But we also know from ice core samples that historicly increases in CO2 follow increases in temperature, not the other way around.
No we don't. They seem to be approximately in lockstep, but that's partly due to the crudeness of the proxy measures of temperature. (Remember how I said that CO2 levels don't need a proxy? Temperatures do.) If you look at pleistocene data (which is cruder yet), there is an indication of what you're talking about. However, there were a lot of things different back then. Some people like to point out that CO2 follows temperature increases in order to suggest that the increased CO2 is leaking out of the oceans (since, for a fixed partial pressure of CO2, increasing the temperature of water decreases the amount of CO2 it can hold). However, those claims ignore the fact that the CO2 levels in the oceans are actually increasing (and leading to more acidic oceans, bleached corals, etc.). This, in turn, is because the partial pressure of CO2 is not fixed, thanks to us.
While CO2 does absorb IR, so does water, and far more effectively.
Except that water saturates (hence, rain) and CO2 does not (at least not at anything like current levels). The water is actually a feedback component of the cycle. By adding CO2 the atmosphere, we effectively allow the atmosphere to absorb more water as well.
I also seem to recall new evidence that galactic cosmic rays may be a large source of temperature variation in earth's atmosphere, as well.
I've heard this claim before, but have never seen any sources to back it up. I suspect it was originated by the same type of people who originated the water claim. (Note: I'm blaiming those who originated it, not those who unwittingly perpeptuate it.)
According to global warming advocates predictions from a few years ago, and given the warming trends we've already seen, sea levels should have already risen...but they haven't.
Increased CO2 in the atmosphere and warmer climates resulting in longer growing seasons could result in increased crop yields and be a boon to plant life, which may well suck up a lot of that extra CO2.
Not necessarily. Some plants do better with increased CO2 and others do worse. Primarily food crops do worse, as they were cultivated under current CO2 levels. (Just as we evolved under current temperature levels, so mentioning that it was hotter when the dinosaurs roamed the earth is irrelevant.)
I can ponder, "what's the relationship between the force exerted on an object, it's mass, and it's acceleration?"
That's exactly what the basic science is. Granted, it gets more complicated than that, but greenhouse gases are called "forcings" for a reason, and that reason ain't politics.
With climate research...not so much. You can only run computer models.
That's not true at all. Early climate research on global warming was done in the late 50's and early 60's. What kind of computer models do you think they were running? The computer models are only necessary to answer some of the details (which are notoriously difficult to answer).
I strongly encourage you to challenge me on any one of these points. I feel like your comments are well thought out, if misinformed, and there's a chance I can clear up some issues for you without resorting to any "alarmism".:)
I think people's capacity for self deception is enormous.
And that's exactly how I explain the fact that intelligent people (such as yourself) still aren't convinced in AGW. I'm not saying you should accept the alarmists who are blaming every single natural disaster on AGW. You're right that they do the scientific community a disservice. However, you also said two things that seem to be somewhat in conflict to me.
(1)
I believe it will most likely continue to warm in the next century.
(2)
I find it doubtful that man's impact is the largest source of global warming, or even a significant portion.
You're basically saying that no evidence will change your mind. Not the fact that we know - beyond a reasonable doubt - that we are directly responsible for increasing the concentration of CO2 from 280 ppmv to 380 ppmv. (Over the last 800,000 years, ice core samples indicate that those levels have varied naturally from 180 (ice age) - 280 ("normal" temperatures) ppmv. No proxies required - the air trapped can be measured directly.) Not the fact that CO2 absorbs infrared radiation (this is lab verifiable). Not the fact that global warming was predicted prior to the current increases in temperatures.
What makes you believe it will continue to warm up? The solar output is currently at its minimum (just passed through it). What are you basing this belief on? It seems like a convenient belief to have because it precludes future evidence from causing you to accept that you might be wrong.
Still, I agree with you that "people's capacity for self deception is enormous", and that most people (yourself included) most likely honestly come by their belief/disbelief in AGW. I also believe that nothing I say will change your mind.:)
The compiler will only be able to do so much. In order to use 80 cores efficiently, you're going to have code differently than you would for single core execution. Some current techniques for this include using libraries designed for C, Fortran, etc., and I have no doubt that improved libraries/compilers will help, but you still have to think of the problem differently. Skills developed thinking about concurrent processing on supercomputers will definitely come in handy. I'm counting on it!:)
Does [the market] need lots of people who develop super computer simulations?
