Perhaps that is true of Watson Jr, who had a more public philanthropic image, but Sr. was a piece of work.
I've read 'IBM And The Holocaust' cover to cover, a thoroughly researched and scholarly work - - http://www.ibmandtheholocaust.... and it's profoundly disturbing what was done in the name of profit. In the modern era you just need to look at IBM's record at stepping into South Africa during apartheid to help scoop up more profits. Profit and not morality is what drives most companies, especially if there are analyst expectations. IBM is no different.
It seems treasonous to me that the current execs behave in a fashion that allows them to gorge themselves at the expense of the already hollowed out middle class in North America and sadly, I'm sure they sleep just fine.
These are complex issues with no 'silver bullet' answer.
I would imagine that in the US it would be difficult to retro-fit a Canadian or UK style system given the power of lobby groups - from the doctors, to the insurance companies and to the pharmaceutical industry - in your style of government.
The world seems to be heading in the direction that John Brunner wrote about many years ago in 'The Sheep Look Up'
Oh yeah, and you don't even treat your vets with respect either -
Harvard researchers say 1.46 million working-age vets lacked health coverage last year, increasing their death rate - Over 2,200 veterans died in 2008 due to lack of health insurance
Nearly 45,000 people die in the United States each year -- one every 12 minutes -- in large part because they lack health insurance and can not get good care, Harvard Medical School researchers found.
You have over 45 million people without insurance - to quote the article: "For any doctor... it's completely a no-brainer that people who can't get health care are going to die more from the kinds of things that health care is supposed to prevent," said Woolhandler, a professor of medicine at Harvard and a primary care physician in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
And yes, I'm Canadian. Our system is not perfect...but that doesn't happen.
While it is unpleasant, at least Ballmer acknowledges it's happenning. At IBM (and as an IBMer), no-one has any official information. It seems like employees are being liquidated by a death squad and made into Orwellian 'unpersons' as their names disappear from 'Blupages' - the company directory.
I would rather get an offical word from the management folks ahead of time. I can only suspect IBM management is afraid of sabotage or people getting upset in public - from those that are to be shown the door. I can't think of any other reason for keeping us in the dark.
To quote Grand Moff Tarkin (sp?) - "Fear will keep the local systems in line..."
To paraphrase Richard Dawkins - teaching intelligent design in schools to teaching flat-earthism, since the scientific consensus regarding these issues is identical. Dawkins has stated that teaching creationism to children is akin to child abuse. I have to agree with him.
I hate to say this, but if the US government is seeking to legalize this activity, I would suspect that privacy is already being invaded and these illegal activites are already being carried out. I just wonder what 'democratic' government will be next....probably the UK if it hasn't done this already? And what can we do about this? I use TOR for surfing, but getting all my non-tech friends to embrace encryption might be problematic at best....
You noted that: "In 2000 the percent of people working in manufacturing jobs was a fairly small proportion of the US workforce." While that may be true (not sure that it is - where do they work now, Walmart?), I know from living in Southern Ontario (Canada) that manufacturing and related work makes up a quite a large proportion of the workforce.
I find it interesting that you seem to accept this ever widenning gap. To quote "Hard Work:Remaking the American Labor Movement":
"Wealth represents an even more significant form of inequality than annual income, and in the United States, the richest 5 percent of the population owns 59 percent of the wealth, more than the remaining 95 percent combined. Today there is greater wealth concentration in the United States than in any other advanced democratic country. It is worth noting that this has only become the case over the last twenty-five or thirty years. Until the early 1970s, the United States had lower wealth inequality than most European nations. However one cuts this cake, the level of inequality in the United States is extraordinary and growing dramatically, but equally remarkable is that most Americans appear to be completely accommodated to it."
