They call it a threat because it neutralizes the "Mutually Assured Destruction" balance that has thus far prevented thermonuclear war from being a viable option. If they can't shoot missiles at us, but we can shoot missiles at them, then there's nothing preventing us from just nuking them out of existence next time we have a disagreement.
The cold war is still pretty fresh in some people's minds...
See, that's the problem. Russian missiles are set to travel over the North Pole, not over Europe. This system would only defend against missiles targeting Europe, and even then its debatable. Of course, let's not even start on submarine and mobile launchers.
Let's see how the US likes pre-emptive strikes against its stuff.
Signed, The world
A "pre-emptive strike" against a defensive system is not justified. The Russians should also consider that any "pre-emtpive strike" will result in retaliation and weigh that before deciding. If the Russians are willing to go to war against the US over and defensive installation that we have offered them unfettered access to, then they really just want war anyway.
Yep. I kept passwords on stickies under my monitor. "That's not secure". Reply: "If somebody in the building is looking under my monitor, finding the PW and figuring out what UID and service it belongs to, we've got bigger problems".
Your coworkers that want to do a little fraud would much rather do it with your UID than their own. And yes, I assume they know your userID.
I know it sounds counter intuitive, but I think the best way to reduce brain injuries now is to simply remove the helmets from the game. Sure, there will be more broken noses, but you will see brain injuries drop substantially. People just don't lead with their heads when moving full speed at a target heading full speed back.
The biggest thing that I can think of is that the later versions of PSD formats are not freely licensed, which is why they are not in the gimp.
If I read this correctly it is possible for European software developers to use competitors file formats, which does not seem to be the case for American developers.
Put another way, the No True Scotsman fallacy is something that occurs when you fail to define your terms beforehand. When you're arguing over whether something or someone is a member of a group, it's important to establish in advance exactly what it means to be a member of that group.
In your first example, the participants clearly have different ideas about what it means to be a Scotsman (characteristics like "enjoys haggis" vs., e.g., ancestry). Both definitions are reasonable, and can be constructed without circular reasoning. In the second case, granting equal weight to both definitions would render the term "vegetarian" meaningless, since one is essentially circular: "someone who self-identifies as vegetarian".
A term like "liberal" is closer to the former case; there are lots of reasonable definitions, spanning literal, historical, and modern interpretations, which themselves vary from place to place, and applied to social or fiscal policies. It's difficult, and perhaps even impossible, to be "liberal" in every sense of the term; on the other hand, most people are liberal in some areas.
Very true. Everyone sees themselves as the middle. Those that agree with them are also middle of the road. Anyone to the left of them is a liberal. Anyone to the right of them is a conservative. It's all relative.
But, the point I was referring to is this one by a post somewhere above:
2) On average liberals are more intelligent than right-wingers.
Since he never defined what he meant by "liberals", I can only go off the standard definition of someone who likes a strong central government that uses its power to enforce equality by redistributing wealth. I don't think me meant any other definition like "someone open to new ideas" or "someone who values personal freedom over all else".
Once you start providing for yourself, you attitude tends to change quite drastically. Students, who receive federal grants are all for federal assistance programs. Once they are no longer students and find that 15% of their paychecks goes to fund federal assistance programs, that view tends to change rather quickly.
Yeah, if you're a sociopath asshole. I would hope these working folks understand that they are paying that 15% so that *others just like them* can go to school on federal grants/assistance programs. What kind of asshole benefits from a program and then slashes it right after he's done with it? Talk about not paying it forward...
It's not a matter of selfishness. It's a matter of ignorance. Many vegetarians didn't start out that way. They were served burger, they ate it and they enjoyed it. Then, when they found out what was sacrificed to make that burger, they found themselves sickened and vowed to never eat another living creature again.
In this case, they lived off the dole because they simply don't know any better. They liked it. They are given government money and they have no idea where it comes from. Given the chance to vote for more government money, they'll do it in a heartbeat. However, once they realize where that money comes from, they might change their minds.
Reality hits you hard, bro. This is why the OP I responded to was full of shit when he said "reality has a liberal bias." Liberalism is great until you become the one paying for it. When that reality hits, liberalism doesn't look so good any more. Someone has to be on the other side of that glory hole or it doesn't work. When you used it all week, it was nice. You didn't know how it worked, nor did you care. Then when you find out that it's your turn to be on the other side, suddenly it's not such a good idea. Had you known what was involved before you used it, you never would have. Now it's too late and it's your turn.
In other words, the kids said they were liberal, but when you got down to what they truly believed, it turns out they were actually fairly conservative.
Is that like an inversion of the No True Scotsman fallacy? Shall we coin the Everyone's a True Scotsman fallacy?
Even if you think you're liberal, you're really conservative!
Actually, Wikipedia explains it better than I can.
Fallacy:
Alice: All Scotsmen enjoy haggis.
Bob: My uncle is a Scotsman, and he doesn't like haggis!
Alice: Well, all true Scotsmen like haggis.
NOT Fallacy:
Jake: All vegetarians refuse to eat steak.
Deb: My uncle is a vegetarian, and he eats steak all the time!
Jake: Well, then he's not really a vegetarian.
Holding liberal ideals is pretty much required to be a liberal just as not eating meat is a requirement to be a vegetarian.
In other words, the kids said they were liberal, but when you got down to what they truly believed, it turns out they were actually fairly conservative.