You wouldn't have guessed it 5-10 years ago, but these skills will shortly be in high demand. Once 4+ core CPUs (with 80-core already in development) become the norm, what used to be called "super computers" will be called "desktop computers" in the near future.
You need WD-40, too. If it moves and it shouldn't, use the duct tape. If it doesn't move and it should, use the WD-40. (I've forgotten where I lifted that from.)
CO2 absorbs infrared radiation. Absorbing infrared radiation results in a net increase in thermal equilibrium. That results in hotter temperatures. (I've had severalphysics courses in thermodynamics - I know what I'm talking about.)
Historically, over the last 800,000 years (including several ice ages), CO2 levels have varied from approximately 180 ppmv (ice age) to 280 ppmv ("normal" temperatures). Currently we're at about 380 ppmv. Carbon isotope ratios of C13/C12 independently verify that the overwhelming majority (about 98%) of the increase in CO2 is due to burning fossil fuels.
AFAIK, there is no debate on either of these two issues. The only debate is over how much worse it will get. The few scientists who challenge global warming do not challenge these two points, to the best of my knowledge. The only thing I've gotten from reading the "challengers" is that they think that sooner, rather than later, hidden systems will kick in that will counteract our influence. Other than wishful thinking, I have no idea what they're basing this on (as I can't find any journal articles that support this idea).
One could also contemplate the idea of launching selfreplicating
probes i.e. probes that are able to build copies
of themselves by harvesting materials from each stellar
system they pass.
The construction of such probes are technologically
as difficult as producing the conventional probes proposed
to be used to explore the Galaxy, as these conventional
probes must operate for millions, if not billions,
of years. Therefore one can argue that self-replicating
probes should instead be used to explore the Galaxy, as
using such probes will lead to much faster exploration
times, as the number of probes increase as time goes by.
In fact if self-replicating probes, or von Neumann
probes as they are also termed, were used to explore
the Galaxy it has been shown that a search of the entire
Galaxy will take 4 10^6 3 10^8 years dependent on the
speed of the probes (Tipler 1980). This is much faster than
using the non-replicative probes proposed in this paper.
So, if they figure out how to use self-replicating probes, the entire galaxy could be probed in 4 Myr - 300 Myr. I suspect solving that technological problem would be a worthwhile investment.
I saw you made that comment (or similar) a few times, and no one else called you on it - by the time I saw the summary it said highest literacy rate - so I suspected it might have been a case of fixing the summary.
Most of the grandstanding is happening in the popular press (you won't find it in scientific journals - even the climatology journals)...
There's so much wrong with that statement...
First off: watch An Inconvenient Truth. The movie is full of grandstanding.
Watched it, loved it. Not so much a scientific journal as it is popular media.
...claims that there's consensus on the most extreme predictions (flooding of huge parts of North America, for example, which international consensus disagrees with by an order of magnitude over the next 100 years)
Um, did you watch it? He never made such a claim. He did say that if all of the ice on Greenland melted or if the West Antarctic Ice Shelf melted, most of Manhatten (including the site of the twin towers - yes, that was grandstanding, but hey, this is a movie, not a journal article) would be flooded. Not quite the same thing you're saying he claimed, however.
I know of at least two labs (one is a well known observatory) that saw funding for good science dry up because Gore and his ilk saw their results used by their political opponents (out of context, of course).
Really? Which labs?
What realclimate and other such outlets tend to do is attack the people involved for taking "the other side", while using a one-sided argument against select pieces of the science to justify their attacks. I've never visited realclimate without getting the sense that that site could be wholy replaced by evangelism of any other flavor without chaning a whole lot. That they include footnotes is just window-dressing used to justify some very, very harsh attacks. So, as far as realclimate "defending scince"... no.
Can you give me a single example of this? Just one?
That is, no one is saying, "climatology is bunk... it's all just the hand of God."
Actually, until recently you would find comments like this from Pat Robertson. Of course, now, he too is a convert, albeit for all the wrong reasons.
