In other words, about half of Obama's money came from untraceable sources. It might be a zillion people breaking out their wallets, or it might be a few perl scripts from one or two big donors getting around campaign finance laws.
The logic failure of the people arguing against secondary markets is colossal.
But it is worth noting that secondary markets in both cars and housings have been screwed with in recent years. "Cash for clunkers" was a program that bought a bunch of used cars and bricked them. Recently, we saw the selling of gas with ethanol that might damage older cars. And there have been some efforts to keep foreclosed homes from appearing on the market.
Corporations are collections of CAPITAL and people.
FIFY. That kills your entire argument. Again, to repeat what has already been said, the Citizens United argument was to grant to groups of people the rights that they were due. The corporation's legal existence is irrelevant aside from being a convenient form for groups to organize under.
What they essentially said was that once Congress or the states allow corporations to exist that they then lose all authority over them, which is both illogical and stupid.
I think it's painfully obvious that Congress and the states didn't actually lose authority over corporations. A bit of bad and unconstitutional law concerning campaign funding was overturned. No real drama occurred.
Saying that high resolution, fps, and 3D don't belong in a drama is like saying a high quality sound system is only appropriate for rock and hip hop and what is the point of using one to play Mozart.
Mozart would be the audio analogue to to all those flashy movies that have high sensory demands. What's the point of using a high quality sound system for most rock and hip hop? Might as well use a electric cheese grater.
Is it more dramatic when a jewelry box is opened to reveal cut glass or the sparkle of a diamond? The visual impact has a dramatic impact quite aside from the monetary one. Why would dramatic film be any different?
Where would this "dramatic impact" come from? I doubt ten percent of the audience could discern any difference.
We were speaking of an industrialised nation where your car is 8 years old max.
I agree with houstonbofh. If your industrialized nation is throwing away cars every eight years or less, then you're massively wasting resources. Mind you I don't really care about waste, but I find it deeply hypocritical to change the formula of gas in order to obsolete a large portion of your automotive fleet - all in the name of environmentalism no less.
There are two things to note here. First, homeowners with guns are not public figures and hence, have an expectation of privacy. They don't lose this just because someone wants to make a political point.
Second, this list opens the Journal News to liability from crimes it inspires. Guns have significant value and thieves aren't always deterred by the threat. The newspaper has just handed out a list of places to rob.
Regardles of the who and what, but the climate is changing noticable.
Ever hear of confirmation bias? Just because you think you notice something doesn't mean you do.
Besides we have yet to use the proper methods for determining whether weather is due to climate change. Here's a simple test. Take your suspect weather event and throw it in a pond. If it floats, then it's a witch^H^H^H^H^H climate change induced extreme weather event.
Why are climate change skeptics, who call climate change global warming, still taken seriously?
Indeed, what else would you call "global warming", but the obvious term, "climate change"?
As for myself, I too suffer dearly from climate change. Due to the warming of the past century, my bid for Supreme Galactic Emperor has fallen into shambles. Damn that nefarious Industrial Age! And now with all this extreme weather, I had to give up on the consolation prize, the Most Excellent Emir of the Orion Arm position. You wouldn't think that US flood insurance policies have intergalactic implications. Well, that's why I'm a space noble and you're a space peasant!
I think my suffering is worth at least $200 billion dollars and the title of Honorable Viceroy of the Sol System. It's not too much to ask, given the circumstances and the money sloshing around.
Actually, let's mind the car. Think of all those new jobs that are created whenever you pump the wrong fuel into your tank. Only way it could get better is if we pay people to break cars. New economy, here we come!
and put petty patriotism behind us./quote>
Too bad that doesn't work both ways. At the sociopathic international level, nobody else will look out for your interests. If someone else is doing all the research, then you can bet good money, assuming you have any, that will work out to your detriment sooner or later.
Put it this way. If you're going for a job that doesn't require a STEM degree, then why put the extra effort in? Most people don't get an education for the education, but because the degree is a gateway to higher quality jobs and thereby, better income.
