This article speaks for more skeptics (but doesn’t directly relate to climate at all; read it as a metaphor). What do some members of baseball teams, cycling teams, and certain hockey teams have in common?
http://www.cnn.com/2012/06/15/opinion/pearlman-lance-armstrong/index.html
“Why fans shouldn’t forgive Armstrong”
Comment on Analyzing AGW skepticism: missing the point? by Diag
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Comment on Analyzing AGW skepticism: missing the point? by MarkB
It’s not difficult for a person with a scientific education to be skeptical of sweeping claims based on highly complex mathematical models. Until very recently, climate science was a backwater of physics. Now, they’ve somehow become willing to remake the modern industrial word on the basis of a guesstimate of sensitivity?
In order for me to be confident in GCMs, I would have to be certain that climate scientists know EVERYTHING there is to know about how the planet’s climate changes over geological time. I can’t imagine this is true. And hindcasting the 20th century is such a weak test that is can’t possibly impress me. My skepticism isn’t OF science, it’s BECAUSE OF science. The greater the claim, the greater requirement for proof.
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Comment on Analyzing AGW skepticism: missing the point? by Wagathon
<strong>
Let's look at the science:</strong>
<em> Akasofu calls the post-2000 warming trend hypothetical. His harshest words are reserved for advocates who give conjecture the authority of fact.</em> (Andrew Orlowski)
<strong>Now, let's look at the psychological aspect of the matter:</strong>
<em>Before anyone noticed, this hypothesis has been substituted for truth... The opinion that great disaster will really happen must be broken.</em> (Shunichi Akasofu)
Behavioral psychology tells us that those in a position of power who should know better (i.e., who are supposed to understand the concept of the 'null hypothesis') who purposefully collude and engage in the activity of substituting their opinions for fact to knowingly deceive others are corrupt.
All of us are free to second-guess the motives of others all we want. But, it does not change the science: <em>[The IPCC's] conclusion that from now on atmospheric temperatures are likely to show a continuous, monotonic increase, should be perceived as an improvable hypothesis.</em> (Kanya Kusano)
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Comment on State shift (?) in Earth’s biosphere by Dave Springer
I’m a determinist. Intellectually I know it doesn’t matter what we believe because our actions and beliefs were predetermined since the beginning of time.
How’s that for a dangerous idea? And you thought the idea that God is looking after us is dangerous…
Go ahead and tell me exactly what you think and be aware that whatever response you make if you think you have a choice about it you’re fooling yourself. 
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Comment on State shift (?) in Earth’s biosphere by Dave Springer
Determinism has a long distinguished following in philosophy and it is certainly not disproven by science. Quantum field equations are time reversible and unitary meaning with complete information about any current state of the universe you can run the clock either backward or forward and know exactly what happens in either direction. Quantum uncertainty is an artifact of incomplete information. Therefore all the information in the universe, including all our thoughts, was present in the universe at the time of its birth. Information obeys the law of conservation. Now what I want to know isn’t where the universe came from. That’s the easy part. What I want to know is where the order in it came from. The second law, if true, that in a closed system order can only decrease, means that unless something has been injecting order into our universe that it was at its most orderly at the instant of creation. If something is injecting order again I want to know how and from where.
Of course I can’t wondering these things because I was destined to ask these questions since 14 billion years ago.
More to learn here:
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Comment on Analyzing AGW skepticism: missing the point? by Wagathon
Let’s start with burning all of the witches.
Lance Armstrong Responds to USADA Allegation
AUSTIN, TX — June 13, 2012 — I have been notified that USADA, an organization largely funded by taxpayer dollars but governed only by self-written rules, intends to again dredge up discredited allegations dating back more than 16 years to prevent me from competing as a triathlete and try and strip me of the seven Tour de France victories I earned. These are the very same charges and the same witnesses that the Justice Department chose not to pursue after a two-year investigation. These charges are baseless, motivated by spite and advanced through testimony bought and paid for by promises of anonymity and immunity. Although USADA alleges a wide-ranging conspiracy extended over more than 16 years, I am the only athlete it has chosen to charge. USADA’s malice, its methods, its star-chamber practices, and its decision to punish first and adjudicate later all are at odds with our ideals of fairness and fair play.
