There is already a tag which our software recognizes as indicating a typo in an article. It's 'typo'. This is in the FAQ. If you want to get the attention of the editor on duty, use the 'typo' tag.
Anonymous cowards can be funny sometimes. By way of explanation, here's an excerpt from Vonnegut's book God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian:
I am a humanist, which means, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without any expectation of regards or punishments after I'm dead. My German-American ancestors, the earliest of whom settled in our Middle West about the time of our Civil War, called themselves "Freethinkers," which is the same sort of thing. My great grandfather Clemens Vonnegut wrote, for example, "If what Jesus said was good, what can it matter whether he was God or not?"
I am honorary president of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the late, great, spectacularly prolific writer and scientist, Dr. Isaac Asimov in that essentially functionless capacity. At an A.H.A. memorial service for my predecessor I said, "Isaac is up in Heaven now." That was the funniest thing I could have said to an audience of humanists. It rolled them in the aisles. Mirth! Several minutes had to pass before something resembling solemnity could be restored.
Blocking websites is what is under discussion here. Not spam.
Can you explain how a web host can abuse your network's resources by quietly sitting around until a HTTP request is sent to it, and then responding with a webpage?
Presumably you would encrypt your observations before storing them. Then it's just a matter of whether and under what circumstances the government can force you to reveal your passphrase.
My guess is that, faced with this novel situation, a judge might rule that if the police have probable cause to believe you were involved in a crime at a particular time, the court can demand your observations for that time period be decrypted, but aren't entitled to view your entire life. Failure to comply might keep you in jail for contempt of court.
A very strong argument could be made, though, that the 5th Amendment entitles us to refuse to disclose our passphrases. I confess I don't know the state of case law on this.
Modding/. staff down means you won't be getting mod points again for a very long time...
To the contrary -- when I saw someone modded me Redundant, I went back and checked, and in the 4 minutes it took me to paste in my Asimov quote, others beat me to it. So the moderator was exactly correct. I put another Redundant on myself because I deserved it.
And the code I'm working on this week will ensure that that moderator -- who modded the same as an admin, before the admin -- will get more influence in our system in the weeks to come, not less:)
OK, now I will click Submit, and then mod myself Offtopic, which this comment clearly is!
Yes, we'd love to have readers making more use of tags to describe / categorize / save / locate content. That's their best use, more helpful than expressing an opinion or making an in-joke. We think that's the main reason for tags and our FAQ talks about this a bit. I often use tags that way on Slashdot, the way they're used on del.icio.us, bookmarking stuff for later.
But of course the point of tags is not to have top-down decisions about what words to associate with content, so we're not going to limit who's allowed to tag.
That said, we are working on systems to identify which Slashdot users tag in the ways that benefit the site (categorizations and value judgments) and to have the site make more use of those users' contributions.
This may sound obvious, but DO NOT use binoculars during the day to look at objects near the sun. One slip and you get instant, permanent, crippling eye damage.
The linked stories do talk about binoculars, but they were written for looking at the comet after sunset.
I didn't say it was the Republicans who failed to ratify Kyoto, I said they campaigned on it. You may not understand the dynamics of a two-party system. In political systems like ours, one party can stake out a popular position and make it essentially impossible for the other party to oppose it. Much of our political dynamic, indeed perhaps the dominant political force in America, is one party using simple (often simplistic) ideas and slogans to force the other party to give ground on, or not press, a particular position. Think about the ideas that shape our public discourse today: soft on crime, cut-and-run, raise your taxes. When the opposing position is too nuanced to explain in brief, it can be extraordinarily difficult to persuade the public in our soundbite culture, and when the staked-out position is popular enough, it's often not worth expending precious airtime to make the effort.
That's the case with Kyoto. The Republicans staked out the position that global warming is a hoax and Kyoto would sacrifice the U.S. economy for other countries. The Democrats simply had no choice but to acquiesce.