The Christian Scientists have been kicking around since the 19th century and they're off shoots of even older anti-scientific religious groups which can be traced back to the Reformation in Europe.
People should be asking "What changed?" since then. As I see it, a lot of society requires vast amounts of knowledge, some with a short shelf life. And humans haven't gotten a whole lot better at learning. So I think a big part of what's going on is that people are creating sub-societies with a lower knowledge requirement. Toss in insecurity from the resulting power differential and I think you have all the ingredients for an anti-science movement.
None of which has to do with the religion itself. They're things any large scale organization can promise you.
Well, then show me the non-religious "large scale organization" that increases your chances of having a old school family (working father, at home mother, and a bunch of kids). A lot of religions offer that.
It also fills a psychological need. They offer purpose, a powerful and motivating outlook that you're part of something big. You occasionally run into people who would be self-destructive in some way if it weren't for the mitigating influence of a religion. This is not unique to religion, but it is a feature of any religion.
In addition, you grant above that religion as a "large scale organization" does provide things.
This statement actually supports my point: religion is not about the real world present life benefits. Religion is about the after life, the vague things that you just gotta have faith to believe in. If religion was about real world benefits, then yes people would switch religions on the fly like a politician switching stances to get more votes.
No, it would prove your point if no switching occurred. Infrequent switching indicates merely that there are substantial costs to switching (such as losing much of your old social circle).
There are risks in most things, and how people judge whether risks are worth taking is to look at history or past experiences. If you tell me starving is bad, I can refer to my own experiences, or watch other people starve and verify that you are right.
But when you're talking about religion, it talks about the afterlife. Now how in the world can we tell if a religion is correct? That would involve one of us going to the after life and then somehow communicating the experience back, and so far there's no convincing evidence or argument (just like you know, there's no convincing argument for AGW?
As I noted above, it's not all about the afterlife.
I'm not sure why you're so antagonistic when we're probably on the same side about AGW)
If all I sought was agreement, then I could get that by only posting to echo chambers that reflect my views. I expect others to disagree with me, often legitimately, and I'm willing to push my argument a bit.
To summarize my view, sure it appears at first that religion is about an unaccountable, supernatural reward. That's what they push first and foremost. I think it's the catch that grabs people with the psychological need.
But if we look at why some religions stick around and some go away, we see that religions provide more than that nebulous end game. They're social networks. They often provide stability both at the personal and family levels. They provide some of the benefits any large scale organization can provide (connections, resources, something to do, etc). That's why some religions are thriving and some aren't.
I just don't see AGW advocacy offering anything like those benefits. It doesn't have the social or stability benefits of a religion. It's not an organization with some use. It doesn't build anything (instead tearing down existing infrastructure). And it seems quite counterproductive by diverting substantial resources away from needs that are more important (for example, bad farming practices and treatable disease), making people poorer (poor people being a common cause of environmental destruction), and misattributing a variety of problems to AGW.
Before we discuss funding for independent data collection and modeling at an adequate resolution (which probably will require a cutting edge supercomputer), I should point out that extreme weather is not temperature sensitivity.
One can grant temperature sensitivity to CO2 and even the existence of some positive correlation with extreme weather, yet still question the current studies of extreme weather and the claims they make.
I think this is particularly relevant since extreme weather currently makes up most of the case for urgently dealing with AGW. If instead, extreme weather is not a big issue, then the argument for urgency depends on melting of Greenland/Antarctica ice and possible "tipping points", neither which has been demonstrated to be a near future threat.
People dismiss models as "you can make a model do what you want", but no, you can't.
Not sure why you're trying so hard to be wrong here. But yes, you can make a model do whatever you want. You can easy make it fit past data, real or fabricated. Confirmation bias is extremely hard to remove from model building, especially when there's a huge financial incentive for it.
