I'm dissapointed jcr your posts are normally better than that. Taking money from taxpayers is not profit for anyone but the taxpayer when it's plowed into research and I have never met a scientist who is "in it for the money" although I'm sure they exist somewhere.
The point is research should be independent, ie: you pay for the study not the answer. Do you think AGW research done under the Bush Administration came up with the answer the Bush Administration wanted to see? - No it came up with the same answer it did under poppa Bush, Clinton and Now Obama, why? - because the research was independent.
What the OP was alluding to are places that run deliberate misinformation campagins such as the heartland institute with whom Watt's is affiliated, there is no possible way a "reasonable person" can call the heartland institute either scientific or independent. It is basically a think tank full of well paid and skillfull bullshitters who lobby for the FF and tabacoo industry by filling the mass-media with red-herrings and myths. They are not interested in anything but delaying action, so far they have been very successfull. However like the tabacoo scam where they played a similar psuedo-scientific role in the 90's, it can't last forever, personally I predict another mass show trial in the next decade where the FF CEO's are slapped on the wrist for "misleading" their mates in congress.
"You don't even seem to realize that Mann and the other contributors to realclimate.org are also the people that authored these emails."
A fine example of how casual text can be misleading, no?
Anyone who has seen me around slashdot knows AGW is my pet topic and has been for well over 20yrs. I know the names in this little faux-drama as well as I know the characters of gilligans island. I have been a regular reader and occassional poster on RC since the day it was put up, I go there because the science is straight from the horses mouth and I keep going there because their track record of providing me with a reliable source of information is impecable.
I know the WUWT site and it's history quite well but haven't looked at the site for a long time, I can't decide if Watt's is a paid fraud or just another nut. Whatever the case, anyone who knows anything about this subject would only need to skim his site to determine he has zero scientific credibility. Given his connections with the proffesional frauds at the heritige foundation I'm leaning towards "in it for the money".
Now maybe you think this is unfair and that WATT's is an oppressed genius, so why hasn't he or one of his avid fans published? - The only answer here involves a global conspiracy personally directed at one man. I have a science degree and a long standing interest in this topic, you don't have to accept my opinion but my background tells me Watt's is more than just wrong and the conspirators he hints at are people who quite rightly dismiss his disinformation out of hand.
"Actually, sometimes it seems that Gibson's figures don't know exactly why their technology works either..."
I would call that astute social commentry. The same idea is taken to the extreme in H G Well's Time Machine, the Eloi(?) have no idea about or interest in the world around them.
"If the RC article is right, why would whoever wrote that email pick such an unclear phrasing?"
Why does it matter, it's certainly not evidence of conspuracy on a global scale? I thought slashdotters of all people would be aware of the faulty logic of convicting people using a single phrase from a personal email. Isn't this the very reason there are so many rabid privacy advocates here or am I on the wrong site?
"CO2 isn't air pollution, CO, Hydrogen Sulfides, Sulfuric Acid, Mercury, Nitrogen oxides DO kill animals and more importantly Plants."
The definition of a pollutant is "a resource out of place". More importantly CO2 is what is turning the ocean acic (carbonic acid) this in turn threatens the very bottom of the global food chain (ie: plankton). Covering the earth with trees would help but it is still not enough to aborb our emmissions. Ironiclly many of the traditional pollutants that you mention form areosols and have a significant cooling effect.
Umm no, you need both types of people for society to progress, one to ignore the precautionary principle and the other to record the result for future generations.
If you want to live like an aborigine wandering the desert and digging up grubs for breakfast that's fine there's lots of space to do that over here in Oz, however the rest of us are kind of fond of civilization so I hope you don't mind if we continue to huddle around what farmland we have left on the east coast.
So hows the gaslight and buggy-whip bussiness doing these days?
Compound interest is just accounting, you need physical and human resources to build a dyson sphere, a wind farm, or a coal plant. This problem is about global risk management and our collective allocation of resources in the still unfolding "industrial age". ALL of the coal fired infrustructure that now exists was built in my 50yr lifetime, to build this infrastructure would have involved millions of people and had an astronomical price tag, but frankly I hardly noticed it was happening.
