If the patent office is overworked the solution is simple. No appeals process and a bias towards rejection. Stop this bullshit of putting in multiple claims some of which are obvious, one obvious claim means no patent, one claim with prior art means no patent. Stop this bullshit of poorly worded and vague patents. If within the first 30 minutes of getting your patent it isn't clear how to implement it, automatic rejection. Force the inclusion of pseudocode for software patents (or better yet just ban them), and the inclusion of schematics for everything else, and demands that it should be clear from those schematics how to actually build the device in question. Anyone submitting a claim to an invention with documented prior art should be fined heavily for wasting the offices time. Allow the extension of prior art to softer situations, so don't simply look at academic papers and other patents (although those should be used to determine if the submitter should be fined) but include any other reasonable source of prior art (blog postings which outline similar ideas, public speculation in the media).
Once it is clear that only geniune patents will be accepted the volume of patents submitted to the patent office will drop rapidly.
Urgh, where to being. Every single concept you have is an abstraction. You think something like social class is less of an abstraction than say force or momentum? There are different kind of abstractions, sure I will grant you that, but if you think the work you do pertains more to the 'real world' in some way, as though the lab doesn't exist in the real world then you have gone gaga. I'm not sure given the phenomenal incompetence of boards of directors and CXOs the best argument you can make is that they have to use the skills you talk about, given that the hard sciences have cured diseases and put people on the moon. I would come up with a better example than people who cause financial crises and fire people for a bonus. If these are the people that have and are using these these skills might I suggest we replace them with people who can do real science. The problem with some (and not all, there are good people who do social sciences) social scientists one question one answer approach is that it is literally useless. Given the limited controls over the 'experiment', and given the historical factors which will never occur again, you get an ad hoc explanation for one event, which you can never generalise. Calling the totally quantifiable factors you don't understand 'mysterious elements' doesn't change that fact. To any hard scientist it is obvious you need a massively complex statistical approach to even have a hope of getting an answer (for an example of how to do this right, look at something like fivethirtyeight.com's approach to elections). As for this idea that there are things that cannot be expressed in mathematical language, I'm sorry but name one. Mathematics isn't just numbers, so I wouldn't just go spouting off about things which cannot be quantified. If you don't know what the bounds of mathematics are I suggest you start by pulling out a text book and studying it for a bit before you go declaring that there are things that mathematics cannot encode. It might well be the case that there are things that are better encoded in other, less formal ways, but I wouldn't trust someone who obviously has no idea what mathematics is to be able to elucidate us on that concept.
I know you are trying to bring balance into the debate but last I heard no one is calling for people like Eigil Friis-Christensen or Henrik Svensmark to be defunded, and I've never heard either of these two calling for defunding of climate research. Radio blowhards, sure, but no respected scientists on either side of the (very limited) debate. In fact every time I hear climatologists talk about these two they talk about the need to fund their work since there really aren't a whole heap of even vaguely plausible possible alternatives to the current synthesis regarding climate. Heck search the so called 'Climategate' emails for these two names if you like, you'll find some less than complimentary comments of Friis-Christensen in the form of a point-by-point rebuttal of a few of his ideas but nothing amounting to a call to defund them. Sure I'm willing to bet there are a few arseholes, probably most of them in the proponent camp now-a-days since this camp is so much bigger. I doubt there are that many more than there are arsehole particle physicists or evolutionary biologists. The problem isn't with the way the science is being conducted (although we scientists can always do better, climate science doesn't seem that bad to me), the problem is with the filter the media puts on it. These are the people calling for funding to be deallocated.
Thanks for pointing this out, I'm a particle physicist and this was good for a laugh. That said I will admit to feeling a certain amount of relief when I played snarXiv vs. arXiv and was 10 for 10. There are days when you wonder if some random paper you are reading is just a string of meaningless words.
I agree, I'm on the political left. There is however a distinction between someone on the right who, due to different values to me, wants to try to fix only some of the problem with as little intervention as possible, and someone on the right who pretends nature is not as it is. You and I tolerate a little intervention by the state to prevent excessive externalisation, a person on the right tolerates a little externalisation to prevent intervention by the state. We have different values and that is what politics is about. The issue I have with the anti-science perspective of the right is that they are pretending the universe doesn't work the way it does because they want their fantasy land ideas to be true. I have no problem attacking the political right over this because the attitude is now so pervasive it is representative, but at the same time I'm not going to suggest that being on the right of the political spectrum automatically invalidates someone's opinion.
I'm sorry but that is just a big crock of shit. It isn't scientists fault that the right of the political spectrum is too stupid and blinkered to ask the right questions or adjust their views enough to accommodate reality.
A scientists job in this context is to present the facts they have gathered and the conclusions they have drawn in a politically neutral manner. Why do you think they all sound like Vulcans on CSPAN.
If the political right wants scientists to say that the breaking of a continent in two due to fracking is incredibly unlikely I'm certain (since that statement is bloody obviously true) that you can find a reputable geophysicist willing to say that. Most scientists are happy to provide their advice (free of charge), to public institutions. The reason the political right wont do that is because the next question they are going to be asked by the gentleman with the blue tie is "how much does this increase the chances of a 7.0+ earthquake near a population centre".
Why didn't the right invite a scientists to testify about the Nebraska pipeline? It is within their power to request it, so why not? The media doesn't give a crap what scientists say so if the political right wants to champion a science led perspective on policy they're are going to have to use their media pull to promote it.
The reason, in this context, that the political right has not provided the soap box scientists need to counter these claims is because they know that once it is all tied down the moral implications of this kind of work is that either certain extraction techniques should be prohibited or (and here is where I fall on the issue) they need to be taxed higher to offset the additional costs incurred in terms of insurance, first responder preparations, etc. The political right, instead of doing what they are supposed to do (countering the lefts heavy handed statist approach with a different political solution to the problem by using the market) are pretending the problem doesn't exist,
Depends on why you are using the animation. Every element of a presentation should have a reason to be there otherwise it is a distraction. Those stupid cube rotation things that Keynote does is annoying and distracting in most presentations because it has me thinking about rotations and not about whatever chemical composition or algorithm or whatever is being discussed. So are the silly wipes people use in PowerPoint. This type animation is probably going to be used in a stupid and distracting way in most presentations. However I think it can be considerably more useful than the cube or wipes because this kind of animation can be used to place related concepts in spatial relation to one another. Imagine a presentation on a multi-stage algorithm where one moves up and down a flowchart constantly reminded of the relations between different operations in the algorithm due to their spatial relations on the slide. I suspect if this is used that way, it could be a powerful tool.
He was CTPO of the MPAA. You don't work for a group that evil and get to claim that you are a person working for the common good. You cant be fair minded and take the MPAA's money. At best he is a Puyi, and someone that politically naive does not belong belong in this position.
Even if he was trying to change it from the inside the only change that needs to happen at the MPAA is for it to disband and for everyone involved who ever aided in the bribery of politicians to be locked up. Your friend is complicit in the corruption of the United States political system and belongs in a cell, not heading up a North American chapter of ISOC.