Personally, I think that sticking your head in the sand and saying that: "All these statistics add up and show that maybe there really isn't a problem." I don't think the US model is all that it's cracked up to be - the average standard of living for workers and their families has improved in Europe, that doesn't seem to be true for the US worker. To again quote from the above publication:
"Despite the recent troubles of the U.S. economy, the conviction that U.S.-style neoliberalism remains the best economic model, both here and abroad, goes virtually unquestioned. We are told repeatedly that America's current economic and social woes will be solved by more of the same policies that purportedly generated the boom in the first place: more deregulation, further privatization, and greater tax cuts (especially for the wealthiest Americans).
We contend that perceptions of U.S. superiority, even during the boom years, have been largely an optical illusion, and that the American model is not all that it is cracked up to be. In fact, the "new economy" is not very different from the old and U.S. job creation has not been particularly noteworthy or distinct from that in many European countries.
What is truly distinctive about the United States when compared to Western Europe is a lack of social provisions-such as national health insurance, universal child care, and paid parental leave-as well as scandalously high levels of poverty and inequality. In fact, most working-class Europeans have a better standard of living than most working-class Americans.
European families are often better off than their American counterparts in large part because a historical weakness and a narrowness of vision have prevented American labor from effectively challenging the power of U.S. capital within the American political and economic system. This weakness undergirds the emergence of neoliberalism as the dominant political discourse today in the United States and allows U.S. capital to attempt to impose the American model on the rest of the world."
Anyway, this is an interesting topic - we'll see what the future holds.
"Nobody beats the U.S. when it comes to the difference in pay between CEOs and the average worker. In 2000, on average, CEOs at 365 of the largest publicly traded U.S. companies earned $13.1 million, or 531 times what the typical hourly employee took home. The corresponding ratio in 1980 was only 42, and in 1990 it was 85."
The norm seems to be for CEOs to help themselves, while they downsize away -
I guess I would disagree - it kind of shows that some policy makers, and this one in particular, are in positions that they are clearly not suitable to hold - he's a man who once admitted that he believed humans and dinosaurs roamed the earth and at the same time, refused to send condolences to the Palestinian people on the death of President Yassir Arafat. Why? Because of Mr. Arafat's support for armed struggle against Israel? No. Because he might have died of AIDS. I wonder of Mr Day refuses to send condolences to families in his constituency whose loved ones die of AIDS? Or would they qualify only if they could prove the disease was not sexually transmitted? Just what are the rules for receiving sympathy from the man who holds one of the senior positions in the Conservative Party and Canadian Government?
Back when Mr Day was dismissing evolution he was also, lest we forget, trying to defend his more serious transgressions.
He was also proud of the fact that he made a point of being one of the first customers at holocaust denier Jim Keegstra's new garage after he was convicted of hate crimes. When he was an Alberta MLA, he spent years badgering his cabinet colleagues to end abortion funding.
The disturbing pattern of those days is revealing itself again. If the law and constitution of the land conflict with
Mr Day's perverse version of Christian values, then he feels no compunction in simply ignoring the law. The roots of this contempt for human rights go deep for Mr. Day, right to the very notion of democratic governance. Under his guidance the Bentley (Alberta) Christian Centre featured a social studies lesson which declared that democratic governments "represent the ultimate deification of man, which is the very essence of humanism and totally alien to God's word." One might have hoped that years of being in government might have moderated this extremist nonsense. But clearly Mr Day still gives preference to his interpretation of "God's word" on homosexuality and not on the word of Parliament.
And this is the same politician who will have a hand in making decisions around the Canadian government's decisions on intruding in our personal lives? There should always be a clear seperation of church/religious belief from the state - we don't need an american style "democracy" here. So, to summarize, I do see the point of bringing his "religion" into the discussion. When a person is allegedly representing me as a Canadian citizen, I like to try to understand their resaoning behind their policy decisions.
