You're denser than I thought. You have completely missed the point. I thought you were reading this thread. You are, once again, resorting to ad hominem and guilt-by-association attacks. How on earth does this invalidate the science?
Skepticism is the lazy person's default position. I think for most global warming skeptics, the desire not to do anything different came first, and the skepticism was reached through a chain leading from "I don't want to have to do anything" back to "this is why I don't have to do anything."
I can't speak for everyone, but this is not true in my case. I believed the prophets of doom and gloom until 1990, when I met Sherwood Idso in a completely unrelated context. I have great respect for the man, and would stake my life on the claim that he is doing good science, not shilling for an industry. Swayed by his findings, I have since followed the debate and the science quite closely. I've been anything but lazy, thank you very much. I have come to identify strongly with the "skeptic" side of the argument.
I recently read The Satanic Gases: Clearing the Air about Global Warming, and found it to be a good, readable summary of the hard science that questions the current paradigm. I'd like to suggest that you go read it, and then come back and refute the actual science.
But you won't, will you? I haven't seen it happen yet.
I thought, before starting to read the site you referenced, that it must allege a litany of wrongs attributed to Mr. Michaels. I'm rather surprised, to say the least, that it is all about a single mis-characterization. Yes, it was disingenuous of him to select Scenario 'A' in Hansen's data instead of the better fit of Scenario 'B'. I am disappointed that he did so, because I am more accustomed to the doomsayers using such tactics, but it hardly invalidates the rest of his work. I think that calling it a 'lie' is inaccurate; he did not fabricate anything. He did take real data from Hansen, just not the particular series of data he ought to have. And he was not incorrect in stating that the Scenario 'A' projection 'failed', regardless of the fact that there were two other scenarios given.
Michaels' book surveys the work of many other scientists. This minor issue certainly doesn't invalidate their work, either. If you were to read his book, you would find a large body of good scientific work that is frequently dismissed with ad hominem and guilt-by-association attacks, but its attackers always seem to shy away from discussing the actual data. 'Everyone knows,' after all, that we're about to destroy the planet if we don't mend our ways.
I intend no offense, but I'm really not sure that your view of the information presented by the 'concerned students' is particularly objective. It's quite a self-righteous tirade, and its claims are terribly overblown. '[B]latant manipulation of published figures'? No. '[A]cademic fraud'? '[P]ermanent dismissal from the University'? Give me a break.
And they are so manipulative. In this instance, where the ambiguous wording can be understood to conflate the "downloading and distribution" with the AOL confirmation that they merely (with dubious accuracy) matched an IP address, the judge clearly understood their claim to be that AOL did indeed confirm the downloading and distribution, as any reasonable person might. Having seen so many other dishonest RIAA tactics, no one will convince me that this ambiguity was unintentional. They could very easily have clarified by saying, "...account through which plaintiff alleges..." instead.
I can see what you're saying, and agree that the wording is ambiguous. But if you read the judge's statement, it is clear that he understood it to confirm the downloading and distribution of files. So he was in need of correction, because that assumption was fundamental to his assertion. Secondly, if the RIAA were not attempting to imply that the AOL letter confirmed both parts, why wouldn't they have made it clear by saying instead, "...account through which plaintiff alleges..."?
It will take me a couple of days to wade through this. At first glance, I see much ado about his source(s) of funding, which is entirely moot to me, as I indicated earlier.
May I ask if you are one of the University of Virginia students or associated therewith?
This is one way that the alternative view is suppressed. Your unsubstantiated yelling and screaming is what leaves an impression on the uneducated, but in reality you haven't a leg to stand on.
And, by the way, why does it matter that he is funded by the coal industry? Does that invalidate the science? Who else is going to fund the science that shows the folly of Kyoto, etc.? You're just repeating the same ad hominem attack as the rest of the flock. Is it unusual for funding to come from people who have a stake in the outcome?
Here are some excerpts from Chapter 11: How Did We Get Here?
"In all highly developed economies, science is a government activity.... Whether that is good or even desirable is a reasonable subject for debate, but, as a society, we now feel that such undertakings are the province of government."
...
"In the past 15 years [preceding 1999], the total federal outlay on global climate change research has ballooned from a few million dollars to $2.1 billion per year. The proposed budget for Fiscal Year 2000 raises the figure to $4.1 billion."
...
"It is in this political environment that our nation's science administrators compete for funding. So do all scientists. This level of expenditure makes any scientific problem a serious political concern that is likely to develop into a sociopolitical issue.... It is impossible to imagine agency administrators encouraging their employees to speak out and bite the hand that feeds them."
"This potentially places science and scientists in an uncomfortable paradox. Every scientist I know believes he or she is pursuing some form of objective truth. That is the lure of the business. Most federally funded scientists truly believe that their work is more 'pure' than that which comes from industry because there is no obvious financial imperative to please stockholders. They consider the public funding process to be more 'value free' because it is filtered through institutional reviews by peers and superiors."