Energetic cost would be my guess. The places wheels win over tracks and legs are deserts and plains (and Mars has plenty of these). Of course wheels are not without issues, Spirit got stuck in a sand trap it could probably have escaped if it had had legs. However, had it had legs it would never have been able to move as far as it did, so I would argue the engineers made the right choice. Mars is largely unexplored, including the flat bits, so if you want to do as much exploration as possible you send the vehicle that can move the cheapest on the most readily explorable terrain, and right now that is a vehicle with wheels. Another factor is that on flat terrain wheels provide a very smooth ride, which is important when you have sensitive equipment. If you used something like the robots I work on on Mars first you would have reliability issues, it would be heavier, and you would have to wait a very long time to charge the robot. On the other hand you could go to a few additional places that existing rovers cant go, but it's an unexplored planet, everywhere is new and interesting! Maybe the mantra should be "legs are better than wheels if you are trying to navigate a burning building filled with rubble and find survivors", but that is a little less catchy...
This strikes me as very likely. I work on legged robotic systems and one of the mantras is 'legs are better than wheels'. Pack animals are much better suited to transporting goods over rough terrain than wheeled vehicles, especially if the wheeled vehicles don't have something like an ICE or battery. Even if you don't have a inorganic power source, on the wrong terrain a primitive wheeled vehicle is probably more of a burden to a pack animal than just putting the material you want to haul on it. Not to mention that if you don't have pack animals your power source (i.e. humans) is even worse suited to the task. In the absence of modern roads, etc. most of the places people would want to live, hunt and move between are the 'wrong terrain'. Moreover there is a lower hanging technological fruit, boats. Food is already concentrated on the river so why wouldn't you take advantage of natures highways before bothering to work out how to build vehicles to go on your own. While there are other uses for 'wheels' such as grindstones and turntables, the thing we traditionally think of as a wheel is, in most parts of the world where ancient peoples lived, useless without infrastructure. A sled is much better if it snows, or if it is flat but tends to get muddy.A boat is better if you have a river. A pack or a pack animal if the terrain is uneven.
6 sigma is not bordering on experimental error. If you are saying that the distribution of neutrino speeds is such that it is very close to what we would expect if there was a systematic error in the measurement of time of flight, then please show your working (as in, do the stats). Otherwise you are just making shit up. I suspect, given the size of the effect and the absence of a good null to test against, you will have a hard time getting a significant result out of any reasonable equivalence test.
"So you repudiate NASA GISS temps and dendro reconstructions? I'm cool with that" - You are an abject weasel. Stop putting words in my mouth. I said it wasn't the topic of conversation, not that I repudiate the results.
"And yes, they have a peer reviewed study, but far be it for me to appeal to authority" - Link to the paper. I'm not reading another blog for you, it isn't my job to fill in your ignorance.
"Your citation of a physical parameter as a both necessary and sufficient to determine the validity of a tinker toy model is puzzling." - You asked me for an experiment. I gave you one. These are the ones I can think of at this stage because all experiments that undermine climate models at this stage are either longitudinal or completely undermine vast swathes of contemporary physics. The only other option I can see is to find some way to show that the empirical parameters of existing models (of which I admit there are a few) cannot take the values the fits currently suggest. You go away and do that and I will certainly demand that model be reconsidered.
"So 800 years of lag is insufficient, but 4000 years would be?" - Yes, go look at the time periods of transitions between glacial periods and the length of time for a typical interglacial period and it is obvious why I picked a number bigger than 1000 and less than 20,000.
"Wouldn't the observation of statistically significant UHI falsify that?" - You have just managed to demonstrate to me that you don't have a beyond high school education in statistics. My urine is, statistically speaking, significantly warm than the ocean. Me pissing in the ocean will not warm it in any meaningful way.
At first I assumed that you were vaguely familiar with the scientific method, but it is now clear that is not the case. No one experimental fact is ever sufficient to validate a theory. Ever. Science is a web, a set of facts embedded in a paradigm. No serious student of science has thought the way you are suggesting we think since Kuhn, regardless of if they buy his explanation of how science is conducted. I can conduct the exact same game you are playing now with any theory in science. Which is exactly the point I raised at the start of this discussion. A point you have still utterly failed to address instead resorting to denialist canard after canard.
You have now shown a poor understanding of the scientific method and epistemology, an inability to cite appropriate sources and a total inability to follow even basic statistics. If you were one of my students I'd suggest you take basket weaving because you clearly aren't cut out of science. Far from your comments being 'well written' if your arguments were my dog I'd shoot it.
"Hansen and Mann" - Non-sequitor, I didn't cite either of these gentlemen. I showed the reference you were using was deceptive. You have not done the same. I will defend the veracity of their claims if I need to call on their research to defend my position.
"the proxy dendro reconstructions have been thoroughly invalidated" - No peer reviewed study there to back up that claim I see.
"Yes, in a laboratory, it absorbs certain wavelengths of radiation." - Yes, and to invalidate the current climate models I expect you to show that these lab experiments have the wrong result. You asked me for experiments that would invalidate the whole theory. Now you are back tracking and demanding that I provide you with experiments that will invalidate only specific subsections. Had I gone to subsections you would have pulled the bait and switch the other way. This is disingenuous and you know it.
"Put a number on it." - Fine, 4000 years with an error of no more than 1000. You find me say six deglaciations with the properties I suggested which cannot be explained by effects already in the literature I will reconsider. Of course you wont find them, because they aren't there, because the measurements have already been done.
"UHI is negligible" - The UHI is negligible when talking about global mean surface temperatures. That is what these paper effectively says. I never moved the goal posts. Please go ahead and find where I claimed the UHI effect is zero. You have falsified nothing.
"All industry is carbon heavy" - Let me rephase my suspicion. Who pays your wages? You can just state what industry it is if you like.
You are not looking to convince me but to put on a show, a show which frankly anyone on slashdot reading this is smart enough to recognise and see through unless they have utterly bought into your conspiracy theory.
I didn't dismiss Watts (I have privately but for your benefit and the purpose of discussion I went to the effort of showing you why he cannot be trusted), I showed you how he was being disingenuous the first time you cited him. I showed how he was misusing data and I pointed out how his failure to submit himself to the peer review process, combined with a history of crank bullhonky undermined his interpretation. I'm not saying he cant be trusted because he isn't a climatologist, I'm saying he is deceptive, politically motivated, isn't a climatologist and has a history if misrepresenting papers. That is reflected in the misleading spin in the first blog entry of his you cite. Having taken one mouthful at this shit buffet I'm not going back for seconds, I've shown you he has no credibility and that is enough.
You ask me what observations past present or future would falsify current climate theory (in the manner you want it falsified, that is minimal human caused warming). Fine, show me that say 80% of the methods we use to measure temperature are invalid and show me that they are all invalid in a way that is consistent and eliminates the known effects of CO2, or show that the warming trend we observe vanish. Show that the observed properties of carbon are not as recorded in the literature. Gather 20 years of data from here on and show me that the current models are a poor fit/at the end of the 20 years/. Find me an example of a series of temperature increases where the CO2 increase follows *substantial* deglaciation (relevant word highlighted since you seemed to have missed it, I'm not talking about a few hundred year lag here, show me deglaciation without amplification by CO2, followed by CO2 release which does not lead to further warming). See none of those conditions will satisfy you though because absolutely none of them are going to show what you want because nature does not work the way you want.
