I hate to break it to you but all programming is highly specialized. Climatology is in no way special in this regard.
Neither do programmers have to understand the abstract model of the program to write it or evaluate it. The vast majority of professional programmers do not understand the abstract model of the code they create. You do not have to be a high-level accountant to write corporate accounting software and you don't have to be a doctor to write medical software. Most programmers spend most of their time implementing models created by non-programmers from fields of which the programmers have no detailed knowledge.
Does that mean that programmers can't spot crappy code just because they don't understand the details of the model? No, it does not. Most software errors don't arise from the model but from sloppy practices in the management of the software project itself. An experienced programmer doesn't even have to know the language of project to see that it's creation and maintenance was incompetently handled.
You don't have to be a climatologist to know that the CRU software was utter crap that would produce sound outputs only by divine intervention. For any experienced programmer, it was immediately obvious that it was a great reeking gob of amateur coding with no structure, no plan and no standards. In my experience, most scientific software is like the CRU software. It evolves in an ad hoc manner over many years with no governing organizational structure.
Commercial software developers have created a wide range of tools and procedures to manage large, vital projects. In the main, scientist use none of these tools and most of them appear unaware they even exist much less why and when they are needed. As a result most scientific software project management is completely amateurish. If most scientific software were written for commercial applications, the developers would be sued or imprisoned for fraud.
Scientist tend to be arrogant and dismissive of the work of others especially those who work in the commercial sector. You believe that because you understand climatology that you therefore understand all the tools you are using. Well you don't. You think that because no one can understand your abstract model that therefore they cannot find significant errors in your code. Well, they can. You think we should reengineer our entire civilization based on your unquestioned and unexamined computerized ivory tower auguries.
Well, we won't.
Your just going to have to suck it up and withstand the at least the same scrutiny we give important commercial software.
Well, its a common trope that anyone who disagrees with a leftist is a rightwing ideolouges.
The basic problem here is that politicians gain power when people are afraid of something and they turn to the state for protection.
Since WWII, the right has specialized in making people afraid of external enemies and criminals. When people fear external attack or crime, they vote for the right.
Since the late 60's, the left has specialized in making people afraid of busines and technology. When people fear the economically productive and technology, they vote left.
Tens of millions of people today are absolutely convinced they are being poisened, irraidated, genetically modified etc by evil corporations and that there only hope to survive lays in investing leftist with greater and greater amounts of state power.
Just as we can with some justice accuse those on the right of magnifing fears about terrorism, we can accuse those on the left of magnifying fears about technology and the businesses that create it. They have a powerful motive to do so regardless of whether the threat is real or not.
I think we should keep that in mind when people start impunging motives.
Everything you say is true however a large number of these "meta" studies are actually done by sociologist and other "soft" scientist who are in the school of liberals arts which is the dominated literally 9 to 1 by extreme leftist. A recent poll of academics found that 17.4% of American academics in the liberal-arts self-identified as marxist. These people are often quoted as "experts" and "researchers" in the media even if they are commenting on matters far outside their field.
With in the technical fields (fields controlled ulitmately by perfomance instead of popularity) like engineering, the science and business, there almost an even balance between left and right. However, academics in all fields are statistically a good bit to the left of their counterparts in non-academic world.
My main point was to remind people that there are more motives for the deceptions oneself and others than just profit motive. More importantly, motives are illrelevent to the ultimate validity of science.
(1) Based on the standard rules of statistical acceptance, a study only has to reach requires a 95% confidence level. That means that 1 in every 20 identical studies will produce a false positive merely by chance. When you have an area of study in which thousands of studies have been done over decades you end up with hundreds of studies reporting positive results just by chance.
(2) Statistical meta analysis of studies is largely nonsense unless your talking about a field in which nearly identical studies are done over and over again. Usually, when these meta studies hit the media you find they they equally weight to every study regardless of presumed rigor of the studies. In this case, the gold standard is the Swedish study that followed tens of thousands of people over decades. How to you compare that to a study that just data mined a few hundred medical records?
(3) Exposure to all types of radio range radiation has increased by literally millions of times since WWII. We know spend something close to 3% of our entire energy budget generating radio signals. Yet, in the last 50+ years, cancers rates have not increased and indeed most likely have fallen (especially when you exclude cigarette smoking.
(4) A a sociological matter, just because a study is not linked to an industry does not mean that the researchers or the people funding them are some how impartial or operating from nobel motives. A lot of people outside of industry have both inherent biases as well as professional and monetary incentive to distort science. Academic today tilt strongly to the left side of the political spectrum and many believe in the post modernist concept that every one has a moral obligation to use whatever power they have, such as that held by respected scientist, to advance their political beliefs. They are inherently hostile to the economically productive. Politicians have incentives to create crises to protect voters from. Trial lawyers stand to make hundreds of millions on law suits and they fund "studies" to contaminate the jury pool. Even competing industries can use studies to undermine competitors.
We should remember that science has its reputation because it produces the same answer regardless of the individual motives of the people who create it. When someone begins the question the motives of researchers, they are making an implicit statement that they have no science to back their position up and that they must instead fall back to human factors. If you have solid science, then you don't need to smear people's motives and call their integrity into question.
Based on that data, a 50% increase would raise one's theoretical high-end risk of developing a tumor in the head from 0.003% per year to 0.0045% per year.
This translates into an effectively zero risk. The risk is so low that an individual couldn't really justify spending any time or money trying to lower it further.
We've got to learn that even though our advancing technology allows us to measure smaller and smaller risk, that doesn't mean that "something has to be done!" for every risk we can measure.
In the late 1800's and early 1900's, the free-market economies of the West showed an alarming tendency to reward people based on their individual merit and notbased on who gave birth to them. People from the lower classes and non-European races kept bubbling up the economic and social ladder in historically unprecedented numbers. Something had to be done.
