You can easily prove that H2O re-radiates infrared, and therefore from basic physics that it must raise global temperature.
As indeed it does. Indeed, modern climate models are critically dependent upon this property of water vapor. Fortunately, because water vapor condenses into rain, and achieves rapid equilibration with huge ocean reservoirs of water, human emissions of water vapor do not alter water vapor concentration (although we can indirectly increase water vapor concentration in the atmosphere by warming the climate with CO2 emissions, increasing evaporation and shifting the ocean/atmosphere equilibrium to increase atmospheric water vapor--which amplifies the warming effect of CO2). This is very elementary physics.
You can easily prove that black paint re-radiates infrared, and therefore from basic physics that it must raise global temperature.
And if we were dumping huge quantities of black paint all over the globe, to reduce its albedo, this would be a concern. But we aren't. We are, however, releasing lots of CO2, and about half of what we release is accumulating in the atmosphere.
You can easily prove that animal life radiates infrared, and therefore from basic physics that it must raise global temperature.
And this could be a concern if the earth's biomass were changing appreciably. But it isn't.
You do understand that you're arguing against yourself now, right? You've intoned this magic incantation to make your favorite hypothesis exempt from the standard criteria of falsifiability:)
On the contrary, climate models make numerous testable predictions which have been confirmed by observation. A partial list may be found here
That's batty. We have observed millions upon billions of years of *constant change* in global climate. You're going to throw away all that precedent and insist that we go with a null hypothesis which is trivially falsified?
Words have actual meanings. Q. "How many legs does a dog have if you call its tail a leg?" A. "Four. Calling a leg a tail does not make it one."
"Null hypothesis" has a meaning. It means "no change." That is the only thing it means. Calling your hypothesis "a null hypothesis" does not make it one, any more than it makes a tail a leg. The fact that you are engaging in this sort of special pleading reveals that at some level, you are aware that you have no actual hypothesis of "natural" climate change--it's just a magic buzzword to you. In contrast, climate science recognizes multiple physical mechanisms whereby climate can change and has changed in the past. CO2 is only one of these, and physics makes no distinction whether it is "natural" or due to human activities. A given amount of CO2 released into the atmosphere will have the same warming effect no matter where it comes from. Different physical mechanisms of climate change make different predictions which can be tested by observation.
If you want to talk real science instead of phony pseudoscience, you must think in terms of physical mechanisms. "Natural" is not a mechanism, it is just a buzzword. Which specific physical mechanism of climate change that has operated in the past do you imagine to be responsible for the current warming? What is the evidence that it is has changed in recent decades? We certainly know that CO2 has increased....
Stop spreading false information. Law is proven and theory is theory, it's not some ratio leveling scheme like you claim.
Sorry, but as a scientist I can tell you that that is simply not how we use the term. It does not denote a theory that is "proven"--because there is no such thing.
From elementary logic we know that no generalization about the natural world can ever be proved. No matter how many apples you watch fall to the ground, it does not prove that the next apple will not fall up. And although the predictions of Einstein's theory of special relativity have been verified to an incredible degree of precision, it does not prove that a discrepancy will not arise when the theory is tested to yet one more decimal place.
So did Einstein cover more than Newton and do some things better? Sure but the theory of relativity is still just a theory.
Theories cannot be proved, but they can be disproved. Newton's laws of motion have been disproved--the predictions of the theory are in error. On the other hand, Einstein's theory of special relativity has been extensively tested and validated, and may indeed be perfectly correct--but logically speaking, the most you can say about it--or about any scientific theory, is "not yet disproved."
But even though we know that they are wrong, we will continue to refer to Newton's "Law's" of motion--because they are simple and because even though they are not the truth, they are a good enough approximation for most practical purposes. And no matter how much the predictions of Einstein's theory of special relativity are tested and confirmed, we will never call it a "Law," because it introduces mathematical complications that only become important under unusual conditions or when extremely high precision is required.
You can observe a lit cigarette ignite a pile of dead leaves. You can't observe human CO2 emissions raising global average temperature (heck, you can't even observe global average temperature directly!).
Yes, you can prove that a lit cigarette can ignite dry leaves. And you can easily prove that CO2 re-radiates infrared, and therefore from basic physics that it must raise global temperature.
Natural climate change is the null hypothesis, it doesn't need to be proven
You clearly don't understand what "null hypothesis" means. It is not a magic incantation that you can intone to make your favorite hypothesis exempt from the standard criteria for any scientific hypothesis--it must be physically plausible and make testable predictions.