I read the paper Watts cite on the UHI effect, wasn't that clear from my response, why are you again misrepresenting me? It says absolutely nothing to the effect you or Watts want it to. It says that the UHI effect exists and measures it. It doesn't say that it is a large contributor to increases in global mean average temperatures.
As for your discussion of decarbonising the economy, I'm not talking about the economic efforts needed to deal with climate change. I'm not an economist. Although your reaction seems to strongly suggest your job depends on a carbon heavy industry though.
Your lack of respect for the academic process is a fitting reminder that the articles thesis is entirely true. You sir remind me of Ken Ham or Kent Hovind. If anything you are worse.
There comes a point at which you reveal yourself to either be a conspiracy theorist or disingenous, and I'm afraid we have reached that point.
The science of how long it will take for a ball to fall to the ground when dropped on the moon from to within a few a very small fraction of a second is settled. If you believe the science is not settled here, at least for any meaningful definition of the word 'settled', then your standard of settled science is so high that it can never, ever, impact policy. Speaking as someone who would like evidenced based policy and accepts the tentative nature of all science, I find this position more than a little disturbing.
You reveal your intentions right off the bat by calling it catastrophic anthropogenic global warming. Catastrophic or otherwise is a job for economists, biologists and so forth to decide, not climatologists.
1. Kinda left of the end of that quote there skippy didn't you: "This sequence of events is still in full agreement with the idea that CO2 plays, through its greenhouse effect, a key role in amplifying the initial orbital forcing. First, the 800-year time lag is short in comparison with the total duration of the temperature and CO2 increases (5000 years). Second, the CO2 increase clearly precedes the Northern Hemi-sphere deglaciation (Fig. 3)." So you want to falsify the hypothesis, go find me a series of temperature increases where the CO2 increase follows substantial deglaciation. Of course you should also make sure I cant explain the effect with some other known factor like solar output. If you cant do that find me an example of where the lag is long compared with the duration of the temperature increase and again make sure you control for other factors. You'll have a hard time of course, given that we have already measured the crap out of the historical temperature record. So there is your falsifiable hypothesis right there. You aren't happy because the data didn't falsify the hypothesis, not because the hypothesis isn't falsifiable.
2. Say it with me now. Watts is not a climatologist and his blog is not peer reviewed. A break in a climate trend over 2 years? Erm, do you even know what climate is? Go to figure one in Levitus et al. and add the last two points to the graph. Although if Watts follows his usual tricks the relevant graph is buried somewhere near the bottom of the page showing obvious warming. I'm citing Levitus for a reason, it analyses 40 years of data. 8 or even 10 years of data is right at the cusp of what you need to determine if heating has occurred at all, and no where near enough to get good errors on the fit parameters (just tell you they aren't zero). You will notice that Watts doesn't include error bars on his plot (which incidentally would have to take into account the historical variability not just what is observed over his ten year window). I cant blame him of course, the bars would almostbe bigger than the graph itself given the way he has plotted it.
So yes, the 2008 paper is current in the context of climate the results are as predicted. Unless you have something in peer review to back up your assertion I suggest we move on.
3. I just sent you a paper showing that cyclone frequency reduction is a prediction of existing climate theory. I don't get my climate science from Al Gore or CNN so unless you have something in peer review to back up your implication that climate scientists have predicted more hurricanes in the literature then your bare faced assertion is trumped by my actually having papers. The prediction is, as Knutson et. al. point out, fewer, more intense hurricanes. I noticed how you disingenuously focused on the fewer part of the prediction and missed the more intense part. Yeah I think more intense hurricanes is a bad thing. It's the big ones that screw us and do severe damage, but you want an economic assessment, talking to an economist.
4. Deliberately misinterpreting a paper that shows that the UHI effect is real with one which shows it is a large contributor to te
It isn't a problem with theoretical physics. It isn't a problem at all. If having post hoc explanations is a problem for a theory then no theory in existence meets your insane standard. The problem is when people aren't aware that an explanation is essentially post hoc (like say certain cosmologists attitude towards dark matter). There are, admittedly somewhat theoretically ugly, approaches to unifying physics that treat GR as sacrosanct and modify quantum mechanics. So no, it isn't obvious at all that general relativity is in disagreement with experiment. It is obvious that either quantum mechanics, or general relativity or both have problems, but it is not clear where those problems lie.
Last time I looked there were plenty of predictions kicking about regarding local changes in temperatures over the next 100 years, so we can put that one to bed (heck you yourself suggest cyclone frequency is a prediction of global warming). Talking about global average temperature as though it is the only thing these models predict strongly suggests to me that you haven't actually read the literature. Weather only matter to plants or animals on a day to day basis. Climate is what matters over the course of a year or so. You tell me it will be a couple of degrees hotter in some region on average I can go calculate what impact that will have on crop yields. So no, climate science predictions are useful.
Whether or not recent trends in global average temperature are wholly consistent with existing models is in dispute. Phil Jones certainly thinks that the existing anomaly is a problem, others disagree. I'm not in a position to comment since I'm not current on that. What I can point out is that suggesting that a dispute about small anomalies in the present data somehow invalidates the entirety of climate science is absurd.
Reductions in cyclone frequency, and increase in intensity, is a prediction not a refutation http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v3/n3/full/ngeo779.html Worth keeping in mind that to my knowledge these predictions are still considered a bit questionable, and variability in the cyclone record makes this kind of thing difficult, but I'm not exactly current on that so don't quote me.
Finding these things papers took all of five minutes. If you had wanted to know what climatologists actually think you could have done the same. I grant you reading these papers took me a while (although I had read two before so it wasn't that big a deal), but why am I doing this for you? Stop parroting denialists websites, read the damn papers and develop an informed opinion. If you want to come back with objections then I will be all ears but repeating some bullshit a meteorologist, lawyer or an economist told as though it was an informed opinion just makes you look like a prat.
Copyright is a social contract. You publish something it eventually goes in the public domain.
Your analogy with the coffee table fails because you didn't mention that you bribed politicians so that the particular type of coffee table you are offering cannot be bought anywhere else, and use their monopoly on force to mandate this. You then used that monopoly to force up the price. You were granted that monopoly with a particular understanding and by behaving as you are you are violating the terms of the agreement.
You want the social contract of copyright, fine. We get a national culture which enters the public domain in some reasonable period of time and which treats some subset of ideas as though they were physical objects so you have an incentive to produce these things. You don't want the social contract that is also fine, lets abolish copyright and see how you get on then.