Fortunately, people claiming to be scientist rode to the rescue. They claimed to demonstrate that certain groups of people inherently lacked the mental faculties to function as free citizens. As such, restrictions on their political and economic freedoms were perfectly justified.
Today, we see that the free-market of ideas has not rewarded a certain segment of the political spectrum in the manner it once did. The masses no longer kowtow to a intellectual elite as they did in the mid-20th century. Something had to be done.
Now we see a large number of supposed scientist. linguist, political scientist and journalist producing works that explain that that modern Leftist fail in the political marketplace not because their archaic ideas no longer work but rather because the rest of the population is so stupid and easily led.
The point of these works isn't to understand how people think but rather to reinforce the belief in intellectual superiority on which modern Leftism rest. I predict they will end up on the ash heap of embarrassments to science just as the works of the previous century's bigots did.
The sad truth is that since the 60's, the Left has ideologically advocated taking away an individual's right to choose in every facet of our lives except in matters pertaining to sex.
By freedom of choice, I mean that the legal authority to make decisions rest solely with the individual. If an individual can as a practical matter chose between actions A or B without the threat of punishment by the state, then we can say that individual possess freedom of choice in that circumstance. If we look at Leftist policy recommendations in every area of life except sex, we find they believe that the state should make decisions instead of the individual.
Prior to the 1960s, one could at least rely on the Left to protect free speech. Yet, since then, the Left has waged a war on all speech, unrelated to sex, that they disapprove of. They protect speech relating to sex rigorously but feel no qualms about advocating censoring depictions of violence, the speech of corporations or non-leftist speech on public airways. Leftist dominated universities have become the only public places in America where an individual can be actively penalized for speech that isn't incitement.
Let's look at major policy areas and see if Leftists advocate individual choice: Health care? Nope. Social security? Nope. Employment? Nope. Crime? Nope. Housing? Nope. Transportation? Nope. Environment? Nope. Education? Big Nope. Communications? Nope. Economics in general? Nope.
Leftist often mistake state benevolence with individual choice. They believe that if the state gives an individual some material resource or promises to treat them "fairly" then that offsets all losses of individual choice. It doesn't.
I to have noticed that the computer industry seems to hold a higher proportion of Libertarians than other fields. Many factors go into people's political choices but I think the fact that the high number of self-employed, entrepreneurial people in the computer field means that far more of them run into the many restrictions on individual choice than people do in other fields. When a person pours everything they have into creating something knew having some politician wander by and claim they know better want needs to be done rankles to say the least.
Something important that I think many have missed.
Since the mechanism by which the solar cycles influence earths climate is not known and has really only been recognized in the last 5 years or so, none of the major models of climate change account for solar cycles' effect on the warming of the past 150 years. Instead, in order to get the models to fit the data, all warming due to solar forcing has been assigned to anthrogenic gases. This means that the effect of anthrogenic gasses may have been significantly exaggerated.
The impact of this exaggeration grows the further out the models try to predict. Over the course of a few years or a decade, it might be trivial. Over the course of a century it will be significant. Assuming that just 10%-30% of the warming we have seen in the last 30 years comes from unknown solar forcing knocks global warming predictions out of the catastrophic range and down into the minor annoyance/net benefit range.
Since we lack any means of proving Anthrogenic Global Warming false, we can't really prove it true (K. Popper). Instead, we have fallen back on claiming that the source of change must be Anthrogenic because we can't find any other mechanism. Finding a previously unknown source of warming undermines this logical inference.
I find it disturbing how quick many people resort to coercion to accomplish their goals. CFLs so clearly out perform incandescents that their eventual triumph in the free market is assured. Why do we need to hold a gun to people's head to drive their adoption? Will the use of threats of state power really accelerate the rate of adoption enough to justify it?
Moreover, the coercive policy will almost certainly fail in its goal of reducing CO2 emissions. Since it takes more energy to construct CFLs, forcing their adoption will generate more CO2 emissions in the short run. History has shown that making a technology more efficient causes people to consume more of it usually to the point that the increased usage offsets the efficiency gains. Contemporary incandescent bulbs are orders of magnitude more efficient than Edison's bulbs yet we certainly do not use less electricity per capita for lighting. I doubt that CFLs will change this fundamental dynamic.
Can we really justify imposing fines or even imprisoning people to enforce a policy that will almost certainly fail and would provide only modest benefit even if it worked perfectly?
Say this with me: There is no such single thing as "oil".
The earth's crust contains gigatons of interred carbon compounds, ranging in form from gaseous to crystalline solid. We can turn any carbon compound into any other. Its just a matter of cost. We routinely extract and refine substances today that 50 years ago no one would have classified as usable oil. We are not going to run out organic compounds anytime soon and so we will not ever reach any "practical" limit on the availability of something loosely defined as oil.
More importantly, oil wasn't a natural resource 150 years ago, what makes you think it will be one 150 years in the future? Do you burn a lot wood, coal or whale blubber in your car? Heck, 120 years ago, aluminum was precious metal, now we make soda cans out of it. We will never exhaust oil because long before we hit any theoretical limit on "oil" supplies we will have moved on to other more efficient and convenient energy sources just as we did with wood, coal and whale blubber.
" Sure beats those rolling green hills, wildlife and clear rivers, doesn't it?" It certainly does. Absent technology, those rolling green hills won't provide you with reliable food, the wildlife will kill you and the clear rivers seethes with parasites. Natures fine on TV but it sucks to be right in the middle of it. Of course, there is also the fact that as we distance ourselves from nature with our technology we don't have impact the natrual world as hard. Energy intensive agriculture has become so effecient that it is using less and less land to produce more and more food. In north America and Europe, significant amounts of agricultural land are reverting back to the wild. In a hundred years we might have nothing but cities with food factories surrounded by vast natural areas.