I have never doped, and, unlike many of my accusers, I have competed as an endurance athlete for 25 years with no spike in performance, passed more than 500 drug tests and never failed one. That USADA ignores this fundamental distinction and charges me instead of the admitted dopers says far more about USADA, its lack of fairness and this vendetta than it does about my guilt or innocence.
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Comment on Analyzing AGW skepticism: missing the point? by omanuel
Yes, Diag, former sports stars who refused to admit or to address evidence of wrongdoings are exactly like world leaders and leaders of news and science organizations that refused to address evidence in 2009 Climategate emails and documents of thirty (20) years of deceit.
http://joannenova.com.au/2010/01/finally-the-new-revised-and-edited-climategate-timeline/
We now have evidence that official misinformation actually started sixty-four (64) years earlier, in 1945
http://omanuel.wordpress.com/about/
Today society is on the verge of collapse – in Asia, Australia, the EU, the United States, and other drug-infested countries of the Americas, with headlines on unrest in Egypt and the UK:
The problem is arrogance on the part of frightened world leaders and leaders of the scientific community who “painted themselves into a corner,” suffering under the illusion they control reality.
The solution will require conniving, manipulative, intelligent “naked apes” riding on the third ball of dirt orbiting the “fountain of energy that sustains life” to recognize their place in the universe, i.e., to get right-sized.
The probability of success is unfortunately extremely small for those suffering from illusions of grandeur – about like the probability of getting a camel through the eye of a needle.
http://omanuel.wordpress.com/about/#comment-109
Unfortunately all humanity suffers the consequences.
With deep regrets,
Oliver K. Manuel
Former NASSA Principal
Investigator for Apollo
http://www.omatumr.com
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Comment on Analyzing AGW skepticism: missing the point? by ArndB
RE; Adam Corner/ADAM: “scep¬ti¬cism about cli¬mate change is not primarily caused by a ‘mis¬un¬der¬standing’ of the sci¬ence but by motiv¬ated reas¬oning pro¬cesses – rooted in ideo¬lo¬gical dif¬fer¬ences – that mean that the ‘same’ evid¬ence is not eval¬u¬ated in the same way. Would you agree that scep¬ti¬cism about cli¬mate change has more to do with polit¬ical views than an assess¬ment of the science?”
SORRY! If science is not even able to define what “climate” means (http://www.whatisclimate.com/) , it is simple arrogant to say: “scep¬ti¬cism about cli¬mate change has more to do with polit¬ical views”. Unfortunately; SCEPTICISM is neither able to challenge science on this point.
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Comment on State shift (?) in Earth’s biosphere by Pekka Pirilä
All attempts to explain quantum uncertainty as an artifact of incomplete information have failed. Trying to formulate that assumption as a well defined theory has led to results that have been found to contradict empirical evidence. Einstein tried that and failed, many others have tried it after Einstein an failed.
All evidence that we have supports the idea that quantum uncertainty is not due to incomplete information but is more fundamental. Even full knowledge of the wave function precise predictions can not in general be made for the outcome of measurements. It’s also fundamentally impossible to know perfectly the wave function.
While the uncertainties are fundamental it is true that the wave function follows deterministic equations. The uncertainty is not in the dynamics of the wave function but in the interaction with the system described by that wave function with an observer.
