to see the scam fall apart. And we're already seeing the rationalizations that people put forth to try to keep the scam going.
Paying couple hundred grand to go to the EDGE OF SPACE isn't exactly going to space.
It fits the legal definition.
Just look up at the night sky with a telescope or with your own eyes it's the same shit man, minus you know the $250,000 for those precious 15-20min of sight seeing./quote>
Now look at the ground. That will look different when you're 100 km up than when you're standing on it. I find your absence of imagination remarkable especially when you are reminded in the very post you replied to that half the sky will be something other than stars. It's got to be prions or something.
And how many denialers would be alive then? "Having to act now" is only one component of a scam. The other component is to promise payback later, and run away with the money without delivering.
Like the US President Franklin Roosevelt got hunted down for his deceptive Social Security promises? Justice doesn't grind exceeding fine when it comes to such things and scams like this have been going on for a long time and frankly, instigators of such scams are rarely left holding the bag.
This is disingenuous. The proponents are claiming anything from greater costs in addressing the issue later, to it'll be too late and the end of the world as we know it. If they're not scamming, and there's any bit of truth to their claims, then the repercussions will be more than just "a little more dramatic"
Of course, it's disingenuous. It's not my argument though that is claiming such things without evidence for those things. Why can't the arguers contemplate an adaptation strategy, for example? Why can't they handle economic time value of money (which is a huge consideration in any sort of timing strategy, such as, choosing to act now rather than later)?
Ah, I see, your objections are not based on science but rather political ideology.
That's not sufficiently nuanced. Current climate research has significant symptoms in common with a scam the latter which IMHO is a common problem with political ideologies.
First, there's considerable money and power at stake, here, the vast flow of public funds into renewable energy, alternate transportation schemes, and environmental regulation as well as the creation of big, new markets (the carbon emission credit markets in Europe). Globally, I think there's more than $100 billion each year redirected in such a way.
Second, the research conclusion is presented in a way to favor that money and power. Errors are always in favor of greater climate change predictions as the link you gave demonstrates (first chart shows excellent fit between data and models in the past, but growing divergence in the future after the models were established). For example, it's commonly claimed that IPCC estimates are too conservative, but no one actually has an example where this occurred.
Some backtracking on claims has been made such as the IPCC backtracking on its low bound estimate for carbon dioxide temperature sensitivity (from 2 C per doubling of CO2 concentration in atmosphere to 1.5 C). It can afford to be wrong, but not too wrong.
Third, the research is opaque. For example, your link throws out five graphs. We have no idea of the quality of the data that makes up those graphs and no way to independently verify it on our own. For example, you can't go back in time and measure global mean temperature for yourself.
Logical and reasoning fallacies are routinely used in advocacy, such as, argument from authority (witness the bogus "97%" of research backed global warming claim that circulated for a while and how badly it was misrepresented), conflating different things (such as your example of conflating curve fitting with statistical models), component/whole equivalence claims (claiming that climate models are sound as a whole because a part, the one dimensional radiative model is relatively sound), or confirmation bias (the game that's been played over the last few years with so-called "extreme weather").
Finally, we have to act now. A key part of any scam is to keep the mark from thinking. Any predicted changes in climate happen over decades to centuries yet we have to act now due to "baked in" changes or ridiculously low thresholds (can't let global temperature change more than 2 C ever).
That's why I advocating waiting a few decades. If it's a scam, it'll fall apart by then. And if it's not, then the change will only be a little more dramatic than it would be anyway.
So, yes, it's remotely plausible, in the sense that it's absolutely happened (at least) once.
And it might even be the same sort of situation as Sequoyah. A native Aztec (or related dialect) speaker who can't read or write, but knows it is possible because the Spaniards could do it. So he or she creates a phonetic script and writes everything they can into the book.
The methodical nature of the book, with its natural division into somewhat identifiable subjects could indicate it is a knowledge dump perhaps for a posterity that might forget the past. Or maybe it's a crazy person with an opinion from some point in the last 500 years.