To be taken seriously, your model also needs to match the paleontological record
A relevant question at this point is does the paleontological record match the paleontological record? I see signs that paleoclimate data gathering, aggregation, and interpretation was captured by big money back in the 90s. If true, that undermines every model that's built on that data.
And it's worth noting, yet again, that there's more than enough money sloshing around to almost completely corrupt the entire field, much less this particular subfield.
Major religions are the greatest examples of my point.
As I noted, they are not. They promise a lot in this lifetime. Else people would switch to the religion down the street which offers that great afterlife plus better real world benefits.
No, those were not concrete advantages.
Well, one merely needs to look at the quote you replied to. What is the point of making a wrong statement?
They only become concrete when it's after the fact
This is silly. There are risks of failure to doing most things. For example, not starving is a concrete benefit of eating. But suppose you have to travel to eat? What makes not starving a less than concrete benefit? Let's add some risk. You're trapped in a zombie horror flick and the grocery, you're trying to reach, may have been completely looted and burned to the ground. Well, guess what? Not starving still remains a concrete benefit.
No, they are not hidden. The cost is always "obey our set of rules and beliefs". Some of them don't just ask for hundreds of billions, they ask for your very life ("fight for the fatherland!" "give your life for god!") for some nebulous better future. It's no different than the AGW movement
And do you fully know what those rules and beliefs are going to be beforehand? Usually not. "Fight for the fatherland!" is great as an abstract idea. But in reality, your "fatherland" might declare war on the rest of the world which is not what you signed up for.
Yes, but it is and will be probabilistic. See for example this on the Moscow heat waves, for example, and the discussions at RealClimate. Attribution studies are very expensive (in time and money, for computing ensembles), but are a key body of work over the last few years, and there is a section of the upcoming IPCC AR5 report summarizing it. The IPCC reports are
the best summary of the science, even though they are very conservative.
That's nice when you actually get something that is probabilistic. I see some suggestive frequentist studies in your links. But nothing particularly interesting.
For example, an 80% chance of the West Russian heat wave means even by the logic of the algorithm a 20% chance of the heat wave being normal, which is way too high for the claims made. After all, all you have to do is go over a few heat waves and pretty soon, you'll find that 80% chance. I think that was what was done there, probably unintentionally.
Second, I find the Hansen research remarkably deceptive - as usual I might add. The blogger glosses over the choice of "climatology" (a meager data set of only 30 years which I might add is considerably shorter than some solar cycles that do have an effect on Earth's climate) and then claims the ability to detect "3 sigma" deviations from that skimpy data set (ignoring that the data is highly correlated and doesn't share a common distribution even after the normalization effort, which is contrary to the inherent assumptions used).
The IPCC is a well known propaganda mouthpiece. While this isnt' the first time I've heard the claim that the IPCC is "very conservative", I still remember when the IPCC made very liberal claims not backed by any research in the actual body of the report. They also have on occasion inserted rather vapid propaganda as research (the notorious claim that Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035). And they have a number of people of dubious qualification filtering research.
I imagine in the long run we will find that the "very conservative" antics of the IPCC weren't very conservative at all.
Non-scientific, yes. The terms "sceptic", "denialist","AGW believer",etc are not pro- or anti-scientific, they're political.
While "sceptic" and "AGW believer" are pretty neutral, one only uses "denialist" to disparage and discredit. It is a straightforward case of ad hominem fallacy. Hence, why it is anti-scientific.
For ACC vs bad farming practices
Bad farming practices are ACC as well. That's the problem with using the term ACC to mean something other than ACC.
Could we scientifically attribute the rainfall this year to ACC? we could run a large ensemble model (such as the UK Met office did for Russia, 2010) but it would be exteremely expensive in computational time and scientist time, and would still lead a probabilistic result that denialists would dismiss.
The answer is "no". I notice throughout your examples of research a remarkable confusion of algorithm with fact. I too can make an algorithm that takes current data and portrays in some extreme way.