You simply do not understand how technology creates and uses resources so it is easy for people to frighten you with simplistic arguments. Hysteria driven political interventions poise a far greater danger than any possibility of resource exhaustion.
The idea that we can deplete "natural" resources comes from a profound misunderstanding of such resources come into being. Human create them, they do not exist in nature. Oil was not a "natural" resource 120 years ago and I very much doubt it will be one a 100 years for now. In fact, I give it about 30 years max. There is no such thing as "unsustainable" consumption. Over the whole of human history we have created more and more resources. There is no reason to assume that this process will continue. The idea we will run out of resources without some kind of state control and rationing is merely an academic conceit of people with no understanding of the way our civilization creates and uses its technology. It has no empirical basis. People have been making predictions of resource exhaustion since the time of Malthus and they have ALL been wrong.
You remind me of the those back in the 70's enthrall to Paul Ehrlich and his concept of the population bomb. They were convinced that if they didn't take drastic action, like cutting off the people of starve, then the whole planet was doomed. As it turned out population control was minor problem easily handled automatically by raising standards of living, exactly the opposite tack advocated by Ehrlich et al. Places that did buy into the whole idea, like China, may have done themselves serious harm.
I see nothing but a history of failed predictions and nothing that suggest that the means and methods that have carried us to this point will suddenly fail.
People have been confidently predicting the exhaustion of oil supplies since literally 1867, shortly after the first modern oil well was drilled. The problem is that people think of oil and all other "natural" resources as being some discrete substance that basically lays in large natural barrels underground and that when you reach the bottom of the barrel you run out of resource. It doesn't work that way.
There is no such thing as a "natural" resource (unless you want to count oxygen). Everything else is an artificial resource created by human action. The amount of resource doesn't depend on amount of any particular substance in the earth's makeup but rather on the technology we bring to bear on any particular problem. People keep predicting the exhaustion of oil because they keep thinking that whatever and where ever we extracted oil at the time represented our ability to extract oil for the foreseeable future. For over a 100 years they have been constantly wrong. We extract and use substances today that people just a few decades ago wouldn't even have thought of as usable oil.
We will never run out of any resource because we can just create more just as we have always done.
Well, the problem is that (1) known oil reserves are much higher today than they were 20 years ago, something few at the time would have predicted and (2) the recent price spikes were caused by rapid increases in consumption, not reductions in available stocks. The "Energy Crises" proponents held that oil stocks would be in perpetual decline from the late--70's onward. Had you told them that in the year 2000 people would be driving giant SUVs and the major environmental concern would be that we were burning so much petroleum that we might be altering the earth's climate, most would have called you insane. It was a very bizarre time in retrospect. Everybody, and I do mean everybody, bought into the entire concept and then in a period of less than a year the entire "crises" simply disappeared.
I think Anthrogenic Global Warming will suffer the same fate. If nothing else, the same segments of the political spectrum who pushed the idea of the "energy crises" (and in many cases the same individuals) are pushing global warming. I think we will spend the next decade listening to one hysterical prediction of doom after another until we find out that global warming is a relatively small problem.
I remember back when I was a teenager circa 1980 and the UN and virtually everyone else confidently explained that the world was running out of oil, that oil would only grow more rare and more expensive and that anybody who claimed otherwise was just a payed shrill of the oil industry.
The more things change the more they stay the same.
It was really funny watching people try to explain in 1985, after the oil crash, exactly why they so confidently predicted permanent oil shortages only 5 years before. I can't but wonder if 10 years from now we will get a big "never mind" from climatologist as well. After all, accurately measuring oil resources is relatively simple compared to predicting climate 100 years in the future.
Missing from these little bits of political theater is the acknowledgment that richest segment of the world's population is also the most productive. In short, they own lots of stuff because they make lots of stuff. As long as you have asymmetries in the level of productivity, you will have asymmetries in wealth. End of Story. Even if you could wave a magic wand and redistribute the world's physical assets equally, asymmetries in ownership would appear almost instantly as the more productive began to require assets.
Attempts at to radical redistribution end up hurting everyone because they destroy the assets produced by the most productive but don't often raise the actual productivity of the recipients. Nothing changes except that the population as a whole is poorer.
Many if not most organizations reach a crisis at some point in their growth because of the loss of a simple feedback loop. Companies grow because they are profitable, often unusually so, but that profitability reduces the vital negative feedback that strangles bad decisions in their cradles. Myriad bad decisions, which would have died off in the company's more lean times, survive and accumulate. Eventually, the company becomes like a once fast ship now encrusted with barnacles.
People don't like conflict and high profits lets them avoid internal ones. Instead of managers fighting over which competing ideas to implement, high profits let managers avoid conflict by implementing them all. (This is one situation wherein a hyper-competive, dominating jerk of a manager can be better for a company than more consensus guided one.) Instead of fighting one's way up the food chain to earn more money and perks, managers can simply hire more people to work under them. Individuals begin to build internal fiefdoms. No one like firing people so low performing employees are kept on or internally transferred instead of being laid-off.
The longer this process goes on, the worse the eventual correction will be. Efficient companies that survive over long periods usually do so because they survive numerous sharp downturns in their profitability that maintains their internal discipline. In the end, slim margins and slow growth build the strongest and most sustainable companies. Unfortunately, that is something we almost never see in the computer industry.
The problem with solar power is never the efficiency of the collection system but rather with the fact that the power cannot used on demand. Without a staggeringly efficient means of storing the power, solar power will remain useless for all serious generation. There isn't a single factory, communication system, transportation system or any other important part of our civilization that runs off solar power and baring currently unforeseen breakthroughs in storage technology there never will be. We simply can't run a modern civilization off a power source that randomly disappears. Every solar power installation requires a 100% non-solar redundant system to take up the slack when the solar goes off line. Factor that cost in and solar power becomes an economic joke.