At least they had the decency to let you know it was going on....I'm just curious as to what they plan to do with this information? To quote the article -
' Bell Sympatico has informed its customers that it intends to "monitor or investigate content or your use of your service provider's networks and to disclose any information necessary to satisfy any laws, regulations or other governmental request."...A spokeswoman for Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day said no decision has been made on the bill, known as the Modernization of Investigative Techniques Act. But she noted that Day has spoken to telecom industry officials and legal experts about bringing it forward as early as the fall session.'
This means Sympatico users are agreeing to disclose to the government whatever Bell feels like disclosing! No mention has been made of getting a warrant,etc....to prove that this should be carried out for a specific reason. There's no real mention of disclosure criteria.
On a side-note - Stockwell Day is a bit of a dingleberry - a creationist who believes the earth was created 5000 years ago....the sharp swing to the right has begun in Canada....looks like the terrorists are winning when our freedoms start to get whittled away, bit by bit....
There are lots of used media places out there - at least there are alot of them here in Toronto. My collection of music and movies is probably 40 percent made up of used CDs and DVDs. If you're unhappy giving the big media companies your money, look at the "used" alternative before going to a big retail store -
1. How long has it been since you bought a physical music CD?
I tend not to buy brand new discs as they are overpriced. I typically pick up used discs from a few stores that I regularly visit (same with DVDs). The last disc I bought was Triumph's Allied Forces - this week.
2. How long has it been since you were in an actual music store?
This week.
3. How long has it been since you bought a physical movie DVD?
Two weeks ago - the latest Wallace and Gromit flick.
Oh, and you may want to read this recent article-
http://www.techcentralstation.com/070605C.html
"....That was the case when London's Royal Society issued a statement last month announcing that the national science academies of the G8 nations and Brazil, China and India, three of the largest emitters of greenhouse gases in the developing world, had signed a statement on the global response to climate change. The statement stressed that the scientific understanding of climate change is now sufficiently clear to justify nations taking prompt action and called on world leaders, including those meeting at the G8 summit this week at Gleneagles, to take a number of specific measures.
However, it turns out this statement was not supported by the American and Russian Academies of Science. Fred Singer, president of the Science & Environmental Policy Project (SEPP), reported that Bruce Albert, president of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences -- whose signature was printed at the bottom of the statement -- confirmed that the Academy "definitely did not approve the Royal Society press release". Albert added that he had sent a letter to Lord Robert May (the drafter of the press release) expressing his dismay at the misleading and political statements made in it.
The press release came also as a surprise to the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS). As Benny Peiser, a well-known British climate skeptic noted: "The Royal Society appears to have pressured its president, Yuri Osipov, into signing a politically motivated document against the expressed stance of its own organization. The RAS had never seen or discussed the text of the Academies' statement. After having done so, the RAS climate scientists have come to the conclusion that the statement of the Academies is 'lacking scientific proof and having contradictions in logic in its many assertions.' Russian scientists still believe that the Kyoto protocol is scientifically flawed. It is an ineffective way to try to achieve the aim of the UN convention on climate change. They also said it was harmful for the Russian economy. In the meantime, a special climate group of the RAS has requested the president of the Russian Academy of Science to repudiate his signature from the 'Academies' statement."
Hey...I tend to agree. The myth that the "majority of scientists say global warming is real and directly tied into carbon emissions" seems to be based on a single study comparing a large group of abstracts listed on the ISI databank for 1993 to 2003.
There was an attempt to refute that study - but it appears to have been rejected for publication -
Now while the Telegrpah may be a right-leaning publication, I think a bit of skepticism may be needed here, it's interesting to read the study and all the correspondence around it:
Hey, I just don't think debate should be stifled because people have preconcieved notions - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/ne ws/2005/05/01/wglob01.xml&sSheet=/news/2005/05/01/ ixworld.html
"Leading scientific journals 'are censoring debate on global warming'
By Robert Matthews
(Filed: 01/05/2005)
Two of the world's leading scientific journals have come under fire from researchers for refusing to publish papers which challenge fashionable wisdom over global warming.