In fact, the term "null hypothesis" has no meaning outside of statistics, and statistics does not and cannot concern itself with questions of causality. So any hypothesis regarding what causes what cannot be a null hypothesis. "Null hypothesis" has a very specific meaning within statistics. "Null" means "zero" and it denotes that the null hypothesis is always the hypothesis of zero difference or zero correlation. So there is only one null hypothesis of global climate, and that is the hypothesis that it is constant and unchanging. The null hypothesis of climate is easily disproved: changes in global temperature are statistically significant by any statistical test you choose. That's the only null hypothesis that there is, and once the null hypothesis of zero change is excluded, it is gone--something else does not become the null hypothesis. Once the null hypothesis of no change has been excluded, we enter the realm of causality, and all hypotheses of why climate has changed are evaluated on an equal basis, by the same scientific criteria.
The argument of "gaps" is what creationists use to critique natural selection and evolution, do you really want to use the same argument as they do?
Natural selection satisfies the basic requirements for a scientific theory--it is based on a physically plausible mechanism and it makes testable predictions.
Rising temperatures happened well before humanity existed. We've had global warming and global cooling and global staying the same for the entire history of the planet.
Or to make a similar argument, "Forest fires happen all the time from lightning strikes, so that forest fire cannot be due to me throwing my lit cigarette into a pile of dead leaves." Perhaps you can spot the fallacy when the same argument is placed in another context.
The question is, what observations would convince you that rising temperatures are due to natural variation, and not human activity (much less that they'll be catastrophic)?
Quite simply, identify the source of the natural variation and provide a plausible mechanism whereby it could produce such a large and prolonged increase in temperature. All this has been done for increased temperatures due to human CO2 emissions. We have the radiative physics, we have the calculation of the expected effect, we have the measurements of temperature changes, and it all matches. There are certainly plausible explanations for natural climate change in the past. If it's the sun (one of the sources of some past changes in climate), we should be able to detect a substantial change in solar output (but there isn't any). If it's CO2 from volcanoes, we should be able to show that the isotopic signature of the increased atmospheric CO2 matches that released by volcanoes (it doesn't). Etc.
So basically the "skeptics" (who become utterly credulous when it comes to any argument that reassures them that they don't have to worry about global warming) are asking us to believe: 1. There is some unknown source of warming that has been responsible for warming in the past (even though there are plausible explanations of past warming in terms of mechanisms that demonstrably aren't present today), and that for some unknown reason has kicked in over the last century or so (but whatever it is, it's going to stop Real Soon Now), and 2. There is some other unknown mechanism that prevents the warming that is predicted based on the physics of CO2 (and which coincidentally matches the measured warming) from taking place.
Last time I looked it up, textbooks still said "Theory of Evolution" not "Law of Evolution". In fact I've had many professors over the years argue even Newton's Law of Gravity should be renamed a Theory, since the misnamed "law" has been debunked by later discoveries over the centuries.
You are falling into the misconception that a "Law" represents a higher level of certainty that a "Theory." That's not actually the way that scientists use the term. The usage of "Law" is more along the lines of "Rule of thumb" -- i.e. a simple formula that may or may not be exactly correct, but is close enough for many practical purposes. So we will continue to talk about Newton's "Laws of motion" and Einstein's "Theory of Relativity." Even though we know that Newton's Laws are definitely wrong, and Einstein's theory is, to say the least, "more right." But Einstein's theory has complications that just get in the way for many practical purposes. If you want to calculate the trajectory of an artillery shell, you'll use Newton's Laws, not Einstein's more accurate theory.
I'm a scientist, and there are many things about science that I believe, in the same sense that I may say, "I believe that it is going to rain today." Often, my beliefs turn out to be mistaken. That's fine--I can make new ones. As far as I'm concerned, it is OK for a scientist to have beliefs. What is not OK is to get too attached to them, and to cling to them in the face of contrary evidence.
It's not just psychology. Most scientific journals are not much interested in replications or negative results. Generally, to get such things published, you need to embed them in a paper that also includes some novel positive results. This imposes a positive bias on the literature of unknown magnitude. The bias is likely greater for results that are surprising or otherwise exciting.
What if Netflix leaked your private information, including credit card, and decided to hide the fact for months until you are the victim of identity theft that takes years of aggravation to clean up? Is that enough value to seek a legal remedy?
You'd probably still do better in individual binding arbitration. In a class action suit, there is a strong incentive for the lawyer to settle, even if the benefit to the individual members of the class is very small, because the lawyer avoids the cost, time commitment, and uncertainty of a trial, and even if the individual settlements are puny, the lawyer gets a slice of all of them, so his payoff can be quite substantial.
