And yet, Monbiot earlier this year, or late last year, called out the very scientists who are the main proponents of AGW for their shoddy science. Hence the danger of appeals to authority, whatever authority Monbiot could be said to have on the subject.
No no, you have it backwards. You cannot ever prove a theory beyond doubt, because all it takes is one counterexample to upend the theory. For example, one of the most successful sets of laws ever devised was Newton's laws of mechanics. They succeeded, and still do for that matter, in accurately describing the motion of objects as we ordinarily observe them. There was just one niggling problem: when we observed Mercury closely enough, it was found that indeed the laws of Newton did not explain Mercury's motion. And thus the theory was disproved. There were actually a number of other things that were adding up against Newton's laws as well, but that was the last straw. But until Einstein was able to provide a replacement theory that better described the motion, and equally described the other observable motions, we didn't have a replacement that was better than Newton.
So the trick is to disprove the current theory, and then ideally to be able to offer a better in its place.
I was attempting to break down the major elements of the AGW claim, and order them such that proving the progression proves the hypothesis. You are welcome to submit a different set of claims and breakdown.
So what you are arguing then is that when this same branch of science (climatology) was arguing in the mid-1970s that we were about to enter an ice age, then we should have been pumping more CO2 into the atmosphere, because Science?
On what evidence do you base the claim that the MWP was regional? China also reported conditions consistent with higher than normal temperatures, and my understanding is that the proxies show evidence of the MWP in central Asia and in southern Africa as well.
I also am not a believer in Anthropogenic Global Warming. I'm not convinced one way or the other. I suspect that sufficient evidence to reach a reasonable conclusion exists. I doubt we could "prove beyond a reasonable doubt" one way or the other -- we seem to understand too little still -- but we could probably make a fairly convincing statement. Unfortunately, bad political motivations on both sides (environmental extremism on one side, and drill, baby, drill [for lack of a better name] on the other side) for the evidence to be clearly and accurately portrayed. Most [vocal] players in this space are partisans and not scientists (even if they are "scientists" if they are partisans then they are not doing "science")
Actually, that's a fairly good summation of my position as well, as it happens.
But, I have a rough explanation of the answer to one of your questions.
> How, specifically, do we know this?
Those graphs of global mean temperature that you've seen bandied about? Well, the temperature data come from a variety of sources.
We have temperature data in some areas that go back to 1850-1880. The number of weather stations and the accuracy of the measurements have improved in the last 160 years, but we have direct measurements for this period. This is called the "instrumental period." It is probably pretty safe to assume that, for measurements taken from the same weather station, the data are sufficiently accurate measurements of temperature at that station.
Excellent. I have a few questions, then. What is the accuracy of the various thermometers? My understanding is that they are accurate to within anywhere from one degree to around five degrees celsius. Given that the changes hypothesized by the AGW crew are on the order of a degree or two celsius per century, are these thermometers even accurate enough to measure the temperature to the precision needed, within a reasonable margin of error? Moreover, my understanding is that attempts to survey the surface temperature stations have found that the records are often not well kept. For example, I have seen a report on a station in, IIRC, Australia, where the station was moved from a remote location to an airport, but the station ID wasn't changed. Given that the airport would be necessarily hotter than the remoter area (because of albedo from the concrete and such), it seems that this would make that station unreliable. Further, it's my understanding that the number of surface stations has been dropping, and moving towards the coast and inhabited areas, for the last fifty years. Finally, it's my understanding that many of the corrections introduced to remove the biases for such things have had the impact of making the temperature records consistently climb, even when the station has changed neither its location nor its equipment over time. These things make me rather suspicious that the temperature measured is reliable enough and accurate enough, and the corrections applied reasonably enough, to make any firm conclusion. (And note that this is just about the particular stations; I'm not addressing at the point the idea of how we go from that to a concept of global average temperature.)
