At least you're asking the question. For the scientists, the conflict comes between the obligation to try to do accurate and unbiased scientific work versus the funding incentive to report research in a way that elevates the significance of climate change.
For the funding sources, there's a similar conflict between the public obligation to fund accurate and unbiased research versus the bureaucratic benefits to be had from portraying an existential threat, real or imaginary, to modern society. The latter means larger budgets and more power to the bureaucracy that can justify them to society at large.
It also reeks to me of a con job. There's always a glib answer to every complaint, language is abused to score propaganda points (such as the widespread use of "climate change" when AGW is meant), everything needs to be done right now, when you scratch the surface on a lot of this research, questionable or sloppy assumptions quickly show up, and these mistakes always favor a more aggressive interpretation of AGW. For example, criticism of a lack of obvious harm from near future AGW were met with the magical discovery of "extreme weather" (something the IPCC is apparently quietly dropping from its latest report BTW).
When one of the first real reports, the Stern review to attempt to quantify future harm of AGW was created, it made a major sloppy assumption by assuming discount rates about half as large as world chained GDP growth (completely ignoring that chained GDP growth is a better measure of ability to pay for future harm) and justified this on a major bogus basis, that a more reasonable discount rate was "immoral". That change alone ended up doubling for every 50 year period out future estimated costs of AGW. And of course, there's the recent weakening of recent climate predictions by the IPCC to reflect that current climate trends don't agree with the old models the IPCC used in previous reports.
This reminds me of a saying I've heard credited, apocryphally perhaps, to Will Rogers. "You expect cashiers to make mistakes on occasion. But when the mistakes are always in the cashier's favor, you have to wonder."
I assume you believe in free markets, which means you believe that capital keeps things honest.
What "free market"? I was, for example, speaking of governments using public funds. That's not a free market activity.
No one profits from AGW, not seriously anyways.
The finance industry does. For example, the carbon credit markets in Europe or the loan guarantees and financing for renewable energy and public transportation projects throughout the developed world.
Not spending money on AGW is clear evidence that AGW is false.
Spending money on AGW is clear evidence that AGW is false.
I'm beginning to understand all this evidence you see that indicated AGW is false.
You didn't get it straight. I think nothing quite illustrates your inability to think and reason like the strawmen arguments you construct.
Again, my argument here is that there is a huge conflict of interest and piles of money involved to confirm and exaggerate the effects of AGW. That doesn't meant that AGW doesn't exist or even isn't as bad as it is claimed to be.
So we have to go to evidence. Here, evidence is any fact or observation that distinguishes between two or more hypotheses, supporting one more than another. So it's not useful to us as evidence that researchers, who are paid to exaggerate the effects of AGW, happen to report that AGW is a threat requiring immediate mitigation. That's what we'd expect from them, whether or not AGW really is such a threat.
But we have other sorts of evidence, such as the cavalier actions of those developing world countries which don't treat AGW as a high priority, a surprising high level of confidence about climate predictions given extremely weak climate data (particularly everything before the modern era) and complex, opaque, jury rigged climate models, and a growing divergence between climate predictions of the past 30 years and the actual climate.
As I see it, while there is a case for a light case of AGW, the catastrophic version is still unjustified. So I'm willing to wait to see if the more extreme theory gets supporting evidence in the next few decades.
My view is that these climate models will not be vindicated and that in addition to the effects of AGW being greatly exaggerated, the ability of humans to deal with climate changes will be greatly understated.
The constitution specifically says congress has the right to regulate.
There's only one place in the entire US Constitution where any government body has the "right" to do anything. It's not the Second Amendment.
Nor does the Second Amendment give Congress the authority to regulate firearms and their use. That is implied to some degree by other parts of the Constitution.
There's no question about the meat of the Second Amendment " the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." "The people" is a well defined term that means everyone who lives in the US. "keep and bear Arms" is only uncertain as to what sort of weapons are considered "Arms". And "shall not be infringed" is pretty self explanatory.
As to the question of what "Arms" are allowed, the guidance of the justification phrase "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State" seems to indicate that normal infantry weapons like the M-16 rifle, common issue hand grenades, pump action shot guns, 9mm Beretta pistol, M-50 machine gun, maybe some of the more exotic weapons like wire guided missiles would. After all, how can you readily serve in a modern US flagged infantry militia if you aren't acquainted with the weapons that US infantry currently use?
