Hey, how about the citations of the papers that interoduce real world tested and verified String theory proofs.
I already stated that string theory probably has falsifiable elements now. They just can't be falsified now.
And if it is real world proven now, with falsifiable elements, why are so many of you asking for the falsifiable aspects to be removed?
Bruised egos, I think. I haven't sat in on a string theory talk for a while (since around 2008). But most of them routinely put caveats about string theory not being physically observed. They near universally acknowledged the current failings of the theory even if they were wildly optimistic about its future.
My view is that string theory isn't particularly expensive and it is generating interesting math which can be used elsewhere. So even if the theory fails on its own to generate useful falsifiables, it may either help improve mathematical tools that we can use with a better, falsifiable theory or it might manifest in a more fundamental theory or mathematical construction (resulting in quick extrapolation of various properties of this future theory).
If I were sitting on some central planning committee for allocating theoretical physics grad students by subject, I'd recommend pulling back from the relatively heavy numbers of the 90s and 00s.
Sounds like I have no idea what you are talking about. I'm talking about the typical creationist or other denier tactic of saying something like the theory of Evolution is "just a theory", using the word incorrectly as meaning a hypothesis or - wild ass guess.
I don't base meaning of words on what creationists decide they mean. You shouldn't either.
The problem with string theory is that it has several unobservable aspects, like the 10 space-time dimensions, and some unobservable spatial dimensions as well.
That's incorrect. We observe 3+1 spacetime and the observed symmetries of the non-gravitational forces (electromagnetism, weak force, strong force) introduce the other 6 dimensions. This has nothing to do with string theory. It's real world physics.
So what makes that real world? From the mathematical models of each of the three forces in question, we mathematically derive transformation groups (or "gauges") of dimensions 1, 2, and 3 respective to the list in the previous paragraph. That's where the 6 dimensions come from. And every elementary particle we know of (including its elementary nature) has been found to be defined via these three symmetries either as an irreducible representation or a gauge boson (a particle which in the machinery of the math models transmits one of the three forces in question).
In other words, our best present-day models, which are not string theory models (!), require 10 dimensions. And in exchange, they predict every particle class we have ever observed.
Instead, a real scientific problem with string theory and plenty of other such theories, is the huge variety of priors which have to be set for the theory to be tuned to the observed universe. This may just be a fundamental issue of physics where the priors of the observer actually do force a huge amount of the physics. Or it might be that we haven't yet found a sufficiently parsimonious model which nails that all down.
Sure, when we know all there is to know about the physical world, and there's nothing left to learn, science will be obsolete. When we know all there is to know about the abstract world, and there's nothing left to learn, philosophy will be obsolete - but I rather suspect that will come later.
What does philosophy have to say about the abstract world that mathematics doesn't say? Give your abstract idea any structure, any consistency, any pattern, and it becomes a mathematical idea.
One good example is "ethics", which stubbornly remains a philosophical field, seeming immune to either mathematical proof from first principles (except for those of some strong faith), or to empirical measurement. Without a god to provide the answers in the back of the book, we're stuck with our intuitions and our ability to reason about them. And we're far from any sort of general agreement on the answers.
I strongly disagree. For starters, a key requirement of ethics is consistency (that is, you try for a system with objectivity) which brings in logic and mathematics.
Also, if you want parsimony (because a 10 billion page rulebook is a bit hard for the naked apes to figure out) in your description of your system of ethics, say by deriving the rules of the system from basic principles, you need logic and mathematics for that as well.
If you want your system of ethics to satisfy wants of the participants to any degree, you've just introduced economics. This would at first glance appear to be a small niche, but IMHO ignorance of economics is the greatest failing of attempts at constructing ethics systems. Medical ethics and legal systems are particularly notorious for causing harm to thousands, millions, or even billions of people in order to prevent rich guys.
Finally, if you want your system of ethics to fit well with the natural world and behavior of the participants in your system, you need science.
And we're far from any sort of general agreement on the answers.
It's not the difficulties of ethics that make general agreement difficult. It's the conflicts of interest. A very common one is that you have way too much stuff. I want the stuff. Therefore, I favor an ethical system that gets me that stuff. But there's a catch. For some strange reason, you seem to be of the opinion that you don't have too much stuff, that instead, I'm the one with too much stuff. And crazy enough, you want my stuff. Thus, conflict of interest.
and please please don't interpret hypothesis or wild assed guess as theory
Sounds like you're on the wrong track. The quality of the theory or guess is not a measure of falsification.
I do know the stringy guys have been bitching because their hypotheses are not testable, but if the debate to allow non-testable ideas into the philosophy of the scientific method, it will be a problem.
What are their hypotheses anyway? And why aren't those hypotheses testable? My understanding instead is that string theory has the problem that whatever crude predictions it can make are not testable using current or near future technology. In other words, it makes falsifiable predictions right now, but they can't be falsified right now.
And the predictions that could be made right now? Well, it turns out figuring out larger scale stuff is hard in string theory.