Is that like an inversion of the No True Scotsman fallacy? Shall we coin the Everyone's a True Scotsman fallacy?
Even if you think you're liberal, you're really conservative!
In other words, the kids said they were liberal, but when you got down to what they truly believed, it turns out they were actually fairly conservative.
Is that like an inversion of the No True Scotsman fallacy? Shall we coin the Everyone's a True Scotsman fallacy?
Even if you think you're liberal, you're really conservative!
Nice analysis, except the error is not on my part, but that of the students and the researcher. The Scotsman fallacy argument would work if I were the one claiming that liberal ideals are now conservative. That's not the case.
My point is twofold. First, they asked kids about their political affiliation. I don't trust kids to know this or have enough life experience to answer accurately. It's easy to claim to be a liberal when you are living off of someone else's work and money. Once you start providing for yourself, you attitude tends to change quite drastically. Students, who receive federal grants are all for federal assistance programs. Once they are no longer students and find that 15% of their paychecks goes to fund federal assistance programs, that view tends to change rather quickly.
Next is that kids might identify themselves with something they are not. They assume they are liberal. After all, all their friends are liberal. All their TV heroes and musical idols are liberal. When they see the common perception of a conservative, they are old, fat, rich and stuffy. When they see the perception of a liberal, they are charitable (working for the Peace Corps or something), actively working to save seals or something, young, open minded and friendly. It's no surprise that they would identify themselves with the group that fits more of who they think they are. But when you ask them if they want the school to raise lunch prices and give a portion of their lunch money to feed the less fortunate students or if they feel that the government should confiscate their X-Boxes to buy Wiis for everyone, they tend to be more conservative.
The study would have more legitimacy if, instead of asking the students if they were liberal of conservative, they asked them questions that would identify their affiliation. Even then, you may get skewed results. For example if you asked students if the rich should pay their fair share in taxes, it's like that 100% would say yes. But if you asked if them if it is fair that they should have give up their own luxuries for those that don't have them or share their good grades to raise the GPA of those that don't do as well, you may get a different answer.
I've already explained this to you, using a very simple analogy with a hare and a tortoise. Did you not understand?
It makes no difference if the vast majority of the effect from the methane happens over 9-15 years. We can still say how much effect it had over any length of time we choose. Over 15 years, say, it might have 70 times the effect of CO2. Over 50 years it might have 45 times the effect of CO2. Over 100 years it might have 20 times. Over 500 years it might have 4 times the effect. [These figures are not meant to be exact, they are purely to illustrate the concept]
Do you understand it now?
I understand the analogy you are trying to make, but it doesn't fly. The tortoise/hare analogy is as follows from your post:
A hare and a turtle go for a race of 10 minutes. The hare runs 100 meters in one minute, calls it quits and takes a nap. The turle works for 10 minutes and manages to crawl 10 meters. The hare won, although he stopped after 1 minute. Methane does so much damage in that 9-15 years the CO2 needs about 2000 years to catch up
In distance, this works. Not so much with heat. Put two pots on the stove, one on high for 10 minutes and another on low for two hours. Sure, the pot on high will boil, but it will eventually cool down to a temperature lower than the pot on low. After the two hours, the pot that was on high will be cooler than the pot that is still on low. Why? Heat dissipates. If you were to replace the earth's atmosphere with 100% methane, it may heat up quite a bit, but in since the methane breaks down in less than 15 years, the heat will dissipate into space, leaving the planet pretty much as it was before. Space is a poor insulator.
John C. Green, a senior fellow at the Pew Forum, said he was surprised to see that teaching both evolution and creationism was favored not only by conservative Christians, but also by majorities of secular respondents, liberal Democrats and those who accept the theory of natural selection. Mr. Green called it a reflection of "American pragmatism."
1) Reality has a well know liberal bias. 2) On average liberals are more intelligent than right-wingers.
1) When I hear liberals say things like, "Obama is doing a great job with the economy", I see that bias has affected what some see as reality.
2) Bullshit. I hear that spouted all the time, but only by liberals. Many of the media driven surveys that claim this usually did so by asking respondents questions that liberals are more likely to know the answer to, like "Where was Obama born" or "Did Iraq have something to do with 9-11". They don't ask questions like, "Who said that she could see Alaska from her house."
The more professional studies used to come up with that conclusion used kids to make the determination. KIDS! They also allowed the kids to determine their political affiliation themselves rather than determining them from the ideals the children hold dear.
The Add Health study shows that the mean IQ of adolescents who identify themselves as "very liberal" is 106, compared with a mean IQ of 95 for those calling themselves "very conservative." The Add Health study is huge — more than 20,000 kids — and this difference is highly statistically significant.
But self-identification is often misleading; do kids really know what it means to be liberal? The GSS data are instructive here: Kanazawa found that more-intelligent GSS respondents (as measured by a quick but highly reliable synonym test) were less likely to agree that the government has a responsibility to reduce income and wealth differences. In other words, intelligent people might like to portray themselves as liberal. But in the end, they know that it's good to be the king.
In other words, the kids said they were liberal, but when you got down to what they truly believed, it turns out they were actually fairly conservative.
I agree that 84% (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveys_of_scientists%27_views_on_climate_change) is not unanimous, but it's getting closer every year. Unless, ofcourse, you count the opinion of people who don't understand the science involved and blame other people for their own lack of understanding.
