The problem with environmentalism isn't the actual facts.
The problem is that once people try to use these facts to justify policies that will harm other people, the victims of those new policies will try to dispute the facts in order to discredit the policies that are harming them.
Yes, exactly: a good deal of the criticism that is purported to be skepticism of the science (and the scientists) is actually aimed at discrediting the policy implications.
The unexpected consequence is that, since it apparently much easier to cast doubt on the science than to rationally discuss policy, there has been almost no discussion of the proposed policies.
Of course, policy discussions are so full of boobytraps and ideological landmines in the US, that's not surprising.
Correct me if I am wrong but in simple terms the planet warmed a little over 10 years ago and at which time the warming leveled off.
Not much point in replying to posts by anonymous coward, since even if, as you say, "I am willing to listen to evidence that refutes it," how would I know? I don't even know what data you're willing to look at, and what data you have decided to ignore because you claim it is (quoting from the previous post) "...lying with statistics... fabricating temperature readings... committing scientific and financial frauds."
Would you say, based on this data, that "the Earth warmed a little ten years ago and the warming stopped"?
What about if you draw a line from the 1998 data point to the 2008 data point? Would you say that this line is, or is not, representative of the data?
This despite the fact that present day CO2 levels are now even higher than worst case scenario predictions 10 years ago.
Actually, no; check your data source. It turns out that the global recession had a negative impact on the CO2 emission growth rate. It's not "higher than worse case predictions," it ended up being "slightly less than predicted." (Not enough to make much of a difference in the predictions, though).
That graph came from the BEST FAQ, which can be found here: http://berkeleyearth.org/faq/#stopped You can also try the NASA data, NOAA data, CRU data etc. The Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) graphs, for example, compare data taken by several different methods; they are here: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/
"Guess what-- the results are still the same. The data showing the planet is warming is real."
Guess what? Not the real question and everyone knows it including you.
I was responding to a parent post stating that data showing that the planet is warming is "lying with statistics," stating that one of the scientists who measured this warming "fabricating many temperature readings" and "commit these frauds" and "have disqualified themselves as scientists by their scientific and financial frauds" and that " in your world view we should dispense with reproducibility of their claims and take them on faith."
OK. The scientists who measured global warming are not "lying with statistics;" these data have been reproduced by many different institutions, using many different data measurement methods. The scientists who collated surface temperature readings did not "fabricate many temperature readings" nor "commit frauds". It is not my "world view" that we should "dispense with reproducability" because every attempt to reproduce the temperature data by every independent study has shown the same overall result.
I will agree that this does not show a cause for warming. That needs to be done by measuring forcing functions and response functions, which is also done. However, the claim that I am addressing, that temperature measurements are a "fraud" and "not reproducable," and therefore the greenhouse effect is a scam, is blatantly false
You do know how easy it is to lie with statistics don't you? Oh right scientists can do no wrong in your world view and we should dispense with reproducibility of their claims
You are aware that right now six different independent groups are analyzing the temperature records, using ground, ocean, balloon, and satellite measurements, and getting very consistent results?
Here's a quote from leading skeptic Anthony Watts about that BEST study (March 2011):
“I’m prepared to accept whatever result they produce, even if it proves my premise wrong.the method isn’t the madness that we’ve seen from NOAA, NCDC, GISS, and CRU.That lack of strings attached to funding, plus the broad mix of people involved especially those who have previous experience in handling large data sets gives me greater confidence in the result being closer to a bona fide ground truth than anything we’ve seen yet. Dr. Fred Singer also gives a tentative endorsement of the methods.Climate related website owners, I give you carte blanche to repost this.
How much "reproducability of their claims" do you want?
Satellite measurements, ground station measurements,ocean measurements, balloon-sonde measurements, microwave measurements-- very different techniques, same answers.
Most notably, Kim Jong-un was born nearly thirty years after the Korean war. His viewpoint on politics is going to be vastly different than the previous generation.
Because you think his family didn't indoctrinate him into their views?
You think indoctrination is perfect, and thus every child thinks and acts exactly the same way his parents did?