I suppose the modern compromise is based on an expected training period. So the more advanced and dangerous weapons can be considered unnecessary for a militia to know going into a potential conflict. Hence, the legal definition of Arms for Second Amendment purposes is constrained somewhat from the above.
Gun registration need not be an infringement on the right to keep and bear Arms, but in practice it usually is. For example, in NYC gun registrants were public information. That was glaringly abused when the Journal News made it into an easily searchable data base. Making gun owners the public targets of thieves and witchhunters throughout the NYC area is an infringement of their Second Amendment rights.
It's the people trying to evaluate evidence who are the amateurs playing scientist.
What's the point of evidence, if you don't evaluate it? At this point, I can't tell if you have a genuine concern or a mental illness.
The reason I want citations and credible sources is because I don't want to play scientist, I want to know what the people who actually ARE scientists actually think.
And the reason I want evidence, is because I want to know what is going on, not merely what scientists are being paid to think.
So you think that the EU willing to spend 20% of its budget is evidence that climate change is false??
No, I think it's an example of the large conflicts of interest on the AGW advocacy side which people insist on ignoring. That $30 billion a year (plus whatever the national governments spend on the same) only gets spent because a few hundred million people have been convinced that climate change is such a pressing danger.
And it's Other Peoples' Money not the EU's money.
Liberals generally respect science and feel they have to respond to and mitigate AGW, Conservatives know this will be expensive. Therefore the Conservatives strategy is to downplay AGW as much as possible. This makes the actions the Liberals feel are necessary more unpopular, and translates into electoral gains for Conservatives.
So what? That's how debate works. The "liberals" can then present their own arguments and sway people to their side and make their arguments more popular. It's not the job of the "conservatives" to make the arguments of their opponents more popular.
What is different about the "liberal" versus "conservative" debate here is that the "conservatives" aren't using public funds for advocacy. I've remarked on this before but the IPCC and a number of NGOs receive considerable public funding - more than has ever been claimed for the allegedly huge fossil fuel propaganda effort. For example, the IPCC and the World Wildlife Fund both received individually more in public funds over the past fiften years than AGW opposition groups did over the same period.
That doesn't really make sense, AGW hurts developing countries disproportionately and they know that.
That's your cognitive dissonance acting up. The developing world knows no such thing. Sure, they're willing to pay lip service to AGW mitigation for money or political advantage. But when push comes to shove, their economic growth is a far higher priority than the mild harm that AGW would cause.
A lot of people died of cancer before we figured out the harmful effects of tobacco smoking. We've only got the one Earth so if we screw it up there's no quick fix.
But at least in the case of smoking there was copious evidence that it was a serious health problem.
This isn't some lame cable news show, saying "reality" doesn't cut it.
To the contrary, Slashdot looks like the kind of place where rank amateurs go to play scientist, demanding things like "citations", "credible publications/institutions", and other gobble-gook. Reality trumps that shit easily. Show the evidence or get lost.
And if you think these abstract motives are sufficient to wrongly bias scientists in favour of AGW what about the many billions of dollars invested in fossil fuels?
What of it? They can pick up climate change money as easily as anyone else rather than oppose it.
This is one of the significant stories people miss about the global warming debate. The fossil fuel industries are the dogs that didn't bark. Sure, there's a bit of money being spent by isolated "oil billionaires" such as the Koch brothers, but IMHO it's about two to three orders of magnitude smaller than what the fossil fuel and associated industries could crank out if they really felt like it.
I think you'd notice a hard core $10 billion a year campaign if it were going on. In its place, we have this pretty hard core climate change visibility. Journalists fall all over themselves to report science news which has a climate change connection no matter how contrived. Various NGOs gets lots of money and burn it on activities which promote the climate change propaganda (for example, the World Wildlife Fund or Greenpeace).
Similarly, there's stories that US researchers in relevant fields can help their funding chances by speculating in their research on a climate change connection. Maybe they're urban myths, but there are a lot of really strained and tenuous connections made out there in the research to climate change. Something has to be encourage those people to do that.
And of course, there are national governments and supergovernments just aching to spend vast sums on climate-related causes (such as the EU spending 20% of its budget on climate-related stuff over the 2014-2020 period).
