In general in Westminster Parliaments the failure rate of private member bills is very high. First of all, you have to convince the Government to put them on the order paper. That pretty much kills the larger part of them right away. Then it has to make it through three readings, through committees, where almost all the rest die. Looking at this one, the government supports it, but I still wouldn't hold my breath. Even when everyone says "Yeah, that sounds alright", they still have a high failure rate.
Not that I'm necessarily against the general notion, though the fines are absurdly high and would likely get nailed on a Charter challenge, but it's a long ways away from law.
So far as I understand it, it's not a government bill, it's a bill that a government backbencher is going to introduce. I'm not even sure it's made it to the order paper, but it likely won't survive through first reading anyways.
Questioning is one thing, but wholesale declarations that the large majority of climatologists are liars or fools is another. What's more it's an old tactic developed by the Creationists in their attacks on evolution; declarations of a cabal of biologists out to hide the truth blah blah blah.
You act as if consensus is a bad thing. Do you think evolution is false because the overwhelming majority of biologists accept it? Do you think General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics is wrong because the overwhelming majority of physicists accept it? I'll wager you don't, but because AGW says "We keep vomiting vast amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere we're going to screw things up royally", which interferes with your short-term self interest, well, it must be false.
First of all, scientists aren't forcing anyone. They do not have that power. Governments do. Beyond that, history indicates that people do not make the right choices all on their own, and quite often will give in to selfishness and shortsightedness. Look at the North Atlantic cod fishery. For decades scientists warned that it was going to get wiped out, but market forces and the short-term self interest of the fishermen won out, until, that is, the population collapsed due to centuries of overfishing. Leaving the fishermen to their own devices didn't work, it backfired and a major industry of the east coast of North America was all but wiped out.
You have this idea somehow that politics can trump reality. It can't. If we're going to get hit by a tsunami, it doesn't matter one little bloody bit that some organized group stands up and says "It's all liberal lies!"
Then ignore Al Gore. This constant bitching about him is ludicrous, and to my mind an intentional red herring. Al Gore is not a scientist, you don't need to hear anything he has to say to understand AGW. But, I guess, when you don't like what someone is saying, you find an easy strawman to knock down.
The overwhelming majority of experts in fields related to climatology accept that AGW is real. You can call that a high horse, but I call it at least suggestive that maybe they have something.
Magicians are also using pyrotechnics, low and special lighting and a host of visual tricks to make it all work. When I go to the polls and find out that the overseer is David Copperfield, then I'll be concerned.
Actually, in Canada, if you can demonstrate that the irregularities were high enough to have brought an election result into question a judge can order the election results vacated and a new election runs. I'd like to think that if 30% of the votes were lost that the *independent* (there's a keyword right there) election commission would go to a judge and ask exactly that, that the election results be vacated and a new election called. And Canada may find out soon, as evidence of robocall interference may call the results of at least a few ridings into question, which means even if it ends up being a year or more since the election, those results can be discarded and a new election fought.
Really? How is it easier to alter the result of a paper election? You have the ballots watched at all times, locked up when the polls close, it's damned hard to stuff. The problem in the States is, of course, that no one seems to have struck the bright idea that other democratic jurisdictions did decades ago that you don't let political parties run elections, ever. You create independent departments that are specifically non-partisan in nature to run your elections, instead of whatever Republican or Democrat jackass somehow lucked into basically overseeing the vote.
Paper voting means a physical verifiable record. As to hanging chads the issue is complex and poorly designed ballots.
As to the speed of counting ballots, so what? You have to wait a few hours, or on tight races, a few days. Sounds like a reasonable sacrifice for not having fucked up elections due to equipment failure.
And again, Lord Kelvin was not an aeronautics expert, so why do you think his views on the topic would be any more well informed than his gardener's? Here's a hint, science is littered with great men who made fools of themselves by making sweeping claims on subjects they held no particular expertise in. I have my doubts that engineers at the time Kelvin made any such claim believed it impossible, and certainly great progress was made towards the end of the 19th century.
Was patently unscientific, and was bought by the Soviets because they viewed it as ideologically pleasing. I know of no one outside Soviet circles who thought Lysenko was anything but a crackpot.
But his expertise was not aeronautics. To those who were experts, I'm sure for much of the 18th and 19th century they understood the underlying problem was creating a sufficiently light engine to provide lift. I'm not sure why you think quoting Lord Kelvin is any more useful to this debate than quoting his cook.
Ether straddles a line between Classical Physics and a solidy pre-scientific era. I don't think any physicist would view it as a theory in and of itself, any more than alchemy is chemistry. Not everything that attempted to explain an observation is science. And it's been a helluva long time since anything like a scientific theory has been outright falsified. The last I can think of were some of the pre-Tectonic Plate geological theories and the Steady State theories (although the latter had no real model at all, and was more of just an assumption).