Maybe they did get "indoctrinated", but nevertheless, the post-war generation didn't go through what the war generation did, and they're not going to think or act like the pre-war generation. That doesn't mean "better", or "more pacifistic", or less authoritarian, but it does mean that they will have different goals and different ideas on how to do things. Don't expect them to act the same.
More likely it's the new leader trying to shower his people with food to associate a good year with his rise to power--and an attempt at good will from the international community who are hoping they can relax.
Exactly. It's worth noting that this is a completely new leader than Kim Jong-il, who is the one who set N. Korea to developing nuclear weapons. It's yet to be seen what he does.
Most notably, Kim Jong-un was born nearly thirty years after the Korean war. His viewpoint on politics is going to be vastly different than the previous generation.
That doesn't mean "celebrate, Korea is going to be a free country and flying unicorns are going to be dropping gold nuggets from the clouds." It does mean "things are likely to change, don't expect the new North Korea to be identical to the old one."
You should do your homework and find out where are the roots of the Metro interface, then you'll see iOS was not even in Jobs' wildest dreams when they started.
Neither was the first mac when windows 1.0 came out, but that doesn't stop the fanboys from claiming windows stole something.
checking dates: "Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS" "The first Macintosh was introduced by Apple's then-chairman Steve Jobs on January 24, 1984"
It's hard to see why one could claim that the first mac was "not even in Jobs' wildest dreams" when Windows 1.0 came out, since the mac had been on the market for nearly two years by the time Windows came out.
Are they trying to catch real-world terrorists or Lex Luthor?
Well, Homeland security also encompasses the Federal Emergency Management Agency, so they do have some real interest in getting the news fast if there is a natural disaster going on. It turns out that the twitter feeds actually do spread news of natural disasters faster than watching CNN.
(...and, for that matter, if Lex Luthor is up to tricks, shouldn't they want to catch him?)
But this assumes that the natural lifespan of a company is infinite. What I think Geoffrey is saying is that when Kodak went out of business, the answer to "what exactly went wrong?" is that nothing went wrong.
Right. "Kodak" was an assemblage of people organized together into a group with particular expertise in manufacturing and developing (no pun intended, sorry) the chemical engineering technologies that go into making film.
Now, one might say "well, why shouldn't that group of people have changed their organization to become a group of people with expertise in manufacturing and developing the technologies for digital cameras?" Well, sure-- but why should they? Why shouldn't some other group of people do that? In what way is the world a better place if the people that were formerly the organization "Kodak" did this instead of some other groups of people?
They were a group of people organized for their skill mix, which was expertise in film; when that market went away, it's entirely proper that the organization dissolved. Bye. There's no reason it would have been "better" for that organization, instead of some other one, to be repurposed to make digital cameras.
In fact, in some ways it would have been worse, since Kodak did continue to serve their market even while it was being drained away by the competing technology.
I'm not sure why people think that it wasn't a right and proper thing for Kodak to die.
Kodak's strenght was film photography. There turned out to be plenty of other companies with strengths in digital, why should Kodak have colonized that market? Let them produce the stuff they're good at as long as people want it, then quietly go away. There's no reason corporations need to be immortal.
* we chose a file name that matches some regular expression deemed dangerous by their IT staff... (Yes sir, gamesexpert.com is not a sex site!)
Yep! I remember when the firewall used to block the old JPL Mars exploration website, marsexploration.jpl.nasa.gov. Notice those three letters in the middle of the word "marsexploration." --JPL eventually renamed the site.
And don't even try to access the old physics preprint site, xxxlanl, any site beginning with those letters just has to be pr0n. (that one got renamed, too)
I agree; this article is baffling. The link from the sentence "The U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals has found that forcing a suspect to decrypt his hard drive when the government did not already know what it contained would violate his 5th Amendment rights" points to an article, dated yesterday, that says "Ruling Stands: Defendant Must Decrypt Laptop".
That is precisely the opposite of what the summary states.
There is actually a pretty significant amount of evidence it's faked....
No, what you listed is merely evidence that the pdfs were not all produced at the same time.
This is interesting, but has no relevance to whether it's faked or not. There is no reason that real documents might not have been pdf'd at different times.
...The problem for Heartland is that they're acting like dicks toward a lot of people, when they should be upending heaven and hell to find the [putative] memo forger and crucifying him for libel.