Solar power isn't a solution. Its a distraction. It lets politicians and others pretend that they are doing something about serious energy questions instead of making unpopular, real-world choices.
I am perfectly willing to believe that politicians would love to manipulate prices for their own benefit. During the 60's and 70's it was common for countries without independent central banks to short term inflation of the money supply in order to give the economy a shot in the arm in time for an election. However, no such mechanism exist for any American politician to compel any business to set prices. Inflating a currency is easy, just crank up the presses. Making a business forgo billions in profits just for the chance of a beneficial government policy down the road takes arm twisting.
Even if Oil companies could arbitrarily set prices for the own benefit, wouldn't political pressure from all the non-oil corporation who rely on oil products i.e. all of them, exert their undo influence to force the government to bring down prices?
The most compelling evidence against the current price changes being politically motivated is simply that there is no need to evoke such explanations. If you look in detail at the gasoline markets it becomes very clear why prices rise and fall. For one thing, gasoline prices decrease every Fall without exception. The prices continue to fall throughout the winter and start to rise again in the spring. There is no reason to believe we aren't seeing a variant of that long standing pattern.
The site also has a wealth of historical data that will allow people to test out their favorite economic conspiracy theory. Of course, no one actually ever wants to test their economic conspiracy theories. Their faith-based nature is what makes them so fun in the first place.
I don't suppose you've ever checked the actual price data to see if there was ever any correlation between gasoline prices (or any other commodity) and elections? I recommend the Energy Information Adminstration. as the best place to start your researches.
On inconvenient truth revealed by ice cores is that CO2 levels change after the temperature rises or falls. Temperature decreases before CO2 levels drop and temperature rises before CO2 levels rise. You can see this very clearly if you look at CO2 levels at the beginning and ending of ice ages. The ice ages themselves drive CO2 levels and not the other way around.
Temperature powerfully affects the carbon cycle which in turn affects CO2 levels in the atmosphere. I have seen a lot of chatter to the effect that ice cores prove that CO2 levels control major heating and cooling trends and that is not the case.
They did lose it in the courts but congress passed an act giving it back to them. How many companies want to stake their future on congress passing legislation just for them? If you want a more recent example there is considerable speculation that Google is in danger of losing its trademark because "google" has become a verb listed in the OED. Levi lost a seagull trademark. I am sure there are many less prominent examples that only trademark lawyers could site.
The law requires that trademark holders actively defend their trademarks. How does one actively defend a trademark? Simple, you sue anyone whose names might possibly constitute infringement even if it requires extremely exaggerated interpretation. That way, when a real case of infringement comes up, you can go into to court and say, "look we defend our trademark. We have filed X number of suits every year for the past Y years". This produces insane behavior. From an article by Cory Doctrow:
There aren't many areas of business wisdom more fraught with superstition and dread than trademark lore. Trademarks exist, mainly, to prevent consumer confusion, but for many business people, they're important competitive assets. They're the company's good name, upon which it trades, and companies have a duty to their shareholders to defend those good names. And defend it they do, even if the defense is so odious that it makes the company synonymous with litigious bullying.
Ask a lawyer for a 100 percent assurance of trademark protection and he'll give you plain advice: pay me to send a nasty letter to everyone who utters your name without due care and specificity, or I can't guarantee you that your mark won't slip out of your fingers and into the public domain. He won't be lying: 100 percent certainty is the kind of unrealistic objective that requires extraordinary, self-defeating measures to achieve.
Corporate officers face a "damned if they do, sued if they don't" situation. Trademark lawyers will advise them defend their trademarks out on the hinterlands of reasonableness even it makes the company look like an irrational bully. If they don't follow this advise, which constitutes a standard business practice, their stockholders can sue them if the company does lose the trademark years down the road. Put yourself in their shoes. Would your opinion of Apple's action change if you personally would face significant lawsuits 10 years down the road if "iPod" becomes a generic term?
I am curious. What is your model of why companies like Apple spend the money and take the PR hit of seemingly trivial trademark lawsuits? What is more likely: Corporate executives in many companies acting like loons or computer geeks with the same grasp of trademark law as trademark lawyers have of operating systems?
Opiate addiction is 90% psychological and 10% physical. Physical addiction aggravates addiction to psychoactive drugs but does not actually cause the addiction in the first place. Cocaine, Marijuana, LSD, and Esctasy are not physically addictive yet addicts have as difficult time stopping as opiate addicts. New drugs that have the same psychological effects will present the same addiction risk and nearly the same degree of difficult in stopping the drug as opiates.
My concern is that paying to much attention he physical addiction obscures the major problem. We talk about opiate addiction as if it was a form of demonic possession. We talk as if anyone will become hopelessly addicted if exposed to the drug. The entire War on Drugs is based on this premise. We've warped our entire justice system based on a fallacious concept of addiction. We refuse pain killers to those who suffer from disease or injury from an exaggerated fear they will become addicts. Contrary wise we ignore the risk posed by other drugs because they aren't physically addictive. (I am old enough to remember when Crack was thought to be better than heroin because it wasn't physically addictive.)
Your experience mirrors that of most who use morphine for medical reasons. I have some chronic pain but I don't take opiates for it because they leave me unable to think and work which leads to boredom which I find worse than the pain. Most people respond that way.
Only people who suffer psychological pain, those for whom day-to-day existence feels extremely emotionally painfully, risk addiction. For them, the reduced mental state caused by the drug is a feature not bug. For the rest of us it is a major annoyance.
Biofuels have a tremendous environmental impact, one far larger than fossil fuels.