Problem is the "tradgedy of the commons" is now fucking up the climate of our agriculture and turning the oceans acidic, which in turn is threating the bottom of the food chain we find ourselves dangling from. It's not like we can't plan these things, coal fired plants already have a 40-50yr lifecycle, the current energy infrastructure is barely past generation one. Civilization has only got this far by learning from our mistakes and all but the hydro dams will need replacing over the next 50yrs anyway. This is what's called "progress" and there will be just as many opportunities to make a buck in a "green" future as there are now.
"I remember watching the satellite images at weather.gov as Katrina developed, and wondering whether this would be the one to devastate New Orleans. Several earlier storms had missed, but it was well-known to be just a matter of time." - ditto and I've never set foot in the US.
"The very concept of "Greenhouse Gas" is a hypothetical, not a principle...[snip]...The original experiments seem to lack important scientific controls."
You have got to be fucking joking!!! The "original experiments" were performed by Faraday in the mid 19th century, the theoretical foundation comes from Forrier who correctly predicted the phenomena in the early 19th century. The experiment can be watched on youtube and I would assume a majority of slashdotters would have the tech savy to reproduce the experiment if they were genuinely skeptical.
BTW: You will notice the tube in the experiment is open ended and therefore not "pressurised".
"Applying that disingenuous label to anyone who questions your methods or motives is exactly why AGW is a religious movement- whether its true or not"
IANAC but I do know a little about the subject, the GP is not displaying religious behaviour, however you are displaying what is known as the Dunning-Kruger effect
BTW: The difference between a skeptic and a psuedo-skeptic is easy to spot, psuedo-skeptics consistently fail to question their own ideas. Watt's is a well known psuedo-skeptic and has about as much scientific crediblity as the discovery institute.
Gore is a rich man but it didn't come from being "green". And even if it did, what's wrong with making a buck out of betting on future industrial/financial trends?
"The idea that Anthropogenic CO2 is the sole cause of any warming is where the debate is."
I call BS, it is disingenious to give the idea that any scientist holds this position let alone is seriously debating it (as in having it peer-reviewed, something Watts has failed to do). And cotrary to your point 3 here is the breakdown of forcings from the IPCC, you will notice the large error bars and if you bothered to look up the original report you would see they state with a 95% confidence level that humans are CAUSING more than 50% of the OBSERVED warming. Note from the graph that this warming would be almost twice as much as observed if humans were not also causing the earth to cool via areosols in our smog.
There are also quite a few other well known red-herrings and myths contained in you post. I will pick on point 2 because I belive presenting a widely debunked red-herring created by lobbyists at the heartland institute as a serious hypothesis, is also disingeniuos. - Yes historically CO2 increases with warming but this does not mean that CO2 cannot cause warming and enter a feedback loop such that more CO2 realeses more CO2 (eg: melting permafrost). This is part of a major subject in climate science called "climate sensitivity", unfortunately geological records and the rapid disintergration of Artic ice indicates that our climate has a high "sensitivity".
Some other points.
In point 3 you conflate cliamte and wether climate is the statistics of wether and is remarkably stable (ie: in 100 million years summer will still be warmer than winter, the tropics will always be warm and the poles cold, etc).
Climate is hideously complex to model - Actually it's horrendously expensive to calculate but the math is just simple brute force numerical intergration, similar to what they use for other "chaotic" problems such as space probe trajectories and streamlining vehicles. Like all modles thay are imperfect but by no means useless. Climate models have passed the acid test, predicting unknown phenomena that were later observed (google polar amplification for a good example, or high altitude precipitation rates or a cooling stratosphere if you want more).
Point 6, we know from industrial records that humans have put at least half a trillion tons of excess CO2 into the atmosphere in the last 250yrs, we can also extrapolate the current rate of emmissions to find that figure will double in the next 40yrs.
Point 5. Geologic and ice core data says it's happened before, the last time it was as warm as this decade the ice was gone and manhattan island was 180 feet below sea level.
Point 4. Again paleoclimatology and observation indicates a high sensitivity, models tend to be less sensitive because they generally ignore feedbacks. This is why model predictions tend to be CONSERVATIVE, eg: the last IPCC report predicted an ice free artic summer by ~2080. It's clear from observations since then that it's very likely to be ice free by 2020.
"They do indeed have a pro-global-warming bias. Check out the apologetics on their wiki."
