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Comment on Skeptical of skeptics: is Steve Goddard right? by homes for sale in mcallen tx
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Comment on Is the road to scientific hell paved with good moral intentions? by Carrick
Note by the way that the humans need not be the point of the collection of the subjective data. Examples of subjective data include rendering an opinion about a manuscript. Ranking manuscripts based on the degree of endorsement of AGW certainly qualifies as that.
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Comment on Is the road to scientific hell paved with good moral intentions? by Paul Matthews
There’s a lot of sense in what Mosh says here. It’s certainly true that skeptics waste a huge amount of time on pointless bickering on blogs. Attempts to organise them into doing something more coherent have failed – perhaps because they tend to resist authority and prefer to work independently.
The “better skeptics” call is a big ask. You need someone who has the necessary technical expertise, and is prepared to work full time for no money. So it’s not surprising that there’s only a tiny handful of people that fit the requirements.
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Comment on Week in review by climatereason
Faustino
May I recommend a book that can be downloaded free via amazon/kindle entitled ‘The History of England Volume 1′ by David Hume.
it seems pretty old-which is probably why its free-but it covers England’s early history and the medieval period very well and the evolution of many of the anglo-sphere laws and customs can be seen
tonyb
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Comment on Is the road to scientific hell paved with good moral intentions? by Jonathan Abbott
+1 again
It’s frankly astonishing that whoever is paying for the science (especially if its the taxpayer) doesn’t require this sort of approach in the terms of the contract. In any branch of science.
I sometimes seriously wonder if anyone involved really wants to get to the truth or are more concerned about tiptoeing around peoples’ feelings.
I used to design avionics and I was subject to internal audits every month, where everything I did was pulled apart and reviewed by the QA manager and others – I had to provide evidence for everything I did. It took at least half a day. Some of the engineers complained about such a regular ‘waste of time’ but I liked it – I knew it made my work better and saved me time over all.
A lot of scientists seem to take their work as seriously as if they were still Victorian gentlemen amateurs.
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Comment on Kardashian Index by Tomas Milanovic
Alistair
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Because you took the time and energy to ask questions, I would like to honor them by answering those I understand.
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does time dilate?
Yes. It is the necessary consequence of the invariance of c. Experimental proofs exist.
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are there “magic forces” that attract or repel without a medium, across distances and timeframes as large as 14.5 billion years?
It is much better to think in terms of fields than forces. Then yes, the quantum fields extend over scales you mention.
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what causes the wave distortion in the famous failed experiment by Michelson and Morely?
I don’t know about any “distortion”. M&M is just a very classical wave interference experiment proving that light propagates at the same speed in all directions.
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what causes the movement pattern of the earth’s hotspots?
Don’t know what you refer to. If it is something connected to the plate tectonics then its engine is the convection.
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what is dark energy or dark matter?
What became called “dark energy” is a synonyme of the cosmological constant – it’s the energy density of vacuum. Dark matter is still unknown. It is probably constituted of supersymetric partners of “usual particles”. None heve been observed sofar. However follow closely the LHC when it restarts at max energy next year. There are some hints at supersymmetry so the answer may come fast. Or not.
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who exactly has the right answer about the operation of black holes? (I heard Stephen Hawking has second guessed the theory he supported for 40 years.)
Black holes are just a necessary consequence of general relativity. So everybody who masters GR has the right answer. everybody agrees on the basics but here are (still) a few controversies about partial technicalities (f.ex information paradox etc).
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why are there credentialed scientists looking to send light faster than C?
You have a name? If it exists then they are cracpots to me – I would put the Lorenz invariance right at the second place after the 2. law of thermodynamics as something that will stay as a fundamental law of nature for a VERY long time if not forever.
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why are there “impossible” yet existing, working EMdrives?
I know nothing about that.
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where does “binding energy” go? And from whence does it return?
What “binding energy” ? Generally “binding energy” is a synonyme of potential energy. And potential energy is just the energy of a field. Another case where it is simpler and faster to think in terms of field.
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why is there a perceived conflict between GR and QT? Is one or the other, or both, fundamentally slightly wrong?
This one is propagated in many popular books, shows, Youtubes and blogs.
Technically the conflict has been resolved by string theory already many years ago. But basically in the prehistory the problem was coming from the fact that the space-time in GR was curved while it was euclidean in QM. I am not competent enough in ST to explain in a non mathematic way how the “conflict” went away in ST.
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what was the global temperature for each of the last 30 years, one answer please.