Agriculture has the greatest environment impact of any human activity. Most of the impact comes the sheer area that agriculture requires. Every cleared field represents an entirely destroy natural area. The diffuse nature of the fields also means that they require more roads and other support infrastructure to function. By contrast, fossil fuels, especially oil, can be extracted from natural areas using only small fraction of the total area.
Agriculture in the developed world has been growing progressively more dense in the last few decades. Significant areas formally under cultivation are reverting to natural states. This reversion is also interring huge amounts of carbon. Using biofuels created from crops will reverse that trend. In the 19th century 30-40% of all agricultural land was dedicated to growing carbohydrates to feed to draft animals. Biofuels will take us back to that time.
Slashdot Mirror
I hate to break it to you but all programming is highly specialized. Climatology is in no way special in this regard.
Neither do programmers have to understand the abstract model of the program to write it or evaluate it. The vast majority of professional programmers do not understand the abstract model of the code they create. You do not have to be a high-level accountant to write corporate accounting software and you don't have to be a doctor to write medical software. Most programmers spend most of their time implementing models created by non-programmers from fields of which the programmers have no detailed knowledge.
Does that mean that programmers can't spot crappy code just because they don't understand the details of the model? No, it does not. Most software errors don't arise from the model but from sloppy practices in the management of the software project itself. An experienced programmer doesn't even have to know the language of project to see that it's creation and maintenance was incompetently handled.
You don't have to be a climatologist to know that the CRU software was utter crap that would produce sound outputs only by divine intervention. For any experienced programmer, it was immediately obvious that it was a great reeking gob of amateur coding with no structure, no plan and no standards. In my experience, most scientific software is like the CRU software. It evolves in an ad hoc manner over many years with no governing organizational structure.
Commercial software developers have created a wide range of tools and procedures to manage large, vital projects. In the main, scientist use none of these tools and most of them appear unaware they even exist much less why and when they are needed. As a result most scientific software project management is completely amateurish. If most scientific software were written for commercial applications, the developers would be sued or imprisoned for fraud.
Scientist tend to be arrogant and dismissive of the work of others especially those who work in the commercial sector. You believe that because you understand climatology that you therefore understand all the tools you are using. Well you don't. You think that because no one can understand your abstract model that therefore they cannot find significant errors in your code. Well, they can. You think we should reengineer our entire civilization based on your unquestioned and unexamined computerized ivory tower auguries.
Well, we won't.
Your just going to have to suck it up and withstand the at least the same scrutiny we give important commercial software.
Well, its a common trope that anyone who disagrees with a leftist is a rightwing ideolouges.
The basic problem here is that politicians gain power when people are afraid of something and they turn to the state for protection.
Since WWII, the right has specialized in making people afraid of external enemies and criminals. When people fear external attack or crime, they vote for the right.
Since the late 60's, the left has specialized in making people afraid of busines and technology. When people fear the economically productive and technology, they vote left.
Tens of millions of people today are absolutely convinced they are being poisened, irraidated, genetically modified etc by evil corporations and that there only hope to survive lays in investing leftist with greater and greater amounts of state power.
Just as we can with some justice accuse those on the right of magnifing fears about terrorism, we can accuse those on the left of magnifying fears about technology and the businesses that create it. They have a powerful motive to do so regardless of whether the threat is real or not.
I think we should keep that in mind when people start impunging motives.
Everything you say is true however a large number of these "meta" studies are actually done by sociologist and other "soft" scientist who are in the school of liberals arts which is the dominated literally 9 to 1 by extreme leftist. A recent poll of academics found that 17.4% of American academics in the liberal-arts self-identified as marxist. These people are often quoted as "experts" and "researchers" in the media even if they are commenting on matters far outside their field.
With in the technical fields (fields controlled ulitmately by perfomance instead of popularity) like engineering, the science and business, there almost an even balance between left and right. However, academics in all fields are statistically a good bit to the left of their counterparts in non-academic world.
My main point was to remind people that there are more motives for the deceptions oneself and others than just profit motive. More importantly, motives are illrelevent to the ultimate validity of science.
(1) Based on the standard rules of statistical acceptance, a study only has to reach requires a 95% confidence level. That means that 1 in every 20 identical studies will produce a false positive merely by chance. When you have an area of study in which thousands of studies have been done over decades you end up with hundreds of studies reporting positive results just by chance.
(2) Statistical meta analysis of studies is largely nonsense unless your talking about a field in which nearly identical studies are done over and over again. Usually, when these meta studies hit the media you find they they equally weight to every study regardless of presumed rigor of the studies. In this case, the gold standard is the Swedish study that followed tens of thousands of people over decades. How to you compare that to a study that just data mined a few hundred medical records?
(3) Exposure to all types of radio range radiation has increased by literally millions of times since WWII. We know spend something close to 3% of our entire energy budget generating radio signals. Yet, in the last 50+ years, cancers rates have not increased and indeed most likely have fallen (especially when you exclude cigarette smoking.
(4) A a sociological matter, just because a study is not linked to an industry does not mean that the researchers or the people funding them are some how impartial or operating from nobel motives. A lot of people outside of industry have both inherent biases as well as professional and monetary incentive to distort science. Academic today tilt strongly to the left side of the political spectrum and many believe in the post modernist concept that every one has a moral obligation to use whatever power they have, such as that held by respected scientist, to advance their political beliefs. They are inherently hostile to the economically productive. Politicians have incentives to create crises to protect voters from. Trial lawyers stand to make hundreds of millions on law suits and they fund "studies" to contaminate the jury pool. Even competing industries can use studies to undermine competitors.
We should remember that science has its reputation because it produces the same answer regardless of the individual motives of the people who create it. When someone begins the question the motives of researchers, they are making an implicit statement that they have no science to back their position up and that they must instead fall back to human factors. If you have solid science, then you don't need to smear people's motives and call their integrity into question.