All we (the dissent) are suggesting is that the ratchet down the political discourse, and let the people doing real work in the field hash this out without yelling at them or yanking funding for suggesting "the wrong thing."
Perhaps that's all you're suggesting, but that's not what I call being a denier. To me, being a denier means believing that either (a) it's hubris to assume that man could change the climate (if I had a dime for every time someone said this...), or (b) there's a conspiracy to spread global warming theories and that the temperature will return to normal "real soon now". Again, if you look at what Pat Michaels and Richard Lindzen (two poster boys for the AGW denier camp) are saying, they don't deny that AGW is real. They merely say what you're saying - namely, that the popular press (and, yes, some scientists) are over-stating the problem. (Well, they do sometimes couch those statements in ways that a non-careful reader might think they were actually denying AGW.) On that issue, you will not find me in denial.
I do understand why intelligent, well-meaning, well-educated people (amongst others) will bring this up - especially if they lived through the 70's and were not involved with the climatology science itself (as very few were, of course). I would not be surprised, either, if you could find a small handful of climatologists (and possibly even journal articles) from the 70's who suggested this.
However, The difference is that it was never accepted by mainstream climatology. Therefore, the global cooling "alarmists" have more in common with the global warming "deniers" of today than with the global warming "alarmists" (and I use both words loosely). That makes this comparison invalid when arguing against "consensus science".
If you want to search journal articles form the 70's and 80's, you can always go here. You may not be able to pull up the entire article, but you should be able to find the abstracts. (You might want to be selective in your "Information types" - unless you want to get home pages, too.)
<sarcasm>Time and Newsweek have always been reliable presenters of science news.</sarcasm>
The question is, can you find a climatology journal article from the 70's that agrees with Time or Newsweek? If not, then one should be no more surprised that Time and Newsweek were wrong then about science as one should be surprised when they're wrong now.
Dude, did you even read what I wrote?
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I never claimed the election was stolen. In fact, in other posts, I've expressed my skepticism to that effect. I was just pointing out that the *obvious* explanations were actually discussed.
Go cry over "your" lost Congress somewhere else. (I'm not a Democrat, either. I do, however, favor moderation in government, so I wasn't upset to see the Republicans lose control. One party in charge of everything never leads to moderation.)
Read carefully that piece you linked. Specifically,
A clearer claim as to what debate has ended is provided by the environmental journalist Gregg Easterbrook. He concludes that the scientific community now agrees that significant warming is occurring, and that there is clear evidence of human influences on the climate system. This is still a most peculiar claim. At some level, it has never been widely contested. Most of the climate community has agreed since 1988 that global mean temperatures have increased on the order of one degree Fahrenheit over the past century, having risen significantly from about 1919 to 1940, decreased between 1940 and the early '70s, increased again until the '90s, and remaining essentially flat since 1998.
There is also little disagreement that levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have risen from about 280 parts per million by volume in the 19th century to about 387 ppmv today. Finally, there has been no question whatever that carbon dioxide is an infrared absorber (i.e., a greenhouse gas--albeit a minor one), and its increase should theoretically contribute to warming. Indeed, if all else were kept equal, the increase in carbon dioxide should have led to somewhat more warming than has been observed, assuming that the small observed increase was in fact due to increasing carbon dioxide rather than a natural fluctuation in the climate system. Although no cause for alarm rests on this issue, there has been an intense effort to claim that the theoretically expected contribution from additional carbon dioxide has actually been detected.
It's buried, but it's in there. Lindzen does not deny AGW. He merely thinks that Al Gore's movie is alarmism. He's right that no single hurricane can be attributed to global warming and that the media misrepresent it. That does not mean he disagrees with global warming. Thank you for the link, by the way. It's very handy for pointing out Lindzen's current beliefs with respect to global warming. He does not deny AGW, he merely thinks there's "no cause for alarm". He agrees 100% with the basic science. CO2 absorbs infrared radiation and mankind is directly responsible for the drastic increase in CO2 concentration.