No idea. I don’t think that this parameter has relevance for anything. But it is surely easy to get the answer in Google. I also think that climate science is a very young branch of science and has not (yet) achieved maturity with a consistent, verified and predictive theory.
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is radioactive decay rate constant?
Yes. But under extreme conditions, external factors may interfer with the decay so that the decay law is no more defineded by the strict proportionality of decay to the overal amount of particles. I know of no example but could imagine that f.ex very near to a black hole non linear things would happen.
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can we count on the solidity of our ability to measure time, consistently and accurately?
Yes to a certain accuracy.
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would a bottle of champagne, broken in space go to gas, chunk ice, or float around for a short time as globules of liquid? (i threw this one in, because I haven’t found an opinion on the matter I trust as a reliable source yet)
Ultimately it must finish in gaz because the pressure is 0. So it is sure that at P=0 and T = 3 K it cannot be a liquid. I have never thought about that problem but I think that there must be a transient – the sudden drop of pressure makes the liquid boil. But the gaz at this extremely low temperature may still partly recondense directly to solid (in small crystals ?) because the density had not enough time to drop to 0 and then the solid would sublimate again to gaz over a longer time.
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oh, this is my favorite: How many degrees of our realized global surface temperature is created specifically by radioactive decay within the earth?
I am afraid this question is based on some misunderstanding (so shouldn’t be favorite for anything). The Earth’s interior has been cooling since its birth 5 billions years ago. And this will not stop. What the radioactive decay is doing is to slow down (slightly) this cooling. So the surface temperature is defined by the overal internal cooling trend which will go for billions of years and which is modulated by the Sun life cycle where the Sun increases its energy output also on very large time scales. On these 2 massive trends are superposed all kinds of microscopical perturbations due to oceanic cycles, atmosphere, clouds, biosphere etc etc. So the surface temperature can’t be decomposed in a sum saying this comes from here and this comes from there.
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Comment on Is the road to scientific hell paved with good moral intentions? by stevepostrel
Faustino: I don’t disagree with general tenor of what you say, but I think there is a specific and avoidable pothole that Judith has stepped in more than once and it has to do with this question of advocacy. If one says “we should prefer policies with property x,” that’s advocacy of a sort even if the set of policies that possesses x is pretty broad. That characterization is especially the case if a strongly favored policy that is front and center on the public agenda does not possess property x.
If I said, “I’m not advocating for policy in the area of drug regulation, but any good policy ought to recognize that animal testing throws out a lot of drugs that would be safe and effective in humans” that would be implicit advocacy to change the process by which drugs are approved in the U.S. I agree that the broader the two sets of included and exclusive policies are, the less pointed the advocacy and the more “disinterested” it may appear to other policy advocates. But I can remember when ideas like cap-and-trade and carbon taxes were seen as agents of the devil by mainstream environmentalists, and economists saying “we should use market-based mechanisms to implement pollution control” were perceived as controversial advocates. That perception occurred even though these economists weren’t trying to prescribe the tightness or greenness of the actual environmental policy but were applying “neutral” science to the problem of maximizing the amount of pollution reduction per unit of lost output. But they were indeed advocating against “best available technology” standards that have been the norm in U.S. air pollution control.
When you rule out someone’s favored policy on “scientific” grounds, they are going to see you as an advocate and they are not being illogical. You are indeed advocating–it is simply a matter of specifying the modesty or non-directiveness of what you are advocating. And that is where I think Judith ends up: Her policy advocacy is mild in that it doesn’t specify exactly what ought to be done, but it is considerably sharper in saying what should not be done. And I suspect she perceives her views in a similar way to the economists who pushed market mechanisms in environmental policy: As value-free perceptions of scientific reality that ought to apply regardless of how alarmed you are by the threat of catastrophic global warming.
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Comment on Kardashian Index by stevepostrel
So it may be a biology-only phenomenon that Hall found. On the other hand, I’d rather see a Hall-style study in other fields than go by a non-random sample of successful bloggers–that might miss the successful peer-review publishers and give a distorted picture. But you’re right that it is an open question in other fields.
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Comment on Week in review by beththeserf
Same back at yer, Peter.:)
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Comment on Week in review by beththeserf
Context’s the thing whereby
we may unearth the problem
situation of the king and troops.)
Situation analysis is able ter
transcend the myopia of
point of view and opacity
of time and space.
The study of History is valuable for its own sake. … I think of
the chilling scene in Orwell’s ‘1984’ where in the the distopia
of the Ministry of Truth, the records shredded and cast down
the memory hole so that myth may prevail. ‘So now you must
be told about the past that which you need ter know.’ Then
there’s another against-the-record alternative, life with no record.