Any records that you see from before 1850-1880 are proxies. We have found several data sources that we have data for (or can measure today) that appear to be reasonable proxies for temperature in an area. Not being a climate scientist or expert in this area, I can't tell you whether they are highly accurate proxies or not. Maybe somebody else can weigh in on that. I'm not saying that they are not accurate. I have no information, and I haven't seen any significant evidence one way or the other.
According to Wikipedia, sources such as ice cores, tree-ring widths, borehole temperatures and others are providing proxy temperatu
You restated my point 4, that the warming will cause catastrophic effects. You are making an assumption that I understand nothing about this. That's as good a start as any, and I won't correct you. I only ask that you convince me that catastrophic AGW is correct, or at least holds a reasonably good chance of being correct. I even gave you the list of what you'd have to convince me of already broken out. All you have to do is explain the hypothesis and present the evidence and answer questions. "Shut up," which is the meat of your response, is not a useful substitute.
If the catastrophic AGW hypothesis is correct, all of these must be true, in order (that is, falsifying any earlier point falsifies all later points from the point of view of the theory):
The temperature of the earth is warming over time.
The amount of this warming is unprecedented.
The warming will continue past the point where the earth's feedback mechanisms can correct it.
The warming will cause catastrophic impacts to life on earth, particularly humans.
The warming is caused by human activity, if not entirely, then mostly.
If the first is false, then there is no global warming. If the second is false, there is no way to prove the third, because we would have examples of the warming going past this point and then correcting. If the third is false, then we need take no action. If the fourth is false, then we need take no action. If the fifth is false, then any action we could take would likely be meaningless.
The scientific method being what it is, and with the hypothesis claimed to be proven beyond reasonable doubt, then there must be significant evidence and reasonable argument to draw each of these conclusions. I haven't seen it, and I've been looking for a while. Normally, the "argument" rapidly devolves into name calling. But I'm willing to try, and so I have some questions, starting with the first point:
What is the optimum temperature (or range) of the Earth?
When has it been at that temperature in the past?
Has it ever been outside that temperature in the past?
How, specifically, do we know this?
In particular, how does one define the temperature of the Earth, and how does then measure that?
Science is a human activity. Biases and prejudices and agendas are a part of that, and always have been. The beauty of science is that the method is eventually self-correcting.
But it is reasonable to say, I don't agree with this stupid law, to violate it if that seems appropriate at the time, and then to take whatever punishment the law metes out. Just because something is passed by the legislature, that does not make it right or just, even if it is approved by the President and the Supreme Court (insert relevant institutions as needed for countries other than the US). And it is the duty of all citizens to ignore unjust laws, and to refuse to punish people charged under unjust laws if you are on the jury. Citizens are part of the checks and balances.
If it's not about rights, then why is Adobe suing Apple to allow Flash?
Because Apple created a product that gave Apple a competitive and commercially exploitable advantage, and Adobe (having failed to get Apple to share in the goodies voluntarily) wants the courts to step in and give Adobe access to the competitive advantage Apple created, rather than creating their own. Adobe could have chosen — could still choose — to make the Flash IDE into a tool for exporting either SWF or HTML5/CSS3/JScript/etc, and in the process Adobe would make a huge amount of money, if their tools are as good as people keep saying they are. But that's risky, and Adobe might fail to make a good enough product to get that market. So instead, they're rent seeking, looking for government help to compel Apple to let Adobe in on the profits.
Maybe I'm just misunderstanding your point, but a "right" is not a "well-established social norm". A right is a thing you can do that compels no one else to do anything, nor prevents them from exercising their own rights of the same kind. Your right to use your property any way you like doesn't prevent me from doing the same with my property. In other words, a right is something for which you cannot justly be punished. It is one of the four controls of societal interaction, along with a privilege (which you are granted immunity from punishment for, even if it creates an obligation on someone else or in some way infringes another's rights), a duty (which you can be justly punished for not doing) and a prohibition (which you may not do without facing at least the risk of punishment).
Not true. They give you crash reports, instrumentation output and a few other things, depending on the problem they find. They don't do the debugging themselves, but they do give you lots of information to work with.