A British authority on natural catastrophes who disputed whether climatologists really agree that the Earth is getting warmer because of human activity, says his work was rejected by the American publication, Science, on the flimsiest of grounds.
A separate team of climate scientists, which was regularly used by Science and the journal Nature to review papers on the progress of global warming, said it was dropped after attempting to publish its own research which raised doubts over the issue."
I don't mind going against the grain - I just think that all viewpoints need to be examined as no one group or person has all the answers. Crichton certainly makes a good case for looking at things a little closer - and I find people's knee-jerk reactions to his stuff quite telling in terms of the attitudes out there. Scientists should be "certain that what [they] present to the world as knowledge is disinterested and honest" - not unduly influenced by either left wing or right, oil-man or environmentalist....or media-types looking for the next doom-laden, sensationalist scenario to push their own agenda of media visibility and screen time or...politicians seeking to reap the benefits of a popular politically-correct opinion. I mean, at one pojnt, people used to think that the Earth was the centre of the solar-system, and that the Earth was flat - it didn't make it any truer because people seem to believe it....
I don't see that he has a particular hatred of anyone - or any particular agenda. His point seems to be that no one is really basing their opinions on hard facts - alot of what is being touted in the media is just played for it's 'sensational' value. Crichton did bring up a discussion where Carl Sagan expected the the residue from the burning Kuwait oil wells to create a sort of mini-nuclear winter - and the media played it up that way....very sensational, but hardly factual....
I'm more interested in the un-varnished truth, not one tainted by obvious agendas....you obviously have jumped to the conclusion that Mr Crichton hates environmentalists when in fact he seems to despise people that use bad science in pursuit of political opportunism and power!
What is YOUR agenda?
I think this is really worth a look....I find that the truth about global warming has become harder to discern because of the various agendas out there - to quote Micheal Crichton from 'State Of Fear' -
'But as Alston Chase put it, "when the search for truth is confused with political advocacy, the pursuit of knowledge is reduced to the quest for power." That is the danger we now face. And this is why the intermixing of science and politics is a bad combination, with a bad history. We must remember the history, and be certain that what we present to the world as knowledge is disinterested and honest.'
Further interesting reading -
http://www.crichton-official.com/speeches/speeches _quote04.html
To quote Micheal Crichton - " But it is impossible to ignore how closely the history of global warming fits on the previous template for nuclear winter. Just as the earliest studies of nuclear winter stated that the uncertainties were so great that probabilites could never be known, so, too the first pronouncements on global warming argued strong limits on what could be determined with certainty about climate change. The 1995 IPCC draft report said, "Any claims of positive detection of significant climate change are likely to remain controversial until uncertainties in the total natural variability of the climate system are reduced." It also said, "No study to date has positively attributed all or part of observed climate changes to anthropogenic causes." Those statements were removed, and in their place appeared: "The balance of evidence suggests a discernable human influence on climate."
What is clear, however, is that on this issue, science and policy have become inextricably mixed to the point where it will be difficult, if not impossible, to separate them out. It is possible for an outside observer to ask serious questions about the conduct of investigations into global warming, such as whether we are taking appropriate steps to improve the quality of our observational data records, whether we are systematically obtaining the information that will clarify existing uncertainties, whether we have any organized disinterested mechanism to direct research in this contentious area."
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps that is true of Watson Jr, who had a more public philanthropic image, but Sr. was a piece of work. I've read 'IBM And The Holocaust' cover to cover, a thoroughly researched and scholarly work - - http://www.ibmandtheholocaust.... and it's profoundly disturbing what was done in the name of profit. In the modern era you just need to look at IBM's record at stepping into South Africa during apartheid to help scoop up more profits. Profit and not morality is what drives most companies, especially if there are analyst expectations. IBM is no different. It seems treasonous to me that the current execs behave in a fashion that allows them to gorge themselves at the expense of the already hollowed out middle class in North America and sadly, I'm sure they sleep just fine.