Like the EPA?. Tell me if you can spot the huge logic hole in this statement:
Methane (CH4) is a greenhouse gas that remains in the atmosphere for approximately 9-15 years. Methane is over 20 times more effective in trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide (CO2) over a 100-year period
Remember, these are the people writing policy and regulations concerning our rights with respect to climate change.
But, until the engineers get involved on a real fix I wouldn't bother changing your lifestyle, other than maybe switching to LED lights and turning down the thermostat. Politicians never fix anything.
From your blog post:
Mars: To start, is Mars even warming globally at all? Perhaps not — it might be a local effect.
Jupiter: The evidence for Jupiter’s global warming is nothing of the sort. It is evidence that there are warm spots, with storms rising to the tops of the clouds. This may just be a local effect, and not global.
Therefore it’s very difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish between factors like the Sun warming up Triton anomalously, or just the usual changes in the moon due to seasons.
As for tiny Pluto, its dynamics are very poorly understood. What we do see is that its atmosphere appears to be thicker than expected right now. Pluto doesn’t have much of an air blanket, and it changes over the course of Pluto’s orbit as the tiny iceball approaches and recedes from the Sun. Pluto reached perihelion, the closest point in its orbit to the Sun, in 1989, and is slowly drawing away again. You might think its atmosphere would start freezing out, getting thinner. But that’s not happening; it’s getting quite a bit thicker. However, this is not totally unexpected. Changes are not instantaneous, and it may take a while for things to thaw.
The BLOG post you linked to is full of "may be" and we don't know. He consistently claims there is no warming, then claims that we don't know what's causing the warming. For example, on Jupiter he claims that there is no evidence for warming and then in the same paragraph claims that the warming may be local. Again, MAY BE local. And if there is no evidence of warming, what local warming is he talking about?
Finally, he pulls a classic fallacy of "Poisoning the well":
And the guy who is proposing that the Sun is warming Mars doesn’t think CO2 is a greenhouse gas.
OK, so he doesn't think that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. What does that have to do with his ability to judge the temperature on Mars? Also, it's not true. What the article your blog used as a source said was, "Heading Pulkovo's space research laboratory is Dr. Abdussamatov, one of the world's chief critics of the theory that man-made carbon dioxide emissions create a greenhouse effect, leading to global warming." and "It is no secret that increased solar irradiance warms Earth's oceans, which then triggers the emission of large amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. So the common view that man's industrial activity is a deciding factor in global warming has emerged from a misinterpretation of cause and effect relations." So, it's not that he doesn't believe CO2 is a greenhouse gas, but he questions the source of CO2 and its overall effect.
I have an open mind and take an agnostic approach to AGW. Unfortunately, I see a whole lot more BS coming from the global warming crowd. Take this gem, from the EPA itself:
Methane (CH4) is a greenhouse gas that remains in the atmosphere for approximately 9-15 years. Methane is over 20 times more effective in trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide (CO2) over a 100-year period
Am I the only one who fails to see the massive logic fail in that statement? If methane only lasts for 9-15 years, how is more effective at trapping heat over a 100 year period?
But, until the engineers get involved on a real fix I wouldn't bother changing your lifestyle, other than maybe switching
Let's see, a series of anti-global warming stories, anti-environmental stories, etc, shortly followed by a pork barrel promotion story blaming the sitting president for, of all things, cutting funding to a dead end science experiment. Gee whiz, I wonder why Slashdot is once again carrying Republican talking points and pushing a Republican agenda? Oh rriiight, it's an election year so the right wing media is ratcheting it up a notch and slashdot is doing its usual duty for the right.
Here are the recent Slashdot stories:
Who Needs CISPA? FBI Has a Non-Profit Workaround WW2 Vet Sent 300,000 Pirated DVDs To Troops In Iraq, Afghanistan Key Test For Skylon Spaceplane Engine Technology China Plans National, Unified CPU Architecture Microsoft Patches Major Hotmail 0-day Flaw After Widespread Exploitation Conflict of Interest Derails UK Government Open Source Consultation Analytic Thinking Can Decrease Religious Belief Bionic Eye Patient Tests Planned For 2013 BOLD Plan To Find Mars Life On the Cheap 'Mein Kampf' To Be Republished In Germany UK Digital Economy Act Delayed Till 2014
The only thing I see here remotely political is the "Analytic Thinking Can Decrease Religious Belief", which is another way of calling religious people stupid and "'Mein Kampf' To Be Republished In Germany", which contains a whole bunch of comments comparing "Mein Kampf" to the Bible.
Seriously dude! How bad do you really really want to believe in the fictional "right wing media" to make you see evidence of it where it does not exist?
What? I'm not following the connect between power & health costs.
How come the government is doing fusion research instead of the private sector, like existing electric companies?
Because electric companies are public utilities. See, in order to spend (invest) an enormous amount money into expensive, unproven research projects like this, you must have "extra" money laying around. That money comes from profits. Utility companies are a natural monopoly and are therefor heavily regulated so they don't take advantage of their consumers. If the utility companies had the types of huge profits needed to invest in nuclear fusion research, the government would step in and force them to lower their prices, thus eliminating their profits and research capital.
