Wow, they found another topic to argue about. 
Stroke vs. Aiming
- Thread starter JB Cases
- Start date
I have read the debate. I also just read Patrick Moore's speech http://www.thegwpf.org/patrick-moore-should-we-celebrate-carbon-dioxide/
CO2 is not the only issue.
But beyond that here is a piece that rebut's Moore's central assertions.
https://skepticalscience.com/moore-2012.html
So who is right? Well if you like your coastline to be around Oklahoma then I guess you don't want to do anything. If however you like your beachfront property in Miami you might want to try to support anything that has any chance of stopping the ice melt that will send your skylight permanently underwater.
And Dan, we are talking about something that is far beyond you and I. No, I don't have critical thinking skills. I have the ability to read opposing points of view and make a decision as to which point of view I will support based on what sounds most reasonable to me. It's pretty much all I can do when I am not actually involved in the research on either side.
Do you do it any differently? You point towards Patrick Moore who himself is not an active researcher in any climate science discipline as far as I can tell. Is that not what you accused me of doing by mentioning my (ex) girlfriend who was a physics professor at the University of North Carolina? Are you telling me that I should just believe in Patrick's Moore's claims because of who he is or should I critically think about his claims and look for corroboration or opposition and evaluate that information?
Not sure what you are trying to tell me here. You say you have read and read and read and read and that this makes you right. Yet it seems that others have read and read and read and read and come to the opposite conclusion that you have. Who is right?
Well...anyway....glad you slipped the insult in there....wouldn't be a good discussion without calling me stupid would it?
Do you do it any differently? You point towards Patrick Moore who himself is not an active researcher in any climate science discipline as far as I can tell. Is that not what you accused me of doing by mentioning my (ex) girlfriend who was a physics professor at the University of North Carolina? Are you telling me that I should just believe in Patrick's Moore's claims because of who he is or should I critically think about his claims and look for corroboration or opposition and evaluate that information?
Not sure what you are trying to tell me here. You say you have read and read and read and read and that this makes you right. Yet it seems that others have read and read and read and read and come to the opposite conclusion that you have. Who is right?
Well...anyway....glad you slipped the insult in there....wouldn't be a good discussion without calling me stupid would it?
What you did was to select possibly the most radical global warming site on the internet to counter Moore, and then you side with them.
Let me illustrate my point. They start out by mocking skeptics by saying that they are being alarmist. Then I look to the right side of the website and they actually have a counter showing how many Hiroshima bombs worth of heat the earth has accumulated. No, they're not alarmist at all. Of course, then there's this critique of the same website:
http://www.populartechnology.net/2012/03/truth-about-skeptical-science.html
You should always look for corroboration. I brought him up because we skeptics are always accused of being bought off by "big oil" (I wish). That's why I said, "If you don't believe me, maybe you'll believe the co-founder of Greenpeace." For the record, I didn't read that whole speech, but what I did read was pretty spot on.
Let me put it in terms you might be more familiar with. You keep telling CTE skeptics that we don't have a leg to stand on if we are unwilling to get to the pool table and get some instruction and give it a good, honest try AT THE TABLE. Well, I think you are doing the same thing with global warming. You are unwilling to get on the table and dig into it. In other words, if you go to the website I recommended and start reading the stuff I recommended, and not have a defensive attitude, you may quickly find that it is not difficult to tell who is right and who is wrong. You don't have to understand every last bit of statistics involved (God knows I don't), but if you keep at it you will clearly see what is going on.
I didn't personally insult you like your fearless leader likes to do to me. I said you are clueless (and/or ignorant) OF THE FACTS. I was careful to say it was not a warm, fuzzy thing to say, but I'm trying to snap you out of this fog where you think you can rely on global warming propaganda sites for real science. Saying that someone is ignorant of the facts is not the same thing as calling them ignorant. Do I really have to explain this?
Dan <---- the "bugar eating hater"
what you asked is if I have any critical thinking skills. I didn't mention that you said I am clueless which I obviously am not.
You want me to go and read the emails where some scientists are alleged to be talking about how to fudge the data?
I will go for the summaries instead of the people who have read them in depth and in context.
http://www.factcheck.org/2009/12/climategate/
and as for climateaudit.org..... the guy who runs it isn't exactly unbiased is he?
