Yes, that's obvious. The problem is that the same argument can always be used to discredit anything said by an expert in the field, and indeed it usually gets used that way.
How about, instead of poisoning the well, responding to the actual content of the argument?
Unfortunately, you're simply failing to grasp the scope of the problem.
You're quite right that poverty is the biggest killer on the planet, but poverty is also the primary reason why people will die (and already are dying) due to global warming.
You see, when a system of oscillators accumulates energy, the amplitude of the oscillations tends to increase. This means that the extremes become more extreme, and you get both extreme droughts and extreme floods. Haven't you noticed that Texas and Arizona are burning while the Mississippi floods? That sort of thing starts happening much more frequently as the temperature increases.
So it's not just a matter of being slowly inundated by the encroaching sea, it's more like being alternately inundated with record flooding and parched with severe drought, repeatedly for many years, and then being slowly inundated by the encroaching sea.
You are fortunate that denial is, as they say, not just a river in Africa, because when the rivers of Africa start to experience alternating severe drought and flooding the way Australia already is, you're probably not going to want to be clinging desperately to any African rivers anyway.
So, what effect do you suppose all of this will have on food commodity prices? And what effect do you suppose that will have on the poor? It's already happening, food prices are way up and many people are dying because of it. And this is only the beginning, Mother Nature is just getting warmed up.
Let's call things what they are for a change, shall we?
When multiple independent well-established lines of evidence all point unequivocally to the same conclusion, I call that science.
When thousands of papers, the official statements of every major scientific organization in the world, and the professional opinion of ~97% of active researchers in the field support the same conclusion, you might just want to consider whether that conclusion might not be science, you think?
When the incoherent antiscientific blatherings of professional corporate shills contradict the vastly overwhelming body of scientific evidence, I call that propaganda.
Of course I do. Real Climate is spearheaded by Gavin Schmidt, one of NASA's leading climatologists and a genuine hero.
By your logic we shouldn't listen to any expert on any issue, since their funding is dependent on their subject of study. OK, so we throw out all scientific knowledge, and we know nothing whatsoever about anything. That's not helpful.
To elaborate, what you're doing is citing a study without understanding anything about it, out of context, and claiming it relates to an issue upon which it has very little bearing. That experiment didn't disprove that the moon is made of green cheese either.
You read about that paper on some non-scientific propaganda site like WUWT or Denial Depot. People there, who have no more understanding of science than you do, claimed that the paper meant something it doesn't, and you believed them because it fit in with your preconceived notions.
So far no science has been mentioned in this discussion. Pretty disappointing, really. Slashdot used to be a place where smart people came to talk about issues.
I'm sorry, but if you can't be bothered to pay attention or even do minimal research, there's not much point in talking to you. Go read something other than denialist propaganda, like... oh, I don't know, some issues of Science or something.
This whole line of reasoning seems plausible on the surface, until you actually do some research into it.
It's not a matter of optimal, it's a matter of what we're used to. Radical, rapid change in climate (such as we're already experiencing, and it'll get much worse) changes rainfall patterns and other factors that will force us to change where we build our cities, where we grow our food, etc. That kind of adjustment is incredibly expensive, much more expensive than taking reasonable mitigation steps now.
You want to move people out of areas that might be affected? OK, then start with the entire continental US, which is projected to experience severe drops in precipitation that will make the dustbowl look like a monsoon. And that's just one dimension of the probable impacts.
See this article, "Real adaptation is as politically tough as real mitigation, but much more expensive and not as effective in reducing future misery":
When they did well in 2009, it seemed like part of the reason was the unusual name. It made people curious to find out more about them. Certainly it didn't seem to be holding them back, they did way better than expected for a minor party.
Now that the haven't done so well, people are saying "drop the name."
Maybe the change is due to actual political factors, not merely a branding problem.
I'm pretty sure the GOVERNMENT has no concept of, or right to, ownership..
This is incorrect on several levels. For one thing, ownership is actually defined by the government. Without a government, the piece of paper that says you own something would be worthless. Not only does the government have a concept of ownership, it actually creates all ownership.
"Owned by the government" means "belongs to the people" since WE paid for it.
Of course that is quite correct, but it does nothing to negate the grandparent's point. We the people paid for the property on which streets are built. Therefore in order to use that property for their networks, ISPs need permission from the elected representatives of the people, a.k.a. the government.
If these providers are not going to give all of us unfettered access to their networks, what incentive do we have to allow them to use our property to build those networks? They should buy their own damn land and put their networks there if they want to have total control over the signal. As long as they're putting the network on our land, we should have unfettered access to it.
It goes beyond the problem of having different groups of friends. The problem is that in real life most people have many different personae. You would say and do things with your friends from college that you would never say or do in front of your boss, as the most obvious example.