I'm a theoretical physicist, there was a reason I said 'general relativity' when referring to a specific theory of gravity. Your suggested experiment wouldn't falsify general relativity. Nor would any other single observation. It would take a collection of controlled experiments ruling out one possible explanation after another before general relativity was falsified because people would come up with post hoc explanations (unobserved celestial bodies, extra forces, dark matter, negative energy and so on). I know this to be the case because there are experimental results that have to posit things like dark matter or negative energy in order to explain observations without falsifying general relativity.
No established theory has a single experiment that would overthrow it. That is not the way science works in practice, nor should it be. The overthrow of a theory as well established as general relativity or the theory of anthropogenic climate change is usually accompanied by a paradigm shift, and abandoning established paradigms is not something you should do based on one experimental result.
You have made the accusation that challenging observations are simply discarded in climate science. Do you have an example to back up that claim? Specifically, do you have one which isn't of the exact same form as we consider when potential falsifications of general relativity come up?
Just to clarify, data isn't just repetition, it is repetition under controlled circumstances.
As you correctly point out, anecdotes can be valuable and useful, especially for illustrating a point that is established by more rigorous means or providing insight for a hypothesis. But lots and lots of anecdotes do not make data, they make a badly controlled sample.
Your example is an excellent case of anecdotes providing a good illustration. We know the planet is warming. We have calculated how much it is going to continue warming under various scenarios. And anecdotally we see that warming played out in local migration patterns of animals. The hypothesis suggested by these anecdotes is played out in the data gathered by birders, which is gathered under more controlled conditions than me with a pair of binoculars showing my friend a robin playing in the snow because the conditions in which the sample was taken are also recorded.
I'm not saying this to be pedantic (your language suggests you are already aware of what I'm saying), but I want to ward off any suggestion that the work biologists or climatologists somehow fails basic rigour. A while back there were (largely asinine) objections made to part of the temperature recordings used to validate climate models and the hockey stick graph. These objections amounted to the suggestion that climatologists sampling methods were questionable. Of course they weren't, and after a review in which the worst offending weather stations were removed and the data reprocess the exact same result was found.
I'd also point out calling the man who had been striving for peaceful relations (against the will of much of the military) with Serbia, and who envisioned converting the Austro-Hungarian empire into a federal state with more rights for minorities (thus potentially reducing the risk of ethnic strife in the Balkans) a 'dipshit' is a bit disrespectful. I mean sure the man was very far from perfect (staunchy conservative in the European old Catholic style and exactly as aristocratic as you might expect from someone of the Habsburg line, and certainly fundamentally unlike-able for a number of other reasons), but given the options at the time he was probably Eastern Europe's best hope for peace.
The problem is your God is omnipotent as well as omnibenevolent. I don't have to come up with an entire cosmology which is better. I have to come up with a single instance of unnecessary evil. If over the course of my entire existence I encounter the slightest discomfort more than is necessary visited upon some sentient being, that is enough to support the problem of evil, and we live in a world where there is an abundance of suffering.
Your own analogy works against you. We have made better programming languages that are easier to comprehend and follow, closer to natural English. My python code is easier to read than assembly. We have made better systems for programming and can imagine a better world than the one that is.
Do you really believe this world is as perfect as it is possible to be?
The question the parent is asking is always a difficult one to answer with an established theory.
How, at this stage, would you falsify the theory of gravity? Well you could wake up tomorrow and find that every experimental facts which implies that general relativity is true is no long replicable, but at this stage that seems so unlikely we don't even register it as a possibility.
Outside of the frontier of climate science the theory of anthropogenic climate change has a pretty similar status. It is extremely unlikely to be falsified at this stage in the way that the deniers want because it is established science. That is kinda the point. As you say, it would take an observation like no net warming over the next ten year when compared to the last ten, and even then there would be lots more work to do before the theory was thrown away wholesale.
You don't actually know anyone with a phyiscs PhD do you.
Calling quantum physics uncertain and barely understood is absurd. Some of the philosophy of quantum mechanics is a bit tricky to understand, but the equivalent of quantum engineering is so refined that your average joe PhD in physics could calculate physical quantities like the g-minus 2 of the electron to precision that would make your eyes bleed.
Your inability to comprehend relative levels of uncertainty here is staggering. Yes, the existence of the Higgs boson is unclear, there are other mechanisms which could be at play. The empirical evidence is not yet in. But the computer you used to type this message is dependent on the staggering accuracy of quantum mechanics outside of the very uncommon (terrestrially speaking) high energy regime where things like the Higgs are a concern.
Putting climate science in the same league as quantum mechanics is absurd precisely because the engineering associated with quantum mechanics is just that darn good. The engineering associated with climate science is no where near as good as that associated with that of quantum mechanics, this is precisely why so few climate scientists are gung ho about geoengineering. At the same time suggesting it is in some way poorly understood or unclear is about 30 years out of date, and even then there were things we knew with as close to cast iron certainty as you can get in science.
You seem to be confused as to what a scientific law, a theory and a hypothesis are. A law not a certain statement in science (in fact almost all laws break down under suitable conditions). A law is generally non-mechanistic relationship between variables which holds over a wide variety of conditions, for example Newtons Law of Universal Gravitation. As laws don't posit mechanisms they are in fact generally viewed in the scientific community to be subordinate to theories, since unlike a theory which seeks to explain a wide collection of observed phenomena a law simply acts as a record of observed phenomena.
Theories represent the pinnacle of scientific inference. They posit mechanisms for observed phenomena, make predictions about how relevant parts of the material world will behave and explain a large set of empirical facts, none of which contradict the theory in its domain of applicability. An example would be the theory of quantum electrodynamics. Like all scientific statements, theories can, and usually are wrong. One of the jobs of science is establishing the domain of applicability of theories. However, suggesting that something be treated like a 'theory' when we are operating in the known domain of applicability of that theory is tantamount to suggesting that it should be treated as gospel.
All models are guesses, but calling the basis for climate models vague is absurd. There are facts here, these can be tied together into theories, those theories suggest models which can make predictions.
It is a fact that mean global surface temperature has gone up in the last 50 years. It is a fact that the ocean is absorbing more heat. It is a fact that the polar ice caps are shrinking. It is a fact that birds and plants are migrating and flowering earlier in the year. It is a fact that extreme weather events are becoming more common.
The theory, at present the only theory, which explains all these facts and is consistent with existing theories in physics is the theory of anthropogenic climate change. If you have an alternative hypothesis I'm all ears, but it has to explain everything that the theory of anthropogenic climate change explains and cannot violate known principle of physics because by explaining these facts and predicting the current warming trend the theory of anthropogenic climate change has attained precisely that status, the status of a theory. It is this achievement that your pretender hypothesis now has to aspire to. There is a Nobel prize and tenure waiting for you if you can do it.
Once you have that hypothesis your next job is to build a model
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If the patent office is overworked the solution is simple. No appeals process and a bias towards rejection. Stop this bullshit of putting in multiple claims some of which are obvious, one obvious claim means no patent, one claim with prior art means no patent. Stop this bullshit of poorly worded and vague patents. If within the first 30 minutes of getting your patent it isn't clear how to implement it, automatic rejection. Force the inclusion of pseudocode for software patents (or better yet just ban them), and the inclusion of schematics for everything else, and demands that it should be clear from those schematics how to actually build the device in question. Anyone submitting a claim to an invention with documented prior art should be fined heavily for wasting the offices time. Allow the extension of prior art to softer situations, so don't simply look at academic papers and other patents (although those should be used to determine if the submitter should be fined) but include any other reasonable source of prior art (blog postings which outline similar ideas, public speculation in the media).