"But that seems naïve. George Mason University's James Buchanan won a Nobel Prize with his much different point of view, known as 'Public Choice Theory.' Simply put, Buchanan argues that individuals in the public service -- scientists, administrators, technicians, and the like -- put their own self-interest first. When a monopoly source of funds appears (our [US] federal government, for example, is certainly very close to being the sole provider of research funding for climate change), and that source is biased toward one political view or another, then the recipients of the funds will support that political view, Buchanan argues."
"In The Calculus of Consent...[Buchanan] wrote, 'We must assume that individuals will, on the average, choose "more" rather than "less" when confronted with the opportunity for choice in a political process, with "more" and "less" being defined in terms of measurable economic position.'"
"Speaking to the nature of individuals vs. groups, Buchanan and Tullock write, 'Under individualistic postulates, group decisions represent outcomes for certain agreed-upon rules for choice after the separate individual choices are fed into the process.'"
"In this way individuals build political support for whatever produces personal gain. Not exactly shocking, but certainly counter to the popular perception of value-free scientists in search of objective truth."
"Perhaps the most influential treatise ever published on the nature of science is Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions....[I]ts core ideas join with those of Buchanan to synergistically provide a model that may explain much of the evolution of the notion of disastrous global warming. Taken together, Kuhn and Buchanan predict that large amounts of research support will generate a 'paradigm,' or an overarching theoretical structure that is believed by scientists to explain the majority of a system's behavior. Kuhn calls the activity of most scientists 'normal science,' which is basically the care and feeding of the paradigm, as well as its defense, suppressing the publication or the importance of novelties that assault the paradigm."
"...Kuhn wrote, 'Mopping-up operations are what engage most scientists throughout their careers.... Closely examined, whether historically or in the contemporary laboratory, that enterprise seems an attempt to force nature into the preformed and relatively inflexible box that the paradigm supplies.'"
I am constantly amazed by the number of people posting here who have strong opinions on climate change without, evidently, having read much of the available literature. (Cue the "you must be new here" posts...)
Granted, I believed what I heard through the media and education system too, until I met Sherwood Idso in 1990. A good starting point for Slashdotters (and the BBC, for that matter) is The Satanic Gases: Clearing the Air about Global Warming, in which Patrick J. Michaels cites hundreds of peer-reviewed papers that question the catastrophic predictions of "mainstream" climate research, and explains how such research is systematically suppressed.
Heh. A lot of them are limited to four digits, though, aren't they? I've heard several people mention so, and always thought it was pretty stupid, considering how we're always being told to choose long, complex passwords. Your ATM PIN is kind of an important one. Having to present the card itself for two-factor authentication helps, I guess, but each additional digit multiplies your security.
It would be interesting to see how much the quality could be even further improved by using identical frames recorded at the three different locations, as well as the overlap from the two recorders that had to be reloaded every 15 minutes, for noise removal.
Back when I was assembling i386 PCs for a small reseller, one of our regular clients walked in the door carrying a machine we had recently sold to his company. He said that it had "just stopped working", and implied that it should be covered under warranty.
When I opened up the machine, I discovered that every screw and stand-off holding the motherboard had been sheared off, and the board was shorting against the case. There was no obvious damage to the case itself. I figured the guy must have dropped the machine and it landed flat on the bottom. Amazingly, after the board was re-mounted, everything seemed to work perfectly.
Of course, we were rather curious about what had happened, so my boss asked the client when he returned. The client sheepishly admitted that they had planned to use the machine for tracking wildlife, running off a generator in the middle of the forest. They flew it to the intended location, and dropped it from the aircraft with a parachute. I turned around and headed back into the shop stifling my laughter while my boss told the client he couldn't justify covering the incident under warranty.
Your ideas will work fine before they're teenagers, after that they won't feel any particular obligation to do what you tell them to, nor will they fell any obligation to tell you what they're doing. If you try to force the matter, they'll learn to hide things from you.
Nobody seems to believe in good kids any more. Not every child is this duplicitous, especially if you've done your job as a parent from the beginning. It is possible for a parent to be justifiably confident in a child.
Slashdot Mirror
You're denser than I thought. You have completely missed the point. I thought you were reading this thread. You are, once again, resorting to ad hominem and guilt-by-association attacks. How on earth does this invalidate the science?
Refute the science, "bucky"!
I can't speak for everyone, but this is not true in my case. I believed the prophets of doom and gloom until 1990, when I met Sherwood Idso in a completely unrelated context. I have great respect for the man, and would stake my life on the claim that he is doing good science, not shilling for an industry. Swayed by his findings, I have since followed the debate and the science quite closely. I've been anything but lazy, thank you very much. I have come to identify strongly with the "skeptic" side of the argument.
I recently read The Satanic Gases: Clearing the Air about Global Warming, and found it to be a good, readable summary of the hard science that questions the current paradigm. I'd like to suggest that you go read it, and then come back and refute the actual science.
But you won't, will you? I haven't seen it happen yet.
I thought, before starting to read the site you referenced, that it must allege a litany of wrongs attributed to Mr. Michaels. I'm rather surprised, to say the least, that it is all about a single mis-characterization. Yes, it was disingenuous of him to select Scenario 'A' in Hansen's data instead of the better fit of Scenario 'B'. I am disappointed that he did so, because I am more accustomed to the doomsayers using such tactics, but it hardly invalidates the rest of his work. I think that calling it a 'lie' is inaccurate; he did not fabricate anything. He did take real data from Hansen, just not the particular series of data he ought to have. And he was not incorrect in stating that the Scenario 'A' projection 'failed', regardless of the fact that there were two other scenarios given.