So here's the thing. When I look at actual propaganda out there, climate change wins by a big margin. At this point, I see concern about Big Oil money and such as akin to the character, Emmanuel Goldstein in 1984. He was an imaginary villain used to give the oppressed people of Oceania something to hate (with the infamous two minute hate).
The real resistance isn't powerful fossil fuel businesses or billionaires. It's people who don't want to cut back the quality of their lives just because someone got the climate change religion. There's also the developing world countries who see climate change as a reasonable price for obtaining developed world economies.
And again by the Outer Space Treaty their country of origin is responsible for anything they break while they're up there in orbit.
Imagine if the effort was sufficiently international in nature, how would anyone decide which State has to give "authorization and continuing supervision"?
Don't know, but wouldn't be hard for someone with a real navy to mess with them. I don't think it'd be automatic, but they would have to keep their act pretty clean and isolated and/or well defended to avoid getting raided.
This is one of the reasons I advocate waiting rather than acting on the alleged AGW threat.
That's rather like a smoker saying "I'll wait until I get lung cancer before I quit."
These terrible, anti-scientific arguments are another reason why I advocate waiting. Reality can't be bluffed. If AGW really is harmful to the world like heavy smoking is for a person, then we'll see the effect and can act when we know and are confident of the danger. If it isn't, then we just saved ourselves from some irrational hysteria.
Name a publication more credible than a top tier scientific journal or an institution more credible than a research University.
I already did. Reality. If there really is a credible climate-based danger, we will observe it at some point. We won't need shaky models based on unreliable data.
Who is this mysterious uber-powerful funding agency who has a vested interest in not burning fossil fuels?
The EU and a good portion of its member states, for example. There's also a lot of developed world people (I would say a few hundred million such) who've got some degree of the environmental religion where industrial activity of certain sorts is bad.
If the analysis in that article is correct it will be replicated in credible sources, if the analysis is flawed it will be confined to the denialist sphere.
Similarly, if AGW really is a credible threat then it too will be replicated in credible sources, here, reality. I think you need to accept at this point that most of the world simply won't go along with AGW mitigation. The US, BRIC, OPEC, etc just aren't interested enough in vague, hysterical predictions that seem to consistently overshoot reality.
Scientists are seeing something that causes them to be more and more certain
The hand that provides the funding is the hand that rules their world.
Let's start by observing the inevitable. Large rocket launches even when they aren't orbital are heavily regulated. You can't escape it even if you're doing covert launches out of a third world wilderness. The Man gets real uptight over unauthorized rocket launches and that's that.
I have indirect experience with US regulation for launching rockets and other things via my work for JP Aerospace. There are a bunch of things to consider here. First, regulators love a good track record. That means among other things you need to have a record of regulation-compliant launches before you try anything big or urgent.
Doing that gives you cover in a number of ways. If they decide you did something wrong, you have the good faith defense that you did this way in the past few launches without incident.
Similarly, if someone tries to block your activity via bogus regulatory or safety concern (the aerospace industry has long been notorious for using such techniques to harass competitors), then you have the means to contest these obstacles (by pointing out successful launches in the past). If you want to have access to multiple sites, you need a good track record for each site and its bureaucratic requirements. Finally, you can push the regulatory envelop and try (legally and safely of course) new technologies or techniques in order to establish a history for those.
So a track record is good.
Second, take this regulation seriously and come up with ways to do it efficiently rather than bypass it illegally. For example, US regulators want you to fill out every form. So no photocopying the old launch paperwork even though the new one is exactly the same. Learn the quirks of each process you have to do.
I would also refrain from asking publicly about ways around regulation as you did above. That's huge fail right there should you end up in an audit or trial at some point.
Third, treat such paperwork as a launch requirement. You have to have this paperwork at such and such stage before launch or it's "no go". You should have a really good idea how many man-hours it takes to fill out the forms for a give location and level of regulatory compliance.
There's probably certain paperwork that some inspector can ask for that would nix your flight, if it comes up missing. Treat it like you would your rocket or your payload and never leave home without it and perhaps a copy or two.
If you have regulatory obstacles to a particular technology, like your gunpowder igniter, you can either get a waiver for that (which is a whole lot easier to obtain IMHO with a good track record) or develop an alternate technology that bypasses the regulation. Just do it, don't risk your flight, program, and personal freedom on cutting that particular corner.
