Temperatures *have* been flat for 10 years, but that is because temperature increase is not monotonic year-on-year. But if you look at decadal averages you get a different story. Let me guess -- in 2020, you will be saying that the temperature has not increased in the last 10 years, even if the 2010s were warmer than the 2000s were warmer than the 1990s, etc. Just choose the correct length of time, and you will get a "flat" trend.
Besides, while scientists by and large agree that CO2 and temperatures have increased due to human activity, there is no consensus whatsoever on the long term consequences or on effective interventions.
The consensus on warming has been around for over 30 years now. What to do about AGW is a policy problem that is outside of the purvey of science, as is clearly stated in the IPCC reports. The consequences of AGW are poorly understood (also clearly stated). We are running a vast experiment, and the results could be great, benign, or tragic. It is a matter of risk management. So... how do you bet on the stock market? Do you put all your money on short-term options? This is the type of discussion we should be having -- not whether CO2 is plant food or not, which is an obvious politically motivated red herring.
It is amazing that these same canards come up time and time again. Water vapor/does/ dwarf CO2, but because water stays in the air for weeks, (and CO2 1000s of years), a water vapor is a *feedback*. Increase a little CO2, you get some warming, which produces a greater average amount of water vapor. *NOT* the other way around.
Secondly, CO2 *is* a trace gas in the atmosphere. But the amount of warming it causes is an empirical question. By analogy, a drop of snake venom shouldn't harm a human being, right? It's only a small amount, after all.
Make no mistake, AGW is happening, and the counter "arguments" are as vacuous as the two that you just made.
- isn't oil what you want? If you didn't want it, why would you buy it?
If free markets always had the answer, then we would never have a stock-market crash because the market would always be factoring in the long-term.
But we live in a culture of short-term profits, and CEOs and financial institutions don't *need* to factor in long-term risks, because they will have exited the show before the consequences of their actions are felt.
If we restrict the supply of oil, then the market will search of solutions. If we keep plundering, we will do to oil what we did to Dodos; however, there will be no handy alternative food (fuel source) when the shit hits the fan.
In this case, trusting the markets is like driving toward a cliff.
I know Apple is a big bad evil company, but my first thought actually is that this is to cover the angle and protect third party devs, before some patent troll comes along to cover it from this angle too.
If this explanation is true, then the patent lawyers certainly dealt themselves a big hand. Where do we buy futures?
Then kill them all. Fuck them. It's the 21st century. Time for them to fuck off. The world has bigger problems to deal with. Time these fucktards were stopped from holding the rest of us up.
I almost split my spleen laughing at this. You, my friend, are a parody of yourself.
Financial fraud is subjective (as it's used today), do you have any concrete examples that were so widespread they could have caused a financial crisis?
Yes. Read about Brooksley Born. There were other whistle blowers who also brought evidence to bear, but were shut down for interfering in the free markets.
The science behind these issues are inconvenient to certain aspects of liberal ideology,
The biggest liberal blind spot with regards to science, is the absurd quality of the nature-nurture debate -- which challenges the "truth" that liberal political thinking is based on. This has been a research specialty for me. The best book on the topic is Steven Pinkers "The Blank Slate: The modern denial of human nature". If you hunt around academic for criticisms of this book, you will note (hopefully with much amusement), that liberal ideologues make purely political arguments against Pinkers' academic arguments. Another great book on the topic is Matt Ridleys "The Agile Gene", although this book does not directly address the political aspects of the debate.
It is not so much a question of protecting the already-powerful -- that would be a degenerate form of conservationism. And it is not a case of just challenging any new idea. The core and timeless conservative wisdom is that change should be slow and organic, and in particular because the existing institutions of society are carefully arranged to work in ways that are beyond the comprehension of radical reformers.
But if he really thinks that this is where his audience is really coming from, he's woefully out of touch.
It is where *his* audience is coming from, which simply doesn't include you. Make no mistake, the most ignorant republican (or democrat) believes that they are the one dealing in facts, and that everyone else is misguided. For example, all those climate scientists are swayed by funding grants, or involved in some world-government conspiracy. But Andy Watts and co.... those guys know the *facts*.
It seems highly unlikely the current Republican fiscal policy will make the U.S. economy better.