Eventually, experiment and theory shall meet and we can then determine how bad the theory is.
But philosophy does highlight how little we really know, despite our ever-growing skill at the practical.
I disagree. I think science has done a better job at that as well. Without knowledge you don't understand ignorance.
And it's worth remembering that every field of science started as philosophy, and only with the tools and the mindset did it eventually become practical, become science.
One could note that philosophy in turn started as earlier things, like rhetoric and mysticism. There is such a thing as obsolescence of human ideas IMHO.
What does he have to do with the Tea Party? I get the feeling you don't understand the draw of someone like Trump. He's the "fuck you" vote for Republicans tired of political hacks and establishment shenanigans. That groups shares some overlap with the Tea Party grouping, but they aren't identical. In particular, Trump doesn't have a strong draw for the strongly religious or the strongly libertarian.
It should be really obvious here that extraordinary conclusions require extraordinary evidence.
But the amount of evidence supporting catastrophic AGW is staggering and growing constantly.
Then point to this evidence rather than making the same empty assertions over and over again.
The fact that the oceans and biosphere take many thousands of years to absorb the volumes of CO2 we're talking about (and that warming lags behind emissions by decades) would seem to be lost.
Unless, of course, that isn't true and hence, isn't a fact.
Like I said, a wall of denial and a shift from "evidence" to demands for absolute certainty (which also has nothing to do with science), this time referring to leading scientists (in a pure research field, no less) as "salesmen". I suppose the "salesmen" are also engaged in a conspiracy, and if Congress just harasses them one more time we'll finally find it.
I bet if the salesmen made climate change even scarier and even more urgent, then I'd believe them too. That's how science works, right?
You've given no reason to consider why the law of unintended consequences is more important for economics than it is for ecology. Its evident to me that (like modern medicine) ecology provides the reasons why some cheap-and-nasty technologies and practices are not allowed, and that the economy has to work with such limits.
And you know what? I agree. Unintended consequences can happen in ecology too. For example, if we make a lot of people poor, because climate change.
We'll start with the fact that it's been known for over a century that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, and that increasing the amount in the atmosphere would increase the heat the Earth retains. Add to that the billions of tons we put in each year (about 7.5 billion metric tons is about 1 ppm - you can verify that by finding the mass of the atmosphere and applying a little basic chemistry). We know the increased carbon dioxide comes primarily from fossil fuels by the carbon isotope distribution.
At this point, the naive conclusion would be that we're causing a warmup, and that if one didn't occur it would be good to ask why.
Fine so far. I agree.
If you want to check temperatures, you can go by what the scientists say about measurement, or you can dig into the raw data, which is available in large quantities. You can decide how deep you want to dive into this.
Let's work with the IPCC's assumptions (and that doesn't mean that I will agree with IPCC claims, I'm just using their own assumptions) since they are driving this debate. They claim CO2 temperature forcing is 1.5C to 4.5C per doubling of CO2 concentration, that there are mild costs to mitigation, that there are larger costs associated with adaptation, and that hardcore mitigation will void the need for anything beyond a trivial amount of adaptation.
One sees a huge problem right away with the huge range of temperature forcing. Namely, the harm of higher CO2 concentrations varies greatly depending where you are. For example, to hold long term temperature increases to 2C from 1850 (285 ppm CO2 in 1850), the final concentration of CO2 is determined from the following formula:
285 ppm*2^(2C/forcing),
where "forcing" is the increase in temperature which comes from a doubling of CO2. For a few values, here's what you get:
1.5 718
2 570
2.5 496
3 452
3.5 424
4 403
4.5 387
The obvious observation is that this extreme stop scenario only makes sense, if the forcing constant is at or above 3 C. We're currently at 400 ppm and rising at a rate of roughly 2 ppm/year. That means that if the temperature forcing were 2.5 C/doubling instead of 3 C/doubling, then we'd have another couple of decades to reduce mitigation. At 2C/doubling, it's more like half a century additional time.
Conversely, the goal of holding temperature increases to 2C makes sense only if the forcing constant is at or below around 3.5C/doubling. Above that, you are still spending on adaptation. Above that, you do need under the IPCC assumptions commit to full CO2 halt, but there are trade offs between adaptation and mitigation that need to be considered, rather than just going with mitigation-only strategy. I have my suspicions why they completely avoid discussing adaptation, but I'll save that for later.
So the strategy being pushed works only for a narrow range. Outside that range, which would be a majority of the probability, it's either too aggressive a schedule or not aggressive enough (by avoiding adaptation spending).
An obvious aspect which is ignored is that there is no plan B. What happens, if instead, we target a 3C increase instead of a 2C increase? After all, by the IPCC's own admission, there's a fair probability we are already past a 2C increase (and that's not even counting the high CO2 emission countries that just aren't going to comply with a hardcore emission reduction scheme without more evidence or perhaps, coercion than present).