Realclimate have a pro-science bias, check out the science in their articles. M. Mann who founded the site is a world renown climatologist with over 60 papers published in journals such a nature and science. He is also the authour of the much maligned hockey stick. The other contributors on the site are all also well known climatiologist and have numerous publications under their belt, all of them have contributed to the IPCC reports and Mann himself has been a lead authour. Scientists of this caliber do not often waste their time trying to educate the public and it's a pity there isn't more of it on other subjects surrounded by psuedo-science, such as medicine.
Watts on the other hand is a TV weatherman and a pathological liar who's only publication is his DISinformative web site. He is affliated with the lobbyists at the heartland institute which pumps out more high quality bullshit than the dicovery institute (see their icecap site for another example).
IMHO people who support Watts are like creationists, scientifically illiterate and gullible enough to be proud of it.
"Even Einstein was a social deviant to the point that he had to escape his homeland"
Ummm, Albert was the target of a genocidal regime due to his ethinicty, it had nothing to do with his behaviour, deviant or otherwise.
"Put Christian teaching heavily in place in the schools and mix it with the current economic hell that people are suffering and people will straighten up in twenty years or so."
As someone who went through such a school system in the 60's and 70's I have to say that you don't have a fucking clue what you are talking about.
Yep, according to "Time team" their steel boots got stuck in the mud at Agincourt (like gum boots do), the English ranks were mostly wearing rags as shoes and could move more freely. Longbows were the WMD of the middle ages, especially when you had 10K archers all of whom could fire fast enought to keep 3 arrows in the air at once. Such a volley of arrows flying through the air is said to make a roar that could be heard for miles. As to wether they were effective against armour apparently that depended on what type of metal the amour and arrow heads were made of.
"Make sure that you only provide the view that fits your philosophy."
I gave my source which you obviously found, what more do you want?
"Oooooohhh- you mean the Bible DOESN'T really mention Unicorns??"
The word "unicorn" appears multiple times in the bible in the context of an animal of some sort, in otherwords your post is a fullfilment of the prophecy in your sig.
"Somebody had to create the computer too. So that's just bringing more into the equation. This whole computer simulation thing is the same as everything else - it's just another religion, no matter how you twist it around."
The universe is not simulated, YOU are. That statement is not religious, it is simply the result of carefull observation and ruthless logic. The only magic* computer required is the universe itself and the algorithm it runs is infinitely recursive - your mind simulates the universe that simulated your mind with your brain.
A mind is a mathematical entity that emerges from the interactions of organised matter, you could say it's the byproduct of the universe observing itself. Human minds create a 3D repesentation of the universe and call it "commonly percieved reality".
The bottom line of all this is our minds are incomplete. We will never fully understand ourselves, let alone reality.
"And unicorns don't appear anywhere in the Bible, AFAIK"
* "God brought them out of Egypt; he hath as it were the strength of an unicorn."--Numbers 23:22
* "God brought him forth out of Egypt; he hath as it were the strength of an unicorn."--Numbers 24:8
* "His glory is like the firstling of his bullock, and his horns are like the horns of unicorn: with them he shall push the people together to the ends of the earth."--Deuteronomy 33:17
* "Will the unicorn be willing to serve thee, or abide by thy crib? Canst thou bind the unicorn with his band in the furrow? or will he harrow the valleys after thee? Wilt thou trust him, because his strength is great? or wilt thou leave thy labour to him? Wilt thou believe him, that he will bring home thy seed, and gather it into thy barn?"--Job 39:9-12
* "Save me from the lion's mouth; for thou hast heard me from the horns of unicorn."--Psalm 22:21
* "He maketh them [the cedars of Lebanon] also to skip like a calf; Lebanon and Sirion like a young unicorn."--Psalm 29:6
* "But my horn shalt thou exalt like the horn of the unicorn: I shall be anointed with fresh oil."--Psalm 92:10
* "And the unicorn shall come down with them, and the bullocks with their bulls; and their land shall be soaked with blood, and their dust made fat with fatness."--Isaiah 34:7
Shamelessly cut & paste from God, errr I mean Wikipedia.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm dissapointed jcr your posts are normally better than that. Taking money from taxpayers is not profit for anyone but the taxpayer when it's plowed into research and I have never met a scientist who is "in it for the money" although I'm sure they exist somewhere.