Note that this is precisely what has happened with this story. Coral reefs aren't actually threatened any more than they were before. The model just changed (and not necessarily in a more realistic manner!). A similar thing happened with the other recent Slashdot story about the temperature of West Antarctica. Maybe the temperature change really was more dramatic than formerly thought. But maybe it wasn't.
It's worth reminding people what is at stake. Hundreds of billions of dollars in public funds each year. That's far more than you would need to buy completely the field of climatology. That's also more than the fossil fuel industry earns each year except possibly in the best years.
So my view is that the best strategy is simply to wait rather than rely on opaque and easily corruptible statistical analysis and predictive models. If there really is a problem, we'll see it by then.
Anthropogenic climate change encompasses global warming but includes changes in precipitation, wind and other things as well.
It also includes desertification, deforestation, urbanization, and any other human-generated climate change. It's worth noting that higher carbon dioxide emissions have three claimed direct results, warmer temperatures, acidification of the oceans, and some effects positive and negative on plant growth. All other effects are secondary and derived from the global warming aspect of carbon dioxide emissions.
Then there's the other greenhouse gasses that have a temperature effect and no other direct effect.
You effectively argue that global warming should be called something else because its consequences change more than just global mean temperature. I think that's a very poor argument to make.
Wow, I never thought I'd see someone admit to using HylaFAX. I remember looking for a lightweight FAX interface back in 2000-2001 for some demo project I was doing. It was a lot better than what else was out there. The MS library stuff in particular was a vast pile of crap and OS-specific of course.
But if you flip a coin 1000 times and it comes up heads 659 times, you can say with a high degree of confidence that the coin is not fair.
It may also be that you are reporting a number of tails as heads. Or didn't record a number of flips and are guessing at what those flips were from what you do have.
Slashdot Mirror
57% of Obama donations were under $200
24% of Romney donations were under $200
In other words, about half of Obama's money came from untraceable sources. It might be a zillion people breaking out their wallets, or it might be a few perl scripts from one or two big donors getting around campaign finance laws.
The logic failure of the people arguing against secondary markets is colossal.
But it is worth noting that secondary markets in both cars and housings have been screwed with in recent years. "Cash for clunkers" was a program that bought a bunch of used cars and bricked them. Recently, we saw the selling of gas with ethanol that might damage older cars. And there have been some efforts to keep foreclosed homes from appearing on the market.
Corporations are collections of CAPITAL and people.
FIFY. That kills your entire argument. Again, to repeat what has already been said, the Citizens United argument was to grant to groups of people the rights that they were due. The corporation's legal existence is irrelevant aside from being a convenient form for groups to organize under.
What they essentially said was that once Congress or the states allow corporations to exist that they then lose all authority over them, which is both illogical and stupid.
I think it's painfully obvious that Congress and the states didn't actually lose authority over corporations. A bit of bad and unconstitutional law concerning campaign funding was overturned. No real drama occurred.
Saying that high resolution, fps, and 3D don't belong in a drama is like saying a high quality sound system is only appropriate for rock and hip hop and what is the point of using one to play Mozart.
Mozart would be the audio analogue to to all those flashy movies that have high sensory demands. What's the point of using a high quality sound system for most rock and hip hop? Might as well use a electric cheese grater.
Is it more dramatic when a jewelry box is opened to reveal cut glass or the sparkle of a diamond? The visual impact has a dramatic impact quite aside from the monetary one. Why would dramatic film be any different?
Where would this "dramatic impact" come from? I doubt ten percent of the audience could discern any difference.
LOL. American?
Because English is everyone's first language.
Nonsense. Brazil has been using E20 and E25 for decades. All it requires is some small tweaks.
Sure... as long as you're paying!
We were speaking of an industrialised nation where your car is 8 years old max.
I agree with houstonbofh. If your industrialized nation is throwing away cars every eight years or less, then you're massively wasting resources. Mind you I don't really care about waste, but I find it deeply hypocritical to change the formula of gas in order to obsolete a large portion of your automotive fleet - all in the name of environmentalism no less.