1.5 1140
2 806
2.5 654
3 570
3.5 516
4 479
4.5 452
Now, the 4.5C/doubling is doable using the proposed break-hard strategy and 3C/doubling is where we were with 2C/doubling at the old level. At lower levels of forcing, like 2C/doubling, we have something like a century of additional time.
But that level of increase might result in some degree of adaptation spending. And now, we come to one of the mysteries of the IPCC, why avoid
So now its not about weighing the evidence... its shifted to "actually knowing".
I've been very clear on what I mean by "actually knowing".
This is a confusionist tactic and has nothing to do with science.
You are so very quick to say such things about me. This is an example of an ad hominem fallacy.
A key problem with using geological evidence to determine rate of change, is that stuff moves. Normally, that isn't much of a problem because the evidence consists of very thick deposits. But for events like the PETM, you're trying to resolve events that happened over a 20,000 year period from over 50 million years in the future. Even in ideal circumstances the signal is smeared over time due to the inconsistency of deposits and migration of isotopes studied.
And methane release is not studied directly at all, but merely deduced from concentrations of carbon isotopes.
For example, it could have been not a gradual release over 20,000 years, but little release over most of the time period, punctuated by large releases over very short periods of time. I think that more likely merely because modern volcanoes tend to operate that way. That means among other things, oceanic chemistry could be very different from what was presented in the current AGW-biased narrative. It's going to be a very different story, if ocean anoxia is due to underwater volcanoes dumping huge amounts of toxic chemicals and nutrients directly into deep sea rather than some ancient flavor of global warming.
It's also worth noting that gradual change, such as present with human industry is less likely to result in extinction than punctuated change.
Second, you ignore the absolute size of the release which is much larger than the human contribution to this point and the different circumstances, such as sea level not having significantly risen prior to the alleged release of clathrates from sea beds. If current human-generated global warming reaches 5 C and the ice at the poles melts, clathrates in seabeds will be much more stable due to the presence of 200 meters of addtional water pressure (100 meters from the end of the last ice age, and 100 meters from the melting of the two major ice fields, Greenland and Antarctica).
We don't actually know. We don't have evidence. We have salesmen yet agin peddling a particular story. And that story is always that human-caused global warming is, despite no evidence to the contrary, about to cause a huge catastrophe for which we need to spend a lot of money right now. I think that right there is evidence of a scam.
Evidence distinguishes between hypotheses. You have not presented evidence. For example, there's no evidence to support the assertion that current rates of change are faster than they were during actual extinction events. Second, there is a conflation of rate of change with amount of change.
This looks like a wall of denial to me, and a complete inability to reference anything credible. In the context of science as a social process, that indicates failure.
But a wall of denial on whose part? After all, you don't actually know rates of change for prehistoric changes in atmospheric composition, you just hope it's less than present. I don't either, but that doesn't help your argument.
With the advent of broadcast communication, radicals were able to start reaching their diasporas and Muslims outside of the normal stomping grounds of the radical schools based in the Middle East. The Internet not only enables that broadcasting, but enables dialogue. It's now possible for radical imams and jurists in the Middle East to do more than a fire-side chat with young Muslims across the world, they can actually engage them as pupils and groom them personally.
I absolutely do not support Trump's proposal, but guys like you are precisely the sort of idealists that he will steamroll over without any effort in the public spotlight. Everyone else out there can see that as a matter of fact, the Internet enables terrorist recruitment probably 10x better than broadcast media did in the 60s to late 80s/early 90s.
And the obvious rebuttal is the question, where are they? If terrorist groups are recruiting 10x people, then why aren't there 10x attacks?
As I understand it, the idea is that you have an unstable control situation where multiple opposing forces pull the vehicle away, relatively quickly, from an equilibrium point., but these forces pull the vehicle towards useful directions. The active control is needed to stabilize this equilibrium point and help keep the vehicle out of bad instability.
So for example, it allows fighter jets to have more aggressive and responsive maneuvering because the system readily veers from equilibrium in the desired way.
The problem here is that rollover is not in a desirable direction. In addition to the capsizing threat, it makes turning more difficult as well as providing less stability for firing weapons perpendicular to the ship's axis (firing stability apparently is the reason for the "wave piercing" hull). Sure, one can adjust for this in other ways, particularly via an active control system, but ultimately, it's a straight trade off of radar stealth for somewhat worse maneuverability and handling.
I'm basing this on science: the science referenced in the Wikipedia page (although the science is not uncontested). You have not provided any sources.
I find it bizarre you would even resort to this in support of uninformed personal opinion. Science doesn't help you when you have no evidence. Nor does Wikipedia have useful information on someone's personal mental and emotional state. It's not even wrong.
You fail at reading. You said 'none of your money' which is 0%. I said: 'a sizable part of my money', where the exact percentage is none of your business but trivially more than 0%. QED. Thank you for playing.
Not interested. In a national level budget, you're a very small drop in a bucket. And I don't care in the least that you make the pretense of that drop meaning something to me.