Finally, you have some ability to shop around for launch sites. Always have backup sites scoped out in case you can't use the original site.
To summarize, don't play games with this stuff, make it a part of your launch process every time, and good luck.
It was more considerable than being off a few flips. I'll link to the article again. Note that for all four IPCC reports, the averages of their estimates all end up over the actual measurements.
There could be a systemic bias, or it could be a partially chaotic system acting slightly less biased than usual.
The point of evidence is to distinguish between models. As we get more data, it'll help us distinguish between these possibilities.
We've been waiting since the 70's and the evidence continues to get stronger. The longer we wait the more severe the consequences are and the harder it is to change direction. If you wait for absolutely incontrovertible evidence it will almost certainly be too late to stop serious warming. It's possible we've already passed the tipping point and are looking at an unavoidable increase of 2-3 degrees no matter what we do.
Except the evidence isn't growing stronger as a case for near future action. Instead we're seeing growing divergence between the predictions made and the actual climate.
If costs are kept down but supply is not keeping up with demand, there's still a profit to be made in filling the gap and sucking up whatever demand there is, even at the set price.
No, the low price may mean that there isn't a profit to be made. Even when it does, the low profit margin means that it'll take longer to build up the capital needed to respond to changes in demand or improve services.
By naturally, I mean due to the dynamics of the established system. We know that all wealthy societies greatly reduce pollution and those societies which aren't in that category are all growing wealthier. So the dynamics are such that as the less wealthy societies continue to improve, they'll cut down on pollution.
Just look at the worlds resources and how they are all being spent at a frightening pace. And I am not just talking about oil. I mean all of them. Raw materials, food sources, clean water, a nice, clean place to live. The possibility to get away from other people sometimes. Waning Bio diversity, species are extinct every day.
And then consider that you and I are probably part of the 20% of the population that uses 80% of the resources and that the other 80% wants the same living standards as we do.
Since the living standard is not based on a fixed amount of pollution, it'll just be provided at a small portion of the pollution at somewhat greater relative cost. It's also worth noting that most of that pollution actually comes from the countries that have 80% of the population. As they deal with those pollution problems, the problem will go away naturally.
You really want assholes like Strom Thurmond living to the ripe old age of 1000?
Sure. He wasn't a bad guy. I rather him not be a senator for that long though.
And for all your yacking, a lot of problems would be dealt with because they would be in peoples' lifetimes rather than a few generations down the road and without a lot of fake urgency.
Considering that temperatures are still within the 95% uncertainty range I don't think it's justifiable to say the model projections are overshooting temperatures yet.
This overshooting is by almost all of the prediction models. It is consistent with a systematic error in all model building. Something which can be explained by a community wide bias in favor of exaggerating the effects of AGW.
If the situation remains that way for another 20 years then you may have some justification for saying they're overshooting.
This is one of the reasons I advocate waiting rather than acting on the alleged AGW threat. So that we can see if it's a temporary aberration or a bias.
But they _don't_ tell the government what to do. Political donars do.
I read his letter as doing just that in a diplomatic way.
So Hansen went political. Do you really think Hansen and the people who review his scientific articles can't tell what is politics and what is science?
I don't know about the reviewers, but Hansen seems to have a lot of trouble these days separating the two.
The cohort at the Heartland Institute don't do original research.
Your opinion of "original research" is irrelevant to whether someone is or isn't a scientist.
Do you think becoming a scientists means you are never never allowed to participate in political discourse, because that would be "telling the government what to do", because like, all those politicians aren't cowed enough by their political donars?
No. I was making two points. First, we shouldn't be playing the "No True Scotsman" game with scientists. Second, there are substantial conflicts of interest of those who fund most climate research which isn't being explored.
This is another "read a book" non-answers I occasionally run across. Since you haven't actually bothered to explain your "oil companies are hungry for shills", I'll just have to give up on this conversation.
Apparently, the performance varies between states since some of the states have their own systems which work rather than the federal default one. I recall hearing that California and New York both had working systems.
Slashdot Mirror
Where is this conflict of interest coming from?
At least you're asking the question. For the scientists, the conflict comes between the obligation to try to do accurate and unbiased scientific work versus the funding incentive to report research in a way that elevates the significance of climate change.