Seriously? I give you the Berkeley graphs, which appear to have used a pretty rigourous method, where you can download their temperature data and source code, and is being peer-reviewed, and you rebut this with a graph that does not have a labelled y-axis and appears to have been drawn with a bezier tool? If you want to convince me that there is no scientific consensus, i.e. that researchers who know what they're doing and are doing it properly, disagree that global warming is happening/is a problem, then please stop using graphs like that. Especially when they disagree with the graph I provided, which gives its sources (IIRC, every temperature measurement they could get their hands on), and includes three other groups' sets of numbers on the same axes - none of which agree with the graph you provided.
Fair enough. "Negate" was probably a bad term. My point was that I can find a graph that says pretty much anything I want, that uses good data and models just like your Berkeley graph. This settled debate can't agree on climate's past. I don't trust them to predict the future.
You make some good points and I am in no way expert enough to negate them. Although, while I'm not a climatologist I know enough about climate science to know that it's always changing. It is always changing. Of course, by changing, we mean that it is always getting warmer or cooler as those are the only two directions it can go. Since we are dealing with such large time scales, natural change happens over hundreds of thousands of years, or it can happen in a century or two. This means that the temperature can decrease slowly for hundreds of thousands of years and then suddenly increase very quickly for 50. The change we are seeing now is not unprecedented. The Thames river in London used to freeze over often enough to have fairs on it just a couple of centuries ago. The last time the Thames froze over was in 1814, about 75 years before the very first automobiles. Now, even snow in London is a rare occurrence. This change happened before the SUV and coal fired plants. It's been getting warmer for quite some time in human time scales, but again, just a blip on climatological time scales.
It could just as easily be getting cooler. What would we blame for global cooling? Would we have a slew of scientist claiming that increased moisture from the cooling towers of power plants mixed with the soot from smoke stacks and car exhausts were causing an increase in cloud cover, thus cooling the planet? Sounds just as reasonable as CO2 is trapping heat.
It just seems like we see something we have not seen before and instantly look as to what WE might be doing to cause it. I call it the rain dance effect. We dance around the fire right before a rain storm so the next time we need rain, we look at what we did to cause it rain last time. Fact is, we did nothing to cause the rain. It would have rained with or without our dance. Just as the climate will change, with or without our SUV's. Another example is from the Steve Martin movie "All of Me". A visitor to this country who has no experience with technology is looking at a toilet for the first time. When he presses the lever, it flushes, but at the same time, someone was calling his phone. He instantly linked these two, unrelated events. Through the rest of the movie, every time the phone rang, he ran into the bathroom and flushed the toilet. The Biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah tells how they were were consumed by fire. The writers instantly assumed that they were destroyed because of the behavior of the people living there and don't consider that anal sex does not normally cause earthquakes or volcanic eruptions.
The bottom line is that the debate is not settled, regardless of what an Internet Hall of Famer with multiple mansions and a fleet of private planes says. I will not give up my rights to a government simply because government paid scientists tell me bad things MIGHT happen if I don't. I take "Give me liberty or give me death" seriously and if I'm wrong and all the coastal cities get wiped out, then the problem has just taken care of itself!
There are no alternative power sources? Better not tell all those countries using nuclear and renewable...oh but wait because the nuttiest eco-kooks have a problem with all energy sources that means they're not a real option while what's currently in place is, the theme that keeps coming up in this discussion.
Nuclear is great for keeping my computer running and keeping my house cool. Unfortunately, nuclear does nothing that will get me to work. And yes, eco-kooks are doing everything they can to block nuclear energy. How many new nuclear power plants have been licensed and built in the past 20 years?
Speaking of graphs, I find this one really scary, and would want to see it flatten out or drop for a good few years before I stop caring about my energy usage.
Just taking a quick gander at that particular graph, I notice that it covers 200 years of surface temperature. This brings a couple of points to my mind:
1) How accurate can we judge the entire planet's average temperature in the year 1800? The graph shows swings from year to year in the 0.2 C range. Can we really judge the average surface temperature of the planet with 0.2 degrees Celsius?
2) Also, the chart shows 200 years. This is a blip on the scale of climate science. If you look at the climate history on a much, much larger scale, you'll find that 200 years means nothing. For example, the chart on this page shows that we are much cooler than the average. An sharp increase in average temps would help put us "right". Or this chart which goes back 4500 years, shows that we just came out of an ice age, so a temperature increase would be expected, and also negates your Berkely graph. Or, finally, this page which shows a whole slew of charts, most of which show that we are in a cold period of climate history, and an increase in average temperature would get the earth back to the "normal" range.
Turning off the lights in the room you're not in is dismantling western civilization ?
If that were all the "greenies" wanted, what was the "Cash for Clunkers" program all about? Why did Obama say that he would make coal power plants too expensive to build?
Slashdot Mirror
This is a repost of the beginnings of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Just with Poland and the Czech Republic instead of Turkey.
I think I'd be OK if Russia put a defensive missile installation in Cuba. The key word here is DEFENSIVE.
They call it a threat because it neutralizes the "Mutually Assured Destruction" balance that has thus far prevented thermonuclear war from being a viable option. If they can't shoot missiles at us, but we can shoot missiles at them, then there's nothing preventing us from just nuking them out of existence next time we have a disagreement.
The cold war is still pretty fresh in some people's minds...
See, that's the problem. Russian missiles are set to travel over the North Pole, not over Europe. This system would only defend against missiles targeting Europe, and even then its debatable. Of course, let's not even start on submarine and mobile launchers.