Which brings up an interesting question. When somebody broke into the CRU and published (what turned out to be a highly edited selection of) stolen e-mail, the response of "let's upend heaven and hell to find the thieves" did not seem to be high on anybody's priority list. So, apparently, it's only an important crime if you steal documents from people denying the science?
How much does solar irradiance vary at wavelengths below 400nm
Quite a bit! The UV component of the sun varies far more than the average luminosity with solar activity.
and what are the physical and chemical effects of this variance on the atmosphere and global climate?
That is a subject of research; a lot of people would like to know! For the most part, the UV doesn't make it to the troposphere, so it doesn't have a direct effect, but it's still an unresolved question as to what indirect effects it may have.
Do the variance in solar magnetic index and the interaction of the solar and terrestrial magnetic fields have any direct or indirect effects on global climate?
I don't know of any confirmed effects there, other than aurorae.
Yes, but the problems with the deniers is that they don't listen to the answers.
Terms like "denier" or "believer" have no place in this debate. Both imply an unwillingness to consider what is known and what isn't.
Let me propose some terminology. The people opposing the anthropogenic theory of global warming can be divided into three distinct categories:
*skeptics
*policy critics
*deniers
Skeptics are asking legitimate questions about the science. Policy critics deny the proposed responses to global warming, for economic or political reasons (I have no problem with this-- there should be more debate on policy.) Deniers deny anthropogenic global warming, period, end of discussion.
Skeptics and deniers are actually complete opposites. The key feature of deniers is that they are not skeptical, in fact, they are completely credulous of any argument, no matter how ridiculous, that opposes global warming.
I have a quick heuristic to distinguish deniers from skeptics: ask if they've actually read the IPCC report from Working-Group 1, "The Physical Science Basis of Climate Change" http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/publications_and_data_reports.shtml Not "well, no, but I read a critique of it on website-X and I know what's wrong with it, the problem is -xxx--." Actually read it. Not the summary, not the analysis on some page, the actual report.
If you haven't read it, but still want to tell me your opinion on why the science is wrong-- well, your opinion is based on ignorance. You're a denier.
If you have read it-- well, congratulations. You're the one percent. It's a pity that the relentless and highly-amplified shouting of the 99% who don't actually know anything about the science is completely drowning out what you have to say.
After 5 billion years, the sun is basically in steady state. I would not expect to see fluctuations over the type of timescales that human beings exist on....
the sun is pretty steady, a middle-aged star, but there are still some small variations in solar intensity. The hypothesis was that the Little Ice Age was correlated with the solar "Maunder Minimum," a 75-year period during which the sun had no sunspots (and hence presumably was about 0.07% lower in brightness).
What this work did was put a good date to the start of the Little Ice Age; using radiocarbon dating to determine when the plants killed by the advancing glaciers died... and the dating shows the Little Ice Age began well before the Maunder minimum. The Maunder minimum didn't cause it, very definitely.
It actually makes sense, if you're a nation where manpower is cheap-- a larger number of lower-awesomeness but cheaper jets may beat a smaller number of higher-awesomeness expensive jets. And they're not likely to be fighting the US-- they primarily need fighters that can beat Pakistan.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes! Exoatmospheric tower next! Let's do it!
The problem with environmentalism isn't the actual facts.
The problem is that once people try to use these facts to justify policies that will harm other people, the victims of those new policies will try to dispute the facts in order to discredit the policies that are harming them.
Yes, exactly: a good deal of the criticism that is purported to be skepticism of the science (and the scientists) is actually aimed at discrediting the policy implications.
The unexpected consequence is that, since it apparently much easier to cast doubt on the science than to rationally discuss policy, there has been almost no discussion of the proposed policies.
Of course, policy discussions are so full of boobytraps and ideological landmines in the US, that's not surprising.
Correct me if I am wrong but in simple terms the planet warmed a little over 10 years ago and at which time the warming leveled off.
Not much point in replying to posts by anonymous coward, since even if, as you say, "I am willing to listen to evidence that refutes it," how would I know? I don't even know what data you're willing to look at, and what data you have decided to ignore because you claim it is (quoting from the previous post) "...lying with statistics... fabricating temperature readings... committing scientific and financial frauds."