It is interesting that he seemingly contradicts himself later when he says:
In a similar vein, the National Academy of Sciences issued a brief (15-page) report responding to questions from the White House. It again enumerated the difficulties with attribution, but again the report was preceded by a front end that ambiguously claimed that "The changes observed over the last several decades are likely mostly due to human activities, but we cannot rule out that some significant part of these changes is also a reflection of natural variability." This was sufficient for CNN's Michelle Mitchell to presciently declare that the report represented a "unanimous decision that global warming is real, is getting worse and is due to man. There is no wiggle room." Well, no.
but if you read that with a skeptical eye, you'll notice that he's just arguing about the words and not the science. The distinction is between whether man is wholly responsible (i.e., one could "rule out that some significant part of these changes is also a reflection of natural variability") and whether man is only mainly or significantly responsible (i.e., "we cannot rule out..."). That's not denying AGW; that's splitting hairs.
It's a really interesting read. It sounds like the words of someone who wants to be a rebel, but can't quite determine how to be non-consensus and still be an honest scientist (which he is). Having studied some non-conventional theories myself, I can understand his predicament.
I've had a debate like this with a RL friend who has said what I was talking about wasn't Fox News' "real" news segment. How about this: if you can find me an approximately 10 minute "real" news clip from Fox News, I'll watch it and tell you if I can spot any lies and/or deliberate misrepresentation (such as leaving out details in such a way as to deliberately change the context of the story). If I can't, I'll chalk up the 2 or 3 experiences I've had in watching the Fox News channel as poor interviewing and/or editorial license.
So you think that the Fox News reporters are perfect beings who never make mistakes, and that everything they do is purposeful and without error? You have a lot more respect for them than I do, and I'm one of their fans.
No, I just can't imagine how one could accidently leave out crucial details that turn a story into something that doesn't even make sense to one of its reporters. It's like saying, "Oh, I accidently forgot to mention that the guy who I said stabbed the cop for no particular reason was being severely beaten on at the time." The words in the report were exactly that misleading. The phrase the female reporter used were something to the effect of "only because these private citizens also happened to be members of city council." I'm sure she wasn't part of the deliberate fabrication, but I'm equally sure there was a deliberate misrepresentation of the story.
And, no, that won't be considered evidence by you. I'm guessing most of their more egregious mistakes only happen on air, so I won't be able to find them on-line (yes, yes, "how convenient"). Therefore, the only way I could satisfy you is to get cable or watch Fox News on someone else's TV. As I only visit the people who watch Fox News about twice a year (hint: they're relatives), that's none too easy.
So, I'll admit I can't prove there is "an obvious deliberate fabrication", although logic dictates that it is the simplest explanation.
Upon further reflection, perhaps I can find some episodes on YouTube. OK, here's an interesting one (first one that came up with the search "Fox News ACLU"). Note that the lady says "Why [the ACLU picks] certain causes, like protecting the right of a man to marry a boy." The ACLU has never tried to protect that right. In fact, it couldn't because such a right doesn't exist. That's after watching less than 2 minutes of the first video I found. Was that, too, accidental? (Granted, it did seem off-the-cuff, so was not premeditated like the my first example.) At around 2:30 into the video, there's a more complicated misrepresentation that might be accidental. Note that the second and third hit also give an example of the type of Fox News misrepresentations of the ACLU, although I'm not sure I count O'Reilly as "news" so much as "opinion".
Or angry voters opposed to Bush, voting Democrat, were delighted to talk to the exit pollsters and have their angry vote registered on the news as well as in the election; nonchalant Bush voters strolled on by not wasting their time answering an exit poll that wasn't going to affect the result anyway.
Which would result in a higher participation in Kerry strongholds, which was not the case. No, it requires a more complicated theory, such as the one A beautiful mind suggested.
You really think that was an honest mistake? How does one make that "mistake" other than intentionally? So, no, I don't think pointing out this deliberate misrepresentation is disingenuous.
Are you complaining about the voting system?
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Surely that humor is intentional, right?
It's interesting where you stopped quoting
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Quoting 101: you should at least finish a sentence. Here was the whole sentence you were quoting:
The recount also showed that the only way that Al Gore could have tallied more votes was by using counting methods that were never requested, but that may have been applied if the USSC-mandated standards had been implemented, and which included "overvotes" -- spoiled ballots containing more than one vote for an office.