Only if your friends are assholes.
That's another thing that increases as you grow the size of the group (especially since friendship is one of those things that doesn't scale). Certainly, by the time we get to a large country, we have plenty of people who will be assholes to someone they don't even know and will never meet.
My friends have done and will do the opposite: when they know the cost is shared they hold back and order less than they would have otherwise
I think I read in Wikipedia that this is bullshit. It was, like, science.
Inefficiency is not a bit you set.
That is in no way a sensible reply to what I said. Be an adult and admit when you're wrong instead of squirming like this.
Let's look again at the quote in question:
Good, the next step is understanding that broadly stating that 'governments' are unreliable or incapable of spending money in the right way is just scapegoating and pointing in the wrong direction. The point here is that all institutions are unreliable to some extent. They all require a structure that mitigates as much of it as possible (checks and balances and what have you). None of them, private or public, are inherently incapable of working properly.
Look at that last sentence. The more considerable inefficiency of government is excused on the basis that everything has the "unreliable" bit set. Everything has the "not working properly" bit set. If you didn't want me to respond in the way I did, you should have written something else.
Although there is some degree of insulation in even a well-working democracy, the nature of most of the insulation is centered around the types of decisions being made. Deciding whether to buy fucking dinner is a very different decision than deciding to spend money on fundamental research or improving the infrastructure of a country. Hell, tons of managers in companies are insulated from the consequences of their own bad decisions and those decisions are puny compared to the ones taken on a national level.
But I take it you have an alternative form of 'government' where 'cost is pooled' and everybody making decisions directly feels the effects of those decisions? Enlighten me.
Well, food is a little different from research or a road. That's why it's an analogy and not a perfect identity. I get that you don't buy the analogy, but I don't see a real difference. Food is important too. As to an example of "costs pooled" and people making more costly decisions that shove cost on others? Tax avoidance is a big example.
If all this government spending is so awesome, everyone could be contributing more income. But they don't. And the huge reason why is that a dollar sent to your friendly, neighborhood government is not a dollar efficiently spent on the science or infrastructure that you want. It's usually at least a couple of orders of magnitude less, even if that government were efficiently doing the science or infrastructure in question.
There isn't any actual evidence that there is not a serious problem either.
It's not a serious problem now. And it's only a problem because of the large number of people on the planet.
I think I'll continue to believe the climate scientists who have gotten more right than wrong in their predictions.
At least you're thinking. But I think we need to be looking for a lot more right than that. And we need to look for some demonstration of that correctness that doesn't rely on adjustment of existing data to fit a particular narrative of catastrophic AGW.
Nobody is suggesting we need to impoverish people and societies in order to mitigate global warming!
Yes, I've heard this before. The unicorns and pixie dust will keep that from happening. In practice, it's been one fuck up after another.
There's every indication that investment in renewable energy is good for economic reasons as well as environmental reasons, while the effects of unimpeded climate change will be disastrous for the economy.
Let's not jump the gun. Show me these indications first. Meanwhile, I'll show you the contrary indications, such as a US Department of Energy loan guarantee program (the one that donated public money to the Solyndra bankruptcy) which has yet to demonstrate a single viable renewable energy scheme in its portfolio of "investments", Germany and Denmark's doubling of residential electricity prices, or poorly designed cap and trade carbon emission markets in Europe.
Evidence distinguishes between hypotheses. You have not presented evidence. For example, there's no evidence to support the assertion that current rates of change are faster than they were during actual extinction events. Second, there is a conflation of rate of change with amount of change.
There is no "do nothing" option.
When doing something is worse than doing nothing, then there is such an option.
We have the choice of continuing current biosphere-damaging industrial processes (the real extreme here) or switching to processes that stay within ecological limits that the biosphere is able to handle.
You ignore here that the primary biosphere-damaging process is population growth. This is driven primarily by poverty. From the variety of poorly executed climate mitigation schemes that have already taken place, there seems to me to be a strong indication that we will see poverty increase with any of the desired hardcore climate change options, and that in turn will result in an increase in population and in climate change.
Why did you bother to write that? Those aren't Tea Party platforms. Sure, there are some people who are anti-abortion and/or are religious, and happen to support the Tea Party. Why should I care?
Even if you are absolutely convinced that there is no climate change, or that it is natural and unavoidable, or that nothing bad will happen or whatever, it's still worth cleaning up the environment.
In that case, you aren't actually cleaning up the environment. Think about it.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, how about the citations of the papers that interoduce real world tested and verified String theory proofs.
I already stated that string theory probably has falsifiable elements now. They just can't be falsified now.
And if it is real world proven now, with falsifiable elements, why are so many of you asking for the falsifiable aspects to be removed?
Bruised egos, I think. I haven't sat in on a string theory talk for a while (since around 2008). But most of them routinely put caveats about string theory not being physically observed. They near universally acknowledged the current failings of the theory even if they were wildly optimistic about its future.
