Re:Scientists Incorrectly Though To Be Perfect
on
The Trouble with Physics
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· Score: 3, Insightful
For example, the quote from Gell-Mann in the review's summary. It's an interesting bit of personal history, but has nothing to do with any physics. What Gell-Mann thinks about anybody's physics is utterly irrelevant. By definition the only thing of interest in science is what can be proven. But scientists, being people, will put more weight on one person's opinion over another's for unscientific reasons.
The scientific method is very good for getting at the reasons behind something, but once you start to worship science as an abstract, you've lost perspective.
1) I didn't know what this is, but according to Wikipedia, it's virtualization. That's available everywhere. I assume Solaris has bigger and better tricks, but I bet it requires Sun hardware too.
2) Sounds good, but is it really that much faster? Almost certainly the wire will be the bottleneck, not the network stack.
3) Security is good, but security is very much implementation-specific.
I'm coming at this from the small-business standpoint. The Solaris wizards I knew when I was slumming it in a BigCorp. were very handy, very smart, and very expensive. I could never see a reason to run Solaris on my own servers as I really didn't have time to learn the Solaris-admin hacks. RedHat burned me, and I stuck with FreeBSD for a lot of years, but I'm back to RedHat (CentOS, really) 'cause it's proven itself to me. IMO Sun should stick with what they do best, which is big corporate-level stuff, not piddly GoDaddy-level stuff. Slugging it out at the low-end of the market will leave them bloodied and broke.
That said, a sysadmin pal is very complementary of the Opteron Fire servers, which are quite reasonably priced.
Finding and downloading stuff from iTMS is easier and faster than the P2P services. It's faster and easier enough that I'm willing to pay for it. I can burn a CD and re-rip back to MP3s if I want, accepting some quality degradation, or just use an appropriate player. Using the P2P systems were acceptable when there was nothing else. Now there is. I'm not so poor that I can't swing $10 for a CD's worth of music that I listen to for hours at a time.
Nobody has ever given me a compelling reason to install Solaris. I put the x86 version of Solaris--7 or 8, I forget which--on a machine, and then tried to set up netatalk for some Macs on the network. It was a pain in the ass. Solaris also likes to put shit all over the disk--in/opt, in/var, in/usr/local/etc/var/ in/ramalamadingdong. I understand why--they have to provide compatibility. But it's just a pain.
Unless you're running highly specialized Solaris hardware, what advantage will you get over CentOS or FreeBSD? As the parent states, it sure isn't hardware compatibility.
Software engineering generally sucks because it's surrounded by suckage all around. Programmers are trained and treated as wiz-kid hackers who can do everything ad hoc, projects and tools are designed that way, and it's no surprise that the products come out that way too.
Kind of. Computer engineering is where regular engineering was back when the pyramids were being built. They built a helluva lot of crooked pyramids. Or bridge-building, to stay on topic. Quite a few bridges went *ffffft* into a ravine.
I used this comparison with an architect once. Imagine that not only are there no standard building details for how windows should be installed, there are no standard brick sizes. Each county in the state makes bricks of a different size. What CAD details you can get are a mix of hand-drawn sketches and computerized masterpieces, but all in different file formats that are incompatible. And finally, your contractor only speaks Swahili. That's why even a simple Web application can entail weeks or months of constant work.
Things are slowly changing. CPAN and PEAR are good examples of "standard details". There are a jillion Java classes to do various things. And with XML-RPC, SOAP and the likes, convenient communication between incompatible languages are possible. It's getting there, it'll just take two more weeks.
I don't disagree. Since TFA may have had some niggling details wrong, his ideologically-based opinion does have good reasoning behind it. Namely that non-neutrality means flexibility for the changing Internet. As compared to guaranteed compatibility with neutrality. But by waving the red flag of ideology, dissent can ignore the good points made.
Anyway, I wanted to point out that Slashdot has a bunch of folks who mistake people agreeing with them for correctness, and tend to be awfully smug about the fact.