The point is research should be independent, ie: you pay for the study not the answer. Do you think AGW research done under the Bush Administration came up with the answer the Bush Administration wanted to see? - No it came up with the same answer it did under poppa Bush, Clinton and Now Obama, why? - because the research was independent.
What the OP was alluding to are places that run deliberate misinformation campagins such as the heartland institute with whom Watt's is affiliated, there is no possible way a "reasonable person" can call the heartland institute either scientific or independent. It is basically a think tank full of well paid and skillfull bullshitters who lobby for the FF and tabacoo industry by filling the mass-media with red-herrings and myths. They are not interested in anything but delaying action, so far they have been very successfull. However like the tabacoo scam where they played a similar psuedo-scientific role in the 90's, it can't last forever, personally I predict another mass show trial in the next decade where the FF CEO's are slapped on the wrist for "misleading" their mates in congress.
"You don't even seem to realize that Mann and the other contributors to realclimate.org are also the people that authored these emails."
A fine example of how casual text can be misleading, no?
Anyone who has seen me around slashdot knows AGW is my pet topic and has been for well over 20yrs. I know the names in this little faux-drama as well as I know the characters of gilligans island. I have been a regular reader and occassional poster on RC since the day it was put up, I go there because the science is straight from the horses mouth and I keep going there because their track record of providing me with a reliable source of information is impecable.
I know the WUWT site and it's history quite well but haven't looked at the site for a long time, I can't decide if Watt's is a paid fraud or just another nut. Whatever the case, anyone who knows anything about this subject would only need to skim his site to determine he has zero scientific credibility. Given his connections with the proffesional frauds at the heritige foundation I'm leaning towards "in it for the money".
Now maybe you think this is unfair and that WATT's is an oppressed genius, so why hasn't he or one of his avid fans published? - The only answer here involves a global conspiracy personally directed at one man. I have a science degree and a long standing interest in this topic, you don't have to accept my opinion but my background tells me Watt's is more than just wrong and the conspirators he hints at are people who quite rightly dismiss his disinformation out of hand.
"Actually, sometimes it seems that Gibson's figures don't know exactly why their technology works either..."
I would call that astute social commentry. The same idea is taken to the extreme in H G Well's Time Machine, the Eloi(?) have no idea about or interest in the world around them.
Yes, few scientists are renowned for their communication skills.
"If the RC article is right, why would whoever wrote that email pick such an unclear phrasing?"
Why does it matter, it's certainly not evidence of conspuracy on a global scale? I thought slashdotters of all people would be aware of the faulty logic of convicting people using a single phrase from a personal email. Isn't this the very reason there are so many rabid privacy advocates here or am I on the wrong site?
"CO2 isn't air pollution, CO, Hydrogen Sulfides, Sulfuric Acid, Mercury, Nitrogen oxides DO kill animals and more importantly Plants."
The definition of a pollutant is "a resource out of place". More importantly CO2 is what is turning the ocean acic (carbonic acid) this in turn threatens the very bottom of the global food chain (ie: plankton). Covering the earth with trees would help but it is still not enough to aborb our emmissions. Ironiclly many of the traditional pollutants that you mention form areosols and have a significant cooling effect.
Tell me, would take your sick child to a doctor or a TV weatherman?
Umm no, you need both types of people for society to progress, one to ignore the precautionary principle and the other to record the result for future generations.
Food and water imported? - yep!
If you want to live like an aborigine wandering the desert and digging up grubs for breakfast that's fine there's lots of space to do that over here in Oz, however the rest of us are kind of fond of civilization so I hope you don't mind if we continue to huddle around what farmland we have left on the east coast.
So hows the gaslight and buggy-whip bussiness doing these days?
Compound interest is just accounting, you need physical and human resources to build a dyson sphere, a wind farm, or a coal plant. This problem is about global risk management and our collective allocation of resources in the still unfolding "industrial age". ALL of the coal fired infrustructure that now exists was built in my 50yr lifetime, to build this infrastructure would have involved millions of people and had an astronomical price tag, but frankly I hardly noticed it was happening.
Problem is the "tradgedy of the commons" is now fucking up the climate of our agriculture and turning the oceans acidic, which in turn is threating the bottom of the food chain we find ourselves dangling from. It's not like we can't plan these things, coal fired plants already have a 40-50yr lifecycle, the current energy infrastructure is barely past generation one. Civilization has only got this far by learning from our mistakes and all but the hydro dams will need replacing over the next 50yrs anyway. This is what's called "progress" and there will be just as many opportunities to make a buck in a "green" future as there are now.