However, taking you at your word for just a moment, here is the data for the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project:
http://berkeleyearth.org/images/berkeley-earth-land-surface-average-temperature-60yr.jpg
Would you say, based on this data, that "the Earth warmed a little ten years ago and the warming stopped"?
What about if you draw a line from the 1998 data point to the 2008 data point? Would you say that this line is, or is not, representative of the data?
This despite the fact that present day CO2 levels are now even higher than worst case scenario predictions 10 years ago.
Actually, no; check your data source. It turns out that the global recession had a negative impact on the CO2 emission growth rate. It's not "higher than worse case predictions," it ended up being "slightly less than predicted." (Not enough to make much of a difference in the predictions, though).
That graph came from the BEST FAQ, which can be found here: http://berkeleyearth.org/faq/#stopped
You can also try the NASA data, NOAA data, CRU data etc. The Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) graphs, for example, compare data taken by several different methods; they are here: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/
"Guess what-- the results are still the same. The data showing the planet is warming is real."
Guess what? Not the real question and everyone knows it including you.
I was responding to a parent post stating that data showing that the planet is warming is "lying with statistics," stating that one of the scientists who measured this warming "fabricating many temperature readings" and "commit these frauds" and "have disqualified themselves as scientists by their scientific and financial frauds" and that " in your world view we should dispense with reproducibility of their claims and take them on faith."
OK. The scientists who measured global warming are not "lying with statistics;" these data have been reproduced by many different institutions, using many different data measurement methods. The scientists who collated surface temperature readings did not "fabricate many temperature readings" nor "commit frauds". It is not my "world view" that we should "dispense with reproducability" because every attempt to reproduce the temperature data by every independent study has shown the same overall result.
I will agree that this does not show a cause for warming. That needs to be done by measuring forcing functions and response functions, which is also done. However, the claim that I am addressing, that temperature measurements are a "fraud" and "not reproducable," and therefore the greenhouse effect is a scam, is blatantly false
You do know how easy it is to lie with statistics don't you? Oh right scientists can do no wrong in your world view and we should dispense with reproducibility of their claims
You are aware that right now six different independent groups are analyzing the temperature records, using ground, ocean, balloon, and satellite measurements, and getting very consistent results?
You are aware that an independent analysis, "BEST" (by U.C. Berkeley), was set up (and funded by, among other things, many skeptics) with the explicit purpose of doing an independent analysis without the purported "biases" that critical claim other temperature groups had.
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2011/10/climate-skeptics-perform-independent-analysis-finally-convinced-earth-is-getting-warmer.ars
Here's a quote from leading skeptic Anthony Watts about that BEST study (March 2011):
Guess what-- the results are still the same. The data showing the planet is warming is real.
http://www.nature.com/news/2011/111020/full/news.2011.607.html
How much "reproducability of their claims" do you want?
Satellite measurements, ground station measurements,ocean measurements, balloon-sonde measurements, microwave measurements-- very different techniques, same answers.
I can buy TWO Ford Focus 40mpg cars for the same price as a Volt.
Wow, I haven't heard anybody else suggest that simple technique for getting 80 mpg.
Everybody's got an agenda.
There is no fact.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."
--Phillip K. Dick.
Interesting-- so corporations are persons, according to the Supreme court, but universities aren't, according to the Virginia court.
Just as well I encrypt all my terrorist social net work postings.
I do even better than that: I write the OPPOSITE of what I mean, and then put "HHOK" at the end! They'll never figure that code out!!
he wasn't arrested for filming the police, he was arrested for disobeying a dispersal order.
Direct quote from the original article:
"Miller was charged with a single count of resisting arrest."
The only thing he was charged with, apparently, was "resisting arrest." He was not charged with "disobeying a dispersal order."
Most notably, Kim Jong-un was born nearly thirty years after the Korean war. His viewpoint on politics is going to be vastly different than the previous generation.
Because you think his family didn't indoctrinate him into their views?
You think indoctrination is perfect, and thus every child thinks and acts exactly the same way his parents did?