This system is no threat to Russia or MAD.
Let's see how the US likes pre-emptive strikes against its stuff.
Signed,
The world
A "pre-emptive strike" against a defensive system is not justified. The Russians should also consider that any "pre-emtpive strike" will result in retaliation and weigh that before deciding. If the Russians are willing to go to war against the US over and defensive installation that we have offered them unfettered access to, then they really just want war anyway.
Signed,
An American Soldier
Yep. I kept passwords on stickies under my monitor. "That's not secure". Reply: "If somebody in the building is looking under my monitor, finding the PW and figuring out what UID and service it belongs to, we've got bigger problems".
Your coworkers that want to do a little fraud would much rather do it with your UID than their own. And yes, I assume they know your userID.
I know it sounds counter intuitive, but I think the best way to reduce brain injuries now is to simply remove the helmets from the game. Sure, there will be more broken noses, but you will see brain injuries drop substantially. People just don't lead with their heads when moving full speed at a target heading full speed back.
The biggest thing that I can think of is that the later versions of PSD formats are not freely licensed, which is why they are not in the gimp.
If I read this correctly it is possible for European software developers to use competitors file formats, which does not seem to be the case for American developers.
How about read a MSSQL DB?
Put another way, the No True Scotsman fallacy is something that occurs when you fail to define your terms beforehand. When you're arguing over whether something or someone is a member of a group, it's important to establish in advance exactly what it means to be a member of that group.
In your first example, the participants clearly have different ideas about what it means to be a Scotsman (characteristics like "enjoys haggis" vs., e.g., ancestry). Both definitions are reasonable, and can be constructed without circular reasoning. In the second case, granting equal weight to both definitions would render the term "vegetarian" meaningless, since one is essentially circular: "someone who self-identifies as vegetarian".
A term like "liberal" is closer to the former case; there are lots of reasonable definitions, spanning literal, historical, and modern interpretations, which themselves vary from place to place, and applied to social or fiscal policies. It's difficult, and perhaps even impossible, to be "liberal" in every sense of the term; on the other hand, most people are liberal in some areas.
Very true. Everyone sees themselves as the middle. Those that agree with them are also middle of the road. Anyone to the left of them is a liberal. Anyone to the right of them is a conservative. It's all relative.
But, the point I was referring to is this one by a post somewhere above:
2) On average liberals are more intelligent than right-wingers.
Since he never defined what he meant by "liberals", I can only go off the standard definition of someone who likes a strong central government that uses its power to enforce equality by redistributing wealth. I don't think me meant any other definition like "someone open to new ideas" or "someone who values personal freedom over all else".
Once you start providing for yourself, you attitude tends to change quite drastically. Students, who receive federal grants are all for federal assistance programs. Once they are no longer students and find that 15% of their paychecks goes to fund federal assistance programs, that view tends to change rather quickly.
Yeah, if you're a sociopath asshole. I would hope these working folks understand that they are paying that 15% so that *others just like them* can go to school on federal grants/assistance programs. What kind of asshole benefits from a program and then slashes it right after he's done with it? Talk about not paying it forward...
It's not a matter of selfishness. It's a matter of ignorance. Many vegetarians didn't start out that way. They were served burger, they ate it and they enjoyed it. Then, when they found out what was sacrificed to make that burger, they found themselves sickened and vowed to never eat another living creature again.
In this case, they lived off the dole because they simply don't know any better. They liked it. They are given government money and they have no idea where it comes from. Given the chance to vote for more government money, they'll do it in a heartbeat. However, once they realize where that money comes from, they might change their minds.
Reality hits you hard, bro. This is why the OP I responded to was full of shit when he said "reality has a liberal bias." Liberalism is great until you become the one paying for it. When that reality hits, liberalism doesn't look so good any more. Someone has to be on the other side of that glory hole or it doesn't work. When you used it all week, it was nice. You didn't know how it worked, nor did you care. Then when you find out that it's your turn to be on the other side, suddenly it's not such a good idea. Had you known what was involved before you used it, you never would have. Now it's too late and it's your turn.
In other words, the kids said they were liberal, but when you got down to what they truly believed, it turns out they were actually fairly conservative.
Is that like an inversion of the No True Scotsman fallacy? Shall we coin the Everyone's a True Scotsman fallacy?
Even if you think you're liberal, you're really conservative!
Actually, Wikipedia explains it better than I can.
Fallacy:
Alice: All Scotsmen enjoy haggis.
Bob: My uncle is a Scotsman, and he doesn't like haggis!
Alice: Well, all true Scotsmen like haggis.
NOT Fallacy:
Jake: All vegetarians refuse to eat steak.
Deb: My uncle is a vegetarian, and he eats steak all the time!
Jake: Well, then he's not really a vegetarian.
Holding liberal ideals is pretty much required to be a liberal just as not eating meat is a requirement to be a vegetarian.
In other words, the kids said they were liberal, but when you got down to what they truly believed, it turns out they were actually fairly conservative.
Is that like an inversion of the No True Scotsman fallacy? Shall we coin the Everyone's a True Scotsman fallacy?
Even if you think you're liberal, you're really conservative!
In other words, the kids said they were liberal, but when you got down to what they truly believed, it turns out they were actually fairly conservative.
Is that like an inversion of the No True Scotsman fallacy? Shall we coin the Everyone's a True Scotsman fallacy?