Based on that data, a 50% increase would raise one's theoretical high-end risk of developing a tumor in the head from 0.003% per year to 0.0045% per year.
This translates into an effectively zero risk. The risk is so low that an individual couldn't really justify spending any time or money trying to lower it further.
We've got to learn that even though our advancing technology allows us to measure smaller and smaller risk, that doesn't mean that "something has to be done!" for every risk we can measure.
In the late 1800's and early 1900's, the free-market economies of the West showed an alarming tendency to reward people based on their individual merit and notbased on who gave birth to them. People from the lower classes and non-European races kept bubbling up the economic and social ladder in historically unprecedented numbers. Something had to be done. Fortunately, people claiming to be scientist rode to the rescue. They claimed to demonstrate that certain groups of people inherently lacked the mental faculties to function as free citizens. As such, restrictions on their political and economic freedoms were perfectly justified. Today, we see that the free-market of ideas has not rewarded a certain segment of the political spectrum in the manner it once did. The masses no longer kowtow to a intellectual elite as they did in the mid-20th century. Something had to be done. Now we see a large number of supposed scientist. linguist, political scientist and journalist producing works that explain that that modern Leftist fail in the political marketplace not because their archaic ideas no longer work but rather because the rest of the population is so stupid and easily led. The point of these works isn't to understand how people think but rather to reinforce the belief in intellectual superiority on which modern Leftism rest. I predict they will end up on the ash heap of embarrassments to science just as the works of the previous century's bigots did.
The sad truth is that since the 60's, the Left has ideologically advocated taking away an individual's right to choose in every facet of our lives except in matters pertaining to sex.
By freedom of choice, I mean that the legal authority to make decisions rest solely with the individual. If an individual can as a practical matter chose between actions A or B without the threat of punishment by the state, then we can say that individual possess freedom of choice in that circumstance. If we look at Leftist policy recommendations in every area of life except sex, we find they believe that the state should make decisions instead of the individual.
Prior to the 1960s, one could at least rely on the Left to protect free speech. Yet, since then, the Left has waged a war on all speech, unrelated to sex, that they disapprove of. They protect speech relating to sex rigorously but feel no qualms about advocating censoring depictions of violence, the speech of corporations or non-leftist speech on public airways. Leftist dominated universities have become the only public places in America where an individual can be actively penalized for speech that isn't incitement.
Let's look at major policy areas and see if Leftists advocate individual choice: Health care? Nope. Social security? Nope. Employment? Nope. Crime? Nope. Housing? Nope. Transportation? Nope. Environment? Nope. Education? Big Nope. Communications? Nope. Economics in general? Nope.
Leftist often mistake state benevolence with individual choice. They believe that if the state gives an individual some material resource or promises to treat them "fairly" then that offsets all losses of individual choice. It doesn't.
I to have noticed that the computer industry seems to hold a higher proportion of Libertarians than other fields. Many factors go into people's political choices but I think the fact that the high number of self-employed, entrepreneurial people in the computer field means that far more of them run into the many restrictions on individual choice than people do in other fields. When a person pours everything they have into creating something knew having some politician wander by and claim they know better want needs to be done rankles to say the least.
Something important that I think many have missed.
Since the mechanism by which the solar cycles influence earths climate is not known and has really only been recognized in the last 5 years or so, none of the major models of climate change account for solar cycles' effect on the warming of the past 150 years. Instead, in order to get the models to fit the data, all warming due to solar forcing has been assigned to anthrogenic gases. This means that the effect of anthrogenic gasses may have been significantly exaggerated.
The impact of this exaggeration grows the further out the models try to predict. Over the course of a few years or a decade, it might be trivial. Over the course of a century it will be significant. Assuming that just 10%-30% of the warming we have seen in the last 30 years comes from unknown solar forcing knocks global warming predictions out of the catastrophic range and down into the minor annoyance/net benefit range.
Since we lack any means of proving Anthrogenic Global Warming false, we can't really prove it true (K. Popper). Instead, we have fallen back on claiming that the source of change must be Anthrogenic because we can't find any other mechanism. Finding a previously unknown source of warming undermines this logical inference.
I find it disturbing how quick many people resort to coercion to accomplish their goals. CFLs so clearly out perform incandescents that their eventual triumph in the free market is assured. Why do we need to hold a gun to people's head to drive their adoption? Will the use of threats of state power really accelerate the rate of adoption enough to justify it?
Moreover, the coercive policy will almost certainly fail in its goal of reducing CO2 emissions. Since it takes more energy to construct CFLs, forcing their adoption will generate more CO2 emissions in the short run. History has shown that making a technology more efficient causes people to consume more of it usually to the point that the increased usage offsets the efficiency gains. Contemporary incandescent bulbs are orders of magnitude more efficient than Edison's bulbs yet we certainly do not use less electricity per capita for lighting. I doubt that CFLs will change this fundamental dynamic.
Can we really justify imposing fines or even imprisoning people to enforce a policy that will almost certainly fail and would provide only modest benefit even if it worked perfectly?
Say this with me: There is no such single thing as "oil".
The earth's crust contains gigatons of interred carbon compounds, ranging in form from gaseous to crystalline solid. We can turn any carbon compound into any other. Its just a matter of cost. We routinely extract and refine substances today that 50 years ago no one would have classified as usable oil. We are not going to run out organic compounds anytime soon and so we will not ever reach any "practical" limit on the availability of something loosely defined as oil.
More importantly, oil wasn't a natural resource 150 years ago, what makes you think it will be one 150 years in the future? Do you burn a lot wood, coal or whale blubber in your car? Heck, 120 years ago, aluminum was precious metal, now we make soda cans out of it. We will never exhaust oil because long before we hit any theoretical limit on "oil" supplies we will have moved on to other more efficient and convenient energy sources just as we did with wood, coal and whale blubber.