Maybe they did get "indoctrinated", but nevertheless, the post-war generation didn't go through what the war generation did, and they're not going to think or act like the pre-war generation. That doesn't mean "better", or "more pacifistic", or less authoritarian, but it does mean that they will have different goals and different ideas on how to do things. Don't expect them to act the same.
More likely it's the new leader trying to shower his people with food to associate a good year with his rise to power--and an attempt at good will from the international community who are hoping they can relax.
Exactly. It's worth noting that this is a completely new leader than Kim Jong-il, who is the one who set N. Korea to developing nuclear weapons. It's yet to be seen what he does.
Most notably, Kim Jong-un was born nearly thirty years after the Korean war. His viewpoint on politics is going to be vastly different than the previous generation.
That doesn't mean "celebrate, Korea is going to be a free country and flying unicorns are going to be dropping gold nuggets from the clouds." It does mean "things are likely to change, don't expect the new North Korea to be identical to the old one."
You should do your homework and find out where are the roots of the Metro interface, then you'll see iOS was not even in Jobs' wildest dreams when they started.
Neither was the first mac when windows 1.0 came out, but that doesn't stop the fanboys from claiming windows stole something.
checking dates:
"Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS"
"The first Macintosh was introduced by Apple's then-chairman Steve Jobs on January 24, 1984"
It's hard to see why one could claim that the first mac was "not even in Jobs' wildest dreams" when Windows 1.0 came out, since the mac had been on the market for nearly two years by the time Windows came out.
Why is this post moderated "informative"?
Hurricane, Tornado, Twister, Tsunami, Earthquake, Tremor, Flood
Are they trying to catch real-world terrorists or Lex Luthor?
Well, Homeland security also encompasses the Federal Emergency Management Agency, so they do have some real interest in getting the news fast if there is a natural disaster going on. It turns out that the twitter feeds actually do spread news of natural disasters faster than watching CNN.
(...and, for that matter, if Lex Luthor is up to tricks, shouldn't they want to catch him?)
But this assumes that the natural lifespan of a company is infinite. What I think Geoffrey is saying is that when Kodak went out of business, the answer to "what exactly went wrong?" is that nothing went wrong.
Right. "Kodak" was an assemblage of people organized together into a group with particular expertise in manufacturing and developing (no pun intended, sorry) the chemical engineering technologies that go into making film.
Now, one might say "well, why shouldn't that group of people have changed their organization to become a group of people with expertise in manufacturing and developing the technologies for digital cameras?" Well, sure-- but why should they? Why shouldn't some other group of people do that? In what way is the world a better place if the people that were formerly the organization "Kodak" did this instead of some other groups of people?
They were a group of people organized for their skill mix, which was expertise in film; when that market went away, it's entirely proper that the organization dissolved. Bye. There's no reason it would have been "better" for that organization, instead of some other one, to be repurposed to make digital cameras.
In fact, in some ways it would have been worse, since Kodak did continue to serve their market even while it was being drained away by the competing technology.
I'm not sure why people think that it wasn't a right and proper thing for Kodak to die.
Kodak's strenght was film photography. There turned out to be plenty of other companies with strengths in digital, why should Kodak have colonized that market? Let them produce the stuff they're good at as long as people want it, then quietly go away. There's no reason corporations need to be immortal.
* we chose a file name that matches some regular expression deemed dangerous by their IT staff ... (Yes sir, gamesexpert.com is not a sex site!)
Yep! I remember when the firewall used to block the old JPL Mars exploration website, marsexploration.jpl.nasa.gov. Notice those three letters in the middle of the word "marsexploration." --JPL eventually renamed the site.
And don't even try to access the old physics preprint site, xxxlanl, any site beginning with those letters just has to be pr0n. (that one got renamed, too)
I agree; this article is baffling. The link from the sentence "The U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals has found that forcing a suspect to decrypt his hard drive when the government did not already know what it contained would violate his 5th Amendment rights" points to an article, dated yesterday, that says "Ruling Stands: Defendant Must Decrypt Laptop".
That is precisely the opposite of what the summary states.
There is actually a pretty significant amount of evidence it's faked. ...
No, what you listed is merely evidence that the pdfs were not all produced at the same time.