Even if you think you're liberal, you're really conservative!
Nice analysis, except the error is not on my part, but that of the students and the researcher. The Scotsman fallacy argument would work if I were the one claiming that liberal ideals are now conservative. That's not the case.
My point is twofold. First, they asked kids about their political affiliation. I don't trust kids to know this or have enough life experience to answer accurately. It's easy to claim to be a liberal when you are living off of someone else's work and money. Once you start providing for yourself, you attitude tends to change quite drastically. Students, who receive federal grants are all for federal assistance programs. Once they are no longer students and find that 15% of their paychecks goes to fund federal assistance programs, that view tends to change rather quickly.
Next is that kids might identify themselves with something they are not. They assume they are liberal. After all, all their friends are liberal. All their TV heroes and musical idols are liberal. When they see the common perception of a conservative, they are old, fat, rich and stuffy. When they see the perception of a liberal, they are charitable (working for the Peace Corps or something), actively working to save seals or something, young, open minded and friendly. It's no surprise that they would identify themselves with the group that fits more of who they think they are. But when you ask them if they want the school to raise lunch prices and give a portion of their lunch money to feed the less fortunate students or if they feel that the government should confiscate their X-Boxes to buy Wiis for everyone, they tend to be more conservative.
The study would have more legitimacy if, instead of asking the students if they were liberal of conservative, they asked them questions that would identify their affiliation. Even then, you may get skewed results. For example if you asked students if the rich should pay their fair share in taxes, it's like that 100% would say yes. But if you asked if them if it is fair that they should have give up their own luxuries for those that don't have them or share their good grades to raise the GPA of those that don't do as well, you may get a different answer.
I've already explained this to you, using a very simple analogy with a hare and a tortoise. Did you not understand?
It makes no difference if the vast majority of the effect from the methane happens over 9-15 years. We can still say how much effect it had over any length of time we choose. Over 15 years, say, it might have 70 times the effect of CO2. Over 50 years it might have 45 times the effect of CO2. Over 100 years it might have 20 times. Over 500 years it might have 4 times the effect. [These figures are not meant to be exact, they are purely to illustrate the concept]
Do you understand it now?
I understand the analogy you are trying to make, but it doesn't fly. The tortoise/hare analogy is as follows from your post:
A hare and a turtle go for a race of 10 minutes. The hare runs 100 meters in one minute, calls it quits and takes a nap. The turle works for 10 minutes and manages to crawl 10 meters. The hare won, although he stopped after 1 minute.
Methane does so much damage in that 9-15 years the CO2 needs about 2000 years to catch up
In distance, this works. Not so much with heat. Put two pots on the stove, one on high for 10 minutes and another on low for two hours. Sure, the pot on high will boil, but it will eventually cool down to a temperature lower than the pot on low. After the two hours, the pot that was on high will be cooler than the pot that is still on low. Why? Heat dissipates. If you were to replace the earth's atmosphere with 100% methane, it may heat up quite a bit, but in since the methane breaks down in less than 15 years, the heat will dissipate into space, leaving the planet pretty much as it was before. Space is a poor insulator.
Do remember the NYT is a very left-wing paper and that climate change supporters are majority left-wing.
In a way that's true. Just as evolution "supporters" are more left wing.
Really?
John C. Green, a senior fellow at the Pew Forum, said he was surprised to see that teaching both evolution and creationism was favored not only by conservative Christians, but also by majorities of secular respondents, liberal Democrats and those who accept the theory of natural selection. Mr. Green called it a reflection of "American pragmatism."
1) Reality has a well know liberal bias.
2) On average liberals are more intelligent than right-wingers.
1) When I hear liberals say things like, "Obama is doing a great job with the economy", I see that bias has affected what some see as reality.
2) Bullshit. I hear that spouted all the time, but only by liberals. Many of the media driven surveys that claim this usually did so by asking respondents questions that liberals are more likely to know the answer to, like "Where was Obama born" or "Did Iraq have something to do with 9-11". They don't ask questions like, "Who said that she could see Alaska from her house."
The more professional studies used to come up with that conclusion used kids to make the determination. KIDS! They also allowed the kids to determine their political affiliation themselves rather than determining them from the ideals the children hold dear.
The Add Health study shows that the mean IQ of adolescents who identify themselves as "very liberal" is 106, compared with a mean IQ of 95 for those calling themselves "very conservative." The Add Health study is huge — more than 20,000 kids — and this difference is highly statistically significant.
But self-identification is often misleading; do kids really know what it means to be liberal? The GSS data are instructive here: Kanazawa found that more-intelligent GSS respondents (as measured by a quick but highly reliable synonym test) were less likely to agree that the government has a responsibility to reduce income and wealth differences. In other words, intelligent people might like to portray themselves as liberal. But in the end, they know that it's good to be the king.
In other words, the kids said they were liberal, but when you got down to what they truly believed, it turns out they were actually fairly conservative.
I agree that 84% (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveys_of_scientists%27_views_on_climate_change) is not unanimous, but it's getting closer every year.
Unless, ofcourse, you count the opinion of people who don't understand the science involved and blame other people for their own lack of understanding.
Like the EPA?. Tell me if you can spot the huge logic hole in this statement:
Methane (CH4) is a greenhouse gas that remains in the atmosphere for approximately 9-15 years. Methane is over 20 times more effective in trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide (CO2) over a 100-year period
Remember, these are the people writing policy and regulations concerning our rights with respect to climate change.