These are complex issues with no 'silver bullet' answer.
I would imagine that in the US it would be difficult to retro-fit a Canadian or UK style system given the power of lobby groups - from the doctors, to the insurance companies and to the pharmaceutical industry - in your style of government.
The world seems to be heading in the direction that John Brunner wrote about many years ago in 'The Sheep Look Up'
Anyway, it's an interesting discussion.
Cheers.
Oh yeah, and you don't even treat your vets with respect either -
Harvard researchers say 1.46 million working-age vets lacked health coverage last year, increasing their death rate - Over 2,200 veterans died in 2008 due to lack of health insurance
http://www.pnhp.org/news/2009/november/over_2200_veterans_.php
I find this a fascinating debate -
... it's completely a no-brainer that people who can't get health care are going to die more from the kinds of things that health care is supposed to prevent," said Woolhandler, a professor of medicine at Harvard and a primary care physician in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE58G6W520090917
Nearly 45,000 people die in the United States each year -- one every 12 minutes -- in large part because they lack health insurance and can not get good care, Harvard Medical School researchers found.
You have over 45 million people without insurance - to quote the article: "For any doctor
And yes, I'm Canadian. Our system is not perfect...but that doesn't happen.
While it is unpleasant, at least Ballmer acknowledges it's happenning. At IBM (and as an IBMer), no-one has any official information. It seems like employees are being liquidated by a death squad and made into Orwellian 'unpersons' as their names disappear from 'Blupages' - the company directory.
I would rather get an offical word from the management folks ahead of time. I can only suspect IBM management is afraid of sabotage or people getting upset in public - from those that are to be shown the door. I can't think of any other reason for keeping us in the dark.
To quote Grand Moff Tarkin (sp?) - "Fear will keep the local systems in line..."
To paraphrase Richard Dawkins - teaching intelligent design in schools to teaching flat-earthism, since the scientific consensus regarding these issues is identical. Dawkins has stated that teaching creationism to children is akin to child abuse. I have to agree with him.
I hate to say this, but if the US government is seeking to legalize this activity, I would suspect that privacy is already being invaded and these illegal activites are already being carried out. I just wonder what 'democratic' government will be next....probably the UK if it hasn't done this already? And what can we do about this? I use TOR for surfing, but getting all my non-tech friends to embrace encryption might be problematic at best....
Well said.
I find it interesting that you seem to accept this ever widenning gap. To quote "Hard Work:Remaking the American Labor Movement":
"Wealth represents an even more significant form of inequality than annual income, and in the United States, the richest 5 percent of the population owns 59 percent of the wealth, more than the remaining 95 percent combined. Today there is greater wealth concentration in the United States than in any other advanced democratic country. It is worth noting that this has only become the case over the last twenty-five or thirty years. Until the early 1970s, the United States had lower wealth inequality than most European nations. However one cuts this cake, the level of inequality in the United States is extraordinary and growing dramatically, but equally remarkable is that most Americans appear to be completely accommodated to it."
Personally, I think that sticking your head in the sand and saying that: "All these statistics add up and show that maybe there really isn't a problem." I don't think the US model is all that it's cracked up to be - the average standard of living for workers and their families has improved in Europe, that doesn't seem to be true for the US worker. To again quote from the above publication:
"Despite the recent troubles of the U.S. economy, the conviction that U.S.-style neoliberalism remains the best economic model, both here and abroad, goes virtually unquestioned. We are told repeatedly that America's current economic and social woes will be solved by more of the same policies that purportedly generated the boom in the first place: more deregulation, further privatization, and greater tax cuts (especially for the wealthiest Americans).
We contend that perceptions of U.S. superiority, even during the boom years, have been largely an optical illusion, and that the American model is not all that it is cracked up to be. In fact, the "new economy" is not very different from the old and U.S. job creation has not been particularly noteworthy or distinct from that in many European countries.