" Sure beats those rolling green hills, wildlife and clear rivers, doesn't it?" It certainly does. Absent technology, those rolling green hills won't provide you with reliable food, the wildlife will kill you and the clear rivers seethes with parasites. Natures fine on TV but it sucks to be right in the middle of it. Of course, there is also the fact that as we distance ourselves from nature with our technology we don't have impact the natrual world as hard. Energy intensive agriculture has become so effecient that it is using less and less land to produce more and more food. In north America and Europe, significant amounts of agricultural land are reverting back to the wild. In a hundred years we might have nothing but cities with food factories surrounded by vast natural areas.
You simply do not understand how technology creates and uses resources so it is easy for people to frighten you with simplistic arguments. Hysteria driven political interventions poise a far greater danger than any possibility of resource exhaustion.
The idea that we can deplete "natural" resources comes from a profound misunderstanding of such resources come into being. Human create them, they do not exist in nature. Oil was not a "natural" resource 120 years ago and I very much doubt it will be one a 100 years for now. In fact, I give it about 30 years max. There is no such thing as "unsustainable" consumption. Over the whole of human history we have created more and more resources. There is no reason to assume that this process will continue. The idea we will run out of resources without some kind of state control and rationing is merely an academic conceit of people with no understanding of the way our civilization creates and uses its technology. It has no empirical basis. People have been making predictions of resource exhaustion since the time of Malthus and they have ALL been wrong.
You remind me of the those back in the 70's enthrall to Paul Ehrlich and his concept of the population bomb. They were convinced that if they didn't take drastic action, like cutting off the people of starve, then the whole planet was doomed. As it turned out population control was minor problem easily handled automatically by raising standards of living, exactly the opposite tack advocated by Ehrlich et al. Places that did buy into the whole idea, like China, may have done themselves serious harm.
I see nothing but a history of failed predictions and nothing that suggest that the means and methods that have carried us to this point will suddenly fail.
People have been confidently predicting the exhaustion of oil supplies since literally 1867, shortly after the first modern oil well was drilled. The problem is that people think of oil and all other "natural" resources as being some discrete substance that basically lays in large natural barrels underground and that when you reach the bottom of the barrel you run out of resource. It doesn't work that way. There is no such thing as a "natural" resource (unless you want to count oxygen). Everything else is an artificial resource created by human action. The amount of resource doesn't depend on amount of any particular substance in the earth's makeup but rather on the technology we bring to bear on any particular problem. People keep predicting the exhaustion of oil because they keep thinking that whatever and where ever we extracted oil at the time represented our ability to extract oil for the foreseeable future. For over a 100 years they have been constantly wrong. We extract and use substances today that people just a few decades ago wouldn't even have thought of as usable oil. We will never run out of any resource because we can just create more just as we have always done.
Well, the problem is that (1) known oil reserves are much higher today than they were 20 years ago, something few at the time would have predicted and (2) the recent price spikes were caused by rapid increases in consumption, not reductions in available stocks. The "Energy Crises" proponents held that oil stocks would be in perpetual decline from the late--70's onward. Had you told them that in the year 2000 people would be driving giant SUVs and the major environmental concern would be that we were burning so much petroleum that we might be altering the earth's climate, most would have called you insane. It was a very bizarre time in retrospect. Everybody, and I do mean everybody, bought into the entire concept and then in a period of less than a year the entire "crises" simply disappeared. I think Anthrogenic Global Warming will suffer the same fate. If nothing else, the same segments of the political spectrum who pushed the idea of the "energy crises" (and in many cases the same individuals) are pushing global warming. I think we will spend the next decade listening to one hysterical prediction of doom after another until we find out that global warming is a relatively small problem.
I remember back when I was a teenager circa 1980 and the UN and virtually everyone else confidently explained that the world was running out of oil, that oil would only grow more rare and more expensive and that anybody who claimed otherwise was just a payed shrill of the oil industry.
The more things change the more they stay the same.
It was really funny watching people try to explain in 1985, after the oil crash, exactly why they so confidently predicted permanent oil shortages only 5 years before. I can't but wonder if 10 years from now we will get a big "never mind" from climatologist as well. After all, accurately measuring oil resources is relatively simple compared to predicting climate 100 years in the future.
Missing from these little bits of political theater is the acknowledgment that richest segment of the world's population is also the most productive. In short, they own lots of stuff because they make lots of stuff. As long as you have asymmetries in the level of productivity, you will have asymmetries in wealth. End of Story. Even if you could wave a magic wand and redistribute the world's physical assets equally, asymmetries in ownership would appear almost instantly as the more productive began to require assets. Attempts at to radical redistribution end up hurting everyone because they destroy the assets produced by the most productive but don't often raise the actual productivity of the recipients. Nothing changes except that the population as a whole is poorer.
Many if not most organizations reach a crisis at some point in their growth because of the loss of a simple feedback loop. Companies grow because they are profitable, often unusually so, but that profitability reduces the vital negative feedback that strangles bad decisions in their cradles. Myriad bad decisions, which would have died off in the company's more lean times, survive and accumulate. Eventually, the company becomes like a once fast ship now encrusted with barnacles.
People don't like conflict and high profits lets them avoid internal ones. Instead of managers fighting over which competing ideas to implement, high profits let managers avoid conflict by implementing them all. (This is one situation wherein a hyper-competive, dominating jerk of a manager can be better for a company than more consensus guided one.) Instead of fighting one's way up the food chain to earn more money and perks, managers can simply hire more people to work under them. Individuals begin to build internal fiefdoms. No one like firing people so low performing employees are kept on or internally transferred instead of being laid-off.