Scientific theories don't get to be theories just by being wild-ass guesses.
But blood letting dates back to a point before the scientific discipline of medicine came into being. This is my point. Trying to invoke the bafflegab of the pre-scientific era, or the clearly unsupported nonsense from the scientific era doesn't make the point. I'm talking about scientific theories here. Even ether wasn't really a scientific theory, it had no real supporting evidence for it, and was rather easily falsified.
And QM and GR didn't disprove Newtonian Mechanics at all. That there were problems with Newtonian Mechanics was known before General Relativity came along. The issues with the procession of Mercury were a problem that showed that Newtonian Mechanics had an issue. What you're claiming would be like saying 3.14 is useless because it's not a sufficiently accurate enough approximation of Pi. It's true that for very accurate measurements, 3.14 won't do, and engineers will have to use better approximations, but for the purposes of high school geometry it's fine. Much in the same way, Newtonian Mechanics is a good enough approximation for getting satellites into orbit or getting a probe to orbit Mars. It utterly fails at any kind of relativistic velocities, and for certain kinds of phenomena.
In other words, Newtonian Mechanics wasn't falsified. It was subsumed as an approximation of General Relativity for non-relativistic speeds. It was a part of the answer, not the whole, and you will find most theories sit in that vein. Darwin's Theory of Natural Selection lacked a good system of heredity. Does that mean Natural Selection is wrong? No, it means it was complete and required a marriage with genetics to give a fuller answer, but it was still useful to explain observations.
So let's bring this back to AGW. Is it a complete theory? No, it is not. But enough groundwork has been laid, there is enough data being gathered to suggest that in the larger picture, it is correct, that three centuries of puking millions of years worth of previously sequestered CO2 and other greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere through industrial activity is influencing climate. The theory will doubtless be refined, and is being refined, but nothing brought to bear so far has shown the theory outright false, or even in the important points, mistaken.
You will note that his expertise was not aeronautics. What you're doing is a sort of a reverse appeal to authority. This is no different than Fred Hoyle's anti-evolution claims. Just because someone is an expert in one field does not make them an expert in others.
Yes ether might count, but Newton's models still work for non-relativistic speeds, so are just a special case of GR, electrons like all force mediators can be considered particles, origin of the species if it refers to Darwin is still generally accepted, with modification, wasn't aware miasma was ever a "scientific" theory.
I've never read such a thing. Time dilation happens because one observer's reference frame is moving at a different speed to another observer's reference frame. The faster moving observer will observe events moving slower, and in fact time is moving slower for him. The twin paradox confirms this:
"If we placed a living organism in a box... one could arrange that the organism, after any arbitrary lengthy flight, could be returned to its original spot in a scarcely altered condition, while corresponding organisms which had remained in their original positions had already long since given way to new generations. For the moving organism, the lengthy time of the journey was a mere instant, provided the motion took place with approximately the speed of light." If the stationary organism is a man and the traveling one is his twin, then the traveler returns home to find his twin brother much aged compared to himself. The paradox centers around the contention that, in relativity, either twin could regard the other as the traveler, in which case each should find the other younger—a logical contradiction. This contention assumes that the twins' situations are symmetrical and interchangeable, an assumption that is not correct. Furthermore, the accessible experiments have been done and support Einstein's prediction....
It was also once consensus that the Earth was the center of the universe. A consensus of people in some places think it's okay to stone adulterers.
Neither were scientific.
Just because a majority of people believe something is true doesn't mean that it is.Bringing that up also doesn't do anything to convince people otherwise anyway. Providing facts and exposing myths without being confrontational is what will do it. You can point out factual errors in another's post without going down the road of "cheap rhetoric" and "buillshit" in your own. Try it sometime.
It's a variant the Gish Gallop, invented by (in)famous Creationist Duane Gish, whose chief means of winning debates was to throw so many things at an interlocutor that there was no way to deal with it in the time allotted. So many of the pseudo-skeptics tactics are pretty much based on the pioneering rhetorical games of the Creationists. In this case, you troll journals and repositories and look for anything that faintly looks like it might be anti-AGW and throw it out there, even when it turns out that the authors certainly do not make that case. You see, the amount of energy it takes to just throw articles out there is small compared to having to read through all the articles and references, thus it becomes a sort of rhetorical economics.
The other tactic that links in to this is to ignore when you've been shown the article in question doesn't falsify AGW, and then just keep throwing it out there anyways. This is pretty common, and why you will see some pseudo-skeptics throwing out long-debunked claims as if they were somehow still relevant.