For the funding sources, there's a similar conflict between the public obligation to fund accurate and unbiased research versus the bureaucratic benefits to be had from portraying an existential threat, real or imaginary, to modern society. The latter means larger budgets and more power to the bureaucracy that can justify them to society at large.
It also reeks to me of a con job. There's always a glib answer to every complaint, language is abused to score propaganda points (such as the widespread use of "climate change" when AGW is meant), everything needs to be done right now, when you scratch the surface on a lot of this research, questionable or sloppy assumptions quickly show up, and these mistakes always favor a more aggressive interpretation of AGW. For example, criticism of a lack of obvious harm from near future AGW were met with the magical discovery of "extreme weather" (something the IPCC is apparently quietly dropping from its latest report BTW).
When one of the first real reports, the Stern review to attempt to quantify future harm of AGW was created, it made a major sloppy assumption by assuming discount rates about half as large as world chained GDP growth (completely ignoring that chained GDP growth is a better measure of ability to pay for future harm) and justified this on a major bogus basis, that a more reasonable discount rate was "immoral". That change alone ended up doubling for every 50 year period out future estimated costs of AGW. And of course, there's the recent weakening of recent climate predictions by the IPCC to reflect that current climate trends don't agree with the old models the IPCC used in previous reports.
This reminds me of a saying I've heard credited, apocryphally perhaps, to Will Rogers. "You expect cashiers to make mistakes on occasion. But when the mistakes are always in the cashier's favor, you have to wonder."
I assume you believe in free markets, which means you believe that capital keeps things honest.
What "free market"? I was, for example, speaking of governments using public funds. That's not a free market activity.
No one profits from AGW, not seriously anyways.
The finance industry does. For example, the carbon credit markets in Europe or the loan guarantees and financing for renewable energy and public transportation projects throughout the developed world.
So lemme get this straight.
Not spending money on AGW is clear evidence that AGW is false.
Spending money on AGW is clear evidence that AGW is false.
I'm beginning to understand all this evidence you see that indicated AGW is false.
You didn't get it straight. I think nothing quite illustrates your inability to think and reason like the strawmen arguments you construct.
Again, my argument here is that there is a huge conflict of interest and piles of money involved to confirm and exaggerate the effects of AGW. That doesn't meant that AGW doesn't exist or even isn't as bad as it is claimed to be.
So we have to go to evidence. Here, evidence is any fact or observation that distinguishes between two or more hypotheses, supporting one more than another. So it's not useful to us as evidence that researchers, who are paid to exaggerate the effects of AGW, happen to report that AGW is a threat requiring immediate mitigation. That's what we'd expect from them, whether or not AGW really is such a threat.
But we have other sorts of evidence, such as the cavalier actions of those developing world countries which don't treat AGW as a high priority, a surprising high level of confidence about climate predictions given extremely weak climate data (particularly everything before the modern era) and complex, opaque, jury rigged climate models, and a growing divergence between climate predictions of the past 30 years and the actual climate.
As I see it, while there is a case for a light case of AGW, the catastrophic version is still unjustified. So I'm willing to wait to see if the more extreme theory gets supporting evidence in the next few decades.
My view is that these climate models will not be vindicated and that in addition to the effects of AGW being greatly exaggerated, the ability of humans to deal with climate changes will be greatly understated.
The constitution specifically says congress has the right to regulate.
There's only one place in the entire US Constitution where any government body has the "right" to do anything. It's not the Second Amendment.
Nor does the Second Amendment give Congress the authority to regulate firearms and their use. That is implied to some degree by other parts of the Constitution.
There's no question about the meat of the Second Amendment " the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." "The people" is a well defined term that means everyone who lives in the US. "keep and bear Arms" is only uncertain as to what sort of weapons are considered "Arms". And "shall not be infringed" is pretty self explanatory.
As to the question of what "Arms" are allowed, the guidance of the justification phrase "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State" seems to indicate that normal infantry weapons like the M-16 rifle, common issue hand grenades, pump action shot guns, 9mm Beretta pistol, M-50 machine gun, maybe some of the more exotic weapons like wire guided missiles would. After all, how can you readily serve in a modern US flagged infantry militia if you aren't acquainted with the weapons that US infantry currently use?