The "Other Planets are Heating up too" hypothesis has been debunked:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2007/04/29/is-global-warming-solar-induced/
But, until the engineers get involved on a real fix I wouldn't bother changing your lifestyle, other than maybe switching to LED lights and turning down the thermostat. Politicians never fix anything.
From your blog post:
Mars: To start, is Mars even warming globally at all? Perhaps not — it might be a local effect.
Jupiter: The evidence for Jupiter’s global warming is nothing of the sort. It is evidence that there are warm spots, with storms rising to the tops of the clouds. This may just be a local effect, and not global.
Therefore it’s very difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish between factors like the Sun warming up Triton anomalously, or just the usual changes in the moon due to seasons.
As for tiny Pluto, its dynamics are very poorly understood. What we do see is that its atmosphere appears to be thicker than expected right now. Pluto doesn’t have much of an air blanket, and it changes over the course of Pluto’s orbit as the tiny iceball approaches and recedes from the Sun. Pluto reached perihelion, the closest point in its orbit to the Sun, in 1989, and is slowly drawing away again. You might think its atmosphere would start freezing out, getting thinner. But that’s not happening; it’s getting quite a bit thicker.
However, this is not totally unexpected. Changes are not instantaneous, and it may take a while for things to thaw.
The BLOG post you linked to is full of "may be" and we don't know. He consistently claims there is no warming, then claims that we don't know what's causing the warming. For example, on Jupiter he claims that there is no evidence for warming and then in the same paragraph claims that the warming may be local. Again, MAY BE local. And if there is no evidence of warming, what local warming is he talking about?
Finally, he pulls a classic fallacy of "Poisoning the well":
And the guy who is proposing that the Sun is warming Mars doesn’t think CO2 is a greenhouse gas.
OK, so he doesn't think that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. What does that have to do with his ability to judge the temperature on Mars? Also, it's not true. What the article your blog used as a source said was, "Heading Pulkovo's space research laboratory is Dr. Abdussamatov, one of the world's chief critics of the theory that man-made carbon dioxide emissions create a greenhouse effect, leading to global warming." and "It is no secret that increased solar irradiance warms Earth's oceans, which then triggers the emission of large amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. So the common view that man's industrial activity is a deciding factor in global warming has emerged from a misinterpretation of cause and effect relations." So, it's not that he doesn't believe CO2 is a greenhouse gas, but he questions the source of CO2 and its overall effect.
I have an open mind and take an agnostic approach to AGW. Unfortunately, I see a whole lot more BS coming from the global warming crowd. Take this gem, from the EPA itself:
Methane (CH4) is a greenhouse gas that remains in the atmosphere for approximately 9-15 years. Methane is over 20 times more effective in trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide (CO2) over a 100-year period
Am I the only one who fails to see the massive logic fail in that statement? If methane only lasts for 9-15 years, how is more effective at trapping heat over a 100 year period?
But, until the engineers get involved on a real fix I wouldn't bother changing your lifestyle, other than maybe switching
Truck. The vehicle of a redneck. It all fits.
Prius. The vehicle of mass ignorance. It all fits.
Nothing fits in a Prius.
out of so called "destruction", new things arrive.
without much of the so called destruction, we wouldn't exist.
True, but now that we do exist, I would like the destruction to stop, thank you very much.
"Insightful" gives a better boost to Karma than "Funny" so a lot of mods use "Insightful" in its place.
They shouldn't. It changes the tone of the post. If the comedians really want to earn a karma point they should say something insightful.
I think your sig agrees.
How is this insightful? Funny? Yes. Insightful? No.
"Insightful" gives a better boost to Karma than "Funny" so a lot of mods use "Insightful" in its place.
Let's see, a series of anti-global warming stories, anti-environmental stories, etc, shortly followed by a pork barrel promotion story blaming the sitting president for, of all things, cutting funding to a dead end science experiment. Gee whiz, I wonder why Slashdot is once again carrying Republican talking points and pushing a Republican agenda? Oh rriiight, it's an election year so the right wing media is ratcheting it up a notch and slashdot is doing its usual duty for the right.
Here are the recent Slashdot stories:
Who Needs CISPA? FBI Has a Non-Profit Workaround
WW2 Vet Sent 300,000 Pirated DVDs To Troops In Iraq, Afghanistan
Key Test For Skylon Spaceplane Engine Technology
China Plans National, Unified CPU Architecture
Microsoft Patches Major Hotmail 0-day Flaw After Widespread Exploitation
Conflict of Interest Derails UK Government Open Source Consultation
Analytic Thinking Can Decrease Religious Belief
Bionic Eye Patient Tests Planned For 2013
BOLD Plan To Find Mars Life On the Cheap
'Mein Kampf' To Be Republished In Germany
UK Digital Economy Act Delayed Till 2014
The only thing I see here remotely political is the "Analytic Thinking Can Decrease Religious Belief", which is another way of calling religious people stupid and "'Mein Kampf' To Be Republished In Germany", which contains a whole bunch of comments comparing "Mein Kampf" to the Bible.
Seriously dude! How bad do you really really want to believe in the fictional "right wing media" to make you see evidence of it where it does not exist?
What? I'm not following the connect between power & health costs.
How come the government is doing fusion research instead of the private sector, like existing electric companies?