Agreed. Supply-side economics has been an abject failure. True to form, adherents blame the failure not on the application of supply-side economics, but that it has not been applied enough. A tea-party president and congress might be bloody-minded enough to actually pass legislation that would be disastrous for the US economy.
If it doesn't the party could implode like it has so many times before.
I also see this. At a certain point, the public will just switch off as the ever-party-faithful complain that it is really the democrats that caused all the problems by not letting them cut the budget enough, or lowing taxes below third-world standards.
much of economic theory is about as disconnected from real life as the bible is...
Because you know so much more about how economies should run, and so much more about the truth of climate science, and so much more about the profound spiritual truths in the bible.
+ Just because one economist was wrong once does not mean that economics is wrong.
+ Just because one climate scientist once made a mistake does not mean the climate scientists are wrong.
+ Just because someone misinterprets the bible as literal truth does not mean it contains no wisdom.
You sir, should get an education, or start reading some different books.
They don't get lots of money if they are studying things that either 1) don't interest, or 2) don't coincide with the purse-string holders' ideas/beliefs.
I am a scientists, and I study things that don't interest or coincide with the purse-string holders' ideas/beliefs. I suspect that I am not alone amongst the independent minded -- which is what most scientists are.
People who do not understand the arguments that scientists make *invariably* dismiss scientists by attacking their motives. It is a roadblock to any serious discussion on any topic -- just a trite cliche used to protect ones ignorance.
Regulation is what got us in the financial mess to begin with.
Alan Greenspan and co pushed for deregulation in financial markets to the point that even/fraud/ was not investigated, since that would be an inefficiency. "Let the market sort it out." Greenspan even got emergency legislation pushed through congress in order to prevent Brooksley Born from carrying out her federal mandate in investigating fraud in derivative markets. It was *specifically* this policy that enabled the wide-spread fraud that almost brought down the entire world economy in 2008.
But I am sure that you think you know best. Regulation created the financial mess. So sad.
You have just described how laws are created in the first place. You see, you don't need/any/ laws at all, until someone makes an ass of themselves. Then we create a rule "it is illegal to XYZ". Then someone else comes along and takes the narrowest interpretation of the rule and makes an ass of themselves. Then we create a gazillion clarifications about it being illegal to XYZ. The process continues indefinitely.
For example, take what happened with OOXML. The standards process had plenty of rules, but they were not geared up for the specific actions the M$ used to corrupt the process. Well, we could add a few hundred extra rules, in an attempt to stop a future Microsoft from sidelining the process. But that will just force future-microsoft to take a different attack vector. And people trying to do real work end up dealing with all of these rules.
It is harping on details but science is about details.
The commercial production of atlases is business, not science. That someone made a mistake putting an atlas together has nothing to do with the scientific consensus on climate change. The denier argument amounts to: "look, there is uncertainty here, because there's this mistake over here". At this rate, you might think that there were no forest because there is some space between the trees.
Intractable arguments are generally based on people being dishonest about what is really important to them. Climate science dissenters believe that the environment is robust, and that humans really cannot change it. Environmentalists, therefore, are naive control freaks that are going to interfere with the correct way that things should be run, and for no good reason. That is why there is no real discussion of the science -- the deniers really only care enough to say something that sounds good, so that they can hold onto the underlying meme that is so important to them. My understanding of behavioural genetics suggests that there may be biological factors at play. I suspect that you could predict a climate denier from biological parents, but do no better than chance with adoptive parents.
It is easy to tell that one side is full of shit, and the other is trying its best to be really straight-forward. Firstly, one side repeatedly makes previously discounted arguments never, of course, taking into account any information coming from their opponents. Secondly, one side fails to make coherent arguments -- constantly changing their story and shifting goal-posts. Thirdly, one side fails to make scientific arguments at all, instead talking about conspiracies, and impugning the motives of people who spend their lives studying these things.
It really is very straight-forward, when you see that some people are: never wrong, always changing their story, and making personal attacks instead of discussing the underlying issues.
The mechanisms of denial are well documented, and it happens at a group level.