The part that failed was the remote controll shutoff! There should be comment moderations for "ignorant" and "foolish." This fits the former. My understanding (from a friend's husband who is a deep-water BOP specialist) is that there was a failure of the concrete plug, followed by a failure of the BOP (speculation being that the failure of the concrete plug damaged the BOP's control wires). Such a double-failure has never happened before. There is also a posibility that there was a third failure, and that the reason that the BOP crimped the line, instead of cutting it, was that it just so happened that the 1 out of 30 feet that was in front of the BOP when they finally did get it to activate was a joint, where the pipe lengths are bolted together. This is much thicker than the rest of the pipe, and it's possible that the BOP activated correctly but couldn't cut through the pipe at that point.
Risk mitigation does not mean removing every possibility of foreseen and unforeseen failure. They did a lot of work on ways to prevent leaks. Black swans - unforeseen collections of forces that overwhelm all systems - happen in every realm of life, which is why resiliency is as much or more important than prevention. And the systems are obviously fairly resilient, considering how quickly they are coming up with solutions to unforeseeable events in very difficult operational conditions.
Because if they did that, they would be losing money on hosting apps, rather than breaking even, or making a slight profit. They are trying to maximize their profit (total, devices + software residuals), and obviously they have made the determination that these are the price levels that make that happen.
So let's say that I create a new, awesome format for video playback that just blows everything else out of the water. Does every platform vendor have an obligation to support my format? If your answer is dependent on the prevalence of the format, how prevalent does it have to be? It seems to me that it's within Apple's rights to refuse to support Flash, and it is within customers' rights to decide whether or not they will then buy the devices.
Slashdot Mirror
Dude, you seriously do not know what ad hominem means. You are, however, quite immune to the irony of then using it so broadly.
And yet, Monbiot earlier this year, or late last year, called out the very scientists who are the main proponents of AGW for their shoddy science. Hence the danger of appeals to authority, whatever authority Monbiot could be said to have on the subject.
No no, you have it backwards. You cannot ever prove a theory beyond doubt, because all it takes is one counterexample to upend the theory. For example, one of the most successful sets of laws ever devised was Newton's laws of mechanics. They succeeded, and still do for that matter, in accurately describing the motion of objects as we ordinarily observe them. There was just one niggling problem: when we observed Mercury closely enough, it was found that indeed the laws of Newton did not explain Mercury's motion. And thus the theory was disproved. There were actually a number of other things that were adding up against Newton's laws as well, but that was the last straw. But until Einstein was able to provide a replacement theory that better described the motion, and equally described the other observable motions, we didn't have a replacement that was better than Newton.
So the trick is to disprove the current theory, and then ideally to be able to offer a better in its place.
I was attempting to break down the major elements of the AGW claim, and order them such that proving the progression proves the hypothesis. You are welcome to submit a different set of claims and breakdown.
So what you are arguing then is that when this same branch of science (climatology) was arguing in the mid-1970s that we were about to enter an ice age, then we should have been pumping more CO2 into the atmosphere, because Science?
On what evidence do you base the claim that the MWP was regional? China also reported conditions consistent with higher than normal temperatures, and my understanding is that the proxies show evidence of the MWP in central Asia and in southern Africa as well.
First, thanks for the thoughtful response.
I'm not a climate scientist.
I also am not a believer in Anthropogenic Global Warming. I'm not convinced one way or the other. I suspect that sufficient evidence to reach a reasonable conclusion exists. I doubt we could "prove beyond a reasonable doubt" one way or the other -- we seem to understand too little still -- but we could probably make a fairly convincing statement. Unfortunately, bad political motivations on both sides (environmental extremism on one side, and drill, baby, drill [for lack of a better name] on the other side) for the evidence to be clearly and accurately portrayed. Most [vocal] players in this space are partisans and not scientists (even if they are "scientists" if they are partisans then they are not doing "science")
Actually, that's a fairly good summation of my position as well, as it happens.