If the right-wing had had principles and actually cared about future generations, it might not have funded think-tanks to deceive the American people and cynically tilted the playing field against those who might want to do some good. Maybe the Democrats would have done the right thing on Kyoto and maybe not; we'll never know. In 1998, after years of GOP battering on the issue, the minority party politically had no choice but to go along. I know who to blame for that; do you?
Kyoto is flawed becuase it won't SOLVE the problem but it is a step that is crucial for our future.
Exactly. Kyoto would buy our children time to figure out and implement more technologically-advanced, cheaper, and less-painful ways of altering their world.
Coincidentally, Kyoto has not been ratified by the same country where "lower taxes!," i.e., lower taxes for me and higher taxes for my children, is the one political rallying cry that always works.
Why the party that campaigns on lowering taxes and refusing to ratify Kyoto hates the world's children has yet to be determined.
There was a typo in the submitter's writeup. Some users decided to tag the story with the typo'd word itself, instead of just tagging it "typo". Note that the tags FAQ specifically requests you don't do this.
You're welcome to do that, of course, but it would be more useful to Slashdot as a whole if you didn't. Misspellings and in-jokes don't help us build consensus about classification or value judgments of Slashdot content.
Um, we do? Please email us, or have someone email us, if there's an entire country that Slashdot is blocking in some way. I think we provide a contact email address on all our "you've been blocked" messages, but just in case you didn't see one, try pater@slashdot.org. Let us know what the IP is and if there's been abuse, we'll handle it, well, pretty much the way Wikipedia did:)
As for not being able to log in, I think that might be something about your ISP. We block anonymous contributions from an IP number by setting it to 'nopost' or 'nopostanon'. The only place our login.pl code checks that is if you try to mail a password to someone (possibly yourself). We disallow that from nopost-blocked IPs, because it could be used for anonymous harrassment of our users.
So unless an IP number has been completely banned from Slashdot (no access to any pages, whether you're logged-in or not), you should be able to create an account and log in from it, as far as I know.
This IP number was temporarily blocked for less than 12 hours, and a block of an entire nation would go absolutely against Wikipedia policy. In the English Wikipedia, such an action would require approval of at a minimum the English Arbitration Committee and/or me personally, and would never ever be undertaken lightly, nor without extensive attempts at direct negotiation with the ISP and/or nation in question.
A user who claims to be from Qatar has added, below your comment:
As one who was affected by the block, I'd like to clarify. On 30 December 2006, a Wikipedia admin placed a one-month block on the IP address 82.148.97.69 for reasons of chronic vandalism and spam. The IP address turned out to belong to a QTel proxy server, and thus anonymous posting from the whole of Qatar was blocked. Account creation was also blocked, but this condition was later relaxed after the ban was widely reported across technology sites.
Apparently the block was reverted, as you say, in under 12 hours. Was the block originally put in place as a one-month block or not? If so, then saying it was "temporarily blocked for less than 12 hours" omits an important detail, and saying "a block of an entire nation would go absolutely against Wikipedia policy... and would never ever be undertaken lightly, nor without extensive attempts at direct negotiation" is misleading (since, whether it is against policy or not, it happened, and was done apparently without attempts at negotiation).
Also, can you comment on whether account creation was unblocked before or after the ban was widely reported? If Slashdot got the story wrong, we will surely update it. But changing the ban after reports surface, and then saying "Move along, nothing to see," is not the same thing.
(For the record, an ISP that routes every user through one IP can expect to have this kind of thing happen. I hope this encourages Qatar and/or its ISP to get a better outgoing-IP policy. If Slashdot had repeated anonymous abuse from this IP we would probably ban it from anonymous posting, and later probably unban it, in pretty much exactly the way Wikipedia seems to have done.)
Wrong. "A person is guilty of an offense if he intentionally engages in electronic surveillance under color of law except as authorized by statute." If you think Bush's surveillance is authorized by statute, please look the statute up and quote it to me.