What is truly distinctive about the United States when compared to Western Europe is a lack of social provisions-such as national health insurance, universal child care, and paid parental leave-as well as scandalously high levels of poverty and inequality. In fact, most working-class Europeans have a better standard of living than most working-class Americans.
European families are often better off than their American counterparts in large part because a historical weakness and a narrowness of vision have prevented American labor from effectively challenging the power of U.S. capital within the American political and economic system. This weakness undergirds the emergence of neoliberalism as the dominant political discourse today in the United States and allows U.S. capital to attempt to impose the American model on the rest of the world."
Anyway, this is an interesting topic - we'll see what the future holds.
http://www.worldwatch.org/node/4289
http://www.finfacts.com/irelandbusinessnews/publis h/article_10002825.shtml
To quote the above article -
"Nobody beats the U.S. when it comes to the difference in pay between CEOs and the average worker. In 2000, on average, CEOs at 365 of the largest publicly traded U.S. companies earned $13.1 million, or 531 times what the typical hourly employee took home. The corresponding ratio in 1980 was only 42, and in 1990 it was 85."
The norm seems to be for CEOs to help themselves, while they downsize away -
http://www.educationforjustice.org/index.fpl/1200/ article/4995.html
I guess I would disagree - it kind of shows that some policy makers, and this one in particular, are in positions that they are clearly not suitable to hold - he's a man who once admitted that he believed humans and dinosaurs roamed the earth and at the same time, refused to send condolences to the Palestinian people on the death of President Yassir Arafat. Why? Because of Mr. Arafat's support for armed struggle against Israel? No. Because he might have died of AIDS. I wonder of Mr Day refuses to send condolences to families in his constituency whose loved ones die of AIDS? Or would they qualify only if they could prove the disease was not sexually transmitted? Just what are the rules for receiving sympathy from the man who holds one of the senior positions in the Conservative Party and Canadian Government?
Back when Mr Day was dismissing evolution he was also, lest we forget, trying to defend his more serious transgressions. He was also proud of the fact that he made a point of being one of the first customers at holocaust denier Jim Keegstra's new garage after he was convicted of hate crimes. When he was an Alberta MLA, he spent years badgering his cabinet colleagues to end abortion funding.
The disturbing pattern of those days is revealing itself again. If the law and constitution of the land conflict with Mr Day's perverse version of Christian values, then he feels no compunction in simply ignoring the law. The roots of this contempt for human rights go deep for Mr. Day, right to the very notion of democratic governance. Under his guidance the Bentley (Alberta) Christian Centre featured a social studies lesson which declared that democratic governments "represent the ultimate deification of man, which is the very essence of humanism and totally alien to God's word." One might have hoped that years of being in government might have moderated this extremist nonsense. But clearly Mr Day still gives preference to his interpretation of "God's word" on homosexuality and not on the word of Parliament.
And this is the same politician who will have a hand in making decisions around the Canadian government's decisions on intruding in our personal lives? There should always be a clear seperation of church/religious belief from the state - we don't need an american style "democracy" here. So, to summarize, I do see the point of bringing his "religion" into the discussion. When a person is allegedly representing me as a Canadian citizen, I like to try to understand their resaoning behind their policy decisions.
Hehe....now that's funny....
At least they had the decency to let you know it was going on....I'm just curious as to what they plan to do with this information? To quote the article -
' Bell Sympatico has informed its customers that it intends to "monitor or investigate content or your use of your service provider's networks and to disclose any information necessary to satisfy any laws, regulations or other governmental request."...A spokeswoman for Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day said no decision has been made on the bill, known as the Modernization of Investigative Techniques Act. But she noted that Day has spoken to telecom industry officials and legal experts about bringing it forward as early as the fall session.'
This means Sympatico users are agreeing to disclose to the government whatever Bell feels like disclosing! No mention has been made of getting a warrant,etc....to prove that this should be carried out for a specific reason. There's no real mention of disclosure criteria.