If you lived next door to someone with those things you might want to know.
There's a lot of things I want to know, but don't have the right to know.
There are two things to note here. First, homeowners with guns are not public figures and hence, have an expectation of privacy. They don't lose this just because someone wants to make a political point.
Second, this list opens the Journal News to liability from crimes it inspires. Guns have significant value and thieves aren't always deterred by the threat. The newspaper has just handed out a list of places to rob.
Regardles of the who and what, but the climate is changing noticable.
Ever hear of confirmation bias? Just because you think you notice something doesn't mean you do.
Besides we have yet to use the proper methods for determining whether weather is due to climate change. Here's a simple test. Take your suspect weather event and throw it in a pond. If it floats, then it's a witch^H^H^H^H^H climate change induced extreme weather event.
You're ignoring the physical product industry.
Why are climate change skeptics, who call climate change global warming, still taken seriously?
Indeed, what else would you call "global warming", but the obvious term, "climate change"?
As for myself, I too suffer dearly from climate change. Due to the warming of the past century, my bid for Supreme Galactic Emperor has fallen into shambles. Damn that nefarious Industrial Age! And now with all this extreme weather, I had to give up on the consolation prize, the Most Excellent Emir of the Orion Arm position. You wouldn't think that US flood insurance policies have intergalactic implications. Well, that's why I'm a space noble and you're a space peasant!
I think my suffering is worth at least $200 billion dollars and the title of Honorable Viceroy of the Sol System. It's not too much to ask, given the circumstances and the money sloshing around.
Actually, let's mind the car. Think of all those new jobs that are created whenever you pump the wrong fuel into your tank. Only way it could get better is if we pay people to break cars. New economy, here we come!
But by all accounts we would have entered a full blown depression (ala 1939).
You mean a la 1929. 1933 happened anyway.
and put petty patriotism behind us./quote> Too bad that doesn't work both ways. At the sociopathic international level, nobody else will look out for your interests. If someone else is doing all the research, then you can bet good money, assuming you have any, that will work out to your detriment sooner or later.
Put it this way. If you're going for a job that doesn't require a STEM degree, then why put the extra effort in? Most people don't get an education for the education, but because the degree is a gateway to higher quality jobs and thereby, better income.
The Christian Scientists have been kicking around since the 19th century and they're off shoots of even older anti-scientific religious groups which can be traced back to the Reformation in Europe.
People should be asking "What changed?" since then. As I see it, a lot of society requires vast amounts of knowledge, some with a short shelf life. And humans haven't gotten a whole lot better at learning. So I think a big part of what's going on is that people are creating sub-societies with a lower knowledge requirement. Toss in insecurity from the resulting power differential and I think you have all the ingredients for an anti-science movement.
None of which has to do with the religion itself. They're things any large scale organization can promise you.
Well, then show me the non-religious "large scale organization" that increases your chances of having a old school family (working father, at home mother, and a bunch of kids). A lot of religions offer that.
It also fills a psychological need. They offer purpose, a powerful and motivating outlook that you're part of something big. You occasionally run into people who would be self-destructive in some way if it weren't for the mitigating influence of a religion. This is not unique to religion, but it is a feature of any religion.
In addition, you grant above that religion as a "large scale organization" does provide things.
This statement actually supports my point: religion is not about the real world present life benefits. Religion is about the after life, the vague things that you just gotta have faith to believe in. If religion was about real world benefits, then yes people would switch religions on the fly like a politician switching stances to get more votes.
No, it would prove your point if no switching occurred. Infrequent switching indicates merely that there are substantial costs to switching (such as losing much of your old social circle).
There are risks in most things, and how people judge whether risks are worth taking is to look at history or past experiences. If you tell me starving is bad, I can refer to my own experiences, or watch other people starve and verify that you are right.