Now, in terms of legal authorities, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act provides -- requires a court order before engaging in this kind of surveillance that I've just discussed and the President announced on Saturday, unless there is somehow -- there is -- unless otherwise authorized by statute or by Congress. That's what the law requires.
Personally I don't have a problem with this program. How the heck else are we going to find out this information?
How about... legally?
The problem that Democrats and other patriot have is not with the wiretapping. Listening in on phone calls between Americans and suspected terrorists abroad is, everyone agrees, a good thing, and entirely legal if it is done according to the law of the land. That means getting a warrant from the FISA court.
The issue with Bush's wiretapping is that it violates that law. Bush is engaging in warrantless wiretapping of those phone calls.
(And, incidentally, the administration has never given a plausible reason why it can't get warrants. The FISA court is notorious for rubber-stamping requests -- it rarely turns them down. And the request can be made retroactively, so it's not like a warrant would hold up a time-sensitive investigation.)
Please don't turn this into an issue of whether or not we should listen in on phone calls with a suspected terrorist on one end. Everyone agrees we should. The question is whether the law should apply to the president, and whether warrants should be required before listening in on Americans' phone calls.
The question which the Department of Justice will now, for a second time, investigate, is what role the Department of Justice had in this violation of the law. Whether it really makes sense for Bush's DoJ to investigate itself, I can't say. (The first investigation, long-delayed, was eventually cancelled when -- I am not making this up -- George W. Bush personally refused to grant security clearance to the investigators.)
He can do this because we are in a state of declared war.
You are absolutely, 100% wrong. Bush's Attorney General Alberto Gonzales in July confirmed that there's been no declaration of war and that this therefore does not affect the legality of this program.
the National Science Teacher's Association rejected an offer to provide free copies of the movie to classrooms, for fear of losing money from Exxon
That's an allegation, but the facts of the article don't strongly support it. Yes, the NSTA was worried about losing corporation contributions; whether they actually would have or not has not been demonstrated. And yes, one of their supporters is Exxon-Mobil, and other contributors are also in that industry, but it has not yet been shown that Exxon is the supporter that the email's author was chiefly concerned about.
Slashdot is being accurate here, presenting the facts and allowing you to draw your own conclusions. Slashdot - 1, you - 1:)
we could show causation [with] a controlled experiment where we can make changes and see the results, etc.
I'm afraid I don't really know what you're talking about. The "etc." only makes things worse.:) Let me try to explore this idea.
Obviously a "controlled experiment" where we isolate two patches of the Earth and do different things to them will not help at all to show causation. For example, we might find two very similar islands in the middle of the Pacific and build giant glass walls around them, a hundred miles high, to cordon them off from the rest of the atmosphere. Then we could e.g. inject a few kilotons of CO2 into the atmosphere of one of them to observe what changes it wreaks.
Of course that wouldn't be enough -- the islands might be slightly differently shaped or sized, changing the heating patterns above them and affecting the local climates. So let's posit they are exactly the same size and shape. We'll probably have to build them ourselves. Oh, and let's put them at exactly the same latitude as well. Now wait! They can't possibly be at the same longitude also, so they are getting slightly different amounts of sunlight (on one island, its daylight hours occur slightly closer to or further from the Earth's perihelion, and in slightly different stages of the sunspot cycle).
It gets worse. How many fish are encircled in each glass cage? We can't have circulation with the rest of the ocean and we can't have ecosystems that differ between the two. Even one fish's worth of difference could make the difference of a species extinction which results in algae bloom taking over the microenvironment, throwing all our calculations out of whack. We have to have precisely the same number of fish to start with.
But of course there are random effects that can result in nonlinear changes even if the number of each enclosed species is the same. If two fish have different start states in their little fish brains at the beginning of the experiment, maybe the control fish will swim left while the experiment fish swims right, getting itself eaten by a shark... which saves that shark from starvation, resulting in more fish getting eaten, a catastrophic decline in the fish population, and we're back the algae bloom.