My view is that string theory isn't particularly expensive and it is generating interesting math which can be used elsewhere. So even if the theory fails on its own to generate useful falsifiables, it may either help improve mathematical tools that we can use with a better, falsifiable theory or it might manifest in a more fundamental theory or mathematical construction (resulting in quick extrapolation of various properties of this future theory).
If I were sitting on some central planning committee for allocating theoretical physics grad students by subject, I'd recommend pulling back from the relatively heavy numbers of the 90s and 00s.
Sounds like I have no idea what you are talking about. I'm talking about the typical creationist or other denier tactic of saying something like the theory of Evolution is "just a theory", using the word incorrectly as meaning a hypothesis or - wild ass guess.
I don't base meaning of words on what creationists decide they mean. You shouldn't either.
The problem with string theory is that it has several unobservable aspects, like the 10 space-time dimensions, and some unobservable spatial dimensions as well.
That's incorrect. We observe 3+1 spacetime and the observed symmetries of the non-gravitational forces (electromagnetism, weak force, strong force) introduce the other 6 dimensions. This has nothing to do with string theory. It's real world physics.
So what makes that real world? From the mathematical models of each of the three forces in question, we mathematically derive transformation groups (or "gauges") of dimensions 1, 2, and 3 respective to the list in the previous paragraph. That's where the 6 dimensions come from. And every elementary particle we know of (including its elementary nature) has been found to be defined via these three symmetries either as an irreducible representation or a gauge boson (a particle which in the machinery of the math models transmits one of the three forces in question).
In other words, our best present-day models, which are not string theory models (!), require 10 dimensions. And in exchange, they predict every particle class we have ever observed.
Instead, a real scientific problem with string theory and plenty of other such theories, is the huge variety of priors which have to be set for the theory to be tuned to the observed universe. This may just be a fundamental issue of physics where the priors of the observer actually do force a huge amount of the physics. Or it might be that we haven't yet found a sufficiently parsimonious model which nails that all down.
Sure, when we know all there is to know about the physical world, and there's nothing left to learn, science will be obsolete. When we know all there is to know about the abstract world, and there's nothing left to learn, philosophy will be obsolete - but I rather suspect that will come later.
What does philosophy have to say about the abstract world that mathematics doesn't say? Give your abstract idea any structure, any consistency, any pattern, and it becomes a mathematical idea.
One good example is "ethics", which stubbornly remains a philosophical field, seeming immune to either mathematical proof from first principles (except for those of some strong faith), or to empirical measurement. Without a god to provide the answers in the back of the book, we're stuck with our intuitions and our ability to reason about them. And we're far from any sort of general agreement on the answers.
I strongly disagree. For starters, a key requirement of ethics is consistency (that is, you try for a system with objectivity) which brings in logic and mathematics.
Also, if you want parsimony (because a 10 billion page rulebook is a bit hard for the naked apes to figure out) in your description of your system of ethics, say by deriving the rules of the system from basic principles, you need logic and mathematics for that as well.
If you want your system of ethics to satisfy wants of the participants to any degree, you've just introduced economics. This would at first glance appear to be a small niche, but IMHO ignorance of economics is the greatest failing of attempts at constructing ethics systems. Medical ethics and legal systems are particularly notorious for causing harm to thousands, millions, or even billions of people in order to prevent rich guys.
Finally, if you want your system of ethics to fit well with the natural world and behavior of the participants in your system, you need science.
And we're far from any sort of general agreement on the answers.
It's not the difficulties of ethics that make general agreement difficult. It's the conflicts of interest. A very common one is that you have way too much stuff. I want the stuff. Therefore, I favor an ethical system that gets me that stuff. But there's a catch. For some strange reason, you seem to be of the opinion that you don't have too much stuff, that instead, I'm the one with too much stuff. And crazy enough, you want my stuff. Thus, conflict of interest.
and please please don't interpret hypothesis or wild assed guess as theory
Sounds like you're on the wrong track. The quality of the theory or guess is not a measure of falsification.
I do know the stringy guys have been bitching because their hypotheses are not testable, but if the debate to allow non-testable ideas into the philosophy of the scientific method, it will be a problem.
What are their hypotheses anyway? And why aren't those hypotheses testable? My understanding instead is that string theory has the problem that whatever crude predictions it can make are not testable using current or near future technology. In other words, it makes falsifiable predictions right now, but they can't be falsified right now.
And the predictions that could be made right now? Well, it turns out figuring out larger scale stuff is hard in string theory.
Eventually, experiment and theory shall meet and we can then determine how bad the theory is.
But philosophy does highlight how little we really know, despite our ever-growing skill at the practical.
I disagree. I think science has done a better job at that as well. Without knowledge you don't understand ignorance.
And it's worth remembering that every field of science started as philosophy, and only with the tools and the mindset did it eventually become practical, become science.
One could note that philosophy in turn started as earlier things, like rhetoric and mysticism. There is such a thing as obsolescence of human ideas IMHO.