"I remember watching the satellite images at weather.gov as Katrina developed, and wondering whether this would be the one to devastate New Orleans. Several earlier storms had missed, but it was well-known to be just a matter of time." - ditto and I've never set foot in the US.
"Human beings are not evolved to live below sea level."
It's highly likely the first humans evolved in the rift valley - ie: below sea level.
"The very concept of "Greenhouse Gas" is a hypothetical, not a principle...[snip]...The original experiments seem to lack important scientific controls."
You have got to be fucking joking!!! The "original experiments" were performed by Faraday in the mid 19th century, the theoretical foundation comes from Forrier who correctly predicted the phenomena in the early 19th century. The experiment can be watched on youtube and I would assume a majority of slashdotters would have the tech savy to reproduce the experiment if they were genuinely skeptical.
BTW: You will notice the tube in the experiment is open ended and therefore not "pressurised".
"Applying that disingenuous label to anyone who questions your methods or motives is exactly why AGW is a religious movement- whether its true or not"
IANAC but I do know a little about the subject, the GP is not displaying religious behaviour, however you are displaying what is known as the Dunning-Kruger effect
BTW: The difference between a skeptic and a psuedo-skeptic is easy to spot, psuedo-skeptics consistently fail to question their own ideas. Watt's is a well known psuedo-skeptic and has about as much scientific crediblity as the discovery institute.
Gore is a rich man but it didn't come from being "green". And even if it did, what's wrong with making a buck out of betting on future industrial/financial trends?
"The idea that Anthropogenic CO2 is the sole cause of any warming is where the debate is."
I call BS, it is disingenious to give the idea that any scientist holds this position let alone is seriously debating it (as in having it peer-reviewed, something Watts has failed to do). And cotrary to your point 3 here is the breakdown of forcings from the IPCC, you will notice the large error bars and if you bothered to look up the original report you would see they state with a 95% confidence level that humans are CAUSING more than 50% of the OBSERVED warming. Note from the graph that this warming would be almost twice as much as observed if humans were not also causing the earth to cool via areosols in our smog.
There are also quite a few other well known red-herrings and myths contained in you post. I will pick on point 2 because I belive presenting a widely debunked red-herring created by lobbyists at the heartland institute as a serious hypothesis, is also disingeniuos. - Yes historically CO2 increases with warming but this does not mean that CO2 cannot cause warming and enter a feedback loop such that more CO2 realeses more CO2 (eg: melting permafrost). This is part of a major subject in climate science called "climate sensitivity", unfortunately geological records and the rapid disintergration of Artic ice indicates that our climate has a high "sensitivity".
Some other points.
In point 3 you conflate cliamte and wether climate is the statistics of wether and is remarkably stable (ie: in 100 million years summer will still be warmer than winter, the tropics will always be warm and the poles cold, etc).
Climate is hideously complex to model - Actually it's horrendously expensive to calculate but the math is just simple brute force numerical intergration, similar to what they use for other "chaotic" problems such as space probe trajectories and streamlining vehicles. Like all modles thay are imperfect but by no means useless. Climate models have passed the acid test, predicting unknown phenomena that were later observed (google polar amplification for a good example, or high altitude precipitation rates or a cooling stratosphere if you want more).
Point 6, we know from industrial records that humans have put at least half a trillion tons of excess CO2 into the atmosphere in the last 250yrs, we can also extrapolate the current rate of emmissions to find that figure will double in the next 40yrs.
Point 5. Geologic and ice core data says it's happened before, the last time it was as warm as this decade the ice was gone and manhattan island was 180 feet below sea level.
Point 4. Again paleoclimatology and observation indicates a high sensitivity, models tend to be less sensitive because they generally ignore feedbacks. This is why model predictions tend to be CONSERVATIVE, eg: the last IPCC report predicted an ice free artic summer by ~2080. It's clear from observations since then that it's very likely to be ice free by 2020.
"They do indeed have a pro-global-warming bias. Check out the apologetics on their wiki."