I suppose the modern compromise is based on an expected training period. So the more advanced and dangerous weapons can be considered unnecessary for a militia to know going into a potential conflict. Hence, the legal definition of Arms for Second Amendment purposes is constrained somewhat from the above.
Gun registration need not be an infringement on the right to keep and bear Arms, but in practice it usually is. For example, in NYC gun registrants were public information. That was glaringly abused when the Journal News made it into an easily searchable data base. Making gun owners the public targets of thieves and witchhunters throughout the NYC area is an infringement of their Second Amendment rights.
It's the people trying to evaluate evidence who are the amateurs playing scientist.
What's the point of evidence, if you don't evaluate it? At this point, I can't tell if you have a genuine concern or a mental illness.
The reason I want citations and credible sources is because I don't want to play scientist, I want to know what the people who actually ARE scientists actually think.
And the reason I want evidence, is because I want to know what is going on, not merely what scientists are being paid to think.
So you think that the EU willing to spend 20% of its budget is evidence that climate change is false??
No, I think it's an example of the large conflicts of interest on the AGW advocacy side which people insist on ignoring. That $30 billion a year (plus whatever the national governments spend on the same) only gets spent because a few hundred million people have been convinced that climate change is such a pressing danger.
And it's Other Peoples' Money not the EU's money.
Liberals generally respect science and feel they have to respond to and mitigate AGW, Conservatives know this will be expensive. Therefore the Conservatives strategy is to downplay AGW as much as possible. This makes the actions the Liberals feel are necessary more unpopular, and translates into electoral gains for Conservatives.
So what? That's how debate works. The "liberals" can then present their own arguments and sway people to their side and make their arguments more popular. It's not the job of the "conservatives" to make the arguments of their opponents more popular.
What is different about the "liberal" versus "conservative" debate here is that the "conservatives" aren't using public funds for advocacy. I've remarked on this before but the IPCC and a number of NGOs receive considerable public funding - more than has ever been claimed for the allegedly huge fossil fuel propaganda effort. For example, the IPCC and the World Wildlife Fund both received individually more in public funds over the past fiften years than AGW opposition groups did over the same period.
That doesn't really make sense, AGW hurts developing countries disproportionately and they know that.
That's your cognitive dissonance acting up. The developing world knows no such thing. Sure, they're willing to pay lip service to AGW mitigation for money or political advantage. But when push comes to shove, their economic growth is a far higher priority than the mild harm that AGW would cause.
A lot of people died of cancer before we figured out the harmful effects of tobacco smoking. We've only got the one Earth so if we screw it up there's no quick fix.
But at least in the case of smoking there was copious evidence that it was a serious health problem.
This isn't some lame cable news show, saying "reality" doesn't cut it.
To the contrary, Slashdot looks like the kind of place where rank amateurs go to play scientist, demanding things like "citations", "credible publications/institutions", and other gobble-gook. Reality trumps that shit easily. Show the evidence or get lost.
And if you think these abstract motives are sufficient to wrongly bias scientists in favour of AGW what about the many billions of dollars invested in fossil fuels?
What of it? They can pick up climate change money as easily as anyone else rather than oppose it.
This is one of the significant stories people miss about the global warming debate. The fossil fuel industries are the dogs that didn't bark. Sure, there's a bit of money being spent by isolated "oil billionaires" such as the Koch brothers, but IMHO it's about two to three orders of magnitude smaller than what the fossil fuel and associated industries could crank out if they really felt like it.
I think you'd notice a hard core $10 billion a year campaign if it were going on. In its place, we have this pretty hard core climate change visibility. Journalists fall all over themselves to report science news which has a climate change connection no matter how contrived. Various NGOs gets lots of money and burn it on activities which promote the climate change propaganda (for example, the World Wildlife Fund or Greenpeace).
Similarly, there's stories that US researchers in relevant fields can help their funding chances by speculating in their research on a climate change connection. Maybe they're urban myths, but there are a lot of really strained and tenuous connections made out there in the research to climate change. Something has to be encourage those people to do that.
And of course, there are national governments and supergovernments just aching to spend vast sums on climate-related causes (such as the EU spending 20% of its budget on climate-related stuff over the 2014-2020 period).