Also, the chart underneath that quote is quite interesting. I'm just sayin'...
Buying into a particular political philosophy
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Funny, I've always felt that an intelligent person doesn't buy into any particular political philosophy, but rather builds his/her own. That way, there never is an "other side".;)
These are actually very good points, and I don't want anyone to think that my flippant response to A beautiful mind was meant to suggest otherwise. I'm definitely not one of those who thinks anything has been proven (with respect to ballot corruption), but, like you, I'd like to see our voting system changed to a verifiable one to remove (or at least lessen) the doubts of its validity.
Logical fallacy
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See here's the problem: if exit polls reveal a higher number of Kerry votes than the actual precinct results, that means that either (a) the exit polls were systematically faulty (in some other way), (b) the elections were systematically faulty (although not necessarily rigged), or (c) some Republicans were lying. However, since we know that Republicans don't lie, that leaves us with (a) or (b), which is exactly what was claimed in the review.
Now, sure, you might point out that some people on/. are claiming to have said they voted for Kerry to exit pollsters when in fact they voted for Bush, but obviously they are lying and therefore are not Republicans.
Slashdot Mirror
No we don't. They seem to be approximately in lockstep, but that's partly due to the crudeness of the proxy measures of temperature. (Remember how I said that CO2 levels don't need a proxy? Temperatures do.) If you look at pleistocene data (which is cruder yet), there is an indication of what you're talking about. However, there were a lot of things different back then. Some people like to point out that CO2 follows temperature increases in order to suggest that the increased CO2 is leaking out of the oceans (since, for a fixed partial pressure of CO2, increasing the temperature of water decreases the amount of CO2 it can hold). However, those claims ignore the fact that the CO2 levels in the oceans are actually increasing (and leading to more acidic oceans, bleached corals, etc.). This, in turn, is because the partial pressure of CO2 is not fixed, thanks to us.
Except that water saturates (hence, rain) and CO2 does not (at least not at anything like current levels). The water is actually a feedback component of the cycle. By adding CO2 the atmosphere, we effectively allow the atmosphere to absorb more water as well.
I've heard this claim before, but have never seen any sources to back it up. I suspect it was originated by the same type of people who originated the water claim. (Note: I'm blaiming those who originated it, not those who unwittingly perpeptuate it.)
Actually, they have.
Not necessarily. Some plants do better with increased CO2 and others do worse. Primarily food crops do worse, as they were cultivated under current CO2 levels. (Just as we evolved under current temperature levels, so mentioning that it was hotter when the dinosaurs roamed the earth is irrelevant.)
That's exactly what the basic science is. Granted, it gets more complicated than that, but greenhouse gases are called "forcings" for a reason, and that reason ain't politics.
That's not true at all. Early climate research on global warming was done in the late 50's and early 60's. What kind of computer models do you think they were running? The computer models are only necessary to answer some of the details (which are notoriously difficult to answer).
I strongly encourage you to challenge me on any one of these points. I feel like your comments are well thought out, if misinformed, and there's a chance I can clear up some issues for you without resorting to any "alarmism". :)
(1) (2)
You're basically saying that no evidence will change your mind. Not the fact that we know - beyond a reasonable doubt - that we are directly responsible for increasing the concentration of CO2 from 280 ppmv to 380 ppmv. (Over the last 800,000 years, ice core samples indicate that those levels have varied naturally from 180 (ice age) - 280 ("normal" temperatures) ppmv. No proxies required - the air trapped can be measured directly.) Not the fact that CO2 absorbs infrared radiation (this is lab verifiable). Not the fact that global warming was predicted prior to the current increases in temperatures.
What makes you believe it will continue to warm up? The solar output is currently at its minimum (just passed through it). What are you basing this belief on? It seems like a convenient belief to have because it precludes future evidence from causing you to accept that you might be wrong.