On a side-note - Stockwell Day is a bit of a dingleberry - a creationist who believes the earth was created 5000 years ago....the sharp swing to the right has begun in Canada....looks like the terrorists are winning when our freedoms start to get whittled away, bit by bit....
1. How long has it been since you bought a physical music CD? I tend not to buy brand new discs as they are overpriced. I typically pick up used discs from a few stores that I regularly visit (same with DVDs). The last disc I bought was Triumph's Allied Forces - this week.
2. How long has it been since you were in an actual music store? This week.
3. How long has it been since you bought a physical movie DVD? Two weeks ago - the latest Wallace and Gromit flick.
Oh, and you may want to read this recent article- http://www.techcentralstation.com/070605C.html "....That was the case when London's Royal Society issued a statement last month announcing that the national science academies of the G8 nations and Brazil, China and India, three of the largest emitters of greenhouse gases in the developing world, had signed a statement on the global response to climate change. The statement stressed that the scientific understanding of climate change is now sufficiently clear to justify nations taking prompt action and called on world leaders, including those meeting at the G8 summit this week at Gleneagles, to take a number of specific measures. However, it turns out this statement was not supported by the American and Russian Academies of Science. Fred Singer, president of the Science & Environmental Policy Project (SEPP), reported that Bruce Albert, president of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences -- whose signature was printed at the bottom of the statement -- confirmed that the Academy "definitely did not approve the Royal Society press release". Albert added that he had sent a letter to Lord Robert May (the drafter of the press release) expressing his dismay at the misleading and political statements made in it. The press release came also as a surprise to the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS). As Benny Peiser, a well-known British climate skeptic noted: "The Royal Society appears to have pressured its president, Yuri Osipov, into signing a politically motivated document against the expressed stance of its own organization. The RAS had never seen or discussed the text of the Academies' statement. After having done so, the RAS climate scientists have come to the conclusion that the statement of the Academies is 'lacking scientific proof and having contradictions in logic in its many assertions.' Russian scientists still believe that the Kyoto protocol is scientifically flawed. It is an ineffective way to try to achieve the aim of the UN convention on climate change. They also said it was harmful for the Russian economy. In the meantime, a special climate group of the RAS has requested the president of the Russian Academy of Science to repudiate his signature from the 'Academies' statement."
All I'm saying is that the following suggests that consensus among climate scientists might not be as clear as sometimes depicted - http://pdf2html.spawncamp.net/pdf2html.php?url=htt p://w3g.gkss.de/G/Mitarbeiter/bray.html/BrayGKSSsi te/BrayGKSS/WedPDFs/Science2.pdf&ID=150480
"Consensus is the business of politics. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period."
Michael Crichton, author of "Jurassic Park" and creator-producer of "ER,"
Hey...I tend to agree. The myth that the "majority of scientists say global warming is real and directly tied into carbon emissions" seems to be based on a single study comparing a large group of abstracts listed on the ISI databank for 1993 to 2003.
e ws/2005/05/01/wglob01.xml&sSheet=/news/2005/05/01/ ixworld.html
e r.htm
There was an attempt to refute that study - but it appears to have been rejected for publication -
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/n
Now while the Telegrpah may be a right-leaning publication, I think a bit of skepticism may be needed here, it's interesting to read the study and all the correspondence around it:
http://www.staff.livjm.ac.uk/spsbpeis/Sciencelett
Cheers.
K
It's just not true - the belief that the majority of climate researchers agree that humanity is to blame for the rise in global temperatures is also 'hotly' debated. Check out this - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/ne ws/2005/05/01/wglob01.xml&sSheet=/news/2005/05/01/ ixworld.html
And then the actual letter stating that oft quoted study is quite flawed:
http://www.staff.livjm.ac.uk/spsbpeis/Sciencelette r.htm
"RESULTS
The results of my analysis contradict Oreskes' findings and essentially falsify her study:
Of all 1117 abstracts, only 13 (or 1%) explicitly endorse the 'consensus view'."