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Comment on Analyzing AGW skepticism: missing the point? by Dave Springer
Yes, sea ice is a very good insulator. Open water in the Arctic can dump heat to space like crazy while ice covered water cannot. There is a time lag with this process due to the rather slow speed of the oceanic conveyor belt which moves water from tropics to poles and back. In order to become credible with claims of skill at prediction climate boffins need to be able to explain mechanism underlying the 60 year cycle called the Atlantic Multi Decadal Oscillation (AMDO). Instead of explaining it however they were blind-sided by the transition from warm to cold side of the cycle and now they’re scrambling about trying to pick up the pieces of their shattered credibility. Their credibility peaked in 2007 and public support has been on the decline since just as the AMDO has been on the decline. Their fortunes were always tied to whether the earth continued warming through the cold side of the AMDO and unfortunately for them they lost that bet and the public, if they understand anything, understand that the earth stopped warming over 10 years ago despite no abatement of CO2 emissions. No warming is a show stopper. Put a fork in the CAGW hypothesis, it’s done. They better hope the earth doesn’t start cooling enough for agricultural output to fall off or there might be repercussions for them that go beyond tarnished reputations.
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Comment on State shift (?) in Earth’s biosphere by Bart R
Peter317 | June 15, 2012 at 1:04 pm |
No, you started it – don’t try turn it back on me now.
Come, come. Who started which?
I was pointing out the paranoid survivalist mentality implicit in the alarmist 5.56/7.62 set response to irrelevant politics in France. You’re the one wanting to descend into the trivialities of bus drivers getting paid for downtime. What’s your point? That some jobs have peaks and lows?
That you don’t like seeing wages paid because customers (who are always right, if I recall correctly) want to be served on demand instead of told when to line up and do as they’re told by the bus scheduling politburo? That’s your end-of-civilized-live catastrophe? Bus drivers are paid to wait for passengers? That’s your detailed logistical analyses?
Ohnoes! Bus drivers get paid for waiting on customers.
To my mind, a bus token and a car differ in no significant way for the Economy. Both are passes to highly subsidized modes of transit. Both leave many servicepeople sitting idle — or have you never driven by a gas station with no customers at the pumps at that moment, never seen a service department with mechanics waiting to do oil changes, never seen tires piled up in inventory waiting for cars to need a tire change, never driven past a full parking lot? There’s five orders of magnitude more such idle time in personal cars than in bus drivers’ schedules; if anything yours is an argument against the abject waste of the personal vehicle.
Ohnoes! A bus driver is filling out a crossword puzzle on company time because no one wants to travel between Hyde Park and King’s Cross at 2:34 PM! Grab your M-19 and head for the bomb shelter! The French Reds will take us over!
So if you think you’ve got more, better ‘logistical analyses’ to criticize French socialists with, you might want to keep it to yourself. You’re scoring massive own goals without even taking your feet out of your mouth.
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Comment on Analyzing AGW skepticism: missing the point? by robin
Thanks for the links. I must say the first one reads like propaganda to me, and it really overstates the certainty of many things it touches on (eg: sea level rise is already worst case scenario, humans have warmed the oceans. Also phrases like “mass extinctions”, or “eliminates the ability of ecosystems to support humans” are extremist imo. The call to action (‘Timelines for action are shrinking”, “Proper and universal implementation of the precautionary principle by reversing the burden of proof”) don’t seem very scientific.
That all said, I too am concerned with overfishing (even ‘very’ concerned on that one), and agree plastics etc in the ocean merits more study. Perhaps some fairly simple changes can go a long way there. I think the type of advocacy in paper ‘A’ is counter productive, really it just makes people take it less seriously. It reads as propaganda, so it must not be true – this is a fallacy, but humans have a deep and sensitive BS detector and it is prone to throwing out everything from a discredited source. I think this ‘abstract environmentalism’ has had a pretty poor track record as far as results in the last few decades, hopefully we can shift to focus on more realistic needs and wants, many of which have practical solutions.
Thanks for taking the time to post the links, and I do agree there are still areas of concern in both papers (once you get past the drama).
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Comment on State shift (?) in Earth’s biosphere by Peter317
Point missed by miles, so focus on irrelevance instead.