IRL we put a lot of work into constructing and maintaining these different personae, and we do a lot of work to keep them separate.
With social networking as it is, that's all over. Even if you never participate in Facebook, you are probably tagged in dozens or even hundreds of photos, and the odds are pretty good that some of them show you doing things you wouldn't do in front of your boss.
So the question is, will we adapt the technology to allow the creation and maintenance of a variety of different personae, or will we adapt our own behavior so as to present one consistent, universally acceptable persona to the world?
I think many of us, particuarly the younger generation, are already doing the latter. In order to adapt to this, we have to adjust our expectations of people. Maybe as an employer, you just have to get used to being able to see pictures of your employees smoking weed at parties and so forth, and not let it bother you. However, until we adapt, it creates the problem that suddenly everything you say and do is potentially public (whether you participate in social media or not).
Re:One of the most un-American things I've ever re
on
The Real Science Gap
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
This is a rediculously over-simplified misunderstanding of how society works. How do you propose "making" a job doing basic research? Research has to be funded, that's how it's done in our society. I'm afraid you're living in a fantasy world. This has nothing to do with anyone being "owed" a job. It has to do with setting priorities as a society. We've set up a system in which the priority is short term quarterly gains, and that's what we get. If you want a viable society in the long term, you have to invest in basic research.
Exactly. That's why I left. I didn't care so much about the pay, doing science is in itself worth it as long as you're being paid enough to survive. Yeah, for some people it's that much fun.
But my advisor in grad school worked for ten hours a day in the lab, and then he went home and worked another six on his computer from home. His wife made jokes about being a "physics widow." He had a daughter, but he obviously wasn't participating in raising her.
That's no kind of life for a reasonable person. You have to have a monomaniacal disorder to want to live like that. So I left.
The problem is that there is way too much work to do and way too little funding to hire enough people to do it. The result is an attitude that if you're not willing to work 80-100 hours per week, we'll find someone else who is. There are plenty of smart people in the world.
This problem will persist until we make basic research the financial priority that it should be in order to advance as a society.
Unfortunately, there is no silver bullet. Nuclear power won't meet the world's energy needs either, not in any realistic scenario.
To replace enough fossil fuel use to resolve the climate change problem, we would have to build 3 nuclear plants per week for 50 years. The expense involved would be incomprehensible.
In fact, not only is there no silver bullet, there are no silver b-bs either. Any realistic scenario requires significan efficiency gains -- in other words, we're going to have to consume less!
That's the bit that people really have trouble coming to grips with, at which point they tend to retreat into a fantasy world of some kind.
Awesome timing on that Richie! Should be modded funny as well as informative.
Everyone go and donate -- the Pirate Party is uber-cool for many other reasons in addition to this latest move.
Well, one thing wrong with your statements is that you think climate scientists in general are hiding their models and data. Here, have some climate models and data.
Another error in your statements: the last decade is the hottest on record, in any of the records. You can easily look this up for yourself, so there's no excuse for being wrong about it. The rest of what you said is similarly flawed and uninformed, as can easily be verified with minimal research.
I'm coming late to this discussion, but I have to comment on this. It is simply not true that climate scientists in general don't want to reveal their models. In fact, many of them are publicly available, as is much of the actual data. Here have a look at this collection of climate model code and data.
Incidentally, you are also incorrect about climate science not being esoteric. You think global average temperature is a simple quantity to calculate? Yeah, the result is just a number, but a vast amount of data and calculation goes into getting that number. I think a lot of critics of climate science don't appreciate the degree to which climate scientists have bent over backward to try to make their results accessible to laypeople, although the details are actually quite complicated.
How exactly does any of this call into question the credibilty of NAS? I agree with looking at the evidence, but most people are not qualified to do that, frankly, and need to trust somebody who understands the science to do it for them. Who would you trust to review the evidence and reach a conclusion? Have you reviewed the evidence yourself? I suspect that if you do, you'll find that it is quite sound.
Slashdot Mirror
The fact is that there is abundant scientific evidence that human activities are causing global warming. A good summary is here: http://www.skepticalscience.com/How-we-know-were-causing-global-warming-in-single-graphic.html
Yes, that's obvious. The problem is that the same argument can always be used to discredit anything said by an expert in the field, and indeed it usually gets used that way. How about, instead of poisoning the well, responding to the actual content of the argument?
Unfortunately, you're simply failing to grasp the scope of the problem.
You're quite right that poverty is the biggest killer on the planet, but poverty is also the primary reason why people will die (and already are dying) due to global warming.