The longer this process goes on, the worse the eventual correction will be. Efficient companies that survive over long periods usually do so because they survive numerous sharp downturns in their profitability that maintains their internal discipline. In the end, slim margins and slow growth build the strongest and most sustainable companies. Unfortunately, that is something we almost never see in the computer industry.
The problem with solar power is never the efficiency of the collection system but rather with the fact that the power cannot used on demand. Without a staggeringly efficient means of storing the power, solar power will remain useless for all serious generation. There isn't a single factory, communication system, transportation system or any other important part of our civilization that runs off solar power and baring currently unforeseen breakthroughs in storage technology there never will be. We simply can't run a modern civilization off a power source that randomly disappears. Every solar power installation requires a 100% non-solar redundant system to take up the slack when the solar goes off line. Factor that cost in and solar power becomes an economic joke.
Solar power isn't a solution. Its a distraction. It lets politicians and others pretend that they are doing something about serious energy questions instead of making unpopular, real-world choices.
I am perfectly willing to believe that politicians would love to manipulate prices for their own benefit. During the 60's and 70's it was common for countries without independent central banks to short term inflation of the money supply in order to give the economy a shot in the arm in time for an election. However, no such mechanism exist for any American politician to compel any business to set prices. Inflating a currency is easy, just crank up the presses. Making a business forgo billions in profits just for the chance of a beneficial government policy down the road takes arm twisting.
Even if Oil companies could arbitrarily set prices for the own benefit, wouldn't political pressure from all the non-oil corporation who rely on oil products i.e. all of them, exert their undo influence to force the government to bring down prices?
The most compelling evidence against the current price changes being politically motivated is simply that there is no need to evoke such explanations. If you look in detail at the gasoline markets it becomes very clear why prices rise and fall. For one thing, gasoline prices decrease every Fall without exception. The prices continue to fall throughout the winter and start to rise again in the spring. There is no reason to believe we aren't seeing a variant of that long standing pattern.
The site also has a wealth of historical data that will allow people to test out their favorite economic conspiracy theory. Of course, no one actually ever wants to test their economic conspiracy theories. Their faith-based nature is what makes them so fun in the first place.
If you care.
Temperature powerfully affects the carbon cycle which in turn affects CO2 levels in the atmosphere. I have seen a lot of chatter to the effect that ice cores prove that CO2 levels control major heating and cooling trends and that is not the case.
They did lose it in the courts but congress passed an act giving it back to them. How many companies want to stake their future on congress passing legislation just for them? If you want a more recent example there is considerable speculation that Google is in danger of losing its trademark because "google" has become a verb listed in the OED. Levi lost a seagull trademark. I am sure there are many less prominent examples that only trademark lawyers could site.
The law requires that trademark holders actively defend their trademarks. How does one actively defend a trademark? Simple, you sue anyone whose names might possibly constitute infringement even if it requires extremely exaggerated interpretation. That way, when a real case of infringement comes up, you can go into to court and say, "look we defend our trademark. We have filed X number of suits every year for the past Y years". This produces insane behavior. From an article by Cory Doctrow:
Corporate officers face a "damned if they do, sued if they don't" situation. Trademark lawyers will advise them defend their trademarks out on the hinterlands of reasonableness even it makes the company look like an irrational bully. If they don't follow this advise, which constitutes a standard business practice, their stockholders can sue them if the company does lose the trademark years down the road. Put yourself in their shoes. Would your opinion of Apple's action change if you personally would face significant lawsuits 10 years down the road if "iPod" becomes a generic term?
I am curious. What is your model of why companies like Apple spend the money and take the PR hit of seemingly trivial trademark lawsuits? What is more likely: Corporate executives in many companies acting like loons or computer geeks with the same grasp of trademark law as trademark lawyers have of operating systems?
Opiate addiction is 90% psychological and 10% physical. Physical addiction aggravates addiction to psychoactive drugs but does not actually cause the addiction in the first place. Cocaine, Marijuana, LSD, and Esctasy are not physically addictive yet addicts have as difficult time stopping as opiate addicts. New drugs that have the same psychological effects will present the same addiction risk and nearly the same degree of difficult in stopping the drug as opiates.
My concern is that paying to much attention he physical addiction obscures the major problem. We talk about opiate addiction as if it was a form of demonic possession. We talk as if anyone will become hopelessly addicted if exposed to the drug. The entire War on Drugs is based on this premise. We've warped our entire justice system based on a fallacious concept of addiction. We refuse pain killers to those who suffer from disease or injury from an exaggerated fear they will become addicts. Contrary wise we ignore the risk posed by other drugs because they aren't physically addictive. (I am old enough to remember when Crack was thought to be better than heroin because it wasn't physically addictive.)
Your experience mirrors that of most who use morphine for medical reasons. I have some chronic pain but I don't take opiates for it because they leave me unable to think and work which leads to boredom which I find worse than the pain. Most people respond that way.
Only people who suffer psychological pain, those for whom day-to-day existence feels extremely emotionally painfully, risk addiction. For them, the reduced mental state caused by the drug is a feature not bug. For the rest of us it is a major annoyance.
Biofuels have a tremendous environmental impact, one far larger than fossil fuels.
Agriculture has the greatest environment impact of any human activity. Most of the impact comes the sheer area that agriculture requires. Every cleared field represents an entirely destroy natural area. The diffuse nature of the fields also means that they require more roads and other support infrastructure to function. By contrast, fossil fuels, especially oil, can be extracted from natural areas using only small fraction of the total area.
Agriculture in the developed world has been growing progressively more dense in the last few decades. Significant areas formally under cultivation are reverting to natural states. This reversion is also interring huge amounts of carbon. Using biofuels created from crops will reverse that trend. In the 19th century 30-40% of all agricultural land was dedicated to growing carbohydrates to feed to draft animals. Biofuels will take us back to that time.