What's the point of a physical model that more accurately reflects the political whims of the funder of the research than the actual physics?
I think they're better than anything else we've got and their results have been reasonably good so far considering their limitations.
That depends whether they're better than not making a predictive model at all. And your use of the term "reasonably good" ignores that they're being routinely used for policy decisions in the billions to trillions range. They aren't reasonably good for what is at stake.
And you are of course correct, the subpolar regions will be far more dramatically affected, at least at first
And that "at first" is quite relevant because it is unsubstantiated speculation that polar regions will see the claimed degree of heating.
But I don't remember hearing the claim that landmasses would be dramatically more affected than ocean before
It makes sense in terms of change of albedo. You can actually see this in temperature projections of climate models which have huge temperature increases for Canada and Siberia.
But you are. You cherry picked the article and blog from which you choose to read comments.
Bear in mind that the posters are referring to STANFORD UNIVERSITY which is one of the top 15 Universities in the physical sciences worldwide. Most of the posters claim that professors of climate science at Stanford University are just fucking idiots compared to them. Most claim that the professors know nothing about their OWN FIELD of expertise, but the commenters have it all figured out.
So have you actually read the article that they're commenting on? First, the author's area of expertise is not climate science nor do they have a degree from Stanford. They were hired to write positive things about Stanford University, which they did.
So it's not Stanford University, particularly not a climate researcher, but a guy writing for a newsletter for Stanford University.
Second, we have to consider whether there actually is a legitimate grievance here. For example, from the article:
But what might be even more troubling for humans, plants and animals is the speed of the change. Stanford climate scientists warn that the likely rate of change over the next century will be at least 10 times quicker than any climate shift in the past 65 million years.
If the trend continues at its current rapid pace, it will place significant stress on terrestrial ecosystems around the world, and many species will need to make behavioral, evolutionary or geographic adaptations to survive.
Although some of the changes the planet will experience in the next few decades are already "baked into the system," how different the climate looks at the end of the 21st century will depend largely on how humans respond.
Note every sentence in that stretch contains a qualifying term or what your quoted poster called "weasel words". The problem with such things is that they might happen or they might not. Such a statement as the above would be mostly factually true (aside from the "likely" qualifier in the second sentence), even if the only way it could happen was for humanity to devote its entire energies to make that come true as a prediction rather than doing what it does now.
It's also worth noting here that the Stanford article discusses a review of literature and computer models, not new research. No actual "denier" concerns are addressed by the work in question such as whether the research and computer models in question accurately reflect the state of Earth's climate. But there's another opportunity to regurgitate the usual climate change propaganda.
I am far more humble than almost anyone in the climate denier camp.
Sure, you are.
That brings us to my third point. Just because some of your ideological foes happen to exhibit rather painful intellectual flaws doesn't mean that your argument is correct. That's a variation of the straw man argument where you're attacking only a weak sideshow rather than the core legitimate concern.
Nor does it mean that you don't exhibit those same painful intellectual flaws.
Climate change became the more popular phrase simply because so many people refused to accept that just because he planet as a whole is warming doesn't mean that every area also gets warmer.
In other words, the word with more play propaganda-wise got used. I go with the more accurate term.
Most of the warming will happen at the poles, and that will fundamentally alter the thermal engines driving large-scale weather patterns, which can mean hotter summers and milder winters for some places, but can also mean colder summers and/or winters, as well as slower-moving storm systems which are responsible for flooding/snow-ins and droughts since their payload is all dropped over a much smaller area.
In other words, a bunch of recent weather phenomena can now be blamed on "climate change" because someone came up with a kooky theory. When the weather changes, I assume the theory will change to reflect the currently high profile weather drama.
There's no actual evidence of these latitude-based "thermal engine" changes.