What does he have to do with the Tea Party? I get the feeling you don't understand the draw of someone like Trump. He's the "fuck you" vote for Republicans tired of political hacks and establishment shenanigans. That groups shares some overlap with the Tea Party grouping, but they aren't identical. In particular, Trump doesn't have a strong draw for the strongly religious or the strongly libertarian.
But the amount of evidence supporting catastrophic AGW is staggering and growing constantly.
Then point to this evidence rather than making the same empty assertions over and over again.
The fact that the oceans and biosphere take many thousands of years to absorb the volumes of CO2 we're talking about (and that warming lags behind emissions by decades) would seem to be lost.
Unless, of course, that isn't true and hence, isn't a fact.
Like I said, a wall of denial and a shift from "evidence" to demands for absolute certainty (which also has nothing to do with science), this time referring to leading scientists (in a pure research field, no less) as "salesmen". I suppose the "salesmen" are also engaged in a conspiracy, and if Congress just harasses them one more time we'll finally find it.
I bet if the salesmen made climate change even scarier and even more urgent, then I'd believe them too. That's how science works, right?
You've given no reason to consider why the law of unintended consequences is more important for economics than it is for ecology. Its evident to me that (like modern medicine) ecology provides the reasons why some cheap-and-nasty technologies and practices are not allowed, and that the economy has to work with such limits.
And you know what? I agree. Unintended consequences can happen in ecology too. For example, if we make a lot of people poor, because climate change.
We'll start with the fact that it's been known for over a century that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, and that increasing the amount in the atmosphere would increase the heat the Earth retains. Add to that the billions of tons we put in each year (about 7.5 billion metric tons is about 1 ppm - you can verify that by finding the mass of the atmosphere and applying a little basic chemistry). We know the increased carbon dioxide comes primarily from fossil fuels by the carbon isotope distribution.
At this point, the naive conclusion would be that we're causing a warmup, and that if one didn't occur it would be good to ask why.
Fine so far. I agree.
If you want to check temperatures, you can go by what the scientists say about measurement, or you can dig into the raw data, which is available in large quantities. You can decide how deep you want to dive into this.
Let's work with the IPCC's assumptions (and that doesn't mean that I will agree with IPCC claims, I'm just using their own assumptions) since they are driving this debate. They claim CO2 temperature forcing is 1.5C to 4.5C per doubling of CO2 concentration, that there are mild costs to mitigation, that there are larger costs associated with adaptation, and that hardcore mitigation will void the need for anything beyond a trivial amount of adaptation.
One sees a huge problem right away with the huge range of temperature forcing. Namely, the harm of higher CO2 concentrations varies greatly depending where you are. For example, to hold long term temperature increases to 2C from 1850 (285 ppm CO2 in 1850), the final concentration of CO2 is determined from the following formula:
285 ppm*2^(2C/forcing), where "forcing" is the increase in temperature which comes from a doubling of CO2. For a few values, here's what you get:
1.5 718
2 570
2.5 496
3 452
3.5 424
4 403
4.5 387 The obvious observation is that this extreme stop scenario only makes sense, if the forcing constant is at or above 3 C. We're currently at 400 ppm and rising at a rate of roughly 2 ppm/year. That means that if the temperature forcing were 2.5 C/doubling instead of 3 C/doubling, then we'd have another couple of decades to reduce mitigation. At 2C/doubling, it's more like half a century additional time.
Conversely, the goal of holding temperature increases to 2C makes sense only if the forcing constant is at or below around 3.5C/doubling. Above that, you are still spending on adaptation. Above that, you do need under the IPCC assumptions commit to full CO2 halt, but there are trade offs between adaptation and mitigation that need to be considered, rather than just going with mitigation-only strategy. I have my suspicions why they completely avoid discussing adaptation, but I'll save that for later.
So the strategy being pushed works only for a narrow range. Outside that range, which would be a majority of the probability, it's either too aggressive a schedule or not aggressive enough (by avoiding adaptation spending).
An obvious aspect which is ignored is that there is no plan B. What happens, if instead, we target a 3C increase instead of a 2C increase? After all, by the IPCC's own admission, there's a fair probability we are already past a 2C increase (and that's not even counting the high CO2 emission countries that just aren't going to comply with a hardcore emission reduction scheme without more evidence or perhaps, coercion than present). 1.5 1140 2 806
2.5 654
3 570
3.5 516
4 479
4.5 452 Now, the 4.5C/doubling is doable using the proposed break-hard strategy and 3C/doubling is where we were with 2C/doubling at the old level. At lower levels of forcing, like 2C/doubling, we have something like a century of additional time.
But that level of increase might result in some degree of adaptation spending. And now, we come to one of the mysteries of the IPCC, why avoid
A handful of cranks at WAWT
Compared to what? The handful of cranks at the IPCC? This is a classic ad hominem fallacy .
I will stop destroying arguments with labels, when people stop making arguments that can be destroyed with labels.