But when you're talking about religion, it talks about the afterlife. Now how in the world can we tell if a religion is correct? That would involve one of us going to the after life and then somehow communicating the experience back, and so far there's no convincing evidence or argument (just like you know, there's no convincing argument for AGW?
As I noted above, it's not all about the afterlife.
I'm not sure why you're so antagonistic when we're probably on the same side about AGW)
If all I sought was agreement, then I could get that by only posting to echo chambers that reflect my views. I expect others to disagree with me, often legitimately, and I'm willing to push my argument a bit.
To summarize my view, sure it appears at first that religion is about an unaccountable, supernatural reward. That's what they push first and foremost. I think it's the catch that grabs people with the psychological need.
But if we look at why some religions stick around and some go away, we see that religions provide more than that nebulous end game. They're social networks. They often provide stability both at the personal and family levels. They provide some of the benefits any large scale organization can provide (connections, resources, something to do, etc). That's why some religions are thriving and some aren't.
I just don't see AGW advocacy offering anything like those benefits. It doesn't have the social or stability benefits of a religion. It's not an organization with some use. It doesn't build anything (instead tearing down existing infrastructure). And it seems quite counterproductive by diverting substantial resources away from needs that are more important (for example, bad farming practices and treatable disease), making people poorer (poor people being a common cause of environmental destruction), and misattributing a variety of problems to AGW.
One can grant temperature sensitivity to CO2 and even the existence of some positive correlation with extreme weather, yet still question the current studies of extreme weather and the claims they make.
I think this is particularly relevant since extreme weather currently makes up most of the case for urgently dealing with AGW. If instead, extreme weather is not a big issue, then the argument for urgency depends on melting of Greenland/Antarctica ice and possible "tipping points", neither which has been demonstrated to be a near future threat.
People dismiss models as "you can make a model do what you want", but no, you can't.
Not sure why you're trying so hard to be wrong here. But yes, you can make a model do whatever you want. You can easy make it fit past data, real or fabricated. Confirmation bias is extremely hard to remove from model building, especially when there's a huge financial incentive for it.
To be taken seriously, your model also needs to match the paleontological record
A relevant question at this point is does the paleontological record match the paleontological record? I see signs that paleoclimate data gathering, aggregation, and interpretation was captured by big money back in the 90s. If true, that undermines every model that's built on that data.
And it's worth noting, yet again, that there's more than enough money sloshing around to almost completely corrupt the entire field, much less this particular subfield.
Major religions are the greatest examples of my point.
As I noted, they are not. They promise a lot in this lifetime. Else people would switch to the religion down the street which offers that great afterlife plus better real world benefits.
No, those were not concrete advantages.
Well, one merely needs to look at the quote you replied to. What is the point of making a wrong statement?
They only become concrete when it's after the fact
This is silly. There are risks of failure to doing most things. For example, not starving is a concrete benefit of eating. But suppose you have to travel to eat? What makes not starving a less than concrete benefit? Let's add some risk. You're trapped in a zombie horror flick and the grocery, you're trying to reach, may have been completely looted and burned to the ground. Well, guess what? Not starving still remains a concrete benefit.
No, they are not hidden. The cost is always "obey our set of rules and beliefs". Some of them don't just ask for hundreds of billions, they ask for your very life ("fight for the fatherland!" "give your life for god!") for some nebulous better future. It's no different than the AGW movement
And do you fully know what those rules and beliefs are going to be beforehand? Usually not. "Fight for the fatherland!" is great as an abstract idea. But in reality, your "fatherland" might declare war on the rest of the world which is not what you signed up for.
Yes, but it is and will be probabilistic. See for example this on the Moscow heat waves, for example, and the discussions at RealClimate. Attribution studies are very expensive (in time and money, for computing ensembles), but are a key body of work over the last few years, and there is a section of the upcoming IPCC AR5 report summarizing it. The IPCC reports are the best summary of the science, even though they are very conservative.
That's nice when you actually get something that is probabilistic. I see some suggestive frequentist studies in your links. But nothing particularly interesting.