Christ, you people are never happy. Apple had the best docking solution in the world--the Duos and the DuoDock. They had them 15+ years ago. The Duos were even sub-notebooks. People wanted bigger laptops. Apple had bigger laptops they stopped producing subnotebooks. "Wahh, where are the subnotebooks?" We get the ibooks and 12" Powerbooks. "Wahh, I want a desktop replacement!" Now it's docking connectors.
Docking connectors don't sell. Apple would make them if they did.
If you shut this guy down for talking outside his area of expertise using ideology to make his judgments, then you'd better get cracking on shutting Slashdot down.
I've got a nice, fast cable modem I'net connection, and I'll still use Netflix. Netflix is like a bag of holding for DVDs, only with a day or two latency. I still do buy the occasional DVD, but I pretty well limit my purchases to real classics.
Since most visitors are not horrified by judicious use of Flash or animated GIFs, I think most sites are respecting their visitors. You are not much of a target audience, and will continue to be largely ignored.
Part of the problem is that AutoCAD the program has been around forever, and architect/draughtsperson productivity with it is high because they know all its quirks and oddities
That's true, but also Autodesk's brilliant strategy to offer educational versions of AutoCAD for somewhere around $200/seat. Every community college, technical training institute, and engineering lab took up Autodesk's offer and churned out thousands of AutoCAD-trained draftsmen.
The old versions of AutoCAD were a lot like a souped-up emacs. AutoLISP is still supported today. Not too shabby.
I dunno, PHP can be as secure and elegant as anything else. Use DB interfaces such as ADODB rather than the language's low-level functions, use PEAR wherever possible, validate input. PHP's rapid development cycle means one person can do quite a lot, and sacrificing some security for simplicity is a fair trade off. Which is why there are so many PHP applications around. That's a net benefit IMO.
What made NWN worthwhile to me was the multi-player. I could get together with my old game-playing friends for a couple of hours a week. In that instance, requiring a large party and dozens of side-quests just makes it harder to have a good time. In fact I started working on a set of "Instant Action" modules for NWN1 that kept gameplay down to a single quest with a single significant treasure at the end, encounters prepared with a balanced party in mind, with gameplay time kept to an hour or two because that's how I wanted to play NWN.
Time constraints prevented me from working further on them, but I still think they're a good idea. After reading the reviews of NWN2, I really think they're a good idea.
This is a complaint of mine. I live within walking distance of a drug store where I can buy milk and bread and the like, but I never walk there because I'd have to cross 4-lanes of traffic unaccustomed to watching for pedestrians. I've been hit by a car before, I'm not eager to revisit the experience.
The reasons for this situation are many, and one certainly is the easy-motoring culture that Americans have become accustomed to. The other is the insane level of fiddling that local, State and Federal governments do that encourage people to leave urban areas for the suburbs. Most people really do want that 3br 2ba ranch-style house in a nice neighborhood. They want the space, it's a good environment to raise kids, and the crime is much, much less. If cities spent more time focussing on their priorities--maintenance, crime deterrence and civil services--they'd be less likely to lose citizens to the suburban dream. To compete, urban living has to be at least as crime-free as the subdivision, the taxes have to be as cheap (or the city services more complete), and the public schools have to be highly competitive. That means skewering a lot of liberal sacred cows, such as putting criminals in jail and keeping them there (even if they're black), not providing an endless buffet of social welfare services, and allowing the free market to work in education.
Until those things happen, you'll mostly only see people rail against SUVs and the like, with the spectre of global warming used like the boogeyman to scare people into driving Yugos--which isn't a solution, long-term or otherwise.
I was thinking this was partially explained by conveniences such as Amazon and the like. I know I buy a heck of a lot less stuff from bricks & morter, and therefore drive commensurately less often. This will likely only increase with time.
I'm white, over 30, and when I got pulled over for not having an up-to-date tag (the county never mailed me the bill), I got a ticket. I said, "I'm sorry officer, I'll get it taken care of." I took care of it. And paid the $150 ticket. Was I annoyed? Sure. Nothing would be solved by pitching a fit however, so I, you know, didn't do that.