I agree. Class action suits over services like this just drive up costs for all customers, and are basically a scam to enrich lawyers. The members of the class receive a pittance, not even worth the effort to fill out the paperwork. Congratulations to Netflix for implementing arbitration.
On my iPad, I have a database with my entire reference library available for download and viewing. I also have note-taking applications. And a perfectly functional word processor that works fine with a bluetooth keyboard.
I've got a 1080p Panasonic plasma, and it seems to do a very good job with all formats. As I said, the difference between 720p and 1080p is pretty subtle. I can see it if I look carefully, but I doubt if I could reliably tell you which format a particular show is in.
Were there actually HD CRT TVs that did both 720p and 1080p natively? I still have a HD CRT TV but its native format is 1080i, and anything else gets converted.
No, I'm not talking about mere mirroring (with a bit of a delay) of the iPhone or iPad display as is currently possible, but about apps running on the AppleTV itself, and possibly using the iPhone or iPad as a peripheral.
Clearly, the killer feature for the AppleTV would be access to the App store. But doing it right is not trivial. Ideally, the AppleTV would run most iPhone apps, with the capacity to use a separate iPhone or iPad as a touch (and voice for iPhone 4s) controller (or a separate extra-cost hand-held version of the Magic iPad for those without an Apple touch-enabled device). Specially enabled apps would run simultaneously on AppleTV and iPhone/iPad, providing a dual display.
looks like the Apple TV 2 was 720p so that the next one would bring 1080p as an incentive for adopters to upgrade or buy a second one.
More likely, the Apple TV2 was 720p because that was the capability of the processor that made it possible for Apple to achieve its price and design goals, and since all of the content then available from Apple and Netflix was 720p, there was no disadvantage. Apple's newer processors now make it possible to bump up to 1080p, using a level of compression that prevents an excessive load on the user's network connection.
I'm not sure that I would have bought the new model just for this; the difference between 720p and 1080p is pretty subtle with my TV size and viewing distance. And in general, I tend to upgrade Apple products every 2nd generation or so. But $100 is not a lot of money, and I want to give my Apple TV2 to my sister, because she recently bought an iPad2, and being able to send video to the TV is a very nice feature.
Was the smartphone, or tablet, or laptop, or music player revolutionary when apple released it, or was it the device they copied from that was revolutionary.
In the sense that previous attempts at such devices did not in fact create a revolution, while Apple's did, it seems that the answer is obvious.
What many people find difficult to grasp is that Apple creates a product revolution, not by being the first to make a device of a particular type, but by being the first to do it really well. And they do it over and over again. They don't invent the mousetrap, they invent the better mousetrap.
What I loved about them was that they threw this horribly flawed protagonist into a classic fantasy universe of Good and Evil, where he didn't fit on either side.
Godstalk, by P.C. Hodgell Jericho Moon, by Matthew Woodring Stover Heroes Die, by Matthew Woodring Stover The Face in the Frost, by John Bellairs Gloriana, by Michael Moorcock Magic Casement, by Dave Duncan
Slashdot Mirror
As indeed it does. Indeed, modern climate models are critically dependent upon this property of water vapor. Fortunately, because water vapor condenses into rain, and achieves rapid equilibration with huge ocean reservoirs of water, human emissions of water vapor do not alter water vapor concentration (although we can indirectly increase water vapor concentration in the atmosphere by warming the climate with CO2 emissions, increasing evaporation and shifting the ocean/atmosphere equilibrium to increase atmospheric water vapor--which amplifies the warming effect of CO2). This is very elementary physics.
And if we were dumping huge quantities of black paint all over the globe, to reduce its albedo, this would be a concern. But we aren't. We are, however, releasing lots of CO2, and about half of what we release is accumulating in the atmosphere.
And this could be a concern if the earth's biomass were changing appreciably. But it isn't.
On the contrary, climate models make numerous testable predictions which have been confirmed by observation. A partial list may be found here
Words have actual meanings.
Q. "How many legs does a dog have if you call its tail a leg?"
A. "Four. Calling a leg a tail does not make it one."
"Null hypothesis" has a meaning. It means "no change." That is the only thing it means. Calling your hypothesis "a null hypothesis" does not make it one, any more than it makes a tail a leg. The fact that you are engaging in this sort of special pleading reveals that at some level, you are aware that you have no actual hypothesis of "natural" climate change--it's just a magic buzzword to you. In contrast, climate science recognizes multiple physical mechanisms whereby climate can change and has changed in the past. CO2 is only one of these, and physics makes no distinction whether it is "natural" or due to human activities. A given amount of CO2 released into the atmosphere will have the same warming effect no matter where it comes from. Different physical mechanisms of climate change make different predictions which can be tested by observation.