You see, when a system of oscillators accumulates energy, the amplitude of the oscillations tends to increase. This means that the extremes become more extreme, and you get both extreme droughts and extreme floods. Haven't you noticed that Texas and Arizona are burning while the Mississippi floods? That sort of thing starts happening much more frequently as the temperature increases.
So it's not just a matter of being slowly inundated by the encroaching sea, it's more like being alternately inundated with record flooding and parched with severe drought, repeatedly for many years, and then being slowly inundated by the encroaching sea.
You are fortunate that denial is, as they say, not just a river in Africa, because when the rivers of Africa start to experience alternating severe drought and flooding the way Australia already is, you're probably not going to want to be clinging desperately to any African rivers anyway.
So, what effect do you suppose all of this will have on food commodity prices? And what effect do you suppose that will have on the poor? It's already happening, food prices are way up and many people are dying because of it. And this is only the beginning, Mother Nature is just getting warmed up.
Let's call things what they are for a change, shall we?
When multiple independent well-established lines of evidence all point unequivocally to the same conclusion, I call that science.
When thousands of papers, the official statements of every major scientific organization in the world, and the professional opinion of ~97% of active researchers in the field support the same conclusion, you might just want to consider whether that conclusion might not be science, you think?
When the incoherent antiscientific blatherings of professional corporate shills contradict the vastly overwhelming body of scientific evidence, I call that propaganda.
Of course I do. Real Climate is spearheaded by Gavin Schmidt, one of NASA's leading climatologists and a genuine hero. By your logic we shouldn't listen to any expert on any issue, since their funding is dependent on their subject of study. OK, so we throw out all scientific knowledge, and we know nothing whatsoever about anything. That's not helpful.
To elaborate, what you're doing is citing a study without understanding anything about it, out of context, and claiming it relates to an issue upon which it has very little bearing. That experiment didn't disprove that the moon is made of green cheese either.
You read about that paper on some non-scientific propaganda site like WUWT or Denial Depot. People there, who have no more understanding of science than you do, claimed that the paper meant something it doesn't, and you believed them because it fit in with your preconceived notions.
Dig a little deeper next time.
Nope, sorry, nice try. http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2011/05/an-incremental-step-blown-up/
So far no science has been mentioned in this discussion. Pretty disappointing, really. Slashdot used to be a place where smart people came to talk about issues.
Hmmm... that's not what the scare-mongers over at MIT say:
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/roulette-0519.html
I'm sorry, but if you can't be bothered to pay attention or even do minimal research, there's not much point in talking to you. Go read something other than denialist propaganda, like... oh, I don't know, some issues of Science or something.
Um... because that theory is not real science and has been completely debunked.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/03/cosmoclimatology-tired-old-arguments-in-new-clothes/
This whole line of reasoning seems plausible on the surface, until you actually do some research into it.
It's not a matter of optimal, it's a matter of what we're used to. Radical, rapid change in climate (such as we're already experiencing, and it'll get much worse) changes rainfall patterns and other factors that will force us to change where we build our cities, where we grow our food, etc. That kind of adjustment is incredibly expensive, much more expensive than taking reasonable mitigation steps now.
You want to move people out of areas that might be affected? OK, then start with the entire continental US, which is projected to experience severe drops in precipitation that will make the dustbowl look like a monsoon. And that's just one dimension of the probable impacts.
See this article, "Real adaptation is as politically tough as real mitigation, but much more expensive and not as effective in reducing future misery":
http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2010/08/27/206596/adaptation-mitigation-climate-chang/
When they did well in 2009, it seemed like part of the reason was the unusual name. It made people curious to find out more about them. Certainly it didn't seem to be holding them back, they did way better than expected for a minor party. Now that the haven't done so well, people are saying "drop the name." Maybe the change is due to actual political factors, not merely a branding problem.
I'm pretty sure the GOVERNMENT has no concept of, or right to, ownership. .
This is incorrect on several levels. For one thing, ownership is actually defined by the government. Without a government, the piece of paper that says you own something would be worthless. Not only does the government have a concept of ownership, it actually creates all ownership.
"Owned by the government" means "belongs to the people" since WE paid for it.
Of course that is quite correct, but it does nothing to negate the grandparent's point. We the people paid for the property on which streets are built. Therefore in order to use that property for their networks, ISPs need permission from the elected representatives of the people, a.k.a. the government.
If these providers are not going to give all of us unfettered access to their networks, what incentive do we have to allow them to use our property to build those networks? They should buy their own damn land and put their networks there if they want to have total control over the signal. As long as they're putting the network on our land, we should have unfettered access to it.
It goes beyond the problem of having different groups of friends. The problem is that in real life most people have many different personae. You would say and do things with your friends from college that you would never say or do in front of your boss, as the most obvious example.