They asked him to leave, according to posted policy, for not having his ID. You can spin any kind of scenario you'd like, the facts remain--the student handled it poorly. The officers may have gone overboard, but when you have a kid with no ID in a public building, and he's acting irrationally, I'd expect some lenience towards the officers who are simply trying to do their job. If I'm reading the UCLA policy on tasering correctly, they are even possibly within their rights.
But I and anyone who understand what a tazzer does knows that tazzing him 4 more times for not getting up after the first tazzing is just idiotic and crossed the line into police brutality
There's a video on YouTube showing a highway officer arresting some redneck fuck. He tased the guy 5 or more times trying to get him to comply. There was no reason the student couldn't get up and leave other than stubbornness. The other option would have been to have officers pile on top of him, hog tie him and bodily carry him out. This introduces danger to the subject and the officers. Getting him to leave under his own power is preferred, and the safest way. If he chooses to make a protest, he is not a victim. Victims are victims because they don't choose to be victimized.
The ID check was common, posted policy. The proper response is, "I'm sorry, I forgot my card. I'll go back to my dorm and get it." They escort you out, you wish them a good night, and you move on.
I was in college 15 years ago. I couldn't go anywhere or do hardly anything without my university ID. How did this kid not have his on him in this day and age? Hell, I couldn't get back into my dorm without my ID.
Also, the way I understand it, the first people on the scene were Community Service Officers. These are basically students. This guy got mouthy with other students, not cops. The security officers came later when he refused to comply. I can't relate to his plight at all, but then I don't find acting like a twat to make a vague and irrational political point worthwhile. Hey, UCSD, this incident had nothing to do with the Patriot Act. Good job on educating him!
I'm not ignorant of ice cores. I'm just not satisfied that they provide anything like a complete picture. The method of dating ice cores according to the fluctuations of isotopes of oxygen is handy since the winter/summer cycle is well understood. However the temperature assumptions are less robust IMO. There are a lot of variables controlling the ratio of one isotope to another, and mean temperature is only one. It's also dependent on local temperature in the case of ice cores, which is always below freezing by definition. This is not the case over most of the Earth, so the data comes from a convenient extreme, as if you did a study on crime and only interviewed Swedes because they don't move around a lot.
You miss the point. Global warming is sold as a religion, which is why the instinct to say "I believe..." is so strong. It's presented as established science fact, when it's really highly dependent on a lot of assumptions and guesswork. Not that there's anything wrong with that--our climate is not a simple system that we can easily model. However it doesn't take too much thinking to come up with plausible alternative reasons for the phenomena we see.
Example: it's been asserted many times that there's been a rise in temperatures that coincide with the industrial revolution. Now why is that? Could it be because that temperatures were being measured where people were, rather than where people were not? It's reasonably clear that human concentration in urban areas increase local temperatures. We weren't taking temperature readings in the 1800s because we were worried about the Earth. We wanted to know about the local weather.
A simple thought experiment such as that starts to bring the data into question. If pressed, the climatologist may get frustrated because, in their mind, they've already accounted for that, but the full answer isn't simple to express. So what you get is, basically, "trust me, I'm a scientist", which is bollocks. For one, wearing the moniker "scientist" doesn't make you right; and two, if you're a scientist make some testable predictions. The ones mentioned in the original article sure didn't come true. That makes it bad science. The goal is not to make testable predictions, the goal is to convince people to act now. That's a religion. Or marketing. Either or, it's not science.
You say you want to expose people to the debates, but that's the last thing that's going on. People who wander off the human-caused global warming reservation are not treated as skeptics, they're treated as heretics. Anti-science heretics, with suspicious agendas.
Note I say this as a person who is supportive of some of the aims of the global warming activists. I think we do need to de-emphasize our easy-motoring lifestyle and to support more mass-transit systems. I think part of the reason we got where we are is because of intrusive and expansive government killing the incentive for people to remain in urban centers and driving the middle class out to the suburbs, and I find it daft that the proposed solution to the problem is invariably more intrusive and expansive government, this time on a global scale. It's crazy.