Global warming may be occurring, but is it humanities fault?
Hey, I just don't think debate should be stifled because people have preconcieved notions - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/ne ws/2005/05/01/wglob01.xml&sSheet=/news/2005/05/01/ ixworld.html
"Leading scientific journals 'are censoring debate on global warming'
By Robert Matthews
(Filed: 01/05/2005)
Two of the world's leading scientific journals have come under fire from researchers for refusing to publish papers which challenge fashionable wisdom over global warming.
A British authority on natural catastrophes who disputed whether climatologists really agree that the Earth is getting warmer because of human activity, says his work was rejected by the American publication, Science, on the flimsiest of grounds.
A separate team of climate scientists, which was regularly used by Science and the journal Nature to review papers on the progress of global warming, said it was dropped after attempting to publish its own research which raised doubts over the issue."
I don't mind going against the grain - I just think that all viewpoints need to be examined as no one group or person has all the answers. Crichton certainly makes a good case for looking at things a little closer - and I find people's knee-jerk reactions to his stuff quite telling in terms of the attitudes out there. Scientists should be "certain that what [they] present to the world as knowledge is disinterested and honest" - not unduly influenced by either left wing or right, oil-man or environmentalist....or media-types looking for the next doom-laden, sensationalist scenario to push their own agenda of media visibility and screen time or...politicians seeking to reap the benefits of a popular politically-correct opinion. I mean, at one pojnt, people used to think that the Earth was the centre of the solar-system, and that the Earth was flat - it didn't make it any truer because people seem to believe it....
I don't see that he has a particular hatred of anyone - or any particular agenda. His point seems to be that no one is really basing their opinions on hard facts - alot of what is being touted in the media is just played for it's 'sensational' value. Crichton did bring up a discussion where Carl Sagan expected the the residue from the burning Kuwait oil wells to create a sort of mini-nuclear winter - and the media played it up that way....very sensational, but hardly factual.... I'm more interested in the un-varnished truth, not one tainted by obvious agendas....you obviously have jumped to the conclusion that Mr Crichton hates environmentalists when in fact he seems to despise people that use bad science in pursuit of political opportunism and power! What is YOUR agenda?
I think this is really worth a look....I find that the truth about global warming has become harder to discern because of the various agendas out there - to quote Micheal Crichton from 'State Of Fear' - 'But as Alston Chase put it, "when the search for truth is confused with political advocacy, the pursuit of knowledge is reduced to the quest for power." That is the danger we now face. And this is why the intermixing of science and politics is a bad combination, with a bad history. We must remember the history, and be certain that what we present to the world as knowledge is disinterested and honest.' Further interesting reading - http://www.crichton-official.com/speeches/speeches _quote04.html
To quote Micheal Crichton - " But it is impossible to ignore how closely the history of global warming fits on the previous template for nuclear winter. Just as the earliest studies of nuclear winter stated that the uncertainties were so great that probabilites could never be known, so, too the first pronouncements on global warming argued strong limits on what could be determined with certainty about climate change. The 1995 IPCC draft report said, "Any claims of positive detection of significant climate change are likely to remain controversial until uncertainties in the total natural variability of the climate system are reduced." It also said, "No study to date has positively attributed all or part of observed climate changes to anthropogenic causes." Those statements were removed, and in their place appeared: "The balance of evidence suggests a discernable human influence on climate."
What is clear, however, is that on this issue, science and policy have become inextricably mixed to the point where it will be difficult, if not impossible, to separate them out. It is possible for an outside observer to ask serious questions about the conduct of investigations into global warming, such as whether we are taking appropriate steps to improve the quality of our observational data records, whether we are systematically obtaining the information that will clarify existing uncertainties, whether we have any organized disinterested mechanism to direct research in this contentious area."