Any experiment regarding climate with a "control" environment, right up to the entire Earth itself, will be impossible to duplicate precisely. There will always be factors beyond the scientists' control.
In fact, even if we could build a second Earth that is atom-for-atom identical with ours, and place it into orbit let's say 180 degrees away from our Earth, there would still be differences between the control Earth and the Earth we experiment on. Opposite sides of the sun don't necessarily radiate exactly the same amount of energy, for starters, especially since one Earth is 6 whole months off in the sunspot cycle! So this basically requires we build a second entire solar system... but then... suppose a stray cosmic ray impacts the brain of a fish on experiment-Earth but not control-Earth, causing it to swim left... you see where this is going I assume.
Not only is a controlled experiment whose results are indisputably due to the difference in starting states impossible to build with current technology, it is impossible to build even in theory.
If you disagree, I'd like to hear what kind of controlled experiment you had in mind.
We're still disagreeing here; I don't see any way whatsoever, even in theory, that such a computer model could be built. I'm speaking philosophically here. Of course it's impossible in the real world, we seem to agree on that or at least you're mostly convinced, but I believe it's impossible even in theory.
I'd asked you to "give an example of how you would write a computer model of any complex system that 'takes every potential factor into consideration,'" and if you'd done that, I think it would quickly be plain how it could not meet that standard. For example, if your model doesn't include ecological changes to the migration patterns of the monarch butterfly (its little wings decrease albedo), it fails to take that factor into consideration. In fact it has to model each beat of their wings, as the disturbances in the air can cause tropical storms months later.
I can point out "potential factors" with any model, right up to bulding a virtual replica that models every atom of the Earth itself -- and even then I'm going to start insisting you model the sun as well. Anything less would, in principle, by definition, fail to take at least something into consideration.
If you disagree, then please either clarify what you meant by "takes every potential factor into consideration," or give an example of how one would write a computer model that would meet your standards.
By the way, did you know that murders go up when ice cream sales rise? It's a fact. Does that mean that there's some ingredient in the ice cream that causes people to kill? No. What they have in common is hot weather.
Let's think about this for a minute. Suppose there were an ingredient in ice cream that was known to make people more violent. Suppose thousands of "violence scientists" had spent decades studying this ingredient's effect on human physiology, doing tests on the chemical mixtures in the brain, analyzing neural pathways, running tests, and so on. They could never, of course, test whether the exact same person had at the exact same time both eaten and not eaten ice cream and compare the results. But through rigorously and carefully eliminating variables they could build increasingly better models of the effect that ice cream consumption had on violent behavior.
If this were done with sufficient rigor, then violence scientists could start trying to estimate how much of the increase in murders was caused by the ice cream changing behavior, and how much was simply a correlation with a shared cause (hot weather). Perhaps 1% would be due to the ice cream, and perhaps 99%. By testing models against real-world conditions, the accuracy of that estimate would improve.
This is of course exactly the situation we are in with climate science. Clearly greenhouse gases have an impact on planetary temperature; I'm assuming you are not disputing that. The chemistry and physics are really not that hard to model, and a lot of very bright people have been modelling it with increasing accuracy.
In fact, you alluded to Pinatubo's eruption earlier. That's a great example. When Pinatubo blew, it sent a great deal of SO2 into the atmosphere. SO2 reduces the amount of sunlight reaching the earth's surface. That provided a great opportunity for climate scientists to test their models. In fact the prediction made about how much the earth would cool in the year or two following was almost exactly right (about half a degree C, I think).
This is what science does: it constructs ever-better models of the world around us which can be used to make ever-better predictions. Our models of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and global warming are very good. Maybe you need to stop assuming that you are smarter than climate scientists.
Well if you really want to learn about the carbon cycle I guess you can educate yourself. You can learn about how much net carbon the oceans absorb (not much). And how much plants absorb (that one's negative, actually, thanks to human activities like deforestation). And so on.