It only appears a non-sequitur, because you are unaware that climate models of arctic change failed to predict the present rate of melting, because they are so *conservative*. Far from being alarmists, climate scientists urge on the side of caution in the materials that they produce, and in particular the IPCC reports.
lol! You are so gullible. I believe that there is at least *one* glacier in the world that is growing. Therefore climate change must be false! And there was also this really cold day last year sometime!
You really think scientists are just idiots, right?
There is an inverse relationship between someone's competence, and how competent they think they are.
An atlas maker that makes a mistake is not scientific discourse. That's just looking for petty errors, and then harping on about them. If only deniers would own up to making mistakes themselves.
In fact that is the give-away that the deniers really are in denial. It is a classic symptom of denial to refuse to acknowledge any deficits in one's own interpretation. Denial proceeds by finding minute details and then making as much noise about them as possible.
It is not GW, it is AGW, as is/clearly/ argued in the scientific literature. There is *no* cogent argument against the scientific argument. The scientific community/would/ change their tune if an argument was made. Somehow, people like you expect scientists to change their minds because atlas makers make a mistake (for example), which is completely irrelevant.
AGW may be slow by the standards of government terms in office, and it may be slow enough to adapt to. But it may not. We are already seeing increases in violent storms and flooding and heat waves, and that costs money and lives.
He is saying this because the climate models are extremely conservative in their predictions. The entire AGW argument isn't contained in a few melting ice-shelves.
Really? Because climate has never, ever, not even once, shifted quickly?
You are misinterpreting something. The arctic melt is proceeding far faster than anybody predicted, because climate science is very *conservative*. People who only "debate" climate science within the public discourse fail to acknowledge just how conservative the science is. So their predictions, consistent with AGW, say X, and we are seeing 2X. And then some scientist says: "looking, the ice is melting far faster then we predicted, we must have been correct." Note that the science is so *conservative* that any poorly understood positive feedback is no counted. So it becomes likely that warming will be greater than the IPCC reports predict.
That may be a little bit too complex to be understood within the public discourse, which focuses on specious arguments and "factoids", and a chronic failure to listen.
Slashdot Mirror
Temperatures *have* been flat for 10 years, but that is because temperature increase is not monotonic year-on-year. But if you look at decadal averages you get a different story. Let me guess -- in 2020, you will be saying that the temperature has not increased in the last 10 years, even if the 2010s were warmer than the 2000s were warmer than the 1990s, etc. Just choose the correct length of time, and you will get a "flat" trend.
lol! And military research into swords has plummeted since the invention of gunpowder! A conspiracy!
Besides, while scientists by and large agree that CO2 and temperatures have increased due to human activity, there is no consensus whatsoever on the long term consequences or on effective interventions.
The consensus on warming has been around for over 30 years now. What to do about AGW is a policy problem that is outside of the purvey of science, as is clearly stated in the IPCC reports. The consequences of AGW are poorly understood (also clearly stated). We are running a vast experiment, and the results could be great, benign, or tragic. It is a matter of risk management. So... how do you bet on the stock market? Do you put all your money on short-term options? This is the type of discussion we should be having -- not whether CO2 is plant food or not, which is an obvious politically motivated red herring.
It is amazing that these same canards come up time and time again. Water vapor /does/ dwarf CO2, but because water stays in the air for weeks, (and CO2 1000s of years), a water vapor is a *feedback*. Increase a little CO2, you get some warming, which produces a greater average amount of water vapor. *NOT* the other way around.
Secondly, CO2 *is* a trace gas in the atmosphere. But the amount of warming it causes is an empirical question. By analogy, a drop of snake venom shouldn't harm a human being, right? It's only a small amount, after all.
Make no mistake, AGW is happening, and the counter "arguments" are as vacuous as the two that you just made.
- isn't oil what you want? If you didn't want it, why would you buy it?
If free markets always had the answer, then we would never have a stock-market crash because the market would always be factoring in the long-term.
But we live in a culture of short-term profits, and CEOs and financial institutions don't *need* to factor in long-term risks, because they will have exited the show before the consequences of their actions are felt.
If we restrict the supply of oil, then the market will search of solutions. If we keep plundering, we will do to oil what we did to Dodos; however, there will be no handy alternative food (fuel source) when the shit hits the fan.
In this case, trusting the markets is like driving toward a cliff.
I know Apple is a big bad evil company, but my first thought actually is that this is to cover the angle and protect third party devs, before some patent troll comes along to cover it from this angle too.