So here's the thing. When I look at actual propaganda out there, climate change wins by a big margin. At this point, I see concern about Big Oil money and such as akin to the character, Emmanuel Goldstein in 1984. He was an imaginary villain used to give the oppressed people of Oceania something to hate (with the infamous two minute hate).
The real resistance isn't powerful fossil fuel businesses or billionaires. It's people who don't want to cut back the quality of their lives just because someone got the climate change religion. There's also the developing world countries who see climate change as a reasonable price for obtaining developed world economies.
Imagine if the effort was sufficiently international in nature, how would anyone decide which State has to give "authorization and continuing supervision"?
Don't know, but wouldn't be hard for someone with a real navy to mess with them. I don't think it'd be automatic, but they would have to keep their act pretty clean and isolated and/or well defended to avoid getting raided.
This is one of the reasons I advocate waiting rather than acting on the alleged AGW threat.
That's rather like a smoker saying "I'll wait until I get lung cancer before I quit."
These terrible, anti-scientific arguments are another reason why I advocate waiting. Reality can't be bluffed. If AGW really is harmful to the world like heavy smoking is for a person, then we'll see the effect and can act when we know and are confident of the danger. If it isn't, then we just saved ourselves from some irrational hysteria.
Name a publication more credible than a top tier scientific journal or an institution more credible than a research University.
I already did. Reality. If there really is a credible climate-based danger, we will observe it at some point. We won't need shaky models based on unreliable data.
Who is this mysterious uber-powerful funding agency who has a vested interest in not burning fossil fuels?
The EU and a good portion of its member states, for example. There's also a lot of developed world people (I would say a few hundred million such) who've got some degree of the environmental religion where industrial activity of certain sorts is bad.
Yeah, we get it. You don't believe in free will.
Not by this post.
Any sufficiently complex axiomatics system can not be both complete and consistant.
Rather it can't be provably consistent within the context of the axiom system. It can be consistent, you just can't prove it.
But we don't need to worry about consistency rearing its pretty head with respect to legislative sausage making.
As noted it's not actually in space. And a suborbital trajectory is a free fall, zero acceleration trajectory which only a few aircraft fly.
If the analysis in that article is correct it will be replicated in credible sources, if the analysis is flawed it will be confined to the denialist sphere.
Similarly, if AGW really is a credible threat then it too will be replicated in credible sources, here, reality. I think you need to accept at this point that most of the world simply won't go along with AGW mitigation. The US, BRIC, OPEC, etc just aren't interested enough in vague, hysterical predictions that seem to consistently overshoot reality.
Scientists are seeing something that causes them to be more and more certain
The hand that provides the funding is the hand that rules their world.
Let's start by observing the inevitable. Large rocket launches even when they aren't orbital are heavily regulated. You can't escape it even if you're doing covert launches out of a third world wilderness. The Man gets real uptight over unauthorized rocket launches and that's that.
I have indirect experience with US regulation for launching rockets and other things via my work for JP Aerospace. There are a bunch of things to consider here. First, regulators love a good track record. That means among other things you need to have a record of regulation-compliant launches before you try anything big or urgent.
Doing that gives you cover in a number of ways. If they decide you did something wrong, you have the good faith defense that you did this way in the past few launches without incident.
Similarly, if someone tries to block your activity via bogus regulatory or safety concern (the aerospace industry has long been notorious for using such techniques to harass competitors), then you have the means to contest these obstacles (by pointing out successful launches in the past). If you want to have access to multiple sites, you need a good track record for each site and its bureaucratic requirements. Finally, you can push the regulatory envelop and try (legally and safely of course) new technologies or techniques in order to establish a history for those.
So a track record is good.
Second, take this regulation seriously and come up with ways to do it efficiently rather than bypass it illegally. For example, US regulators want you to fill out every form. So no photocopying the old launch paperwork even though the new one is exactly the same. Learn the quirks of each process you have to do.
I would also refrain from asking publicly about ways around regulation as you did above. That's huge fail right there should you end up in an audit or trial at some point.
Third, treat such paperwork as a launch requirement. You have to have this paperwork at such and such stage before launch or it's "no go". You should have a really good idea how many man-hours it takes to fill out the forms for a give location and level of regulatory compliance.
There's probably certain paperwork that some inspector can ask for that would nix your flight, if it comes up missing. Treat it like you would your rocket or your payload and never leave home without it and perhaps a copy or two.