Once it is clear that only geniune patents will be accepted the volume of patents submitted to the patent office will drop rapidly.
Urgh, where to being. Every single concept you have is an abstraction. You think something like social class is less of an abstraction than say force or momentum? There are different kind of abstractions, sure I will grant you that, but if you think the work you do pertains more to the 'real world' in some way, as though the lab doesn't exist in the real world then you have gone gaga.
I'm not sure given the phenomenal incompetence of boards of directors and CXOs the best argument you can make is that they have to use the skills you talk about, given that the hard sciences have cured diseases and put people on the moon. I would come up with a better example than people who cause financial crises and fire people for a bonus. If these are the people that have and are using these these skills might I suggest we replace them with people who can do real science.
The problem with some (and not all, there are good people who do social sciences) social scientists one question one answer approach is that it is literally useless. Given the limited controls over the 'experiment', and given the historical factors which will never occur again, you get an ad hoc explanation for one event, which you can never generalise. Calling the totally quantifiable factors you don't understand 'mysterious elements' doesn't change that fact. To any hard scientist it is obvious you need a massively complex statistical approach to even have a hope of getting an answer (for an example of how to do this right, look at something like fivethirtyeight.com's approach to elections).
As for this idea that there are things that cannot be expressed in mathematical language, I'm sorry but name one. Mathematics isn't just numbers, so I wouldn't just go spouting off about things which cannot be quantified. If you don't know what the bounds of mathematics are I suggest you start by pulling out a text book and studying it for a bit before you go declaring that there are things that mathematics cannot encode. It might well be the case that there are things that are better encoded in other, less formal ways, but I wouldn't trust someone who obviously has no idea what mathematics is to be able to elucidate us on that concept.
I know you are trying to bring balance into the debate but last I heard no one is calling for people like Eigil Friis-Christensen or Henrik Svensmark to be defunded, and I've never heard either of these two calling for defunding of climate research. Radio blowhards, sure, but no respected scientists on either side of the (very limited) debate. In fact every time I hear climatologists talk about these two they talk about the need to fund their work since there really aren't a whole heap of even vaguely plausible possible alternatives to the current synthesis regarding climate. Heck search the so called 'Climategate' emails for these two names if you like, you'll find some less than complimentary comments of Friis-Christensen in the form of a point-by-point rebuttal of a few of his ideas but nothing amounting to a call to defund them.
Sure I'm willing to bet there are a few arseholes, probably most of them in the proponent camp now-a-days since this camp is so much bigger. I doubt there are that many more than there are arsehole particle physicists or evolutionary biologists. The problem isn't with the way the science is being conducted (although we scientists can always do better, climate science doesn't seem that bad to me), the problem is with the filter the media puts on it. These are the people calling for funding to be deallocated.
Thanks for pointing this out, I'm a particle physicist and this was good for a laugh. That said I will admit to feeling a certain amount of relief when I played snarXiv vs. arXiv and was 10 for 10. There are days when you wonder if some random paper you are reading is just a string of meaningless words.
I agree, I'm on the political left. There is however a distinction between someone on the right who, due to different values to me, wants to try to fix only some of the problem with as little intervention as possible, and someone on the right who pretends nature is not as it is. You and I tolerate a little intervention by the state to prevent excessive externalisation, a person on the right tolerates a little externalisation to prevent intervention by the state. We have different values and that is what politics is about.
The issue I have with the anti-science perspective of the right is that they are pretending the universe doesn't work the way it does because they want their fantasy land ideas to be true. I have no problem attacking the political right over this because the attitude is now so pervasive it is representative, but at the same time I'm not going to suggest that being on the right of the political spectrum automatically invalidates someone's opinion.
I'm sorry but that is just a big crock of shit. It isn't scientists fault that the right of the political spectrum is too stupid and blinkered to ask the right questions or adjust their views enough to accommodate reality.
A scientists job in this context is to present the facts they have gathered and the conclusions they have drawn in a politically neutral manner. Why do you think they all sound like Vulcans on CSPAN.
If the political right wants scientists to say that the breaking of a continent in two due to fracking is incredibly unlikely I'm certain (since that statement is bloody obviously true) that you can find a reputable geophysicist willing to say that. Most scientists are happy to provide their advice (free of charge), to public institutions. The reason the political right wont do that is because the next question they are going to be asked by the gentleman with the blue tie is "how much does this increase the chances of a 7.0+ earthquake near a population centre".
Why didn't the right invite a scientists to testify about the Nebraska pipeline? It is within their power to request it, so why not? The media doesn't give a crap what scientists say so if the political right wants to champion a science led perspective on policy they're are going to have to use their media pull to promote it.
The reason, in this context, that the political right has not provided the soap box scientists need to counter these claims is because they know that once it is all tied down the moral implications of this kind of work is that either certain extraction techniques should be prohibited or (and here is where I fall on the issue) they need to be taxed higher to offset the additional costs incurred in terms of insurance, first responder preparations, etc. The political right, instead of doing what they are supposed to do (countering the lefts heavy handed statist approach with a different political solution to the problem by using the market) are pretending the problem doesn't exist,
Depends on why you are using the animation. Every element of a presentation should have a reason to be there otherwise it is a distraction. Those stupid cube rotation things that Keynote does is annoying and distracting in most presentations because it has me thinking about rotations and not about whatever chemical composition or algorithm or whatever is being discussed. So are the silly wipes people use in PowerPoint.
This type animation is probably going to be used in a stupid and distracting way in most presentations. However I think it can be considerably more useful than the cube or wipes because this kind of animation can be used to place related concepts in spatial relation to one another. Imagine a presentation on a multi-stage algorithm where one moves up and down a flowchart constantly reminded of the relations between different operations in the algorithm due to their spatial relations on the slide. I suspect if this is used that way, it could be a powerful tool.
He was CTPO of the MPAA. You don't work for a group that evil and get to claim that you are a person working for the common good. You cant be fair minded and take the MPAA's money. At best he is a Puyi, and someone that politically naive does not belong belong in this position.
Even if he was trying to change it from the inside the only change that needs to happen at the MPAA is for it to disband and for everyone involved who ever aided in the bribery of politicians to be locked up. Your friend is complicit in the corruption of the United States political system and belongs in a cell, not heading up a North American chapter of ISOC.
Awesome, I never knew how complicated those collars were. Cheers for the link.
Energetic cost would be my guess. The places wheels win over tracks and legs are deserts and plains (and Mars has plenty of these). Of course wheels are not without issues, Spirit got stuck in a sand trap it could probably have escaped if it had had legs. However, had it had legs it would never have been able to move as far as it did, so I would argue the engineers made the right choice.