What is strongly indicated is that there will be a change in heat distribution with respect to altitude. With warmer temperatures at low elevations and cooler temperatures in the stratosphere. That creates a higher temperature gradient for generating storms which could cause stronger, more extreme weather - though there has been remarkably little evidence to support that hypothesis.
Actual predictions have the greatest warming in the subartic land regions not the polar regions. That's because there's a huge albedo decrease from snow-covered to snow-free land terrain which results in an increase in local heating.
Yes, but there is a big difference. The people who accept global warming, realize that they're not experts about it, and are willing to listen and learn. The deniers, on the other hand, are little armchair climate scientists in their own heads.
And you demonstrate your intellectual maturity and humbleness by labeling people you disagree with as "deniers" and building up this long ad hominem fantasy. Sorry, but that pig doesn't fly.
You obviously thing climate models are just an exercise in curve fitting rather than the actual physical models they are.
Heh. Another person who just doesn't get it. They are both. The former indicates a huge problem with them as physical models. They have too many loose parameters and there's no firm global-scale climate data past a few decades in the past. Thus, they are curved fitted not to actual climate data but to climate estimates and extrapolations which come from complex and opaque statistical processes of proxy climate data.
Slashdot Mirror
To sum it up, Provo gave up millions of dollars a year in revenue for the opportunity to have Google come to town and charge them for the same Internet that they already had for free while simultaneously offending all business owners by kicking them off the network and sticking them with the bill.
Sure they did. According to this story, Provo was paying over $3 million annually just in debt service on this fiber (called "iProvo") and losing money on the service even ignoring those bond payments. It might have had "millions of dollars a year in revenue", but it was a net loss.
Google now owns the $40M fiber network that they paid $1 for
Sounds like iProvo was such a money sink that Provo would have paid someone to take it on - even ignoring the bonds. That's not the sign of a $40 million asset, but of a considerable liability.
And modern America carries out illegal assasinations
Not of democratically elected leaders which is what was originally claimed. I consider your claim mostly accurate while I consider the original AC claim to be mostly inaccurate.
Russia doesn't go around invading any country without nukes
Counterexample.
they don't go around trying to assassinate all secular, democratically elected leaders who don't kiss their ass
None of the nuclear powers do. But modern Russia does poison people with lethal levels of polonium.
Argentina has at least an arguable claim that the land was occupied and that the settlement is illegal.
Even I have an arguable claim on the Falkland Islands. Just because something is arguable, doesn't mean it is worth arguing. And this is a case where Argentina argued it and killed more than 600 Argentinians in the process.
Why do I have to even explain this to you?
Because it wasn't clear at the time that your viewpoint wasn't grounded in reality. For example, there aren't peasants in the developed world; CEOs often start off on the same social level as the engineers; and there's no "unfair advantage" here.
If only the tech workers of the world had a touch more self and class-consciousness, they'd be able to see that, often, management is actively working against their interests.
Why do you think the problem is that people can't "see"? Especially, when these actions are both blatantly obvious and widely talked about?
At some point, you have to decide what is more important, prosecuting imaginary class warfare or the things you want to do, like say raising a family or having a life. My take is that most people don't care what management does as long as the checks clear the bank.
And all of that silicon is bounded with other elements. It takes considerable energy and infrastructure to separate and purify silicon. If you can make a really cheap panel though, it does allow for some interesting feedback effects (say using the cheap power you just made to make even cheaper panels).
The fundamental problem is the assumption that one gets over the infection. For example, that's not true with HIV or Hepatitis C, viruses that tend to stick around for life once one gets infected. Second, Facebook has the distinction that the "infection" has value (including network effects). So Facebook has to burden the user enough to negate that value. If they don't do that, then the incentive to get "cured" doesn't exist.
In order for your premise to be correct the conspiracy to distort climate science has to include most of the governments of the world that are supporting those thousands of climate scientists and it's a conspiracy that has held together for several decades without falling apart. That's just not a reasonable premise in my view.