But it doesn't sound like learning would do you any good. The best models we have right now indicate significant temperature increases over the next century and significant adverse effects on the humans who inhabit sensitive areas. But you, despite not knowing anything about those models, definitively proclaim "it doesn't matter at all," because there is -- maybe! -- some factor scientists haven't foreseen, which will save us all.
You may be right. Science's understanding of cloud formation may be so limited that it turns out tropical clouds will cool the earth enough to mitigate all the adverse effects of anthropogenic global warming. Or maybe Martians will swoop down and save us.
Guess you think that means there's no need to do anything.
Suppose, for just a moment, that the best scientific models available are right and you are wrong. What are you going to say to your grandchildren when they ask why you didn't support doing anything? "Sure, our scientists said you kids were screwed, but I thought they might be wrong so I figured it was silly to change our behavior."
Slashdot Mirror
There is already a tag which our software recognizes as indicating a typo in an article. It's 'typo'. This is in the FAQ. If you want to get the attention of the editor on duty, use the 'typo' tag.
Anonymous cowards can be funny sometimes. By way of explanation, here's an excerpt from Vonnegut's book God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian:
Mmmmmoof!
That's what the tagging system is for. We're working on it!
Did you read as far as the 5th word in the title?
Blocking websites is what is under discussion here. Not spam.
Can you explain how a web host can abuse your network's resources by quietly sitting around until a HTTP request is sent to it, and then responding with a webpage?
assert( $watch->is_gold );
assert( $ring->is_diamond );
assert( $self->num_missing( $thing->single ) < 1 );
Presumably you would encrypt your observations before storing them. Then it's just a matter of whether and under what circumstances the government can force you to reveal your passphrase.
My guess is that, faced with this novel situation, a judge might rule that if the police have probable cause to believe you were involved in a crime at a particular time, the court can demand your observations for that time period be decrypted, but aren't entitled to view your entire life. Failure to comply might keep you in jail for contempt of court.
A very strong argument could be made, though, that the 5th Amendment entitles us to refuse to disclose our passphrases. I confess I don't know the state of case law on this.
To the contrary -- when I saw someone modded me Redundant, I went back and checked, and in the 4 minutes it took me to paste in my Asimov quote, others beat me to it. So the moderator was exactly correct. I put another Redundant on myself because I deserved it.
And the code I'm working on this week will ensure that that moderator -- who modded the same as an admin, before the admin -- will get more influence in our system in the weeks to come, not less :)
OK, now I will click Submit, and then mod myself Offtopic, which this comment clearly is!
"The co-author on my paper said, 'Did I hear you say you killed some cancer?' I said 'Oh,' and took a closer look..." (Katherine Schaefer)
"The most exciting phrase to hear in science is not 'Eureka!' but 'Hmm, that's funny'..." (Isaac Asimov)
Yes, we'd love to have readers making more use of tags to describe / categorize / save / locate content. That's their best use, more helpful than expressing an opinion or making an in-joke. We think that's the main reason for tags and our FAQ talks about this a bit. I often use tags that way on Slashdot, the way they're used on del.icio.us, bookmarking stuff for later.
But of course the point of tags is not to have top-down decisions about what words to associate with content, so we're not going to limit who's allowed to tag.
That said, we are working on systems to identify which Slashdot users tag in the ways that benefit the site (categorizations and value judgments) and to have the site make more use of those users' contributions.
This may sound obvious, but DO NOT use binoculars during the day to look at objects near the sun. One slip and you get instant, permanent, crippling eye damage.
The linked stories do talk about binoculars, but they were written for looking at the comet after sunset.
I didn't say it was the Republicans who failed to ratify Kyoto, I said they campaigned on it. You may not understand the dynamics of a two-party system. In political systems like ours, one party can stake out a popular position and make it essentially impossible for the other party to oppose it. Much of our political dynamic, indeed perhaps the dominant political force in America, is one party using simple (often simplistic) ideas and slogans to force the other party to give ground on, or not press, a particular position. Think about the ideas that shape our public discourse today: soft on crime, cut-and-run, raise your taxes. When the opposing position is too nuanced to explain in brief, it can be extraordinarily difficult to persuade the public in our soundbite culture, and when the staked-out position is popular enough, it's often not worth expending precious airtime to make the effort.