Mars is largely unexplored, including the flat bits, so if you want to do as much exploration as possible you send the vehicle that can move the cheapest on the most readily explorable terrain, and right now that is a vehicle with wheels. Another factor is that on flat terrain wheels provide a very smooth ride, which is important when you have sensitive equipment. If you used something like the robots I work on on Mars first you would have reliability issues, it would be heavier, and you would have to wait a very long time to charge the robot. On the other hand you could go to a few additional places that existing rovers cant go, but it's an unexplored planet, everywhere is new and interesting!
Maybe the mantra should be "legs are better than wheels if you are trying to navigate a burning building filled with rubble and find survivors", but that is a little less catchy...
This strikes me as very likely. I work on legged robotic systems and one of the mantras is 'legs are better than wheels'. Pack animals are much better suited to transporting goods over rough terrain than wheeled vehicles, especially if the wheeled vehicles don't have something like an ICE or battery. Even if you don't have a inorganic power source, on the wrong terrain a primitive wheeled vehicle is probably more of a burden to a pack animal than just putting the material you want to haul on it. Not to mention that if you don't have pack animals your power source (i.e. humans) is even worse suited to the task. In the absence of modern roads, etc. most of the places people would want to live, hunt and move between are the 'wrong terrain'.
Moreover there is a lower hanging technological fruit, boats. Food is already concentrated on the river so why wouldn't you take advantage of natures highways before bothering to work out how to build vehicles to go on your own.
While there are other uses for 'wheels' such as grindstones and turntables, the thing we traditionally think of as a wheel is, in most parts of the world where ancient peoples lived, useless without infrastructure. A sled is much better if it snows, or if it is flat but tends to get muddy.A boat is better if you have a river. A pack or a pack animal if the terrain is uneven.
6 sigma is not bordering on experimental error. If you are saying that the distribution of neutrino speeds is such that it is very close to what we would expect if there was a systematic error in the measurement of time of flight, then please show your working (as in, do the stats). Otherwise you are just making shit up. I suspect, given the size of the effect and the absence of a good null to test against, you will have a hard time getting a significant result out of any reasonable equivalence test.
"So you repudiate NASA GISS temps and dendro reconstructions? I'm cool with that" - You are an abject weasel. Stop putting words in my mouth. I said it wasn't the topic of conversation, not that I repudiate the results.
"And yes, they have a peer reviewed study, but far be it for me to appeal to authority" - Link to the paper. I'm not reading another blog for you, it isn't my job to fill in your ignorance.
"Your citation of a physical parameter as a both necessary and sufficient to determine the validity of a tinker toy model is puzzling." - You asked me for an experiment. I gave you one. These are the ones I can think of at this stage because all experiments that undermine climate models at this stage are either longitudinal or completely undermine vast swathes of contemporary physics. The only other option I can see is to find some way to show that the empirical parameters of existing models (of which I admit there are a few) cannot take the values the fits currently suggest. You go away and do that and I will certainly demand that model be reconsidered.
"So 800 years of lag is insufficient, but 4000 years would be?" - Yes, go look at the time periods of transitions between glacial periods and the length of time for a typical interglacial period and it is obvious why I picked a number bigger than 1000 and less than 20,000.
"Wouldn't the observation of statistically significant UHI falsify that?" - You have just managed to demonstrate to me that you don't have a beyond high school education in statistics. My urine is, statistically speaking, significantly warm than the ocean. Me pissing in the ocean will not warm it in any meaningful way.
At first I assumed that you were vaguely familiar with the scientific method, but it is now clear that is not the case. No one experimental fact is ever sufficient to validate a theory. Ever. Science is a web, a set of facts embedded in a paradigm. No serious student of science has thought the way you are suggesting we think since Kuhn, regardless of if they buy his explanation of how science is conducted. I can conduct the exact same game you are playing now with any theory in science. Which is exactly the point I raised at the start of this discussion. A point you have still utterly failed to address instead resorting to denialist canard after canard.
You have now shown a poor understanding of the scientific method and epistemology, an inability to cite appropriate sources and a total inability to follow even basic statistics. If you were one of my students I'd suggest you take basket weaving because you clearly aren't cut out of science. Far from your comments being 'well written' if your arguments were my dog I'd shoot it.
"Hansen and Mann" - Non-sequitor, I didn't cite either of these gentlemen. I showed the reference you were using was deceptive. You have not done the same. I will defend the veracity of their claims if I need to call on their research to defend my position.
"the proxy dendro reconstructions have been thoroughly invalidated" - No peer reviewed study there to back up that claim I see.
"Yes, in a laboratory, it absorbs certain wavelengths of radiation." - Yes, and to invalidate the current climate models I expect you to show that these lab experiments have the wrong result. You asked me for experiments that would invalidate the whole theory. Now you are back tracking and demanding that I provide you with experiments that will invalidate only specific subsections. Had I gone to subsections you would have pulled the bait and switch the other way. This is disingenuous and you know it.
"Put a number on it." - Fine, 4000 years with an error of no more than 1000. You find me say six deglaciations with the properties I suggested which cannot be explained by effects already in the literature I will reconsider. Of course you wont find them, because they aren't there, because the measurements have already been done.
"UHI is negligible" - The UHI is negligible when talking about global mean surface temperatures. That is what these paper effectively says. I never moved the goal posts. Please go ahead and find where I claimed the UHI effect is zero. You have falsified nothing.
"All industry is carbon heavy" - Let me rephase my suspicion. Who pays your wages? You can just state what industry it is if you like.
You are not looking to convince me but to put on a show, a show which frankly anyone on slashdot reading this is smart enough to recognise and see through unless they have utterly bought into your conspiracy theory.
I didn't dismiss Watts (I have privately but for your benefit and the purpose of discussion I went to the effort of showing you why he cannot be trusted), I showed you how he was being disingenuous the first time you cited him. I showed how he was misusing data and I pointed out how his failure to submit himself to the peer review process, combined with a history of crank bullhonky undermined his interpretation. I'm not saying he cant be trusted because he isn't a climatologist, I'm saying he is deceptive, politically motivated, isn't a climatologist and has a history if misrepresenting papers. That is reflected in the misleading spin in the first blog entry of his you cite. Having taken one mouthful at this shit buffet I'm not going back for seconds, I've shown you he has no credibility and that is enough.
You ask me what observations past present or future would falsify current climate theory (in the manner you want it falsified, that is minimal human caused warming). Fine, show me that say 80% of the methods we use to measure temperature are invalid and show me that they are all invalid in a way that is consistent and eliminates the known effects of CO2, or show that the warming trend we observe vanish. Show that the observed properties of carbon are not as recorded in the literature. Gather 20 years of data from here on and show me that the current models are a poor fit /at the end of the 20 years/. Find me an example of a series of temperature increases where the CO2 increase follows *substantial* deglaciation (relevant word highlighted since you seemed to have missed it, I'm not talking about a few hundred year lag here, show me deglaciation without amplification by CO2, followed by CO2 release which does not lead to further warming). See none of those conditions will satisfy you though because absolutely none of them are going to show what you want because nature does not work the way you want.