If you want to talk real science instead of phony pseudoscience, you must think in terms of physical mechanisms. "Natural" is not a mechanism, it is just a buzzword. Which specific physical mechanism of climate change that has operated in the past do you imagine to be responsible for the current warming? What is the evidence that it is has changed in recent decades? We certainly know that CO2 has increased....
Sorry, but as a scientist I can tell you that that is simply not how we use the term. It does not denote a theory that is "proven"--because there is no such thing.
From elementary logic we know that no generalization about the natural world can ever be proved. No matter how many apples you watch fall to the ground, it does not prove that the next apple will not fall up. And although the predictions of Einstein's theory of special relativity have been verified to an incredible degree of precision, it does not prove that a discrepancy will not arise when the theory is tested to yet one more decimal place.
Theories cannot be proved, but they can be disproved. Newton's laws of motion have been disproved--the predictions of the theory are in error. On the other hand, Einstein's theory of special relativity has been extensively tested and validated, and may indeed be perfectly correct--but logically speaking, the most you can say about it--or about any scientific theory, is "not yet disproved."
But even though we know that they are wrong, we will continue to refer to Newton's "Law's" of motion--because they are simple and because even though they are not the truth, they are a good enough approximation for most practical purposes. And no matter how much the predictions of Einstein's theory of special relativity are tested and confirmed, we will never call it a "Law," because it introduces mathematical complications that only become important under unusual conditions or when extremely high precision is required.
Yes, you can prove that a lit cigarette can ignite dry leaves. And you can easily prove that CO2 re-radiates infrared, and therefore from basic physics that it must raise global temperature.
You clearly don't understand what "null hypothesis" means. It is not a magic incantation that you can intone to make your favorite hypothesis exempt from the standard criteria for any scientific hypothesis--it must be physically plausible and make testable predictions.
In fact, the term "null hypothesis" has no meaning outside of statistics, and statistics does not and cannot concern itself with questions of causality. So any hypothesis regarding what causes what cannot be a null hypothesis. "Null hypothesis" has a very specific meaning within statistics. "Null" means "zero" and it denotes that the null hypothesis is always the hypothesis of zero difference or zero correlation. So there is only one null hypothesis of global climate, and that is the hypothesis that it is constant and unchanging. The null hypothesis of climate is easily disproved: changes in global temperature are statistically significant by any statistical test you choose. That's the only null hypothesis that there is, and once the null hypothesis of zero change is excluded, it is gone--something else does not become the null hypothesis. Once the null hypothesis of no change has been excluded, we enter the realm of causality, and all hypotheses of why climate has changed are evaluated on an equal basis, by the same scientific criteria.
Natural selection satisfies the basic requirements for a scientific theory--it is based on a physically plausible mechanism and it makes testable predictions.
Or to make a similar argument, "Forest fires happen all the time from lightning strikes, so that forest fire cannot be due to me throwing my lit cigarette into a pile of dead leaves." Perhaps you can spot the fallacy when the same argument is placed in another context.
Quite simply, identify the source of the natural variation and provide a plausible mechanism whereby it could produce such a large and prolonged increase in temperature. All this has been done for increased temperatures due to human CO2 emissions. We have the radiative physics, we have the calculation of the expected effect, we have the measurements of temperature changes, and it all matches. There are certainly plausible explanations for natural climate change in the past. If it's the sun (one of the sources of some past changes in climate), we should be able to detect a substantial change in solar output (but there isn't any). If it's CO2 from volcanoes, we should be able to show that the isotopic signature of the increased atmospheric CO2 matches that released by volcanoes (it doesn't). Etc.
So basically the "skeptics" (who become utterly credulous when it comes to any argument that reassures them that they don't have to worry about global warming) are asking us to believe:
1. There is some unknown source of warming that has been responsible for warming in the past (even though there are plausible explanations of past warming in terms of mechanisms that demonstrably aren't present today), and that for some unknown reason has kicked in over the last century or so (but whatever it is, it's going to stop Real Soon Now), and
2. There is some other unknown mechanism that prevents the warming that is predicted based on the physics of CO2 (and which coincidentally matches the measured warming) from taking place.
You are falling into the misconception that a "Law" represents a higher level of certainty that a "Theory." That's not actually the way that scientists use the term. The usage of "Law" is more along the lines of "Rule of thumb" -- i.e. a simple formula that may or may not be exactly correct, but is close enough for many practical purposes. So we will continue to talk about Newton's "Laws of motion" and Einstein's "Theory of Relativity." Even though we know that Newton's Laws are definitely wrong, and Einstein's theory is, to say the least, "more right." But Einstein's theory has complications that just get in the way for many practical purposes. If you want to calculate the trajectory of an artillery shell, you'll use Newton's Laws, not Einstein's more accurate theory.