That's the case with Kyoto. The Republicans staked out the position that global warming is a hoax and Kyoto would sacrifice the U.S. economy for other countries. The Democrats simply had no choice but to acquiesce.
If the right-wing had had principles and actually cared about future generations, it might not have funded think-tanks to deceive the American people and cynically tilted the playing field against those who might want to do some good. Maybe the Democrats would have done the right thing on Kyoto and maybe not; we'll never know. In 1998, after years of GOP battering on the issue, the minority party politically had no choice but to go along. I know who to blame for that; do you?
Exactly. Kyoto would buy our children time to figure out and implement more technologically-advanced, cheaper, and less-painful ways of altering their world.
Coincidentally, Kyoto has not been ratified by the same country where "lower taxes!," i.e., lower taxes for me and higher taxes for my children, is the one political rallying cry that always works.
Why the party that campaigns on lowering taxes and refusing to ratify Kyoto hates the world's children has yet to be determined.
There was a typo in the submitter's writeup. Some users decided to tag the story with the typo'd word itself, instead of just tagging it "typo". Note that the tags FAQ specifically requests you don't do this.
You're welcome to do that, of course, but it would be more useful to Slashdot as a whole if you didn't. Misspellings and in-jokes don't help us build consensus about classification or value judgments of Slashdot content.
Um, we do? Please email us, or have someone email us, if there's an entire country that Slashdot is blocking in some way. I think we provide a contact email address on all our "you've been blocked" messages, but just in case you didn't see one, try pater@slashdot.org. Let us know what the IP is and if there's been abuse, we'll handle it, well, pretty much the way Wikipedia did :)
As for not being able to log in, I think that might be something about your ISP. We block anonymous contributions from an IP number by setting it to 'nopost' or 'nopostanon'. The only place our login.pl code checks that is if you try to mail a password to someone (possibly yourself). We disallow that from nopost-blocked IPs, because it could be used for anonymous harrassment of our users.
So unless an IP number has been completely banned from Slashdot (no access to any pages, whether you're logged-in or not), you should be able to create an account and log in from it, as far as I know.
You wrote on the linked Wikipedia page:
A user who claims to be from Qatar has added, below your comment:
Apparently the block was reverted, as you say, in under 12 hours. Was the block originally put in place as a one-month block or not? If so, then saying it was "temporarily blocked for less than 12 hours" omits an important detail, and saying "a block of an entire nation would go absolutely against Wikipedia policy... and would never ever be undertaken lightly, nor without extensive attempts at direct negotiation" is misleading (since, whether it is against policy or not, it happened, and was done apparently without attempts at negotiation).
Also, can you comment on whether account creation was unblocked before or after the ban was widely reported? If Slashdot got the story wrong, we will surely update it. But changing the ban after reports surface, and then saying "Move along, nothing to see," is not the same thing.
(For the record, an ISP that routes every user through one IP can expect to have this kind of thing happen. I hope this encourages Qatar and/or its ISP to get a better outgoing-IP policy. If Slashdot had repeated anonymous abuse from this IP we would probably ban it from anonymous posting, and later probably unban it, in pretty much exactly the way Wikipedia seems to have done.)
Incorrect.
Wrong. "A person is guilty of an offense if he intentionally engages in electronic surveillance under color of law except as authorized by statute." If you think Bush's surveillance is authorized by statute, please look the statute up and quote it to me.
Good luck, since the President's own Attorney General acknowledged that the law requires warrants:
How about... legally?
The problem that Democrats and other patriot have is not with the wiretapping. Listening in on phone calls between Americans and suspected terrorists abroad is, everyone agrees, a good thing, and entirely legal if it is done according to the law of the land. That means getting a warrant from the FISA court.