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Steve_McIntyre
You want me to go and read the emails where some scientists are alleged to be talking about how to fudge the data?
I will go for the summaries instead of the people who have read them in depth and in context.
http://www.factcheck.org/2009/12/climategate/
and as for climateaudit.org..... the guy who runs it isn't exactly unbiased is he?
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Steve_McIntyre
Try this practice game using the contact patch... http://sites.google.com/site/poolandbilliard/Home/1-2-3
You claim to be a straight pool player. Tell me when you score 30 points in 5 racks. It's as easy as 1-2-3
.
The emails are not the main thing, although they confirm a lot of what was suspected for the last 20 years.
You are reading climate change advocacy sites that have their own, usually political, agenda. You are reading propaganda and thinking it is serious science.
Actually he is about as unbiased as you can get and still be an expert in the field. He is Canadian and his political views are actually quite liberal. He only became interested in global warming, as it was called back when it was still warming, AFTER he retired. McIntyre was a prodigy mathematician/statistician who was looking for a hobby. He saw Mann's hockey stick graph, became interested, and asked if there was an archived copy of the data. The rest is a very interesting history if you are ever inclined to actually read about it.
The stuff I recommended to you is not full of calculations, but generally explains why Mann's research is faulty. They have all the back up information needed to see why, but the info I am recommending is not difficult to get through.
As I surmised, you aren't really interested in the concept that you might not know as much as you think, and might actually be wrong about something. Some people actually like to have their beliefs challenged and have their minds expanded with new information.
You can't help yourself can you? I guess it doesn't occur to you that other smart people can read the same thing you did and come to different conclusions.
OF COURSE you give me "stuff" that you think explains why the research is faulty. After all if you read something and it sounds reasonable and you have no way yourself to actually replicate the experiments or collect the samples and analyze them to gather the data then you have to just accept someone's word for it.
So whatever you want me to go look at is going to be the foundation of your position. I read both sides and make up my own mind.
I read the Greenpeace founder's letter and thought it sounded reasonable and found myself leaning towards his point of view but I tend to want to dig deeper to get some corroboration before I change my position on anything. While doing that I found that his assertions are not supported.
The fact is that when it comes to this topic you and I are literally ants arguing about whether airplanes can crush us or not. I've not see anything that shows me that you are a climate scientist in any way. From what you said you have just read a lot and based your conclusions on what you have read. Nothing really wrong with that per se... especially in a debate such as this where there is a lot of data and physics to absorb to understand the topic to any reasonable degree. But to conclude that Man Made Global Warming is a hoax, a fraud, junk science etc....based ONLY on what you have read is as silly as me saying it's a dire threat based ONLY on what I have read.
The difference between us is that I am willing to go along with the idea that we can do something to mitigate it starting NOW based solely on the concept that IF it's REAL and IF the models are right THEN we are some serious shit. And IF it's not real then we are going to have alternative energy sources and greener living habits and better ways to produce food that don't require as much energy, and we will have figured out how to reduce or reverse ocean acidification and how to balance carbon levels as much as is humanly possible.
As opposed to sitting around and thinking we are ok and fighting against every change when we might not actually be ok.
How would your life change for the worse Dan if America treated climate change as a moonshot project and committed to reducing greenhouse gases significantly? Do you think that there will be a "green" police force established that will arrest you if you don't replace your light bulbs for ones that are better for the environment? Will you be forced to give up your 1965 Impala that gets 3 miles a gallon while putting enough exhaust fumes in it's wake to kill several people within four feet of it. Would it piss you off if the government said you had to change the engine and install a catalytic converter to reduce emissions, or gasp convert to natural gas?
I mean honestly what is that you now DO in your life that you love so much you could not bear to change it that going green would affect dramatically? Steak? Is that you love steak and could not bear the thought of not having cheap steak easily available? Not to say that steak would go away or become super expensive but we know that if demand for beef were cut by 1/7th - i.e. if everyone gave up red meat for just one day then it would have a major impact for the better environmentally.