I'm a scientist, and there are many things about science that I believe, in the same sense that I may say, "I believe that it is going to rain today." Often, my beliefs turn out to be mistaken. That's fine--I can make new ones. As far as I'm concerned, it is OK for a scientist to have beliefs. What is not OK is to get too attached to them, and to cling to them in the face of contrary evidence.
In other words "belief" = "current best guess"
It's not just psychology. Most scientific journals are not much interested in replications or negative results. Generally, to get such things published, you need to embed them in a paper that also includes some novel positive results. This imposes a positive bias on the literature of unknown magnitude. The bias is likely greater for results that are surprising or otherwise exciting.
You'd probably still do better in individual binding arbitration. In a class action suit, there is a strong incentive for the lawyer to settle, even if the benefit to the individual members of the class is very small, because the lawyer avoids the cost, time commitment, and uncertainty of a trial, and even if the individual settlements are puny, the lawyer gets a slice of all of them, so his payoff can be quite substantial.
I agree. Class action suits over services like this just drive up costs for all customers, and are basically a scam to enrich lawyers. The members of the class receive a pittance, not even worth the effort to fill out the paperwork. Congratulations to Netflix for implementing arbitration.
On my iPad, I have a database with my entire reference library available for download and viewing. I also have note-taking applications. And a perfectly functional word processor that works fine with a bluetooth keyboard.
I've got a 1080p Panasonic plasma, and it seems to do a very good job with all formats. As I said, the difference between 720p and 1080p is pretty subtle. I can see it if I look carefully, but I doubt if I could reliably tell you which format a particular show is in.
Were there actually HD CRT TVs that did both 720p and 1080p natively? I still have a HD CRT TV but its native format is 1080i, and anything else gets converted.
No, I'm not talking about mere mirroring (with a bit of a delay) of the iPhone or iPad display as is currently possible, but about apps running on the AppleTV itself, and possibly using the iPhone or iPad as a peripheral.
No, Douglas Englebart invented the mouse. But Apple's Magic Mouse is by far the best one that I've ever used.
Clearly, the killer feature for the AppleTV would be access to the App store. But doing it right is not trivial. Ideally, the AppleTV would run most iPhone apps, with the capacity to use a separate iPhone or iPad as a touch (and voice for iPhone 4s) controller (or a separate extra-cost hand-held version of the Magic iPad for those without an Apple touch-enabled device). Specially enabled apps would run simultaneously on AppleTV and iPhone/iPad, providing a dual display.
Maybe with the next generation of AppleTV...
More likely, the Apple TV2 was 720p because that was the capability of the processor that made it possible for Apple to achieve its price and design goals, and since all of the content then available from Apple and Netflix was 720p, there was no disadvantage. Apple's newer processors now make it possible to bump up to 1080p, using a level of compression that prevents an excessive load on the user's network connection.
I'm not sure that I would have bought the new model just for this; the difference between 720p and 1080p is pretty subtle with my TV size and viewing distance. And in general, I tend to upgrade Apple products every 2nd generation or so. But $100 is not a lot of money, and I want to give my Apple TV2 to my sister, because she recently bought an iPad2, and being able to send video to the TV is a very nice feature.
In the sense that previous attempts at such devices did not in fact create a revolution, while Apple's did, it seems that the answer is obvious.
What many people find difficult to grasp is that Apple creates a product revolution, not by being the first to make a device of a particular type, but by being the first to do it really well. And they do it over and over again. They don't invent the mousetrap, they invent the better mousetrap.
Not quite forgotten, but today he's best known these days for his Xanth series. His earlier, wildly creative and daring works are not as well known.
What I loved about them was that they threw this horribly flawed protagonist into a classic fantasy universe of Good and Evil, where he didn't fit on either side.
A novel of time travel by David Gerold, a bit in the vein of Heinlein's short story, "All You Zombies"
I second the M.A. Foster "Ler" books. I see that Amazon has a collection of all 3.
SF novel by George R.R. Martin, long before "Game of Thrones"
Also, "Emerald Eyes"
C.M. Kornbluth
The House on the Borderland, by William Hope Hodgson
(admired by Lovecraft and cited in Lovecraft's "Supernatural Horror in Literature")
Godstalk, by P.C. Hodgell
Jericho Moon, by Matthew Woodring Stover
Heroes Die, by Matthew Woodring Stover
The Face in the Frost, by John Bellairs
Gloriana, by Michael Moorcock
Magic Casement, by Dave Duncan