Until we know absolutely everything, we might as well do absolutely nothing. Just because all of our lab experiments lead to the conclusion that carbon dioxide makes warming worse, and we pump huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the environment, we should still do nothing. Humans changing our habits wouldn't fix all the problems, everywhere, forever, so we should still do nothing.
I know this gets brought up all the time, but it's an important point. Just a decade or so ago, we were supposed to act now and change our habits in order to forestall global cooling. This odd hysteria and compulsion to act now and change our habits seems to be mostly political, not scientific. Carbon-trading isn't going to stave off global warming. Assuming it is actually implemented in an enforceable way, it will simply open a new avenue for corruption. Of course, nothing is quite so patently condescending as a rich shitpoke trading carbon credits with poverty-stricken fuckers in some hellhole, so it will probably become huge, condescension being a very popular hobby.
Nobody says "I believe in gravity." I think Michael Crichton made this point first, but it's still relevant.
The main problem serious people have about global warming is the reactionary solutions, most of which seem to primarily be a kind of retroactive success-tax on Americans. Example: Kyoto didn't deal with emerging countries who are both 1) ramping up energy use, and 2) aren't saddled with any of the green regulations that 1st world nations put on themselves.
A small number of measurements in the right places would be far more valuable than lots of measurements in the wrong places.
Maybe you have to be a climate scientist to understand differently, but as I understand things, actual data trumps extrapolated data.
I don't know about satellite data. How is done? Is it accurate? What kind of sample size are we talking about? Is it accurate for measuring surface temperatures? How do we know if we don't have enough measuring stations to establish an accurate baseline?
Also high-altitude temps are not the problem. The problem, according to global warming alarmists, are the melting ice caps and higher water temps that are killing coral reefs. In other words, surface phenomena. High altitude temps may be interesting indicators, but when you're talking data on the ground, that means an Eskimo holding a thermometer up and writing down the number, or a diver on the Great Barrier Reef with a thermometer up Jaws's asshole. That means more temperature stations, not less, which is the situation we find ourselves in--assuming the article is accurate.
Slashdot Mirror
For example, the quote from Gell-Mann in the review's summary. It's an interesting bit of personal history, but has nothing to do with any physics. What Gell-Mann thinks about anybody's physics is utterly irrelevant. By definition the only thing of interest in science is what can be proven. But scientists, being people, will put more weight on one person's opinion over another's for unscientific reasons.
The scientific method is very good for getting at the reasons behind something, but once you start to worship science as an abstract, you've lost perspective.
That's a very compelling argument for you, but not so much for me.
1) I didn't know what this is, but according to Wikipedia, it's virtualization. That's available everywhere. I assume Solaris has bigger and better tricks, but I bet it requires Sun hardware too.
2) Sounds good, but is it really that much faster? Almost certainly the wire will be the bottleneck, not the network stack.
3) Security is good, but security is very much implementation-specific.
I'm coming at this from the small-business standpoint. The Solaris wizards I knew when I was slumming it in a BigCorp. were very handy, very smart, and very expensive. I could never see a reason to run Solaris on my own servers as I really didn't have time to learn the Solaris-admin hacks. RedHat burned me, and I stuck with FreeBSD for a lot of years, but I'm back to RedHat (CentOS, really) 'cause it's proven itself to me. IMO Sun should stick with what they do best, which is big corporate-level stuff, not piddly GoDaddy-level stuff. Slugging it out at the low-end of the market will leave them bloodied and broke.
That said, a sysadmin pal is very complementary of the Opteron Fire servers, which are quite reasonably priced.
Finding and downloading stuff from iTMS is easier and faster than the P2P services. It's faster and easier enough that I'm willing to pay for it. I can burn a CD and re-rip back to MP3s if I want, accepting some quality degradation, or just use an appropriate player. Using the P2P systems were acceptable when there was nothing else. Now there is. I'm not so poor that I can't swing $10 for a CD's worth of music that I listen to for hours at a time.
iTMS's DRM is low-impact. I fear it not.