So really I am not understanding what the major problem is here. At one point in our history cigarettes were actually advertised as being healthy for you. The cigarette companies paid for studies that showed that and some doctors supported it. There was "scientific" debate on the topic and studies which showed that cigarette smoke was harmful were attacked as junk science based on flawed research. We all know how that turned out.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1470496/
I understand the debate Dan. I don't understand how you can be so adamant that YOU are right and persist in calling me stupid, ignorant and unwilling to consider your "evidence" about this topic. I did consider it and my conclusion is that there is enough evidence to warrant some major changes in how we live on and with this only habitable planet we have. And that said I am hypocritical about it as well because I don't do all that I can individually to live greener. I certainly support efforts to have wholesale industrial scale change though in ways that are far more likely to help than individual random action.
you know, just in case we might actually be able to influence our environment for the better.
RealClimate.org's rebuttals.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.ph...-regarding-the-mann-et-al-1998reconstruction/
and to circle back around to my Physics Professor girlfriend.....
And then there's physics....https://andthentheresphysics.wordpress.com/about-2/
Catastrophe, hoax, or just “Lukewarm”?
http://www.realclimate.org/index.ph...-regarding-the-mann-et-al-1998reconstruction/
and to circle back around to my Physics Professor girlfriend.....
And then there's physics....https://andthentheresphysics.wordpress.com/about-2/
Catastrophe, hoax, or just “Lukewarm”?
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OK, you are taking a two pronged approach. One prong says that we're ants, not climate experts, so all we have to go on is this guy's word vs that guys. How does Dan White have the nerve to conclude that his interpretation of the back and forth is right and not John Barton's?
Prong two says, "Hey, what's the big deal. Maybe climate change is caused by people and maybe it's not." What's wrong with going green, it's like a
moon shot project.
I'll try to keep this short as we can't go on forever with this and you are wearing me out. If there's no hope for you or your girlfriend to do a little digging then I'm wasting my breath:
Answer to prong 1:
It's called critical thinking. I'll give you a real example. Michael Mann constructs a hockey stick graph that everyone holds up as an incredible bit of scientific research. McIntyre, among a small number of others, takes it upon himself to peer review the hockey stick study for himself. He finds problems with it and publishes his findings about these problems. A pro warming website, RealClimate.org, run by the director of NASA GISS, Gavin Schmidt himself, rebuts McIntyre and more or less says he's wrong on everything, and where he isn't wrong, it doesn't change the results at all. This seems to be where John Barton stops reading and concludes that he likes the way Gavin said things and he's going to believe Gavin. Meanwhile, Dan looks at what Gavin said and waits to see what McIntyre's rebuttal to Gavin is. It goes back and forth like this until it becomes obvious that one side isn't being completely forthcoming and honest. Anecdotally, you can even see this in the way Gavin runs his website compared to how McIntyre runs his. In the comment section, Gavin the moderator routinely blocks posts, actually edits posts before they come out of moderation, and when all else fails, closes discussion on any particular topic. He also plays with posts so that it looks like he has the better of an argument, when in reality he's simply fudged the other guy's post and then put it up. Conversely, McIntyre's site is science based (just go look at it, except for the recent posts about the election) and is what I could call an open source environment. Many experts from various disciplines post there, opposing viewpoints are never edited out, and it is a free exchange of ideas. McIntyre includes guest posts from high powered, highly qualified people.
I may have a little advantage here because I have enough background in stats and engineering to understand enough of the discussion to get the gist of it. Of course I understand some of the issues 100% as would you, and others less so.
In that example from yesterday when that wacko website was saying that the Greenpeace founder was wrong about everything, you need to go a step further and examine whether their statements are accurate. I know enough background to say they are completely wrong. For instance, they claim that we know exactly what forces drive climate. If that were true, the climate models would be very accurate. Even to this day they have shown almost no predictive power. It goes on and on like this. But, you have to keep digging until you see who is making statements based on the best research we have, and who is making statements from out of their butt.
I think you suffer from the group think phenomenon. These vocal groups keep saying man made climate change is real, all this money is being spent on it, carbon exchanges and taxes are being levied in Europe, so there just HAS to be something to it. Besides, people always screw up the environment so we're probably heating up the earth, too.
This is understandable, and is probably why the get away with it for so long. Having the media in your back pocket doesn't hurt, either.