And what happens when fertile ground moves out of the national borders? What if the grain built starts shifting north and suddenly the US's capacity to feed its population now becomes even partially reliant on Canadian and Mexican farmers?
Will civilization end? Probably not. We're not isolated walled cities in the middle of barbarians like we were two or three thousand years ago. But nations can end, the balance of power can shift, and it can have enormous ramifications.
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In general in Westminster Parliaments the failure rate of private member bills is very high. First of all, you have to convince the Government to put them on the order paper. That pretty much kills the larger part of them right away. Then it has to make it through three readings, through committees, where almost all the rest die. Looking at this one, the government supports it, but I still wouldn't hold my breath. Even when everyone says "Yeah, that sounds alright", they still have a high failure rate.
Not that I'm necessarily against the general notion, though the fines are absurdly high and would likely get nailed on a Charter challenge, but it's a long ways away from law.
So far as I understand it, it's not a government bill, it's a bill that a government backbencher is going to introduce. I'm not even sure it's made it to the order paper, but it likely won't survive through first reading anyways.
Because the count is done at the polling station. The recount only happens when the votes between two candidates are exceptionally close.
Hardly a troll. Having spent some time around scientists, they're nothing like you describe. The trolling here is being done by you.
Questioning is one thing, but wholesale declarations that the large majority of climatologists are liars or fools is another. What's more it's an old tactic developed by the Creationists in their attacks on evolution; declarations of a cabal of biologists out to hide the truth blah blah blah.
You act as if consensus is a bad thing. Do you think evolution is false because the overwhelming majority of biologists accept it? Do you think General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics is wrong because the overwhelming majority of physicists accept it? I'll wager you don't, but because AGW says "We keep vomiting vast amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere we're going to screw things up royally", which interferes with your short-term self interest, well, it must be false.
I doubt you've ever been within fifty feet of a scientist.
First of all, scientists aren't forcing anyone. They do not have that power. Governments do. Beyond that, history indicates that people do not make the right choices all on their own, and quite often will give in to selfishness and shortsightedness. Look at the North Atlantic cod fishery. For decades scientists warned that it was going to get wiped out, but market forces and the short-term self interest of the fishermen won out, until, that is, the population collapsed due to centuries of overfishing. Leaving the fishermen to their own devices didn't work, it backfired and a major industry of the east coast of North America was all but wiped out.
You have this idea somehow that politics can trump reality. It can't. If we're going to get hit by a tsunami, it doesn't matter one little bloody bit that some organized group stands up and says "It's all liberal lies!"
Then ignore Al Gore. This constant bitching about him is ludicrous, and to my mind an intentional red herring. Al Gore is not a scientist, you don't need to hear anything he has to say to understand AGW. But, I guess, when you don't like what someone is saying, you find an easy strawman to knock down.
The overwhelming majority of experts in fields related to climatology accept that AGW is real. You can call that a high horse, but I call it at least suggestive that maybe they have something.
Magicians are also using pyrotechnics, low and special lighting and a host of visual tricks to make it all work. When I go to the polls and find out that the overseer is David Copperfield, then I'll be concerned.
The ballots were badly designed. That's like saying "The wheels fell off my Toyota Corolla, therefore all automobiles suck..."
Actually, in Canada, if you can demonstrate that the irregularities were high enough to have brought an election result into question a judge can order the election results vacated and a new election runs. I'd like to think that if 30% of the votes were lost that the *independent* (there's a keyword right there) election commission would go to a judge and ask exactly that, that the election results be vacated and a new election called. And Canada may find out soon, as evidence of robocall interference may call the results of at least a few ridings into question, which means even if it ends up being a year or more since the election, those results can be discarded and a new election fought.
Really? How is it easier to alter the result of a paper election? You have the ballots watched at all times, locked up when the polls close, it's damned hard to stuff. The problem in the States is, of course, that no one seems to have struck the bright idea that other democratic jurisdictions did decades ago that you don't let political parties run elections, ever. You create independent departments that are specifically non-partisan in nature to run your elections, instead of whatever Republican or Democrat jackass somehow lucked into basically overseeing the vote.
Paper voting means a physical verifiable record. As to hanging chads the issue is complex and poorly designed ballots.
As to the speed of counting ballots, so what? You have to wait a few hours, or on tight races, a few days. Sounds like a reasonable sacrifice for not having fucked up elections due to equipment failure.
Temperature measurements over a whole fucking year aren't measuring weather you morons.
And again, Lord Kelvin was not an aeronautics expert, so why do you think his views on the topic would be any more well informed than his gardener's? Here's a hint, science is littered with great men who made fools of themselves by making sweeping claims on subjects they held no particular expertise in. I have my doubts that engineers at the time Kelvin made any such claim believed it impossible, and certainly great progress was made towards the end of the 19th century.