But, I have a rough explanation of the answer to one of your questions.
> How, specifically, do we know this?
Those graphs of global mean temperature that you've seen bandied about? Well, the temperature data come from a variety of sources.
We have temperature data in some areas that go back to 1850-1880. The number of weather stations and the accuracy of the measurements have improved in the last 160 years, but we have direct measurements for this period. This is called the "instrumental period." It is probably pretty safe to assume that, for measurements taken from the same weather station, the data are sufficiently accurate measurements of temperature at that station.
Excellent. I have a few questions, then. What is the accuracy of the various thermometers? My understanding is that they are accurate to within anywhere from one degree to around five degrees celsius. Given that the changes hypothesized by the AGW crew are on the order of a degree or two celsius per century, are these thermometers even accurate enough to measure the temperature to the precision needed, within a reasonable margin of error? Moreover, my understanding is that attempts to survey the surface temperature stations have found that the records are often not well kept. For example, I have seen a report on a station in, IIRC, Australia, where the station was moved from a remote location to an airport, but the station ID wasn't changed. Given that the airport would be necessarily hotter than the remoter area (because of albedo from the concrete and such), it seems that this would make that station unreliable. Further, it's my understanding that the number of surface stations has been dropping, and moving towards the coast and inhabited areas, for the last fifty years. Finally, it's my understanding that many of the corrections introduced to remove the biases for such things have had the impact of making the temperature records consistently climb, even when the station has changed neither its location nor its equipment over time. These things make me rather suspicious that the temperature measured is reliable enough and accurate enough, and the corrections applied reasonably enough, to make any firm conclusion. (And note that this is just about the particular stations; I'm not addressing at the point the idea of how we go from that to a concept of global average temperature.)
Any records that you see from before 1850-1880 are proxies. We have found several data sources that we have data for (or can measure today) that appear to be reasonable proxies for temperature in an area. Not being a climate scientist or expert in this area, I can't tell you whether they are highly accurate proxies or not. Maybe somebody else can weigh in on that. I'm not saying that they are not accurate. I have no information, and I haven't seen any significant evidence one way or the other.
According to Wikipedia, sources such as ice cores, tree-ring widths, borehole temperatures and others are providing proxy temperatu
citation needed
You restated my point 4, that the warming will cause catastrophic effects. You are making an assumption that I understand nothing about this. That's as good a start as any, and I won't correct you. I only ask that you convince me that catastrophic AGW is correct, or at least holds a reasonably good chance of being correct. I even gave you the list of what you'd have to convince me of already broken out. All you have to do is explain the hypothesis and present the evidence and answer questions. "Shut up," which is the meat of your response, is not a useful substitute.
If the catastrophic AGW hypothesis is correct, all of these must be true, in order (that is, falsifying any earlier point falsifies all later points from the point of view of the theory):
If the first is false, then there is no global warming. If the second is false, there is no way to prove the third, because we would have examples of the warming going past this point and then correcting. If the third is false, then we need take no action. If the fourth is false, then we need take no action. If the fifth is false, then any action we could take would likely be meaningless.
The scientific method being what it is, and with the hypothesis claimed to be proven beyond reasonable doubt, then there must be significant evidence and reasonable argument to draw each of these conclusions. I haven't seen it, and I've been looking for a while. Normally, the "argument" rapidly devolves into name calling. But I'm willing to try, and so I have some questions, starting with the first point:
What is the optimum temperature (or range) of the Earth?
When has it been at that temperature in the past?
Has it ever been outside that temperature in the past?
How, specifically, do we know this?
In particular, how does one define the temperature of the Earth, and how does then measure that?
Science is a human activity. Biases and prejudices and agendas are a part of that, and always have been. The beauty of science is that the method is eventually self-correcting.
And 7 problems with counting.
At least he got to see the world anew each day.