IRL we put a lot of work into constructing and maintaining these different personae, and we do a lot of work to keep them separate.
With social networking as it is, that's all over. Even if you never participate in Facebook, you are probably tagged in dozens or even hundreds of photos, and the odds are pretty good that some of them show you doing things you wouldn't do in front of your boss.
So the question is, will we adapt the technology to allow the creation and maintenance of a variety of different personae, or will we adapt our own behavior so as to present one consistent, universally acceptable persona to the world?
I think many of us, particuarly the younger generation, are already doing the latter. In order to adapt to this, we have to adjust our expectations of people. Maybe as an employer, you just have to get used to being able to see pictures of your employees smoking weed at parties and so forth, and not let it bother you. However, until we adapt, it creates the problem that suddenly everything you say and do is potentially public (whether you participate in social media or not).
hydro is the only renewable that can be used to trim baseline load
Actually, solar thermal can maintain baseload by using molten salt to store heat energey during the night. Besides being incredibly useful, the idea of a huge tower of molten salt is just dang cool.
This is a rediculously over-simplified misunderstanding of how society works. How do you propose "making" a job doing basic research? Research has to be funded, that's how it's done in our society. I'm afraid you're living in a fantasy world. This has nothing to do with anyone being "owed" a job. It has to do with setting priorities as a society. We've set up a system in which the priority is short term quarterly gains, and that's what we get. If you want a viable society in the long term, you have to invest in basic research.
Exactly. That's why I left. I didn't care so much about the pay, doing science is in itself worth it as long as you're being paid enough to survive. Yeah, for some people it's that much fun.
But my advisor in grad school worked for ten hours a day in the lab, and then he went home and worked another six on his computer from home. His wife made jokes about being a "physics widow." He had a daughter, but he obviously wasn't participating in raising her.
That's no kind of life for a reasonable person. You have to have a monomaniacal disorder to want to live like that. So I left.
The problem is that there is way too much work to do and way too little funding to hire enough people to do it. The result is an attitude that if you're not willing to work 80-100 hours per week, we'll find someone else who is. There are plenty of smart people in the world.
This problem will persist until we make basic research the financial priority that it should be in order to advance as a society.
Unfortunately, there is no silver bullet. Nuclear power won't meet the world's energy needs either, not in any realistic scenario.
To replace enough fossil fuel use to resolve the climate change problem, we would have to build 3 nuclear plants per week for 50 years. The expense involved would be incomprehensible.
http://climateprogress.org/2007/06/18/nuclear-power-no-climate-cure-all/
http://keystone.org/files/file/SPP/energy/NJFF-Exec-Summ-6_2007.pdf
Even under extremely agressive but realistic growth scenarios, nuclear could only cover about a tenth of our projected requirements.
Wind, by comparison, does surprisingly well, as does solar thermal, but they won't be able to cover it all either.
http://climateprogress.org/2009/03/26/full-global-warming-solution-350-450-ppm-technologies-efficiency-renewables/
In fact, not only is there no silver bullet, there are no silver b-bs either. Any realistic scenario requires significan efficiency gains -- in other words, we're going to have to consume less!
That's the bit that people really have trouble coming to grips with, at which point they tend to retreat into a fantasy world of some kind.
Well... I wouldn't exactly call it "asking."
Awesome timing on that Richie! Should be modded funny as well as informative. Everyone go and donate -- the Pirate Party is uber-cool for many other reasons in addition to this latest move.
Well, one thing wrong with your statements is that you think climate scientists in general are hiding their models and data. Here, have some climate models and data.
Another error in your statements: the last decade is the hottest on record, in any of the records. You can easily look this up for yourself, so there's no excuse for being wrong about it. The rest of what you said is similarly flawed and uninformed, as can easily be verified with minimal research.
I'm coming late to this discussion, but I have to comment on this. It is simply not true that climate scientists in general don't want to reveal their models. In fact, many of them are publicly available, as is much of the actual data. Here have a look at this collection of climate model code and data.
Incidentally, you are also incorrect about climate science not being esoteric. You think global average temperature is a simple quantity to calculate? Yeah, the result is just a number, but a vast amount of data and calculation goes into getting that number. I think a lot of critics of climate science don't appreciate the degree to which climate scientists have bent over backward to try to make their results accessible to laypeople, although the details are actually quite complicated.
I would recommend you check the evidence carefully before committing to that position. Stay tuned for Episode II, the Revenge of the Science.
How exactly does any of this call into question the credibilty of NAS? I agree with looking at the evidence, but most people are not qualified to do that, frankly, and need to trust somebody who understands the science to do it for them. Who would you trust to review the evidence and reach a conclusion? Have you reviewed the evidence yourself? I suspect that if you do, you'll find that it is quite sound.