For example, an 80% chance of the West Russian heat wave means even by the logic of the algorithm a 20% chance of the heat wave being normal, which is way too high for the claims made. After all, all you have to do is go over a few heat waves and pretty soon, you'll find that 80% chance. I think that was what was done there, probably unintentionally.
Second, I find the Hansen research remarkably deceptive - as usual I might add. The blogger glosses over the choice of "climatology" (a meager data set of only 30 years which I might add is considerably shorter than some solar cycles that do have an effect on Earth's climate) and then claims the ability to detect "3 sigma" deviations from that skimpy data set (ignoring that the data is highly correlated and doesn't share a common distribution even after the normalization effort, which is contrary to the inherent assumptions used).
The IPCC is a well known propaganda mouthpiece. While this isnt' the first time I've heard the claim that the IPCC is "very conservative", I still remember when the IPCC made very liberal claims not backed by any research in the actual body of the report. They also have on occasion inserted rather vapid propaganda as research (the notorious claim that Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035). And they have a number of people of dubious qualification filtering research.
I imagine in the long run we will find that the "very conservative" antics of the IPCC weren't very conservative at all.
Non-scientific, yes. The terms "sceptic", "denialist","AGW believer",etc are not pro- or anti-scientific, they're political.
While "sceptic" and "AGW believer" are pretty neutral, one only uses "denialist" to disparage and discredit. It is a straightforward case of ad hominem fallacy. Hence, why it is anti-scientific.
For ACC vs bad farming practices
Bad farming practices are ACC as well. That's the problem with using the term ACC to mean something other than ACC.
Could we scientifically attribute the rainfall this year to ACC? we could run a large ensemble model (such as the UK Met office did for Russia, 2010) but it would be exteremely expensive in computational time and scientist time, and would still lead a probabilistic result that denialists would dismiss.
The answer is "no". I notice throughout your examples of research a remarkable confusion of algorithm with fact. I too can make an algorithm that takes current data and portrays in some extreme way.
Note that this is precisely what has happened with this story. Coral reefs aren't actually threatened any more than they were before. The model just changed (and not necessarily in a more realistic manner!). A similar thing happened with the other recent Slashdot story about the temperature of West Antarctica. Maybe the temperature change really was more dramatic than formerly thought. But maybe it wasn't.
It's worth reminding people what is at stake. Hundreds of billions of dollars in public funds each year. That's far more than you would need to buy completely the field of climatology. That's also more than the fossil fuel industry earns each year except possibly in the best years.
So my view is that the best strategy is simply to wait rather than rely on opaque and easily corruptible statistical analysis and predictive models. If there really is a problem, we'll see it by then.
Anthropogenic climate change encompasses global warming but includes changes in precipitation, wind and other things as well.
It also includes desertification, deforestation, urbanization, and any other human-generated climate change. It's worth noting that higher carbon dioxide emissions have three claimed direct results, warmer temperatures, acidification of the oceans, and some effects positive and negative on plant growth. All other effects are secondary and derived from the global warming aspect of carbon dioxide emissions.
Then there's the other greenhouse gasses that have a temperature effect and no other direct effect.
You effectively argue that global warming should be called something else because its consequences change more than just global mean temperature. I think that's a very poor argument to make.
Wow, I never thought I'd see someone admit to using HylaFAX. I remember looking for a lightweight FAX interface back in 2000-2001 for some demo project I was doing. It was a lot better than what else was out there. The MS library stuff in particular was a vast pile of crap and OS-specific of course.
But if you flip a coin 1000 times and it comes up heads 659 times, you can say with a high degree of confidence that the coin is not fair.
It may also be that you are reporting a number of tails as heads. Or didn't record a number of flips and are guessing at what those flips were from what you do have.
Most data has gaps of some kind.
At least with fossils, they look for new fossils to fill in the gaps between existing ones rather than interpolate and hope they got it right.