Well, maybe I've wandered around a bit in this answer, but you can't just read two articles and pick who you want to believe. You have to dig a little and get down to the actual science. You say it isn't possible for me to do my own climate research. Well, here's an interesting story:
McIntyre questioned why the Mann data ended in 1980 (or thereabouts) and were not brought up to the year 2000, providing much more relevant data. The answer from Mann was that it was very difficult and expensive to get to the locations where these trees are in order to take core samples and he didn't have the resources.
So McIntyre formed what he called "the Starbuck's hypothesis." It went something like this: Could a climate scientist get a Starbuck's coffee in the morning, spend the say sampling tree rings and be back in time for a nice dinner? The answer is here:
https://climateaudit.org/2007/10/12/a-little-secret/
It is a bit of fun, but the fact is this guy got the necessary permits and went out and did his own field work. So it can be done. BTW, Mann knew that his tree rings didn't correlate with temperature so didn't want to bring the data up to date.
I could go on and on with stuff like this. The next thing most people say is, OK maybe tree rings are no good, but there is so much more evidence, ice cores, speleothems, ice sheets, and on and on so the overwhelming research still must be true. Well, if you look at each of those subjects you continue to find varying degrees of junk science. In some cases, the science is good, but you just can't make and definitive conclusions from it.
Prong 2: Maybe you've been spending too much time in China, but there is no free lunch. Where does all this money for the moon shot of environmentalism come from? Does it grow on trees? No, it comes from taxes taken under penalty of jail from the private sector. Who get's to make this decision, Obama? the non-elected bureaucrats at the EPA?
No downside? How about all the coal miners that will be put out of work? How about all the cue case manufacturers who will not be able to find enough leather? Or maybe they will simply be banned from using any leather at all, including cue tips. Or, maybe someone will decide for you that the production of plastic billiard balls emits too much carbon, and so no more balls will be manufactured, just like the incandescent light bulb. You know, the one that was replaced by a compact fluorescent that contains MERCURY. You practically need a haz-mat team to come out if you break a light bulb.
OK, I think I've overstated my point. I really don't want to debate politics and environmental policy.
My original point still stands. You have not taken the time and effort to really understand that one side is being honest about the science, and the other is lying to you for political and financial gain. If you spend the time, you'll realize soon enough which is which.
Suggestion: read the link above about tree sampling and read the comments. Sometimes something will get your interest and you will be off to another link. You can spend hours and hours doing this and you'll be surprised at how much you can learn. If you need clarification on something send me a pm and I'll try to put you in the right direction.
Have a good evening.
No one questioned the "hockey stick" data before McIntyre? Yes they did.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockey_stick_controversy
To act like this guy is the definitive "last word" on the hockey stick chart is silly. The NATURE of widely publicized ANYTHING is that whatever it is will attract criticism and review. And the bigger the criticism the more that the research will be analyzed and defended if possible.
"More than two dozen reconstructions, using various statistical methods and combinations of proxy records, have supported the broad consensus shown in the original 1998 hockey-stick graph, with variations in how flat the pre-20th century "shaft" appears.[12][13] The 2007 IPCC Fourth Assessment Report cited 14 reconstructions, 10 of which covered 1,000 years or longer, to support its strengthened conclusion that it was likely that Northern Hemisphere temperatures during the 20th century were the highest in at least the past 1,300 years.[14] Over a dozen subsequent reconstructions, including Mann et al. 2008 and PAGES 2k Consortium 2013, have supported these general conclusions."
And it's a silly assumption to think that a physics professor can't read all sides and come to her own conclusions on the science and significance of any errors in the research or analysis.
As for your doomsday scenarios of people being held up at gunpoint for climate taxes and poor coal miners being unable to work.....sounds just like the buggy makers whining about all the people in buggy and carriage industry being displaced by the automobile. Here is a doomsday scenario for you, 1ft of sea level rise over the next 50 years will wipe out the living space for hundreds of millions of people and wipe out millions of jobs as well causing the largest forced mass migration of humans in human history.
I guess trying to prevent that isn't something important to you because you're scared of having to maybe pay a little extra in tax?