Was patently unscientific, and was bought by the Soviets because they viewed it as ideologically pleasing. I know of no one outside Soviet circles who thought Lysenko was anything but a crackpot.
But his expertise was not aeronautics. To those who were experts, I'm sure for much of the 18th and 19th century they understood the underlying problem was creating a sufficiently light engine to provide lift. I'm not sure why you think quoting Lord Kelvin is any more useful to this debate than quoting his cook.
Ether straddles a line between Classical Physics and a solidy pre-scientific era. I don't think any physicist would view it as a theory in and of itself, any more than alchemy is chemistry. Not everything that attempted to explain an observation is science. And it's been a helluva long time since anything like a scientific theory has been outright falsified. The last I can think of were some of the pre-Tectonic Plate geological theories and the Steady State theories (although the latter had no real model at all, and was more of just an assumption).
Scientific theories don't get to be theories just by being wild-ass guesses.
But blood letting dates back to a point before the scientific discipline of medicine came into being. This is my point. Trying to invoke the bafflegab of the pre-scientific era, or the clearly unsupported nonsense from the scientific era doesn't make the point. I'm talking about scientific theories here. Even ether wasn't really a scientific theory, it had no real supporting evidence for it, and was rather easily falsified.
And QM and GR didn't disprove Newtonian Mechanics at all. That there were problems with Newtonian Mechanics was known before General Relativity came along. The issues with the procession of Mercury were a problem that showed that Newtonian Mechanics had an issue. What you're claiming would be like saying 3.14 is useless because it's not a sufficiently accurate enough approximation of Pi. It's true that for very accurate measurements, 3.14 won't do, and engineers will have to use better approximations, but for the purposes of high school geometry it's fine. Much in the same way, Newtonian Mechanics is a good enough approximation for getting satellites into orbit or getting a probe to orbit Mars. It utterly fails at any kind of relativistic velocities, and for certain kinds of phenomena.
In other words, Newtonian Mechanics wasn't falsified. It was subsumed as an approximation of General Relativity for non-relativistic speeds. It was a part of the answer, not the whole, and you will find most theories sit in that vein. Darwin's Theory of Natural Selection lacked a good system of heredity. Does that mean Natural Selection is wrong? No, it means it was complete and required a marriage with genetics to give a fuller answer, but it was still useful to explain observations.
So let's bring this back to AGW. Is it a complete theory? No, it is not. But enough groundwork has been laid, there is enough data being gathered to suggest that in the larger picture, it is correct, that three centuries of puking millions of years worth of previously sequestered CO2 and other greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere through industrial activity is influencing climate. The theory will doubtless be refined, and is being refined, but nothing brought to bear so far has shown the theory outright false, or even in the important points, mistaken.
You will note that his expertise was not aeronautics. What you're doing is a sort of a reverse appeal to authority. This is no different than Fred Hoyle's anti-evolution claims. Just because someone is an expert in one field does not make them an expert in others.
Yes ether might count, but Newton's models still work for non-relativistic speeds, so are just a special case of GR, electrons like all force mediators can be considered particles, origin of the species if it refers to Darwin is still generally accepted, with modification, wasn't aware miasma was ever a "scientific" theory.
I've never read such a thing. Time dilation happens because one observer's reference frame is moving at a different speed to another observer's reference frame. The faster moving observer will observe events moving slower, and in fact time is moving slower for him. The twin paradox confirms this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_paradox
Neither were scientific.
None of this has anything to do with the science.
It's a variant the Gish Gallop, invented by (in)famous Creationist Duane Gish, whose chief means of winning debates was to throw so many things at an interlocutor that there was no way to deal with it in the time allotted. So many of the pseudo-skeptics tactics are pretty much based on the pioneering rhetorical games of the Creationists. In this case, you troll journals and repositories and look for anything that faintly looks like it might be anti-AGW and throw it out there, even when it turns out that the authors certainly do not make that case. You see, the amount of energy it takes to just throw articles out there is small compared to having to read through all the articles and references, thus it becomes a sort of rhetorical economics.
The other tactic that links in to this is to ignore when you've been shown the article in question doesn't falsify AGW, and then just keep throwing it out there anyways. This is pretty common, and why you will see some pseudo-skeptics throwing out long-debunked claims as if they were somehow still relevant.
And what happens when fertile ground moves out of the national borders? What if the grain built starts shifting north and suddenly the US's capacity to feed its population now becomes even partially reliant on Canadian and Mexican farmers?
Will civilization end? Probably not. We're not isolated walled cities in the middle of barbarians like we were two or three thousand years ago. But nations can end, the balance of power can shift, and it can have enormous ramifications.