Nobody has ever given me a compelling reason to install Solaris. I put the x86 version of Solaris--7 or 8, I forget which--on a machine, and then tried to set up netatalk for some Macs on the network. It was a pain in the ass. Solaris also likes to put shit all over the disk--in /opt, in /var, in /usr/local/etc/var/ in /ramalamadingdong. I understand why--they have to provide compatibility. But it's just a pain.
Unless you're running highly specialized Solaris hardware, what advantage will you get over CentOS or FreeBSD? As the parent states, it sure isn't hardware compatibility.
Software engineering generally sucks because it's surrounded by suckage all around. Programmers are trained and treated as wiz-kid hackers who can do everything ad hoc, projects and tools are designed that way, and it's no surprise that the products come out that way too.
Kind of. Computer engineering is where regular engineering was back when the pyramids were being built. They built a helluva lot of crooked pyramids. Or bridge-building, to stay on topic. Quite a few bridges went *ffffft* into a ravine.
I used this comparison with an architect once. Imagine that not only are there no standard building details for how windows should be installed, there are no standard brick sizes. Each county in the state makes bricks of a different size. What CAD details you can get are a mix of hand-drawn sketches and computerized masterpieces, but all in different file formats that are incompatible. And finally, your contractor only speaks Swahili. That's why even a simple Web application can entail weeks or months of constant work.
Things are slowly changing. CPAN and PEAR are good examples of "standard details". There are a jillion Java classes to do various things. And with XML-RPC, SOAP and the likes, convenient communication between incompatible languages are possible. It's getting there, it'll just take two more weeks.
I don't disagree. Since TFA may have had some niggling details wrong, his ideologically-based opinion does have good reasoning behind it. Namely that non-neutrality means flexibility for the changing Internet. As compared to guaranteed compatibility with neutrality. But by waving the red flag of ideology, dissent can ignore the good points made.
Anyway, I wanted to point out that Slashdot has a bunch of folks who mistake people agreeing with them for correctness, and tend to be awfully smug about the fact.
Christ, you people are never happy. Apple had the best docking solution in the world--the Duos and the DuoDock. They had them 15+ years ago. The Duos were even sub-notebooks. People wanted bigger laptops. Apple had bigger laptops they stopped producing subnotebooks. "Wahh, where are the subnotebooks?" We get the ibooks and 12" Powerbooks. "Wahh, I want a desktop replacement!" Now it's docking connectors.
Docking connectors don't sell. Apple would make them if they did.
If you shut this guy down for talking outside his area of expertise using ideology to make his judgments, then you'd better get cracking on shutting Slashdot down.
I've got a nice, fast cable modem I'net connection, and I'll still use Netflix. Netflix is like a bag of holding for DVDs, only with a day or two latency. I still do buy the occasional DVD, but I pretty well limit my purchases to real classics.
Since most visitors are not horrified by judicious use of Flash or animated GIFs, I think most sites are respecting their visitors. You are not much of a target audience, and will continue to be largely ignored.
Part of the problem is that AutoCAD the program has been around forever, and architect/draughtsperson productivity with it is high because they know all its quirks and oddities
That's true, but also Autodesk's brilliant strategy to offer educational versions of AutoCAD for somewhere around $200/seat. Every community college, technical training institute, and engineering lab took up Autodesk's offer and churned out thousands of AutoCAD-trained draftsmen.
The old versions of AutoCAD were a lot like a souped-up emacs. AutoLISP is still supported today. Not too shabby.
I dunno, PHP can be as secure and elegant as anything else. Use DB interfaces such as ADODB rather than the language's low-level functions, use PEAR wherever possible, validate input. PHP's rapid development cycle means one person can do quite a lot, and sacrificing some security for simplicity is a fair trade off. Which is why there are so many PHP applications around. That's a net benefit IMO.
What made NWN worthwhile to me was the multi-player. I could get together with my old game-playing friends for a couple of hours a week. In that instance, requiring a large party and dozens of side-quests just makes it harder to have a good time. In fact I started working on a set of "Instant Action" modules for NWN1 that kept gameplay down to a single quest with a single significant treasure at the end, encounters prepared with a balanced party in mind, with gameplay time kept to an hour or two because that's how I wanted to play NWN.