What "thousands of climate scientists"? There are several critical parts that don't have thousands of scientists to control. The big one is paleoclimate data, its aggregation and interpretation. Further, there's huge revenue streams at stake. This is a huge conflict of interest for the governments who also fund the climate science.
Besides the satellite temperature records largely agree with the surface temperature records so that doesn't really help you.
"Largely agree" over insignificant time scales, let us recall.
Got any evidence for that or is it just speculation on your part? I can provide evidence but you probably won't believe it because it's from those conspiring climate scientists.
That is a problem. When data doesn't distinguish between two important hypotheses, then it's not evidence. If you actually have evidence that distinguishes between your alleged hypothesis and my implied one, then please post it.
I guess the problem I have with your attitude is that you think so many climate scientists are willing have their reputations destroyed for the sake of political gain.
I don't know why you think that's a problem with my attitude rather than with the climate scientists in question.
Nobody "measures" a global mean temperature.
Satellites do though not necessarily at the Earth's surface. Everything else is an estimate.
Regarding your last point, the difference in global temperatures between the depths of the Little Ice Age and the mid-20th Century was about 1 degree C. Add another 1 or 2C on top of that and you would expect some pretty drastic changes.
Unless the difference between the Little Ice Age and the mid-20th Century was more than 1 C.
Social Security is doing just fine
Only if you completely ignore modern accounting practices.
and current projections say it will continue to be fine into the 2030's
Even if that were true, and it's not, you still have that the world will move on past the 2030s.
The only current problem with Social Security is that the government has to start paying back all of the money they borrowed from the SS Trust Fund and spent but that's not SS's problem.
Unless the US government does so by inflating the dollar, particularly in a way that doesn't reflect in the CPI. Then it becomes an SS problem.
Let us recall that you wrote:
And how many denialers would be alive then? "Having to act now" is only one component of a scam. The other component is to promise payback later, and run away with the money without delivering.
Now, we see why I was concerned. You manage to rationalize something as shoddy as US Social Security. There will always be an excuse why the climate change fixes don't work. Maybe Big Oil, the denialisters, or the Koch brothers are deliberately sabotaging our civilization with mental failwaves, maybe China and India refuse to do what's good for them (and become the next superpowers by doing so!), maybe it's just worst than we feared, but we just can't see that missing heat.
My view is that we're already starting to see the scam fall apart. And we're already seeing the rationalizations that people put forth to try to keep the scam going.
Paying couple hundred grand to go to the EDGE OF SPACE isn't exactly going to space.
It fits the legal definition.
Just look up at the night sky with a telescope or with your own eyes it's the same shit man, minus you know the $250,000 for those precious 15-20min of sight seeing./quote> Now look at the ground. That will look different when you're 100 km up than when you're standing on it. I find your absence of imagination remarkable especially when you are reminded in the very post you replied to that half the sky will be something other than stars. It's got to be prions or something.
And how many denialers would be alive then? "Having to act now" is only one component of a scam. The other component is to promise payback later, and run away with the money without delivering.
Like the US President Franklin Roosevelt got hunted down for his deceptive Social Security promises? Justice doesn't grind exceeding fine when it comes to such things and scams like this have been going on for a long time and frankly, instigators of such scams are rarely left holding the bag.
This is disingenuous. The proponents are claiming anything from greater costs in addressing the issue later, to it'll be too late and the end of the world as we know it. If they're not scamming, and there's any bit of truth to their claims, then the repercussions will be more than just "a little more dramatic"
Of course, it's disingenuous. It's not my argument though that is claiming such things without evidence for those things. Why can't the arguers contemplate an adaptation strategy, for example? Why can't they handle economic time value of money (which is a huge consideration in any sort of timing strategy, such as, choosing to act now rather than later)?
Ah, I see, your objections are not based on science but rather political ideology.
That's not sufficiently nuanced. Current climate research has significant symptoms in common with a scam the latter which IMHO is a common problem with political ideologies.