If this explanation is true, then the patent lawyers certainly dealt themselves a big hand. Where do we buy futures?
Then kill them all. Fuck them. It's the 21st century. Time for them to fuck off. The world has bigger problems to deal with. Time these fucktards were stopped from holding the rest of us up.
I almost split my spleen laughing at this. You, my friend, are a parody of yourself.
Financial fraud is subjective (as it's used today), do you have any concrete examples that were so widespread they could have caused a financial crisis?
Yes. Read about Brooksley Born. There were other whistle blowers who also brought evidence to bear, but were shut down for interfering in the free markets.
The science behind these issues are inconvenient to certain aspects of liberal ideology,
The biggest liberal blind spot with regards to science, is the absurd quality of the nature-nurture debate -- which challenges the "truth" that liberal political thinking is based on. This has been a research specialty for me. The best book on the topic is Steven Pinkers "The Blank Slate: The modern denial of human nature". If you hunt around academic for criticisms of this book, you will note (hopefully with much amusement), that liberal ideologues make purely political arguments against Pinkers' academic arguments. Another great book on the topic is Matt Ridleys "The Agile Gene", although this book does not directly address the political aspects of the debate.
It is not so much a question of protecting the already-powerful -- that would be a degenerate form of conservationism. And it is not a case of just challenging any new idea. The core and timeless conservative wisdom is that change should be slow and organic, and in particular because the existing institutions of society are carefully arranged to work in ways that are beyond the comprehension of radical reformers.
But if he really thinks that this is where his audience is really coming from, he's woefully out of touch.
It is where *his* audience is coming from, which simply doesn't include you. Make no mistake, the most ignorant republican (or democrat) believes that they are the one dealing in facts, and that everyone else is misguided. For example, all those climate scientists are swayed by funding grants, or involved in some world-government conspiracy. But Andy Watts and co.... those guys know the *facts*.
It seems highly unlikely the current Republican fiscal policy will make the U.S. economy better.
Agreed. Supply-side economics has been an abject failure. True to form, adherents blame the failure not on the application of supply-side economics, but that it has not been applied enough. A tea-party president and congress might be bloody-minded enough to actually pass legislation that would be disastrous for the US economy.
If it doesn't the party could implode like it has so many times before.
I also see this. At a certain point, the public will just switch off as the ever-party-faithful complain that it is really the democrats that caused all the problems by not letting them cut the budget enough, or lowing taxes below third-world standards.
much of economic theory is about as disconnected from real life as the bible is...
Because you know so much more about how economies should run, and so much more about the truth of climate science, and so much more about the profound spiritual truths in the bible.
+ Just because one economist was wrong once does not mean that economics is wrong.
+ Just because one climate scientist once made a mistake does not mean the climate scientists are wrong.
+ Just because someone misinterprets the bible as literal truth does not mean it contains no wisdom.
You sir, should get an education, or start reading some different books.
They don't get lots of money if they are studying things that either 1) don't interest, or 2) don't coincide with the purse-string holders' ideas/beliefs.
I am a scientists, and I study things that don't interest or coincide with the purse-string holders' ideas/beliefs. I suspect that I am not alone amongst the independent minded -- which is what most scientists are.
People who do not understand the arguments that scientists make *invariably* dismiss scientists by attacking their motives. It is a roadblock to any serious discussion on any topic -- just a trite cliche used to protect ones ignorance.
Regulation is what got us in the financial mess to begin with.
Alan Greenspan and co pushed for deregulation in financial markets to the point that even /fraud/ was not investigated, since that would be an inefficiency. "Let the market sort it out." Greenspan even got emergency legislation pushed through congress in order to prevent Brooksley Born from carrying out her federal mandate in investigating fraud in derivative markets. It was *specifically* this policy that enabled the wide-spread fraud that almost brought down the entire world economy in 2008.
But I am sure that you think you know best. Regulation created the financial mess. So sad.
You have just described how laws are created in the first place. You see, you don't need /any/ laws at all, until someone makes an ass of themselves. Then we create a rule "it is illegal to XYZ". Then someone else comes along and takes the narrowest interpretation of the rule and makes an ass of themselves. Then we create a gazillion clarifications about it being illegal to XYZ. The process continues indefinitely.