Realclimate have a pro-science bias, check out the science in their articles. M. Mann who founded the site is a world renown climatologist with over 60 papers published in journals such a nature and science. He is also the authour of the much maligned hockey stick. The other contributors on the site are all also well known climatiologist and have numerous publications under their belt, all of them have contributed to the IPCC reports and Mann himself has been a lead authour. Scientists of this caliber do not often waste their time trying to educate the public and it's a pity there isn't more of it on other subjects surrounded by psuedo-science, such as medicine.
Watts on the other hand is a TV weatherman and a pathological liar who's only publication is his DISinformative web site. He is affliated with the lobbyists at the heartland institute which pumps out more high quality bullshit than the dicovery institute (see their icecap site for another example).
IMHO people who support Watts are like creationists, scientifically illiterate and gullible enough to be proud of it.
"You have such faith in the Federal Gov't. I wish I were still as naive as you."
Speaking of being naive, despite what you think government employees are no where near as lazy as the intellect displayed in your post.
"Even Einstein was a social deviant to the point that he had to escape his homeland"
Ummm, Albert was the target of a genocidal regime due to his ethinicty, it had nothing to do with his behaviour, deviant or otherwise.
"Put Christian teaching heavily in place in the schools and mix it with the current economic hell that people are suffering and people will straighten up in twenty years or so."
As someone who went through such a school system in the 60's and 70's I have to say that you don't have a fucking clue what you are talking about.
Yep, according to "Time team" their steel boots got stuck in the mud at Agincourt (like gum boots do), the English ranks were mostly wearing rags as shoes and could move more freely. Longbows were the WMD of the middle ages, especially when you had 10K archers all of whom could fire fast enought to keep 3 arrows in the air at once. Such a volley of arrows flying through the air is said to make a roar that could be heard for miles. As to wether they were effective against armour apparently that depended on what type of metal the amour and arrow heads were made of.
Heh, for a while I thought that "anonymous cowardon" was a new user.
"Make sure that you only provide the view that fits your philosophy."
I gave my source which you obviously found, what more do you want?
"Oooooohhh- you mean the Bible DOESN'T really mention Unicorns??"
The word "unicorn" appears multiple times in the bible in the context of an animal of some sort, in otherwords your post is a fullfilment of the prophecy in your sig.
You need one of these to get a good aproximation.
"Somebody had to create the computer too. So that's just bringing more into the equation. This whole computer simulation thing is the same as everything else - it's just another religion, no matter how you twist it around."
The universe is not simulated, YOU are. That statement is not religious, it is simply the result of carefull observation and ruthless logic. The only magic* computer required is the universe itself and the algorithm it runs is infinitely recursive - your mind simulates the universe that simulated your mind with your brain.
A mind is a mathematical entity that emerges from the interactions of organised matter, you could say it's the byproduct of the universe observing itself. Human minds create a 3D repesentation of the universe and call it "commonly percieved reality".
The bottom line of all this is our minds are incomplete. We will never fully understand ourselves, let alone reality.
magic* - the universe "just is".
"And unicorns don't appear anywhere in the Bible, AFAIK"
* "God brought them out of Egypt; he hath as it were the strength of an unicorn."--Numbers 23:22
* "God brought him forth out of Egypt; he hath as it were the strength of an unicorn."--Numbers 24:8
* "His glory is like the firstling of his bullock, and his horns are like the horns of unicorn: with them he shall push the people together to the ends of the earth."--Deuteronomy 33:17
* "Will the unicorn be willing to serve thee, or abide by thy crib? Canst thou bind the unicorn with his band in the furrow? or will he harrow the valleys after thee? Wilt thou trust him, because his strength is great? or wilt thou leave thy labour to him? Wilt thou believe him, that he will bring home thy seed, and gather it into thy barn?"--Job 39:9-12
* "Save me from the lion's mouth; for thou hast heard me from the horns of unicorn."--Psalm 22:21
* "He maketh them [the cedars of Lebanon] also to skip like a calf; Lebanon and Sirion like a young unicorn."--Psalm 29:6
* "But my horn shalt thou exalt like the horn of the unicorn: I shall be anointed with fresh oil."--Psalm 92:10
* "And the unicorn shall come down with them, and the bullocks with their bulls; and their land shall be soaked with blood, and their dust made fat with fatness."--Isaiah 34:7
Shamelessly cut & paste from God, errr I mean Wikipedia.