I read the paper Watts cite on the UHI effect, wasn't that clear from my response, why are you again misrepresenting me? It says absolutely nothing to the effect you or Watts want it to. It says that the UHI effect exists and measures it. It doesn't say that it is a large contributor to increases in global mean average temperatures.
As for your discussion of decarbonising the economy, I'm not talking about the economic efforts needed to deal with climate change. I'm not an economist. Although your reaction seems to strongly suggest your job depends on a carbon heavy industry though.
Your lack of respect for the academic process is a fitting reminder that the articles thesis is entirely true. You sir remind me of Ken Ham or Kent Hovind. If anything you are worse.
There comes a point at which you reveal yourself to either be a conspiracy theorist or disingenous, and I'm afraid we have reached that point.
The science of how long it will take for a ball to fall to the ground when dropped on the moon from to within a few a very small fraction of a second is settled. If you believe the science is not settled here, at least for any meaningful definition of the word 'settled', then your standard of settled science is so high that it can never, ever, impact policy. Speaking as someone who would like evidenced based policy and accepts the tentative nature of all science, I find this position more than a little disturbing.
You reveal your intentions right off the bat by calling it catastrophic anthropogenic global warming. Catastrophic or otherwise is a job for economists, biologists and so forth to decide, not climatologists.
1. Kinda left of the end of that quote there skippy didn't you:
"This sequence of events is still in full agreement with the idea that CO2 plays, through its greenhouse effect, a key role in amplifying the initial orbital forcing. First, the 800-year time lag is short in comparison with the total duration of the temperature and CO2 increases (5000 years). Second, the CO2
increase clearly precedes the Northern Hemi-sphere deglaciation (Fig. 3)."
So you want to falsify the hypothesis, go find me a series of temperature increases where the CO2 increase follows substantial deglaciation. Of course you should also make sure I cant explain the effect with some other known factor like solar output. If you cant do that find me an example of where the lag is long compared with the duration of the temperature increase and again make sure you control for other factors. You'll have a hard time of course, given that we have already measured the crap out of the historical temperature record. So there is your falsifiable hypothesis right there. You aren't happy because the data didn't falsify the hypothesis, not because the hypothesis isn't falsifiable.
2. Say it with me now. Watts is not a climatologist and his blog is not peer reviewed. A break in a climate trend over 2 years? Erm, do you even know what climate is? Go to figure one in Levitus et al. and add the last two points to the graph. Although if Watts follows his usual tricks the relevant graph is buried somewhere near the bottom of the page showing obvious warming. I'm citing Levitus for a reason, it analyses 40 years of data. 8 or even 10 years of data is right at the cusp of what you need to determine if heating has occurred at all, and no where near enough to get good errors on the fit parameters (just tell you they aren't zero). You will notice that Watts doesn't include error bars on his plot (which incidentally would have to take into account the historical variability not just what is observed over his ten year window). I cant blame him of course, the bars would almostbe bigger than the graph itself given the way he has plotted it.
So yes, the 2008 paper is current in the context of climate the results are as predicted. Unless you have something in peer review to back up your assertion I suggest we move on.
3. I just sent you a paper showing that cyclone frequency reduction is a prediction of existing climate theory. I don't get my climate science from Al Gore or CNN so unless you have something in peer review to back up your implication that climate scientists have predicted more hurricanes in the literature then your bare faced assertion is trumped by my actually having papers. The prediction is, as Knutson et. al. point out, fewer, more intense hurricanes. I noticed how you disingenuously focused on the fewer part of the prediction and missed the more intense part. Yeah I think more intense hurricanes is a bad thing. It's the big ones that screw us and do severe damage, but you want an economic assessment, talking to an economist.
4. Deliberately misinterpreting a paper that shows that the UHI effect is real with one which shows it is a large contributor to te
It isn't a problem with theoretical physics. It isn't a problem at all. If having post hoc explanations is a problem for a theory then no theory in existence meets your insane standard. The problem is when people aren't aware that an explanation is essentially post hoc (like say certain cosmologists attitude towards dark matter). There are, admittedly somewhat theoretically ugly, approaches to unifying physics that treat GR as sacrosanct and modify quantum mechanics. So no, it isn't obvious at all that general relativity is in disagreement with experiment. It is obvious that either quantum mechanics, or general relativity or both have problems, but it is not clear where those problems lie.
Last time I looked there were plenty of predictions kicking about regarding local changes in temperatures over the next 100 years, so we can put that one to bed (heck you yourself suggest cyclone frequency is a prediction of global warming). Talking about global average temperature as though it is the only thing these models predict strongly suggests to me that you haven't actually read the literature. Weather only matter to plants or animals on a day to day basis. Climate is what matters over the course of a year or so. You tell me it will be a couple of degrees hotter in some region on average I can go calculate what impact that will have on crop yields. So no, climate science predictions are useful.
CO2 lagging temperature changes in the ice core record is a prediction of climate science, not a problem. The end of this paper does a decent enough job explaining why:
http://icebubbles.ucsd.edu/Publications/CaillonTermIII.pdf
Ocean heat content has been rising, for an explanation see
ftp://ftp.nodc.noaa.gov/pub/data.nodc/woa/PUBLICATIONS/grlheat08.pdf
Whether or not recent trends in global average temperature are wholly consistent with existing models is in dispute. Phil Jones certainly thinks that the existing anomaly is a problem, others disagree. I'm not in a position to comment since I'm not current on that. What I can point out is that suggesting that a dispute about small anomalies in the present data somehow invalidates the entirety of climate science is absurd.
Reductions in cyclone frequency, and increase in intensity, is a prediction not a refutation
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v3/n3/full/ngeo779.html
Worth keeping in mind that to my knowledge these predictions are still considered a bit questionable, and variability in the cyclone record makes this kind of thing difficult, but I'm not exactly current on that so don't quote me.
The impact of the UHI effect is negligible
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/population/article2abstract.pdf
Finding these things papers took all of five minutes. If you had wanted to know what climatologists actually think you could have done the same. I grant you reading these papers took me a while (although I had read two before so it wasn't that big a deal), but why am I doing this for you? Stop parroting denialists websites, read the damn papers and develop an informed opinion. If you want to come back with objections then I will be all ears but repeating some bullshit a meteorologist, lawyer or an economist told as though it was an informed opinion just makes you look like a prat.
No, no they cant.
Copyright is a social contract. You publish something it eventually goes in the public domain.
Your analogy with the coffee table fails because you didn't mention that you bribed politicians so that the particular type of coffee table you are offering cannot be bought anywhere else, and use their monopoly on force to mandate this. You then used that monopoly to force up the price. You were granted that monopoly with a particular understanding and by behaving as you are you are violating the terms of the agreement.
You want the social contract of copyright, fine. We get a national culture which enters the public domain in some reasonable period of time and which treats some subset of ideas as though they were physical objects so you have an incentive to produce these things. You don't want the social contract that is also fine, lets abolish copyright and see how you get on then.