For example, take what happened with OOXML. The standards process had plenty of rules, but they were not geared up for the specific actions the M$ used to corrupt the process. Well, we could add a few hundred extra rules, in an attempt to stop a future Microsoft from sidelining the process. But that will just force future-microsoft to take a different attack vector. And people trying to do real work end up dealing with all of these rules.
Fail, you are confusing weather with climate, a common fallacy. Try again.
LoL! You really think you "checkmated" me there don't you.
One storm is weather. A global trend of increasing storm events over years is climate.
Care to play again?
It is harping on details but science is about details.
The commercial production of atlases is business, not science. That someone made a mistake putting an atlas together has nothing to do with the scientific consensus on climate change. The denier argument amounts to: "look, there is uncertainty here, because there's this mistake over here". At this rate, you might think that there were no forest because there is some space between the trees.
But whatever. You know best, right?.
Intractable arguments are generally based on people being dishonest about what is really important to them. Climate science dissenters believe that the environment is robust, and that humans really cannot change it. Environmentalists, therefore, are naive control freaks that are going to interfere with the correct way that things should be run, and for no good reason. That is why there is no real discussion of the science -- the deniers really only care enough to say something that sounds good, so that they can hold onto the underlying meme that is so important to them. My understanding of behavioural genetics suggests that there may be biological factors at play. I suspect that you could predict a climate denier from biological parents, but do no better than chance with adoptive parents.
Both sides have their fair share of bullshit.
It is easy to tell that one side is full of shit, and the other is trying its best to be really straight-forward. Firstly, one side repeatedly makes previously discounted arguments never, of course, taking into account any information coming from their opponents. Secondly, one side fails to make coherent arguments -- constantly changing their story and shifting goal-posts. Thirdly, one side fails to make scientific arguments at all, instead talking about conspiracies, and impugning the motives of people who spend their lives studying these things.
It really is very straight-forward, when you see that some people are: never wrong, always changing their story, and making personal attacks instead of discussing the underlying issues.
The mechanisms of denial are well documented, and it happens at a group level.
It only appears a non-sequitur, because you are unaware that climate models of arctic change failed to predict the present rate of melting, because they are so *conservative*. Far from being alarmists, climate scientists urge on the side of caution in the materials that they produce, and in particular the IPCC reports.
lol! You are so gullible. I believe that there is at least *one* glacier in the world that is growing. Therefore climate change must be false! And there was also this really cold day last year sometime!
You really think scientists are just idiots, right?
There is an inverse relationship between someone's competence, and how competent they think they are.
An atlas maker that makes a mistake is not scientific discourse. That's just looking for petty errors, and then harping on about them. If only deniers would own up to making mistakes themselves.
/clearly/ argued in the scientific literature. There is *no* cogent argument against the scientific argument. The scientific community /would/ change their tune if an argument was made. Somehow, people like you expect scientists to change their minds because atlas makers make a mistake (for example), which is completely irrelevant.
In fact that is the give-away that the deniers really are in denial. It is a classic symptom of denial to refuse to acknowledge any deficits in one's own interpretation. Denial proceeds by finding minute details and then making as much noise about them as possible.
It is not GW, it is AGW, as is
AGW may be slow by the standards of government terms in office, and it may be slow enough to adapt to. But it may not. We are already seeing increases in violent storms and flooding and heat waves, and that costs money and lives.
Why?
He is saying this because the climate models are extremely conservative in their predictions. The entire AGW argument isn't contained in a few melting ice-shelves.
Really? Because climate has never, ever, not even once, shifted quickly?
You are misinterpreting something. The arctic melt is proceeding far faster than anybody predicted, because climate science is very *conservative*. People who only "debate" climate science within the public discourse fail to acknowledge just how conservative the science is. So their predictions, consistent with AGW, say X, and we are seeing 2X. And then some scientist says: "looking, the ice is melting far faster then we predicted, we must have been correct." Note that the science is so *conservative* that any poorly understood positive feedback is no counted. So it becomes likely that warming will be greater than the IPCC reports predict.
That may be a little bit too complex to be understood within the public discourse, which focuses on specious arguments and "factoids", and a chronic failure to listen.