First, there's considerable money and power at stake, here, the vast flow of public funds into renewable energy, alternate transportation schemes, and environmental regulation as well as the creation of big, new markets (the carbon emission credit markets in Europe). Globally, I think there's more than $100 billion each year redirected in such a way.
Second, the research conclusion is presented in a way to favor that money and power. Errors are always in favor of greater climate change predictions as the link you gave demonstrates (first chart shows excellent fit between data and models in the past, but growing divergence in the future after the models were established). For example, it's commonly claimed that IPCC estimates are too conservative, but no one actually has an example where this occurred.
Some backtracking on claims has been made such as the IPCC backtracking on its low bound estimate for carbon dioxide temperature sensitivity (from 2 C per doubling of CO2 concentration in atmosphere to 1.5 C). It can afford to be wrong, but not too wrong.
Third, the research is opaque. For example, your link throws out five graphs. We have no idea of the quality of the data that makes up those graphs and no way to independently verify it on our own. For example, you can't go back in time and measure global mean temperature for yourself.
Logical and reasoning fallacies are routinely used in advocacy, such as, argument from authority (witness the bogus "97%" of research backed global warming claim that circulated for a while and how badly it was misrepresented), conflating different things (such as your example of conflating curve fitting with statistical models), component/whole equivalence claims (claiming that climate models are sound as a whole because a part, the one dimensional radiative model is relatively sound), or confirmation bias (the game that's been played over the last few years with so-called "extreme weather").
Finally, we have to act now. A key part of any scam is to keep the mark from thinking. Any predicted changes in climate happen over decades to centuries yet we have to act now due to "baked in" changes or ridiculously low thresholds (can't let global temperature change more than 2 C ever).
That's why I advocating waiting a few decades. If it's a scam, it'll fall apart by then. And if it's not, then the change will only be a little more dramatic than it would be anyway.
So, yes, it's remotely plausible, in the sense that it's absolutely happened (at least) once.
And it might even be the same sort of situation as Sequoyah. A native Aztec (or related dialect) speaker who can't read or write, but knows it is possible because the Spaniards could do it. So he or she creates a phonetic script and writes everything they can into the book.
The methodical nature of the book, with its natural division into somewhat identifiable subjects could indicate it is a knowledge dump perhaps for a posterity that might forget the past. Or maybe it's a crazy person with an opinion from some point in the last 500 years.
You seem to think climate models are useless
What's the point of a physical model that more accurately reflects the political whims of the funder of the research than the actual physics?
I think they're better than anything else we've got and their results have been reasonably good so far considering their limitations.
That depends whether they're better than not making a predictive model at all. And your use of the term "reasonably good" ignores that they're being routinely used for policy decisions in the billions to trillions range. They aren't reasonably good for what is at stake.
Climate models are not curve fitted to past climate trends. They are merely used to test the output against.
I see it continues. And there's not much point to the link you posted since I'm not disputing that climate models are physical models.
And you are of course correct, the subpolar regions will be far more dramatically affected, at least at first
And that "at first" is quite relevant because it is unsubstantiated speculation that polar regions will see the claimed degree of heating.
But I don't remember hearing the claim that landmasses would be dramatically more affected than ocean before
It makes sense in terms of change of albedo. You can actually see this in temperature projections of climate models which have huge temperature increases for Canada and Siberia.
I am not cherry-picking.
But you are. You cherry picked the article and blog from which you choose to read comments.
Bear in mind that the posters are referring to STANFORD UNIVERSITY which is one of the top 15 Universities in the physical sciences worldwide. Most of the posters claim that professors of climate science at Stanford University are just fucking idiots compared to them. Most claim that the professors know nothing about their OWN FIELD of expertise, but the commenters have it all figured out.
So have you actually read the article that they're commenting on? First, the author's area of expertise is not climate science nor do they have a degree from Stanford. They were hired to write positive things about Stanford University, which they did.