The issue with Bush's wiretapping is that it violates that law. Bush is engaging in warrantless wiretapping of those phone calls.
(And, incidentally, the administration has never given a plausible reason why it can't get warrants. The FISA court is notorious for rubber-stamping requests -- it rarely turns them down. And the request can be made retroactively, so it's not like a warrant would hold up a time-sensitive investigation.)
Please don't turn this into an issue of whether or not we should listen in on phone calls with a suspected terrorist on one end. Everyone agrees we should. The question is whether the law should apply to the president, and whether warrants should be required before listening in on Americans' phone calls.
The question which the Department of Justice will now, for a second time, investigate, is what role the Department of Justice had in this violation of the law. Whether it really makes sense for Bush's DoJ to investigate itself, I can't say. (The first investigation, long-delayed, was eventually cancelled when -- I am not making this up -- George W. Bush personally refused to grant security clearance to the investigators.)
He can do this because we are in a state of declared war.You are absolutely, 100% wrong. Bush's Attorney General Alberto Gonzales in July confirmed that there's been no declaration of war and that this therefore does not affect the legality of this program.
That's an allegation, but the facts of the article don't strongly support it. Yes, the NSTA was worried about losing corporation contributions; whether they actually would have or not has not been demonstrated. And yes, one of their supporters is Exxon-Mobil, and other contributors are also in that industry, but it has not yet been shown that Exxon is the supporter that the email's author was chiefly concerned about.
Slashdot is being accurate here, presenting the facts and allowing you to draw your own conclusions. Slashdot - 1, you - 1 :)
I'm afraid I don't really know what you're talking about. The "etc." only makes things worse. :) Let me try to explore this idea.
Obviously a "controlled experiment" where we isolate two patches of the Earth and do different things to them will not help at all to show causation. For example, we might find two very similar islands in the middle of the Pacific and build giant glass walls around them, a hundred miles high, to cordon them off from the rest of the atmosphere. Then we could e.g. inject a few kilotons of CO2 into the atmosphere of one of them to observe what changes it wreaks.
Of course that wouldn't be enough -- the islands might be slightly differently shaped or sized, changing the heating patterns above them and affecting the local climates. So let's posit they are exactly the same size and shape. We'll probably have to build them ourselves. Oh, and let's put them at exactly the same latitude as well. Now wait! They can't possibly be at the same longitude also, so they are getting slightly different amounts of sunlight (on one island, its daylight hours occur slightly closer to or further from the Earth's perihelion, and in slightly different stages of the sunspot cycle).
It gets worse. How many fish are encircled in each glass cage? We can't have circulation with the rest of the ocean and we can't have ecosystems that differ between the two. Even one fish's worth of difference could make the difference of a species extinction which results in algae bloom taking over the microenvironment, throwing all our calculations out of whack. We have to have precisely the same number of fish to start with.
But of course there are random effects that can result in nonlinear changes even if the number of each enclosed species is the same. If two fish have different start states in their little fish brains at the beginning of the experiment, maybe the control fish will swim left while the experiment fish swims right, getting itself eaten by a shark... which saves that shark from starvation, resulting in more fish getting eaten, a catastrophic decline in the fish population, and we're back the algae bloom.
Any experiment regarding climate with a "control" environment, right up to the entire Earth itself, will be impossible to duplicate precisely. There will always be factors beyond the scientists' control.
In fact, even if we could build a second Earth that is atom-for-atom identical with ours, and place it into orbit let's say 180 degrees away from our Earth, there would still be differences between the control Earth and the Earth we experiment on. Opposite sides of the sun don't necessarily radiate exactly the same amount of energy, for starters, especially since one Earth is 6 whole months off in the sunspot cycle! So this basically requires we build a second entire solar system... but then... suppose a stray cosmic ray impacts the brain of a fish on experiment-Earth but not control-Earth, causing it to swim left... you see where this is going I assume.
Not only is a controlled experiment whose results are indisputably due to the difference in starting states impossible to build with current technology, it is impossible to build even in theory.