Because electric companies are public utilities. See, in order to spend (invest) an enormous amount money into expensive, unproven research projects like this, you must have "extra" money laying around. That money comes from profits. Utility companies are a natural monopoly and are therefor heavily regulated so they don't take advantage of their consumers. If the utility companies had the types of huge profits needed to invest in nuclear fusion research, the government would step in and force them to lower their prices, thus eliminating their profits and research capital.
Fuck that shit.
Couldn't you just block the ad server at the router/firewall level?
Would the OS fail to work if it could not download ads?
Seriously? I give you the Berkeley graphs, which appear to have used a pretty rigourous method, where you can download their temperature data and source code, and is being peer-reviewed, and you rebut this with a graph that does not have a labelled y-axis and appears to have been drawn with a bezier tool? If you want to convince me that there is no scientific consensus, i.e. that researchers who know what they're doing and are doing it properly, disagree that global warming is happening/is a problem, then please stop using graphs like that. Especially when they disagree with the graph I provided, which gives its sources (IIRC, every temperature measurement they could get their hands on), and includes three other groups' sets of numbers on the same axes - none of which agree with the graph you provided.
Fair enough. "Negate" was probably a bad term. My point was that I can find a graph that says pretty much anything I want, that uses good data and models just like your Berkeley graph. This settled debate can't agree on climate's past. I don't trust them to predict the future.
You make some good points and I am in no way expert enough to negate them. Although, while I'm not a climatologist I know enough about climate science to know that it's always changing. It is always changing. Of course, by changing, we mean that it is always getting warmer or cooler as those are the only two directions it can go. Since we are dealing with such large time scales, natural change happens over hundreds of thousands of years, or it can happen in a century or two. This means that the temperature can decrease slowly for hundreds of thousands of years and then suddenly increase very quickly for 50. The change we are seeing now is not unprecedented. The Thames river in London used to freeze over often enough to have fairs on it just a couple of centuries ago. The last time the Thames froze over was in 1814, about 75 years before the very first automobiles. Now, even snow in London is a rare occurrence. This change happened before the SUV and coal fired plants. It's been getting warmer for quite some time in human time scales, but again, just a blip on climatological time scales.
It could just as easily be getting cooler. What would we blame for global cooling? Would we have a slew of scientist claiming that increased moisture from the cooling towers of power plants mixed with the soot from smoke stacks and car exhausts were causing an increase in cloud cover, thus cooling the planet? Sounds just as reasonable as CO2 is trapping heat.
It just seems like we see something we have not seen before and instantly look as to what WE might be doing to cause it. I call it the rain dance effect. We dance around the fire right before a rain storm so the next time we need rain, we look at what we did to cause it rain last time. Fact is, we did nothing to cause the rain. It would have rained with or without our dance. Just as the climate will change, with or without our SUV's. Another example is from the Steve Martin movie "All of Me". A visitor to this country who has no experience with technology is looking at a toilet for the first time. When he presses the lever, it flushes, but at the same time, someone was calling his phone. He instantly linked these two, unrelated events. Through the rest of the movie, every time the phone rang, he ran into the bathroom and flushed the toilet. The Biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah tells how they were were consumed by fire. The writers instantly assumed that they were destroyed because of the behavior of the people living there and don't consider that anal sex does not normally cause earthquakes or volcanic eruptions.
The bottom line is that the debate is not settled, regardless of what an Internet Hall of Famer with multiple mansions and a fleet of private planes says. I will not give up my rights to a government simply because government paid scientists tell me bad things MIGHT happen if I don't. I take "Give me liberty or give me death" seriously and if I'm wrong and all the coastal cities get wiped out, then the problem has just taken care of itself!
There are no alternative power sources? Better not tell all those countries using nuclear and renewable...oh but wait because the nuttiest eco-kooks have a problem with all energy sources that means they're not a real option while what's currently in place is, the theme that keeps coming up in this discussion.
Nuclear is great for keeping my computer running and keeping my house cool. Unfortunately, nuclear does nothing that will get me to work. And yes, eco-kooks are doing everything they can to block nuclear energy. How many new nuclear power plants have been licensed and built in the past 20 years?
Speaking of graphs, I find this one really scary, and would want to see it flatten out or drop for a good few years before I stop caring about my energy usage.
Just taking a quick gander at that particular graph, I notice that it covers 200 years of surface temperature. This brings a couple of points to my mind:
1) How accurate can we judge the entire planet's average temperature in the year 1800? The graph shows swings from year to year in the 0.2 C range. Can we really judge the average surface temperature of the planet with 0.2 degrees Celsius?
2) Also, the chart shows 200 years. This is a blip on the scale of climate science. If you look at the climate history on a much, much larger scale, you'll find that 200 years means nothing. For example, the chart on this page shows that we are much cooler than the average. An sharp increase in average temps would help put us "right". Or this chart which goes back 4500 years, shows that we just came out of an ice age, so a temperature increase would be expected, and also negates your Berkely graph. Or, finally, this page which shows a whole slew of charts, most of which show that we are in a cold period of climate history, and an increase in average temperature would get the earth back to the "normal" range.
Turning off the lights in the room you're not in is dismantling western civilization ?
If that were all the "greenies" wanted, what was the "Cash for Clunkers" program all about? Why did Obama say that he would make coal power plants too expensive to build?