But it is reasonable to say, I don't agree with this stupid law, to violate it if that seems appropriate at the time, and then to take whatever punishment the law metes out. Just because something is passed by the legislature, that does not make it right or just, even if it is approved by the President and the Supreme Court (insert relevant institutions as needed for countries other than the US). And it is the duty of all citizens to ignore unjust laws, and to refuse to punish people charged under unjust laws if you are on the jury. Citizens are part of the checks and balances.
If it's not about rights, then why is Adobe suing Apple to allow Flash?
Because Apple created a product that gave Apple a competitive and commercially exploitable advantage, and Adobe (having failed to get Apple to share in the goodies voluntarily) wants the courts to step in and give Adobe access to the competitive advantage Apple created, rather than creating their own. Adobe could have chosen — could still choose — to make the Flash IDE into a tool for exporting either SWF or HTML5/CSS3/JScript/etc, and in the process Adobe would make a huge amount of money, if their tools are as good as people keep saying they are. But that's risky, and Adobe might fail to make a good enough product to get that market. So instead, they're rent seeking, looking for government help to compel Apple to let Adobe in on the profits.
Maybe I'm just misunderstanding your point, but a "right" is not a "well-established social norm". A right is a thing you can do that compels no one else to do anything, nor prevents them from exercising their own rights of the same kind. Your right to use your property any way you like doesn't prevent me from doing the same with my property. In other words, a right is something for which you cannot justly be punished. It is one of the four controls of societal interaction, along with a privilege (which you are granted immunity from punishment for, even if it creates an obligation on someone else or in some way infringes another's rights), a duty (which you can be justly punished for not doing) and a prohibition (which you may not do without facing at least the risk of punishment).
is Ian's discussion of creativity in programming, and whether platform limitations enhance or retard that creativity, and in what ways.
Heh. Would I get an achievement for that one?
That depends on if you interpret "hypertext" as motion towards, in which case the answer is no, or not, in which case the answer is yes.
You can get 64 Gb flash drives on newegg for less than $150. I remember when I bought a gigabox that was 5 gig for more than that.
You young whippersnapper! At my first job, we spent $60,000 to get our Multimax up to 1GB of disk. Get offa my lawn!
Not true. They give you crash reports, instrumentation output and a few other things, depending on the problem they find. They don't do the debugging themselves, but they do give you lots of information to work with.
In perspective, it's not so bad. Well, it's still bad, but it's not as bad as the raw numbers make it look.
The part that failed was the remote controll shutoff! There should be comment moderations for "ignorant" and "foolish." This fits the former. My understanding (from a friend's husband who is a deep-water BOP specialist) is that there was a failure of the concrete plug, followed by a failure of the BOP (speculation being that the failure of the concrete plug damaged the BOP's control wires). Such a double-failure has never happened before. There is also a posibility that there was a third failure, and that the reason that the BOP crimped the line, instead of cutting it, was that it just so happened that the 1 out of 30 feet that was in front of the BOP when they finally did get it to activate was a joint, where the pipe lengths are bolted together. This is much thicker than the rest of the pipe, and it's possible that the BOP activated correctly but couldn't cut through the pipe at that point.
Risk mitigation does not mean removing every possibility of foreseen and unforeseen failure. They did a lot of work on ways to prevent leaks. Black swans - unforeseen collections of forces that overwhelm all systems - happen in every realm of life, which is why resiliency is as much or more important than prevention. And the systems are obviously fairly resilient, considering how quickly they are coming up with solutions to unforeseeable events in very difficult operational conditions.
So why not sell the apps without a cut?
Because if they did that, they would be losing money on hosting apps, rather than breaking even, or making a slight profit. They are trying to maximize their profit (total, devices + software residuals), and obviously they have made the determination that these are the price levels that make that happen.
So let's say that I create a new, awesome format for video playback that just blows everything else out of the water. Does every platform vendor have an obligation to support my format? If your answer is dependent on the prevalence of the format, how prevalent does it have to be? It seems to me that it's within Apple's rights to refuse to support Flash, and it is within customers' rights to decide whether or not they will then buy the devices.