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Comment on Analyzing AGW skepticism: missing the point? by WebHubTelescope
“You don’t say.”
That’s not proper first-order logic. Unless one invokes negation as failure, an infinite number of phrases will match what one doesn’t say.
said(this).
said(that).
did_not_say(Phrase) :- not(said(Phrase)).
So what exactly was said that wasn’t?
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Comment on State shift (?) in Earth’s biosphere by Bart R
timg56 | June 15, 2012 at 2:00 pm |
You’re losing the program. If the topic is France, it’s French bloviating. And if cartridges existed only for shooting at ranges they’d be no more interesting than tiles from some European tabletop Monopoly-nouveau. You can’t make a crack about stockpiling cases of M-16 and M-19 ammunition in reference to anyone’s political propositions and play all innocent with any plausibility.
Come right out and say what you mean. You need your security blanket of a well-stocked basement bomb shelter because at some point in your childhood you were Mosheresquely frightened out of your life about the Red Scare, and now your first response to socialist arguments is to reach for your gun and cower in the dark. That’s what you meant. That’s what you said. You can’t meet invalid socialist proposals intellectually because you’re so intellectually paralyzed by childhood 1950′s McCarthyist phantasms, and you long for a simpler world where you could just bust some caps into commies.
“Being at the cutting edge doesn’t get you much.”
The thinking that made America great, isn’t it?
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Comment on Analyzing AGW skepticism: missing the point? by robin
agreed. Zero content, all spite. That kind of talk just moves everything backwards.
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Comment on Analyzing AGW skepticism: missing the point? by Chad Wozniak
Tomcat and Lolwot -
Yes, there is proof that doubling the CO2 content of the atmosphere won’t have any effect on climate!
2 billion years ago, before blue-green algae began the process of converting CO2 to O2, the Earth’s atmosphere was about 20 percent CO2, or 500 times the concentration today (and the inventory of CO2 in the air was actually more like 750 times, since the atmosphere was thicker then than now, before it was partially blown off by asteroid impacts such as the Permian and K-T boundary events). And did the Earth overheat and burn up then? Obviously not.
I am a denier based on three things: the historical record which proves there is no correlation between CO2 and climate change; the simple arithmetic which proves that human activity is an infinitesimal portion of CO2 activity, and that CO2 is an infinitesimal factor in climate change; and the hard evidence of fraud and mendacity on the part of the AGW tyrannists,
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Comment on Analyzing AGW skepticism: missing the point? by Latimer Alder
Robin says
‘I think the type of advocacy in paper ‘A’ is counter productive, really it just makes people take it less seriously’
I take a more realistic approach to it. 27 people from 18 organisations spent 3 days on a jolly in Oxford one Easter vacation. They all need to go home showing to their lords and masters that they did something useful. So the report is a bran tub full of whatever it is is the hot button of the parent organisation.
Everybody can point to a bit and say ‘look boss…I made sure our concern was in the final report’. You could have written it without anybody needing to attend at all.
Still Oxford in the spring can be very nice. I hope they had a good time punting, in Blackwell’s, admiring the architecture and of course, following the trail of Inspector Morse around the inns and hostelries of that fair city.
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Comment on Analyzing AGW skepticism: missing the point? by Latimer Alder
-1.
Leave remarks like this for idiots like Greenpeace and Franny Armstrong from 10:10 to make. The alarmists are a sufficiently target-rich environment that e don’t need to do this.
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Comment on Analyzing AGW skepticism: missing the point? by R. Gates
Actually Dave,
As I am not in battle, and certainly therefore cannot be defeated in battle, the notion of me doing the honorable thing as a defeated warrior makes no sense at all. Having said that, the act of hari-kari or sepuku was an act of courage so as to restore some honor to the defeated warrior and their family. I would hope that had I lived the life of a Samurai, and had been defeated in battle, that I would have been so courageous as to commit sepuku.
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