Still, I agree with you that "people's capacity for self deception is enormous", and that most people (yourself included) most likely honestly come by their belief/disbelief in AGW. I also believe that nothing I say will change your mind. :)
The compiler will only be able to do so much. In order to use 80 cores efficiently, you're going to have code differently than you would for single core execution. Some current techniques for this include using libraries designed for C, Fortran, etc., and I have no doubt that improved libraries/compilers will help, but you still have to think of the problem differently. Skills developed thinking about concurrent processing on supercomputers will definitely come in handy. I'm counting on it! :)
You need WD-40, too. If it moves and it shouldn't, use the duct tape. If it doesn't move and it should, use the WD-40. (I've forgotten where I lifted that from.)
AFAIK, there is no debate on either of these two issues. The only debate is over how much worse it will get. The few scientists who challenge global warming do not challenge these two points, to the best of my knowledge. The only thing I've gotten from reading the "challengers" is that they think that sooner, rather than later, hidden systems will kick in that will counteract our influence. Other than wishful thinking, I have no idea what they're basing this on (as I can't find any journal articles that support this idea).
I saw you made that comment (or similar) a few times, and no one else called you on it - by the time I saw the summary it said highest literacy rate - so I suspected it might have been a case of fixing the summary.
Are you confusing literacy with illiteracy, or is there something I'm missing?
I'm not sure what your 700 million is supposed to refer to, but if you're referring to the population of India, it's almost 1.1 billion now.
Watched it, loved it. Not so much a scientific journal as it is popular media.
Um, did you watch it? He never made such a claim. He did say that if all of the ice on Greenland melted or if the West Antarctic Ice Shelf melted, most of Manhatten (including the site of the twin towers - yes, that was grandstanding, but hey, this is a movie, not a journal article) would be flooded. Not quite the same thing you're saying he claimed, however.
Really? Which labs?
Can you give me a single example of this? Just one?
Actually, until recently you would find comments like this from Pat Robertson. Of course, now, he too is a convert, albeit for all the wrong reasons.
Perhaps that's all you're suggesting, but that's not what I call being a denier. To me, being a denier means believing that either (a) it's hubris to assume that man could change the climate (if I had a dime for every time someone said this...), or (b) there's a conspiracy to spread global warming theories and that the temperature will return to normal "real soon now". Again, if you look at what Pat Michaels and Richard Lindzen (two poster boys for the AGW denier camp) are saying, they don't deny that AGW is real. They merely say what you're saying - namely, that the popular press (and, yes, some scientists) are over-stating the problem. (Well, they do sometimes couch those statements in ways that a non-careful reader might think they were actually denying AGW.) On that issue, you will not find me in denial.
If not, I understand.
I do understand why intelligent, well-meaning, well-educated people (amongst others) will bring this up - especially if they lived through the 70's and were not involved with the climatology science itself (as very few were, of course). I would not be surprised, either, if you could find a small handful of climatologists (and possibly even journal articles) from the 70's who suggested this.
However, The difference is that it was never accepted by mainstream climatology. Therefore, the global cooling "alarmists" have more in common with the global warming "deniers" of today than with the global warming "alarmists" (and I use both words loosely). That makes this comparison invalid when arguing against "consensus science".
If you want to search journal articles form the 70's and 80's, you can always go here. You may not be able to pull up the entire article, but you should be able to find the abstracts. (You might want to be selective in your "Information types" - unless you want to get home pages, too.)
<sarcasm>Time and Newsweek have always been reliable presenters of science news.</sarcasm>
The question is, can you find a climatology journal article from the 70's that agrees with Time or Newsweek? If not, then one should be no more surprised that Time and Newsweek were wrong then about science as one should be surprised when they're wrong now.
(For the record, the Summer of the Shark did not see an increase in shark attacks. And no, I'm not holding up CNN as a good science source, either. Coincidentally enough, there was also a Summer of the Shark in 1975.)
I never claimed the election was stolen. In fact, in other posts, I've expressed my skepticism to that effect. I was just pointing out that the *obvious* explanations were actually discussed.
Go cry over "your" lost Congress somewhere else. (I'm not a Democrat, either. I do, however, favor moderation in government, so I wasn't upset to see the Republicans lose control. One party in charge of everything never leads to moderation.)