If you have regulatory obstacles to a particular technology, like your gunpowder igniter, you can either get a waiver for that (which is a whole lot easier to obtain IMHO with a good track record) or develop an alternate technology that bypasses the regulation. Just do it, don't risk your flight, program, and personal freedom on cutting that particular corner.
Finally, you have some ability to shop around for launch sites. Always have backup sites scoped out in case you can't use the original site.
To summarize, don't play games with this stuff, make it a part of your launch process every time, and good luck.
Point is that Simon shouldn't have been lucky once. The bet was heavily favorable to Ehrlich.
There could be a systemic bias, or it could be a partially chaotic system acting slightly less biased than usual.
The point of evidence is to distinguish between models. As we get more data, it'll help us distinguish between these possibilities.
We've been waiting since the 70's and the evidence continues to get stronger. The longer we wait the more severe the consequences are and the harder it is to change direction. If you wait for absolutely incontrovertible evidence it will almost certainly be too late to stop serious warming. It's possible we've already passed the tipping point and are looking at an unavoidable increase of 2-3 degrees no matter what we do.
Except the evidence isn't growing stronger as a case for near future action. Instead we're seeing growing divergence between the predictions made and the actual climate.
If costs are kept down but supply is not keeping up with demand, there's still a profit to be made in filling the gap and sucking up whatever demand there is, even at the set price.
No, the low price may mean that there isn't a profit to be made. Even when it does, the low profit margin means that it'll take longer to build up the capital needed to respond to changes in demand or improve services.
By naturally, I mean due to the dynamics of the established system. We know that all wealthy societies greatly reduce pollution and those societies which aren't in that category are all growing wealthier. So the dynamics are such that as the less wealthy societies continue to improve, they'll cut down on pollution.
Just look at the worlds resources and how they are all being spent at a frightening pace. And I am not just talking about oil. I mean all of them. Raw materials, food sources, clean water, a nice, clean place to live. The possibility to get away from other people sometimes. Waning Bio diversity, species are extinct every day.
Yet Julian Simons won the bet.
And then consider that you and I are probably part of the 20% of the population that uses 80% of the resources and that the other 80% wants the same living standards as we do.
Since the living standard is not based on a fixed amount of pollution, it'll just be provided at a small portion of the pollution at somewhat greater relative cost. It's also worth noting that most of that pollution actually comes from the countries that have 80% of the population. As they deal with those pollution problems, the problem will go away naturally.
You really want assholes like Strom Thurmond living to the ripe old age of 1000?
Sure. He wasn't a bad guy. I rather him not be a senator for that long though.
And for all your yacking, a lot of problems would be dealt with because they would be in peoples' lifetimes rather than a few generations down the road and without a lot of fake urgency.
Considering that temperatures are still within the 95% uncertainty range I don't think it's justifiable to say the model projections are overshooting temperatures yet.
This overshooting is by almost all of the prediction models. It is consistent with a systematic error in all model building. Something which can be explained by a community wide bias in favor of exaggerating the effects of AGW.
If the situation remains that way for another 20 years then you may have some justification for saying they're overshooting.
This is one of the reasons I advocate waiting rather than acting on the alleged AGW threat. So that we can see if it's a temporary aberration or a bias.
But they _don't_ tell the government what to do. Political donars do.
I read his letter as doing just that in a diplomatic way.
So Hansen went political. Do you really think Hansen and the people who review his scientific articles can't tell what is politics and what is science?
I don't know about the reviewers, but Hansen seems to have a lot of trouble these days separating the two.
The cohort at the Heartland Institute don't do original research.
Your opinion of "original research" is irrelevant to whether someone is or isn't a scientist.
Do you think becoming a scientists means you are never never allowed to participate in political discourse, because that would be "telling the government what to do", because like, all those politicians aren't cowed enough by their political donars?
No. I was making two points. First, we shouldn't be playing the "No True Scotsman" game with scientists. Second, there are substantial conflicts of interest of those who fund most climate research which isn't being explored.
This is another "read a book" non-answers I occasionally run across. Since you haven't actually bothered to explain your "oil companies are hungry for shills", I'll just have to give up on this conversation.
Apparently, the performance varies between states since some of the states have their own systems which work rather than the federal default one. I recall hearing that California and New York both had working systems.