So it's not Stanford University, particularly not a climate researcher, but a guy writing for a newsletter for Stanford University.
Second, we have to consider whether there actually is a legitimate grievance here. For example, from the article:
But what might be even more troubling for humans, plants and animals is the speed of the change. Stanford climate scientists warn that the likely rate of change over the next century will be at least 10 times quicker than any climate shift in the past 65 million years.
If the trend continues at its current rapid pace, it will place significant stress on terrestrial ecosystems around the world, and many species will need to make behavioral, evolutionary or geographic adaptations to survive.
Although some of the changes the planet will experience in the next few decades are already "baked into the system," how different the climate looks at the end of the 21st century will depend largely on how humans respond.
Note every sentence in that stretch contains a qualifying term or what your quoted poster called "weasel words". The problem with such things is that they might happen or they might not. Such a statement as the above would be mostly factually true (aside from the "likely" qualifier in the second sentence), even if the only way it could happen was for humanity to devote its entire energies to make that come true as a prediction rather than doing what it does now.
It's also worth noting here that the Stanford article discusses a review of literature and computer models, not new research. No actual "denier" concerns are addressed by the work in question such as whether the research and computer models in question accurately reflect the state of Earth's climate. But there's another opportunity to regurgitate the usual climate change propaganda.
I am far more humble than almost anyone in the climate denier camp.
Sure, you are.
That brings us to my third point. Just because some of your ideological foes happen to exhibit rather painful intellectual flaws doesn't mean that your argument is correct. That's a variation of the straw man argument where you're attacking only a weak sideshow rather than the core legitimate concern.
Nor does it mean that you don't exhibit those same painful intellectual flaws.
Or will we make huge stakes decisions based on long term trends that haven't actually been observed yet?
Climate change became the more popular phrase simply because so many people refused to accept that just because he planet as a whole is warming doesn't mean that every area also gets warmer.
In other words, the word with more play propaganda-wise got used. I go with the more accurate term.
Most of the warming will happen at the poles, and that will fundamentally alter the thermal engines driving large-scale weather patterns, which can mean hotter summers and milder winters for some places, but can also mean colder summers and/or winters, as well as slower-moving storm systems which are responsible for flooding/snow-ins and droughts since their payload is all dropped over a much smaller area.
In other words, a bunch of recent weather phenomena can now be blamed on "climate change" because someone came up with a kooky theory. When the weather changes, I assume the theory will change to reflect the currently high profile weather drama.
There's no actual evidence of these latitude-based "thermal engine" changes.
What is strongly indicated is that there will be a change in heat distribution with respect to altitude. With warmer temperatures at low elevations and cooler temperatures in the stratosphere. That creates a higher temperature gradient for generating storms which could cause stronger, more extreme weather - though there has been remarkably little evidence to support that hypothesis.
Actual predictions have the greatest warming in the subartic land regions not the polar regions. That's because there's a huge albedo decrease from snow-covered to snow-free land terrain which results in an increase in local heating.
Yes, but there is a big difference. The people who accept global warming, realize that they're not experts about it, and are willing to listen and learn. The deniers, on the other hand, are little armchair climate scientists in their own heads.
And you demonstrate your intellectual maturity and humbleness by labeling people you disagree with as "deniers" and building up this long ad hominem fantasy. Sorry, but that pig doesn't fly.
it can't "just happen", there must be a cause.
Sure, there is a cause, the dynamic system of Earth's atmosphere coupled with the Sun as power source.
That's why scientists analyze long term trends
So that means we'll wait at least a few decades to observe these long term trends right?
You obviously thing climate models are just an exercise in curve fitting rather than the actual physical models they are.
Heh. Another person who just doesn't get it. They are both. The former indicates a huge problem with them as physical models. They have too many loose parameters and there's no firm global-scale climate data past a few decades in the past. Thus, they are curved fitted not to actual climate data but to climate estimates and extrapolations which come from complex and opaque statistical processes of proxy climate data.