So now its not about weighing the evidence... its shifted to "actually knowing".
I've been very clear on what I mean by "actually knowing".
This is a confusionist tactic and has nothing to do with science.
You are so very quick to say such things about me. This is an example of an ad hominem fallacy.
A key problem with using geological evidence to determine rate of change, is that stuff moves. Normally, that isn't much of a problem because the evidence consists of very thick deposits. But for events like the PETM, you're trying to resolve events that happened over a 20,000 year period from over 50 million years in the future. Even in ideal circumstances the signal is smeared over time due to the inconsistency of deposits and migration of isotopes studied.
And methane release is not studied directly at all, but merely deduced from concentrations of carbon isotopes.
For example, it could have been not a gradual release over 20,000 years, but little release over most of the time period, punctuated by large releases over very short periods of time. I think that more likely merely because modern volcanoes tend to operate that way. That means among other things, oceanic chemistry could be very different from what was presented in the current AGW-biased narrative. It's going to be a very different story, if ocean anoxia is due to underwater volcanoes dumping huge amounts of toxic chemicals and nutrients directly into deep sea rather than some ancient flavor of global warming.
It's also worth noting that gradual change, such as present with human industry is less likely to result in extinction than punctuated change.
Second, you ignore the absolute size of the release which is much larger than the human contribution to this point and the different circumstances, such as sea level not having significantly risen prior to the alleged release of clathrates from sea beds. If current human-generated global warming reaches 5 C and the ice at the poles melts, clathrates in seabeds will be much more stable due to the presence of 200 meters of addtional water pressure (100 meters from the end of the last ice age, and 100 meters from the melting of the two major ice fields, Greenland and Antarctica).
We don't actually know. We don't have evidence. We have salesmen yet agin peddling a particular story. And that story is always that human-caused global warming is, despite no evidence to the contrary, about to cause a huge catastrophe for which we need to spend a lot of money right now. I think that right there is evidence of a scam.
Evidence distinguishes between hypotheses. You have not presented evidence. For example, there's no evidence to support the assertion that current rates of change are faster than they were during actual extinction events. Second, there is a conflation of rate of change with amount of change.
This looks like a wall of denial to me, and a complete inability to reference anything credible. In the context of science as a social process, that indicates failure.
But a wall of denial on whose part? After all, you don't actually know rates of change for prehistoric changes in atmospheric composition, you just hope it's less than present. I don't either, but that doesn't help your argument.
To what? A hit and run driver or the police state?
Why would there be 10x the attacks? People don't scale.
Actually, number of attacks is one of the things I expect to scale with number of attackers.
With the advent of broadcast communication, radicals were able to start reaching their diasporas and Muslims outside of the normal stomping grounds of the radical schools based in the Middle East. The Internet not only enables that broadcasting, but enables dialogue. It's now possible for radical imams and jurists in the Middle East to do more than a fire-side chat with young Muslims across the world, they can actually engage them as pupils and groom them personally.
I absolutely do not support Trump's proposal, but guys like you are precisely the sort of idealists that he will steamroll over without any effort in the public spotlight. Everyone else out there can see that as a matter of fact, the Internet enables terrorist recruitment probably 10x better than broadcast media did in the 60s to late 80s/early 90s.
And the obvious rebuttal is the question, where are they? If terrorist groups are recruiting 10x people, then why aren't there 10x attacks?
As I understand it, the idea is that you have an unstable control situation where multiple opposing forces pull the vehicle away, relatively quickly, from an equilibrium point., but these forces pull the vehicle towards useful directions. The active control is needed to stabilize this equilibrium point and help keep the vehicle out of bad instability.
So for example, it allows fighter jets to have more aggressive and responsive maneuvering because the system readily veers from equilibrium in the desired way.
The problem here is that rollover is not in a desirable direction. In addition to the capsizing threat, it makes turning more difficult as well as providing less stability for firing weapons perpendicular to the ship's axis (firing stability apparently is the reason for the "wave piercing" hull). Sure, one can adjust for this in other ways, particularly via an active control system, but ultimately, it's a straight trade off of radar stealth for somewhat worse maneuverability and handling.
I'm basing this on science: the science referenced in the Wikipedia page (although the science is not uncontested). You have not provided any sources.
I find it bizarre you would even resort to this in support of uninformed personal opinion. Science doesn't help you when you have no evidence. Nor does Wikipedia have useful information on someone's personal mental and emotional state. It's not even wrong.
You fail at reading. You said 'none of your money' which is 0%. I said: 'a sizable part of my money', where the exact percentage is none of your business but trivially more than 0%. QED. Thank you for playing.
Not interested. In a national level budget, you're a very small drop in a bucket. And I don't care in the least that you make the pretense of that drop meaning something to me.
Only if your friends are assholes.
That's another thing that increases as you grow the size of the group (especially since friendship is one of those things that doesn't scale). Certainly, by the time we get to a large country, we have plenty of people who will be assholes to someone they don't even know and will never meet.