This is interesting, but has no relevance to whether it's faked or not. There is no reason that real documents might not have been pdf'd at different times.
...The problem for Heartland is that they're acting like dicks toward a lot of people, when they should be upending heaven and hell to find the [putative] memo forger and crucifying him for libel.
Which brings up an interesting question. When somebody broke into the CRU and published (what turned out to be a highly edited selection of) stolen e-mail, the response of "let's upend heaven and hell to find the thieves" did not seem to be high on anybody's priority list. So, apparently, it's only an important crime if you steal documents from people denying the science?
The ars technica article has some useful background: arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/02/secret-service-asks-for-shutdown-of-legit-website-over-user-content-godaddy-complies.ars
Sounds like a good reason to leave GoDaddy, IMO.
How much does solar irradiance vary at wavelengths below 400nm
Quite a bit! The UV component of the sun varies far more than the average luminosity with solar activity.
and what are the physical and chemical effects of this variance on the atmosphere and global climate?
That is a subject of research; a lot of people would like to know! For the most part, the UV doesn't make it to the troposphere, so it doesn't have a direct effect, but it's still an unresolved question as to what indirect effects it may have.
The best study I know of looking at the correlation of solar activity with global temperature shows only a plus or minus 0.1 degree variation from solar max to solar min, though, so it doesn't seem to be a major player in temperature (the reference is Camp and Tung, http://depts.washington.edu/amath/research/articles/Tung/journals/GRL-solar-07.pdf ) The Working-Group 1 report links to more references on the subject; you might look at some of them: http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/publications_and_data_reports.shtm
Do the variance in solar magnetic index and the interaction of the solar and terrestrial magnetic fields have any direct or indirect effects on global climate?
I don't know of any confirmed effects there, other than aurorae.
Shouldn't all science be questioned?
Yes, but the problems with the deniers is that they don't listen to the answers.
Terms like "denier" or "believer" have no place in this debate. Both imply an unwillingness to consider what is known and what isn't.
Let me propose some terminology. The people opposing the anthropogenic theory of global warming can be divided into three distinct categories:
*skeptics
*policy critics
*deniers
Skeptics are asking legitimate questions about the science. Policy critics deny the proposed responses to global warming, for economic or political reasons (I have no problem with this-- there should be more debate on policy.) Deniers deny anthropogenic global warming, period, end of discussion.
Skeptics and deniers are actually complete opposites. The key feature of deniers is that they are not skeptical, in fact, they are completely credulous of any argument, no matter how ridiculous, that opposes global warming.
I have a quick heuristic to distinguish deniers from skeptics: ask if they've actually read the IPCC report from Working-Group 1, "The Physical Science Basis of Climate Change" http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/publications_and_data_reports.shtml
Not "well, no, but I read a critique of it on website-X and I know what's wrong with it, the problem is -xxx--." Actually read it. Not the summary, not the analysis on some page, the actual report.
If you haven't read it, but still want to tell me your opinion on why the science is wrong-- well, your opinion is based on ignorance. You're a denier.
If you have read it-- well, congratulations. You're the one percent. It's a pity that the relentless and highly-amplified shouting of the 99% who don't actually know anything about the science is completely drowning out what you have to say.
Shouldn't all science be questioned?
Yes, but the problems with the deniers is that they don't listen to the answers.
After 5 billion years, the sun is basically in steady state. I would not expect to see fluctuations over the type of timescales that human beings exist on....
the sun is pretty steady, a middle-aged star, but there are still some small variations in solar intensity. The hypothesis was that the Little Ice Age was correlated with the solar "Maunder Minimum," a 75-year period during which the sun had no sunspots (and hence presumably was about 0.07% lower in brightness).
What this work did was put a good date to the start of the Little Ice Age; using radiocarbon dating to determine when the plants killed by the advancing glaciers died... and the dating shows the Little Ice Age began well before the Maunder minimum. The Maunder minimum didn't cause it, very definitely.
It actually makes sense, if you're a nation where manpower is cheap-- a larger number of lower-awesomeness but cheaper jets may beat a smaller number of higher-awesomeness expensive jets. And they're not likely to be fighting the US-- they primarily need fighters that can beat Pakistan.