Time constraints prevented me from working further on them, but I still think they're a good idea. After reading the reviews of NWN2, I really think they're a good idea.
This is a complaint of mine. I live within walking distance of a drug store where I can buy milk and bread and the like, but I never walk there because I'd have to cross 4-lanes of traffic unaccustomed to watching for pedestrians. I've been hit by a car before, I'm not eager to revisit the experience.
The reasons for this situation are many, and one certainly is the easy-motoring culture that Americans have become accustomed to. The other is the insane level of fiddling that local, State and Federal governments do that encourage people to leave urban areas for the suburbs. Most people really do want that 3br 2ba ranch-style house in a nice neighborhood. They want the space, it's a good environment to raise kids, and the crime is much, much less. If cities spent more time focussing on their priorities--maintenance, crime deterrence and civil services--they'd be less likely to lose citizens to the suburban dream. To compete, urban living has to be at least as crime-free as the subdivision, the taxes have to be as cheap (or the city services more complete), and the public schools have to be highly competitive. That means skewering a lot of liberal sacred cows, such as putting criminals in jail and keeping them there (even if they're black), not providing an endless buffet of social welfare services, and allowing the free market to work in education.
Until those things happen, you'll mostly only see people rail against SUVs and the like, with the spectre of global warming used like the boogeyman to scare people into driving Yugos--which isn't a solution, long-term or otherwise.
That was awesome.
I was thinking this was partially explained by conveniences such as Amazon and the like. I know I buy a heck of a lot less stuff from bricks & morter, and therefore drive commensurately less often. This will likely only increase with time.
I'm white, over 30, and when I got pulled over for not having an up-to-date tag (the county never mailed me the bill), I got a ticket. I said, "I'm sorry officer, I'll get it taken care of." I took care of it. And paid the $150 ticket. Was I annoyed? Sure. Nothing would be solved by pitching a fit however, so I, you know, didn't do that.
They asked him to leave, according to posted policy, for not having his ID. You can spin any kind of scenario you'd like, the facts remain--the student handled it poorly. The officers may have gone overboard, but when you have a kid with no ID in a public building, and he's acting irrationally, I'd expect some lenience towards the officers who are simply trying to do their job. If I'm reading the UCLA policy on tasering correctly, they are even possibly within their rights.
But I and anyone who understand what a tazzer does knows that tazzing him 4 more times for not getting up after the first tazzing is just idiotic and crossed the line into police brutality
There's a video on YouTube showing a highway officer arresting some redneck fuck. He tased the guy 5 or more times trying to get him to comply. There was no reason the student couldn't get up and leave other than stubbornness. The other option would have been to have officers pile on top of him, hog tie him and bodily carry him out. This introduces danger to the subject and the officers. Getting him to leave under his own power is preferred, and the safest way. If he chooses to make a protest, he is not a victim. Victims are victims because they don't choose to be victimized.
The ID check was common, posted policy. The proper response is, "I'm sorry, I forgot my card. I'll go back to my dorm and get it." They escort you out, you wish them a good night, and you move on.
I was in college 15 years ago. I couldn't go anywhere or do hardly anything without my university ID. How did this kid not have his on him in this day and age? Hell, I couldn't get back into my dorm without my ID.
Also, the way I understand it, the first people on the scene were Community Service Officers. These are basically students. This guy got mouthy with other students, not cops. The security officers came later when he refused to comply. I can't relate to his plight at all, but then I don't find acting like a twat to make a vague and irrational political point worthwhile. Hey, UCSD, this incident had nothing to do with the Patriot Act. Good job on educating him!
The taser was used in "drive stun" mode. It only inflicted pain. It was not used in its incapacitating fuction.
I'm not ignorant of ice cores. I'm just not satisfied that they provide anything like a complete picture. The method of dating ice cores according to the fluctuations of isotopes of oxygen is handy since the winter/summer cycle is well understood. However the temperature assumptions are less robust IMO. There are a lot of variables controlling the ratio of one isotope to another, and mean temperature is only one. It's also dependent on local temperature in the case of ice cores, which is always below freezing by definition. This is not the case over most of the Earth, so the data comes from a convenient extreme, as if you did a study on crime and only interviewed Swedes because they don't move around a lot.