I am not worried about shortages in leather from less cattle being raised and slaughtered, I can surely adapt to less leather if that were the case. Much harder to adapt to a situation where billions of people are displaced and the global economy is in tatters because of endless major disasters.
http://www.climatecentral.org/news/study-reveals-acceleration-of-sea-level-rise-20055
Here you go....these guys do much better at scaring me about the future than you do.
https://youtu.be/Xcp1w-uVDqk
http://sealevel.climatecentral.org/maps
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Where did I say McIntyre was the very first to question it? I said "McIntyre, among a small number of others,"
You just learned the name, Steve McIntyre, two days ago when I told you who he is. I've been reading his blog for years and you are telling me how he fits into the hockey stick debate? He is generally accepted as the #1 authority in the analysis of tree ring proxy studies. Read that again, he's not the guy creating the tree ring studies (although he did that in his Starbuck's article), he's the #1 guy at analyzing the quality of the science that the climate scientists are generating. It's not even debatable.
John - you keep making my point over and over. You can't google "hockey stick graph," find a quote that fits your current point of view, and claim to have rebutted anything. It would take me an hour to explain to you why the quote above is meaningless. I'll try to give you the upshot in just a few lines:
1. Any given temperature reconstruction is created by combining several data sets that span, say, 1000 years. These data sets consist of tree ring measurements from trees all over the world. So, for a temperature reconstruction like Mann's hockey stick, there could be 15 or 20 different sets of tree ring data to create the graph. Similarly, if a guy like Briffa does another reconstruction, he might choose 10 or 12 tree ring histories (called chronologies). Briffa might have different criteria for his temperature reconstruction, so he chooses different tree data sets. Here is the important point: First they say there were 14 other reconstructions that supported the hockey stick. Then they say there were an additional 12 more that did the same. NOWHERE do they say that the tree ring chronologies used in these 26 studies are using data independent from Mann's. What I'm telling you is that all of these studies are using the SAME tree ring data that Mann used. The only difference is that one study chooses maybe these 15 out of a total of 40, and that guy's study chooses maybe 30 of those 40.
2. It's even worse than what I just said. McIntyre proved that the hockey stick is caused by only a handful of bristlecone pines combined with a faulty use of statistics. It's a little hard to get this point across in a few sentences. The best I can do is to say that it didn't matter what data Mann used. As long as he had the tree rings from 3 or 4 trees located in Colorado in his data set, he could have used stock market prices for the last 100 years and he would have gotten the same hockey stick shape. Think about that. He could have used numbers generated by a random number generator for 95% of the data, but if he just made sure to include those bristlecone pines, he gets his hockey stick which is supposed to represent the average temperature of the entire world for over 1000 years... all due to 3 little old trees on a mountain in Colorado.
Hard to believe, huh?
3. On top of all of this, McIntyre's field work in sampling the exact same trees that Mann used showed that the large growth rings in more recent years (presumably meaning hot temps) were actually due to damage to the tree trunks, and subsequent accelerated growth of the still healthy sections.
4. You can't actually use tree rings as a stand-in, or proxy, for temperature. For clarity, there were no thermometers before the mid-ish 1800's so they need to find something they can use to estimate temperature for the last 1000 years. The theory was that if they chose certain trees in high elevation, moisture limited environments, that a larger ring meant warmer weather. Well, that hypothesis has been busted as well, and even some of the people doing these studies have admitted as much privately. A large ring might mean more warmth or it might mean more moisture. It might also mean less warmth (too warm leads to drought and slow growth, too).
Should I go on?
Of course she could, but she will be the first to tell you that she can't do as much by reading fluff articles. It takes time to dig into this stuff and figure it out. A large reason for that is that one side is purposely putting out misleading and outright false information. Yes, they really are.
The difference is that the buggy whip went out due to the free market system, not because the government mandated anything. And, yes, people will go to jail if they refuse to pay their taxes.
And a purple unicorn might fall from space and kill us all. Why don't we do some research to try and stop it. Ted Dansen said the oceans will be uninhabitable by 1998. Al Gore made so many predictions that never happened it is hard to keep count.
Do some more homework. Even the climate alarmists say that stopping nearly all carbon output will only decrease greenhouse gases by a negligible amount.
Please, can't we focus on one disaster at a time?
Just give me a heads up if you guys ever want to go back to talking about Stroke Vs Aiming...