My friends have done and will do the opposite: when they know the cost is shared they hold back and order less than they would have otherwise
I think I read in Wikipedia that this is bullshit. It was, like, science.
Inefficiency is not a bit you set.
That is in no way a sensible reply to what I said. Be an adult and admit when you're wrong instead of squirming like this.
Let's look again at the quote in question:
Good, the next step is understanding that broadly stating that 'governments' are unreliable or incapable of spending money in the right way is just scapegoating and pointing in the wrong direction. The point here is that all institutions are unreliable to some extent. They all require a structure that mitigates as much of it as possible (checks and balances and what have you). None of them, private or public, are inherently incapable of working properly.
Look at that last sentence. The more considerable inefficiency of government is excused on the basis that everything has the "unreliable" bit set. Everything has the "not working properly" bit set. If you didn't want me to respond in the way I did, you should have written something else.
Although there is some degree of insulation in even a well-working democracy, the nature of most of the insulation is centered around the types of decisions being made. Deciding whether to buy fucking dinner is a very different decision than deciding to spend money on fundamental research or improving the infrastructure of a country. Hell, tons of managers in companies are insulated from the consequences of their own bad decisions and those decisions are puny compared to the ones taken on a national level. But I take it you have an alternative form of 'government' where 'cost is pooled' and everybody making decisions directly feels the effects of those decisions? Enlighten me.
Well, food is a little different from research or a road. That's why it's an analogy and not a perfect identity. I get that you don't buy the analogy, but I don't see a real difference. Food is important too. As to an example of "costs pooled" and people making more costly decisions that shove cost on others? Tax avoidance is a big example.
If all this government spending is so awesome, everyone could be contributing more income. But they don't. And the huge reason why is that a dollar sent to your friendly, neighborhood government is not a dollar efficiently spent on the science or infrastructure that you want. It's usually at least a couple of orders of magnitude less, even if that government were efficiently doing the science or infrastructure in question.
There isn't any actual evidence that there is not a serious problem either.
It's not a serious problem now. And it's only a problem because of the large number of people on the planet.
I think I'll continue to believe the climate scientists who have gotten more right than wrong in their predictions.
At least you're thinking. But I think we need to be looking for a lot more right than that. And we need to look for some demonstration of that correctness that doesn't rely on adjustment of existing data to fit a particular narrative of catastrophic AGW.
in 2014, the US federal budget had $21.4B going into climate change programs and activities. This only 0.1% of the $16.8T going into the military.
The US military is around $600 billion actually. Given that both sums are remarkably ineffective, I would suggest cutting both substantially instead.
Nobody is suggesting we need to impoverish people and societies in order to mitigate global warming!
Yes, I've heard this before. The unicorns and pixie dust will keep that from happening. In practice, it's been one fuck up after another.
There's every indication that investment in renewable energy is good for economic reasons as well as environmental reasons, while the effects of unimpeded climate change will be disastrous for the economy.
Let's not jump the gun. Show me these indications first. Meanwhile, I'll show you the contrary indications, such as a US Department of Energy loan guarantee program (the one that donated public money to the Solyndra bankruptcy) which has yet to demonstrate a single viable renewable energy scheme in its portfolio of "investments", Germany and Denmark's doubling of residential electricity prices, or poorly designed cap and trade carbon emission markets in Europe.
How much more evidence do you need than the fact that *everyone* with more knowledge on the subject than you have is convinced?
Evidence. It's all there in the word. I don't need hysterical humans, I need evidence.
If you look at history mitigation if often less expensive than adaption.
And it is often more expensive by the same measure.
"An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure."
And why human behavior and physiology is highly adapted to being lazy.
There is no "do nothing" option.
When doing something is worse than doing nothing, then there is such an option.
We have the choice of continuing current biosphere-damaging industrial processes (the real extreme here) or switching to processes that stay within ecological limits that the biosphere is able to handle.
You ignore here that the primary biosphere-damaging process is population growth. This is driven primarily by poverty. From the variety of poorly executed climate mitigation schemes that have already taken place, there seems to me to be a strong indication that we will see poverty increase with any of the desired hardcore climate change options, and that in turn will result in an increase in population and in climate change.
Why did you bother to write that? Those aren't Tea Party platforms. Sure, there are some people who are anti-abortion and/or are religious, and happen to support the Tea Party. Why should I care?
Even if you are absolutely convinced that there is no climate change, or that it is natural and unavoidable, or that nothing bad will happen or whatever, it's still worth cleaning up the environment.
In that case, you aren't actually cleaning up the environment. Think about it.
...has not been shown to be safe. So the burden of proof is on those who lean towards doing "nothing" (keep polluting).
The base of the oceanic food chain is at risk of shutting down, due to both acidification from CO2 and warming. That is serious Sh!t.
We don't have evidence that the oceanic food chain will shut down. Instead, it seems just fine. That fulfills the "burden of proof".