‘Let’s clean-slate into a fuchur without regret, without memory.’
Hmm … nothing ter compare to … as though new born, and
jest as unaware.
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Comment on Role of Atlantic warming(?) in recent climate shifts by angech
21 reasons why the pause has happened.
Each one claiming to explain a missing 0.2 degrees.
That is 4.2 degrees of heat that has been disappeared.
4.2 degrees!
If they were all right. No one backing down.
So does this mean 4.2 degrees is natural variation?
Or did the deep sea eat the extra 4.2 degrees, Gatesy?
Judith if we have another 10 reasons in the next year it will be 6.2 degrees.
Should not a group in the science community comment on the absolute ridiculousness of all these reasons and bring people to task?
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Comment on Role of Atlantic warming(?) in recent climate shifts by Edim
AMO is neither only (North) Atlantic nor only multidecadal. It’s global, and the secular trend, which has been removed, is just another longer scale variability/oscillation.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/esrl-amo/plot/esrl-amo/trend/plot/hadcrut4sh/detrend:0.742/plot/hadcrut4sh/detrend:0.742/trend
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Comment on Role of Atlantic warming(?) in recent climate shifts by Edim
And PDO is more or less just the slope of the so-called AMO.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/esrl-amo/mean:360/derivative/normalise/plot/jisao-pdo/mean:360/normalise
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Comment on Role of Atlantic warming(?) in recent climate shifts by Claude Harvey
How ’bout we simply settle on the obvious. Global climate is a monstrous, chaotic, self-regulating system that is bounded by the upper and lower temperature limits repeatedly demonstrated in Warm Period and Ice Age cycles. In between those major limits and during the gradual temperature decline into Ice Ages and the rapid temperature rise into Warm Periods, the system is self correcting such that any forcing function is met with negative feedback. The old girl jitters, but she don’t jump off a cliff.
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Comment on Role of Atlantic warming(?) in recent climate shifts by Edim
Your background of warming is just another quasi-cycle, which is plateauing as well and shifting to cooling this decade.
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Comment on Is the road to scientific hell paved with good moral intentions? by Carrick
Michael:
I work in Australia and know the HREC regulations and requirements very well.
Not if you think the collection of subjective data does not require ethics review.
You were also very wrong in your claim about “The purpose of ethics approval is to protect people who are the subject of research. ” Nobody who’s actually completed their humans subjects training would ever make such a claim.
The purpose of ethics review includes> the protection of any human participant in research, not just to protect people who are the “subject of the research”.
When you have human participants, there is always the possibility of harm and you have to weight that against the potential benefits of the research.
Now if you can explain to me how people who are ranking papers are not human participants, I’d be delighted to know. When I’ve had people perform rankings, I’ve always had to go through IRB approval. I’m sure my IRB committee would be very interested in your theories too.
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Comment on Is the road to scientific hell paved with good moral intentions? by Pekka Pirilä
No, actually at some point in the discussion people demand that you “name names” rather tha just talk about principles..
That’s, indeed, the case. It’s probably impossible to discuss constructively ethics in connection to an ongoing dispute. It must be isolated in some way from that. When examples are needed, they should be picked from well known cases of another field. Pondering on own ethical choices as Stephen Schneider did may also succeed, but naming opponents or allowing for the interpretation that it’s about the opponents is effectively certain to lead to the “road to hell”.
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Comment on Role of Atlantic warming(?) in recent climate shifts by beththeserf
Ol’ Earths so stoic. From the Paleozoic ter the Cenozoic,
up ‘n down, that seesaw of temperature and CO2 fluctuation,
… from Greenland’s icy mountains ter India’s corral strand,
up ‘n down, up ‘n down.
http://www.biocab.org/carbon_dioxide_geological_timescale.html
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Comment on Is the road to scientific hell paved with good moral intentions? by Pekka Pirilä
In spite of what I say above, it may be possible to argue constructively about the ethical dimension of a well specified individual act avoiding generalizations to the other behavior the person who did that act.
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Comment on Role of Atlantic warming(?) in recent climate shifts by X Anonymous
The AMO tends to lag ENSO, an easy way to illustrate this fact is to compare the yearly rates of change of both indices.
https://xanonymousblog.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/amo.jpg
As for the trivially true but for the most part actually false statement that there “must be a cause”, I dedicate the following video for the monkeys that wrote this paper.
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