If you disagree, I'd like to hear what kind of controlled experiment you had in mind.
We're still disagreeing here; I don't see any way whatsoever, even in theory, that such a computer model could be built. I'm speaking philosophically here. Of course it's impossible in the real world, we seem to agree on that or at least you're mostly convinced, but I believe it's impossible even in theory.
I'd asked you to "give an example of how you would write a computer model of any complex system that 'takes every potential factor into consideration,'" and if you'd done that, I think it would quickly be plain how it could not meet that standard. For example, if your model doesn't include ecological changes to the migration patterns of the monarch butterfly (its little wings decrease albedo), it fails to take that factor into consideration. In fact it has to model each beat of their wings, as the disturbances in the air can cause tropical storms months later.
I can point out "potential factors" with any model, right up to bulding a virtual replica that models every atom of the Earth itself -- and even then I'm going to start insisting you model the sun as well. Anything less would, in principle, by definition, fail to take at least something into consideration.
If you disagree, then please either clarify what you meant by "takes every potential factor into consideration," or give an example of how one would write a computer model that would meet your standards.
By the way, did you know that murders go up when ice cream sales rise? It's a fact. Does that mean that there's some ingredient in the ice cream that causes people to kill? No. What they have in common is hot weather.
Let's think about this for a minute. Suppose there were an ingredient in ice cream that was known to make people more violent. Suppose thousands of "violence scientists" had spent decades studying this ingredient's effect on human physiology, doing tests on the chemical mixtures in the brain, analyzing neural pathways, running tests, and so on. They could never, of course, test whether the exact same person had at the exact same time both eaten and not eaten ice cream and compare the results. But through rigorously and carefully eliminating variables they could build increasingly better models of the effect that ice cream consumption had on violent behavior.
If this were done with sufficient rigor, then violence scientists could start trying to estimate how much of the increase in murders was caused by the ice cream changing behavior, and how much was simply a correlation with a shared cause (hot weather). Perhaps 1% would be due to the ice cream, and perhaps 99%. By testing models against real-world conditions, the accuracy of that estimate would improve.
This is of course exactly the situation we are in with climate science. Clearly greenhouse gases have an impact on planetary temperature; I'm assuming you are not disputing that. The chemistry and physics are really not that hard to model, and a lot of very bright people have been modelling it with increasing accuracy.
In fact, you alluded to Pinatubo's eruption earlier. That's a great example. When Pinatubo blew, it sent a great deal of SO2 into the atmosphere. SO2 reduces the amount of sunlight reaching the earth's surface. That provided a great opportunity for climate scientists to test their models. In fact the prediction made about how much the earth would cool in the year or two following was almost exactly right (about half a degree C, I think).
This is what science does: it constructs ever-better models of the world around us which can be used to make ever-better predictions. Our models of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and global warming are very good. Maybe you need to stop assuming that you are smarter than climate scientists.
Well if you really want to learn about the carbon cycle I guess you can educate yourself. You can learn about how much net carbon the oceans absorb (not much). And how much plants absorb (that one's negative, actually, thanks to human activities like deforestation). And so on.
But it doesn't sound like learning would do you any good. The best models we have right now indicate significant temperature increases over the next century and significant adverse effects on the humans who inhabit sensitive areas. But you, despite not knowing anything about those models, definitively proclaim "it doesn't matter at all," because there is -- maybe! -- some factor scientists haven't foreseen, which will save us all.
You may be right. Science's understanding of cloud formation may be so limited that it turns out tropical clouds will cool the earth enough to mitigate all the adverse effects of anthropogenic global warming. Or maybe Martians will swoop down and save us.
Guess you think that means there's no need to do anything.
Suppose, for just a moment, that the best scientific models available are right and you are wrong. What are you going to say to your grandchildren when they ask why you didn't support doing anything? "Sure, our scientists said you kids were screwed, but I thought they might be wrong so I figured it was silly to change our behavior."