You miss the point. Global warming is sold as a religion, which is why the instinct to say "I believe..." is so strong. It's presented as established science fact, when it's really highly dependent on a lot of assumptions and guesswork. Not that there's anything wrong with that--our climate is not a simple system that we can easily model. However it doesn't take too much thinking to come up with plausible alternative reasons for the phenomena we see.
Example: it's been asserted many times that there's been a rise in temperatures that coincide with the industrial revolution. Now why is that? Could it be because that temperatures were being measured where people were, rather than where people were not? It's reasonably clear that human concentration in urban areas increase local temperatures. We weren't taking temperature readings in the 1800s because we were worried about the Earth. We wanted to know about the local weather.
A simple thought experiment such as that starts to bring the data into question. If pressed, the climatologist may get frustrated because, in their mind, they've already accounted for that, but the full answer isn't simple to express. So what you get is, basically, "trust me, I'm a scientist", which is bollocks. For one, wearing the moniker "scientist" doesn't make you right; and two, if you're a scientist make some testable predictions. The ones mentioned in the original article sure didn't come true. That makes it bad science. The goal is not to make testable predictions, the goal is to convince people to act now. That's a religion. Or marketing. Either or, it's not science.
You say you want to expose people to the debates, but that's the last thing that's going on. People who wander off the human-caused global warming reservation are not treated as skeptics, they're treated as heretics. Anti-science heretics, with suspicious agendas.
Note I say this as a person who is supportive of some of the aims of the global warming activists. I think we do need to de-emphasize our easy-motoring lifestyle and to support more mass-transit systems. I think part of the reason we got where we are is because of intrusive and expansive government killing the incentive for people to remain in urban centers and driving the middle class out to the suburbs, and I find it daft that the proposed solution to the problem is invariably more intrusive and expansive government, this time on a global scale. It's crazy.
Until we know absolutely everything, we might as well do absolutely nothing. Just because all of our lab experiments lead to the conclusion that carbon dioxide makes warming worse, and we pump huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the environment, we should still do nothing. Humans changing our habits wouldn't fix all the problems, everywhere, forever, so we should still do nothing.
I know this gets brought up all the time, but it's an important point. Just a decade or so ago, we were supposed to act now and change our habits in order to forestall global cooling. This odd hysteria and compulsion to act now and change our habits seems to be mostly political, not scientific. Carbon-trading isn't going to stave off global warming. Assuming it is actually implemented in an enforceable way, it will simply open a new avenue for corruption. Of course, nothing is quite so patently condescending as a rich shitpoke trading carbon credits with poverty-stricken fuckers in some hellhole, so it will probably become huge, condescension being a very popular hobby.
Nobody says "I believe in gravity." I think Michael Crichton made this point first, but it's still relevant.
The main problem serious people have about global warming is the reactionary solutions, most of which seem to primarily be a kind of retroactive success-tax on Americans. Example: Kyoto didn't deal with emerging countries who are both 1) ramping up energy use, and 2) aren't saddled with any of the green regulations that 1st world nations put on themselves.
A small number of measurements in the right places would be far more valuable than lots of measurements in the wrong places.
Maybe you have to be a climate scientist to understand differently, but as I understand things, actual data trumps extrapolated data.
I don't know about satellite data. How is done? Is it accurate? What kind of sample size are we talking about? Is it accurate for measuring surface temperatures? How do we know if we don't have enough measuring stations to establish an accurate baseline?
Also high-altitude temps are not the problem. The problem, according to global warming alarmists, are the melting ice caps and higher water temps that are killing coral reefs. In other words, surface phenomena. High altitude temps may be interesting indicators, but when you're talking data on the ground, that means an Eskimo holding a thermometer up and writing down the number, or a diver on the Great Barrier Reef with a thermometer up Jaws's asshole. That means more temperature stations, not less, which is the situation we find ourselves in--assuming the article is accurate.