I'm a theoretical physicist, there was a reason I said 'general relativity' when referring to a specific theory of gravity. Your suggested experiment wouldn't falsify general relativity. Nor would any other single observation. It would take a collection of controlled experiments ruling out one possible explanation after another before general relativity was falsified because people would come up with post hoc explanations (unobserved celestial bodies, extra forces, dark matter, negative energy and so on). I know this to be the case because there are experimental results that have to posit things like dark matter or negative energy in order to explain observations without falsifying general relativity.
No established theory has a single experiment that would overthrow it. That is not the way science works in practice, nor should it be. The overthrow of a theory as well established as general relativity or the theory of anthropogenic climate change is usually accompanied by a paradigm shift, and abandoning established paradigms is not something you should do based on one experimental result.
You have made the accusation that challenging observations are simply discarded in climate science. Do you have an example to back up that claim? Specifically, do you have one which isn't of the exact same form as we consider when potential falsifications of general relativity come up?
Just to clarify, data isn't just repetition, it is repetition under controlled circumstances.
As you correctly point out, anecdotes can be valuable and useful, especially for illustrating a point that is established by more rigorous means or providing insight for a hypothesis. But lots and lots of anecdotes do not make data, they make a badly controlled sample.
Your example is an excellent case of anecdotes providing a good illustration. We know the planet is warming. We have calculated how much it is going to continue warming under various scenarios. And anecdotally we see that warming played out in local migration patterns of animals. The hypothesis suggested by these anecdotes is played out in the data gathered by birders, which is gathered under more controlled conditions than me with a pair of binoculars showing my friend a robin playing in the snow because the conditions in which the sample was taken are also recorded.
I'm not saying this to be pedantic (your language suggests you are already aware of what I'm saying), but I want to ward off any suggestion that the work biologists or climatologists somehow fails basic rigour. A while back there were (largely asinine) objections made to part of the temperature recordings used to validate climate models and the hockey stick graph. These objections amounted to the suggestion that climatologists sampling methods were questionable. Of course they weren't, and after a review in which the worst offending weather stations were removed and the data reprocess the exact same result was found.
I'd also point out calling the man who had been striving for peaceful relations (against the will of much of the military) with Serbia, and who envisioned converting the Austro-Hungarian empire into a federal state with more rights for minorities (thus potentially reducing the risk of ethnic strife in the Balkans) a 'dipshit' is a bit disrespectful. I mean sure the man was very far from perfect (staunchy conservative in the European old Catholic style and exactly as aristocratic as you might expect from someone of the Habsburg line, and certainly fundamentally unlike-able for a number of other reasons), but given the options at the time he was probably Eastern Europe's best hope for peace.
The problem is your God is omnipotent as well as omnibenevolent. I don't have to come up with an entire cosmology which is better. I have to come up with a single instance of unnecessary evil. If over the course of my entire existence I encounter the slightest discomfort more than is necessary visited upon some sentient being, that is enough to support the problem of evil, and we live in a world where there is an abundance of suffering.
Your own analogy works against you. We have made better programming languages that are easier to comprehend and follow, closer to natural English. My python code is easier to read than assembly. We have made better systems for programming and can imagine a better world than the one that is.
Do you really believe this world is as perfect as it is possible to be?
The question the parent is asking is always a difficult one to answer with an established theory.
How, at this stage, would you falsify the theory of gravity? Well you could wake up tomorrow and find that every experimental facts which implies that general relativity is true is no long replicable, but at this stage that seems so unlikely we don't even register it as a possibility.
Outside of the frontier of climate science the theory of anthropogenic climate change has a pretty similar status. It is extremely unlikely to be falsified at this stage in the way that the deniers want because it is established science. That is kinda the point. As you say, it would take an observation like no net warming over the next ten year when compared to the last ten, and even then there would be lots more work to do before the theory was thrown away wholesale.
You don't actually know anyone with a phyiscs PhD do you.
Calling quantum physics uncertain and barely understood is absurd. Some of the philosophy of quantum mechanics is a bit tricky to understand, but the equivalent of quantum engineering is so refined that your average joe PhD in physics could calculate physical quantities like the g-minus 2 of the electron to precision that would make your eyes bleed.
Your inability to comprehend relative levels of uncertainty here is staggering. Yes, the existence of the Higgs boson is unclear, there are other mechanisms which could be at play. The empirical evidence is not yet in. But the computer you used to type this message is dependent on the staggering accuracy of quantum mechanics outside of the very uncommon (terrestrially speaking) high energy regime where things like the Higgs are a concern.
Putting climate science in the same league as quantum mechanics is absurd precisely because the engineering associated with quantum mechanics is just that darn good. The engineering associated with climate science is no where near as good as that associated with that of quantum mechanics, this is precisely why so few climate scientists are gung ho about geoengineering. At the same time suggesting it is in some way poorly understood or unclear is about 30 years out of date, and even then there were things we knew with as close to cast iron certainty as you can get in science.
You seem to be confused as to what a scientific law, a theory and a hypothesis are. A law not a certain statement in science (in fact almost all laws break down under suitable conditions). A law is generally non-mechanistic relationship between variables which holds over a wide variety of conditions, for example Newtons Law of Universal Gravitation. As laws don't posit mechanisms they are in fact generally viewed in the scientific community to be subordinate to theories, since unlike a theory which seeks to explain a wide collection of observed phenomena a law simply acts as a record of observed phenomena.
Theories represent the pinnacle of scientific inference. They posit mechanisms for observed phenomena, make predictions about how relevant parts of the material world will behave and explain a large set of empirical facts, none of which contradict the theory in its domain of applicability. An example would be the theory of quantum electrodynamics. Like all scientific statements, theories can, and usually are wrong. One of the jobs of science is establishing the domain of applicability of theories. However, suggesting that something be treated like a 'theory' when we are operating in the known domain of applicability of that theory is tantamount to suggesting that it should be treated as gospel.
All models are guesses, but calling the basis for climate models vague is absurd. There are facts here, these can be tied together into theories, those theories suggest models which can make predictions.
It is a fact that mean global surface temperature has gone up in the last 50 years. It is a fact that the ocean is absorbing more heat. It is a fact that the polar ice caps are shrinking. It is a fact that birds and plants are migrating and flowering earlier in the year. It is a fact that extreme weather events are becoming more common.
The theory, at present the only theory, which explains all these facts and is consistent with existing theories in physics is the theory of anthropogenic climate change. If you have an alternative hypothesis I'm all ears, but it has to explain everything that the theory of anthropogenic climate change explains and cannot violate known principle of physics because by explaining these facts and predicting the current warming trend the theory of anthropogenic climate change has attained precisely that status, the status of a theory. It is this achievement that your pretender hypothesis now has to aspire to. There is a Nobel prize and tenure waiting for you if you can do it.
Once you have that hypothesis your next job is to build a model
I think you have missed my point. All inferential science is just models with parameters.
What you have just said amounts to the statement 'No science should ever inform policy'. I would suggest this is truly ridiculous.
Can you point to a single inferential experimental science which is not just models with parameters?