Michaels' book surveys the work of many other scientists. This minor issue certainly doesn't invalidate their work, either. If you were to read his book, you would find a large body of good scientific work that is frequently dismissed with ad hominem and guilt-by-association attacks, but its attackers always seem to shy away from discussing the actual data. 'Everyone knows,' after all, that we're about to destroy the planet if we don't mend our ways.
I intend no offense, but I'm really not sure that your view of the information presented by the 'concerned students' is particularly objective. It's quite a self-righteous tirade, and its claims are terribly overblown. '[B]latant manipulation of published figures'? No. '[A]cademic fraud'? '[P]ermanent dismissal from the University'? Give me a break.
And they are so manipulative. In this instance, where the ambiguous wording can be understood to conflate the "downloading and distribution" with the AOL confirmation that they merely (with dubious accuracy) matched an IP address, the judge clearly understood their claim to be that AOL did indeed confirm the downloading and distribution, as any reasonable person might. Having seen so many other dishonest RIAA tactics, no one will convince me that this ambiguity was unintentional. They could very easily have clarified by saying, "...account through which plaintiff alleges..." instead.
I can see what you're saying, and agree that the wording is ambiguous. But if you read the judge's statement, it is clear that he understood it to confirm the downloading and distribution of files. So he was in need of correction, because that assumption was fundamental to his assertion. Secondly, if the RIAA were not attempting to imply that the AOL letter confirmed both parts, why wouldn't they have made it clear by saying instead, "...account through which plaintiff alleges..."?
Thanks; and I apologize for my impatience.
It will take me a couple of days to wade through this. At first glance, I see much ado about his source(s) of funding, which is entirely moot to me, as I indicated earlier.
May I ask if you are one of the University of Virginia students or associated therewith?
Yeah, that's what I thought...
This is one way that the alternative view is suppressed. Your unsubstantiated yelling and screaming is what leaves an impression on the uneducated, but in reality you haven't a leg to stand on.
And, by the way, why does it matter that he is funded by the coal industry? Does that invalidate the science? Who else is going to fund the science that shows the folly of Kyoto, etc.? You're just repeating the same ad hominem attack as the rest of the flock. Is it unusual for funding to come from people who have a stake in the outcome?
Have you read the book?
Would you care to explain? I find his arguments pretty convincing, but I'm willing to listen to the other side. Point me in the right direction.
Here are some excerpts from Chapter 11: How Did We Get Here?
I am constantly amazed by the number of people posting here who have strong opinions on climate change without, evidently, having read much of the available literature. (Cue the "you must be new here" posts...)
Granted, I believed what I heard through the media and education system too, until I met Sherwood Idso in 1990. A good starting point for Slashdotters (and the BBC, for that matter) is The Satanic Gases: Clearing the Air about Global Warming , in which Patrick J. Michaels cites hundreds of peer-reviewed papers that question the catastrophic predictions of "mainstream" climate research, and explains how such research is systematically suppressed.
In The Satanic Gases: Clearing the Air about Global Warming , Patrick J. Michaels does a great job of explaining how this happens. I'll try to post some excerpts here when I get home to my copy tonight.
Heh. A lot of them are limited to four digits, though, aren't they? I've heard several people mention so, and always thought it was pretty stupid, considering how we're always being told to choose long, complex passwords. Your ATM PIN is kind of an important one. Having to present the card itself for two-factor authentication helps, I guess, but each additional digit multiplies your security.
Seriously? No. Mine is more than that.
Please enter a multiple of $5 or $20.
...including you?
It would be interesting to see how much the quality could be even further improved by using identical frames recorded at the three different locations, as well as the overlap from the two recorders that had to be reloaded every 15 minutes, for noise removal.
Back when I was assembling i386 PCs for a small reseller, one of our regular clients walked in the door carrying a machine we had recently sold to his company. He said that it had "just stopped working", and implied that it should be covered under warranty.
When I opened up the machine, I discovered that every screw and stand-off holding the motherboard had been sheared off, and the board was shorting against the case. There was no obvious damage to the case itself. I figured the guy must have dropped the machine and it landed flat on the bottom. Amazingly, after the board was re-mounted, everything seemed to work perfectly.
Of course, we were rather curious about what had happened, so my boss asked the client when he returned. The client sheepishly admitted that they had planned to use the machine for tracking wildlife, running off a generator in the middle of the forest. They flew it to the intended location, and dropped it from the aircraft with a parachute. I turned around and headed back into the shop stifling my laughter while my boss told the client he couldn't justify covering the incident under warranty.
Nobody seems to believe in good kids any more. Not every child is this duplicitous, especially if you've done your job as a parent from the beginning. It is possible for a parent to be justifiably confident in a child.
Yes; my first thought was of my ZX-81. Ugh.
If the rootkit/DRM is allowed to install, does it disallow ripping of all CDs?