It's buried, but it's in there. Lindzen does not deny AGW. He merely thinks that Al Gore's movie is alarmism. He's right that no single hurricane can be attributed to global warming and that the media misrepresent it. That does not mean he disagrees with global warming. Thank you for the link, by the way. It's very handy for pointing out Lindzen's current beliefs with respect to global warming. He does not deny AGW, he merely thinks there's "no cause for alarm". He agrees 100% with the basic science. CO2 absorbs infrared radiation and mankind is directly responsible for the drastic increase in CO2 concentration.
It is interesting that he seemingly contradicts himself later when he says:
but if you read that with a skeptical eye, you'll notice that he's just arguing about the words and not the science. The distinction is between whether man is wholly responsible (i.e., one could "rule out that some significant part of these changes is also a reflection of natural variability") and whether man is only mainly or significantly responsible (i.e., "we cannot rule out..."). That's not denying AGW; that's splitting hairs.It's a really interesting read. It sounds like the words of someone who wants to be a rebel, but can't quite determine how to be non-consensus and still be an honest scientist (which he is). Having studied some non-conventional theories myself, I can understand his predicament.
I've had a debate like this with a RL friend who has said what I was talking about wasn't Fox News' "real" news segment. How about this: if you can find me an approximately 10 minute "real" news clip from Fox News, I'll watch it and tell you if I can spot any lies and/or deliberate misrepresentation (such as leaving out details in such a way as to deliberately change the context of the story). If I can't, I'll chalk up the 2 or 3 experiences I've had in watching the Fox News channel as poor interviewing and/or editorial license.
No, I just can't imagine how one could accidently leave out crucial details that turn a story into something that doesn't even make sense to one of its reporters. It's like saying, "Oh, I accidently forgot to mention that the guy who I said stabbed the cop for no particular reason was being severely beaten on at the time." The words in the report were exactly that misleading. The phrase the female reporter used were something to the effect of "only because these private citizens also happened to be members of city council." I'm sure she wasn't part of the deliberate fabrication, but I'm equally sure there was a deliberate misrepresentation of the story.
And, no, that won't be considered evidence by you. I'm guessing most of their more egregious mistakes only happen on air, so I won't be able to find them on-line (yes, yes, "how convenient"). Therefore, the only way I could satisfy you is to get cable or watch Fox News on someone else's TV. As I only visit the people who watch Fox News about twice a year (hint: they're relatives), that's none too easy.
So, I'll admit I can't prove there is "an obvious deliberate fabrication", although logic dictates that it is the simplest explanation.
Upon further reflection, perhaps I can find some episodes on YouTube. OK, here's an interesting one (first one that came up with the search "Fox News ACLU"). Note that the lady says "Why [the ACLU picks] certain causes, like protecting the right of a man to marry a boy." The ACLU has never tried to protect that right. In fact, it couldn't because such a right doesn't exist. That's after watching less than 2 minutes of the first video I found. Was that, too, accidental? (Granted, it did seem off-the-cuff, so was not premeditated like the my first example.) At around 2:30 into the video, there's a more complicated misrepresentation that might be accidental. Note that the second and third hit also give an example of the type of Fox News misrepresentations of the ACLU, although I'm not sure I count O'Reilly as "news" so much as "opinion".
You really think that was an honest mistake? How does one make that "mistake" other than intentionally? So, no, I don't think pointing out this deliberate misrepresentation is disingenuous.
Surely that humor is intentional, right?
Funny, I've always felt that an intelligent person doesn't buy into any particular political philosophy, but rather builds his/her own. That way, there never is an "other side". ;)
These are actually very good points, and I don't want anyone to think that my flippant response to A beautiful mind was meant to suggest otherwise. I'm definitely not one of those who thinks anything has been proven (with respect to ballot corruption), but, like you, I'd like to see our voting system changed to a verifiable one to remove (or at least lessen) the doubts of its validity.
See here's the problem: if exit polls reveal a higher number of Kerry votes than the actual precinct results, that means that either (a) the exit polls were systematically faulty (in some other way), (b) the elections were systematically faulty (although not necessarily rigged), or (c) some Republicans were lying. However, since we know that Republicans don't lie, that leaves us with (a) or (b), which is exactly what was claimed in the review.
Now, sure, you might point out that some people on /. are claiming to have said they voted for Kerry to exit pollsters when in fact they voted for Bush, but obviously they are lying and therefore are not Republicans.