faetal on 6/4/2015 at 16:18
Wow, this thread just jumped some serious shark. I don't have anything more to add, since it falls on deaf ears, or more correctly, ignorant ones.
Time for you pigeons to high five each other for shitting on the chess board.
[EDIT] If nothing else, here we really see the epitome of dilettantes, which is a nice thread closer.
Muzman on 6/4/2015 at 16:35
Quote Posted by Tony_Tarantula
RE, Global warming, i found an old column that's sure to get you all steamed:
From the guy who founded what is widely known (if rarely acknowledged as) the best economic analytical and forecasting firm in the business...
You may be familiar with him if you've seen the documentary "The Forecaster"
Overall he's critical of "global warming" with his argument being that the "science" doesn't incorporate data over a large enough timeline and is the equivalent of drawing conclusions about the health of a forest by examining a single tree.
(
http://armstrongeconomics.com/2014/02/13/global-warming-why-it-is-nonsense/)
Quote:
I have reviewed the cyclical discoveries of Sallie Baliunas. Ice core samples were taken going back thousands of years and what was discovered is that the sun is indeed a thermal dynamic system that beats like your heart and there is a 300 year cycle between maximum and minimum. Do not confuse short-term trends or local observations for a few decades and assume we have altered the entire planet.
The thing is one giant straw man with some magical thinking thrown in for good measure. I mean '300year heartbeat'. Hard evidence based rationalist my ass. He presumably knows what happened after the Soon and Balunias paper and to the journal that published it.
Yeah you hear some dodgy things about some environmentalists here and there. Some seem true, but some seem like cherry picking a larger argument about population danger into Alex Jones 'OMG Population Control! FEMA Camps!' fodder. So I'm ...skeptical of the reportage of anti-environmentalists on environmentalists. And hey, most environmentalists these days are staunchly against GMO for frequently mis informed reasons. So they can't be all bad.
That just underlines the hacky ad hom' quality of the article.
Although flipping the script to say that
climate scientists are looking too short term when talking about solar irradiance (which is completely missing the point about why irradiance is a debatable indicator, but anyway...), instead of everyone but climate scientists are looking too short term like usual - doing that is cute, I'll give it that.
The virtual lock step dogmatism of freemarketists' need to undermine climate research ought to give more pause, or at least equal. Doesn't seem to attract as much excitement as "Envoronmentalists are crypto-communists bent on world domination' though. Dunno why.
The settled science thing is a sophistic distraction too. The climate deny-er (there , I said it)-slash-skeptic movement has been virtually post-modern in its attempts to destroy knowledge itself, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised. But the way people talk we should have to re-prove the heart pumps blood before we can't attempt CPR on someone rather than fall to the intellectual crime of presupposing 'absolute certainty'.
It's armchair intellectual onanism.
heywood on 6/4/2015 at 21:23
(
http://thischangeseverything.org/)
The above book, and the favorable publicity it received from left-leaning media, fuels what I think is educated denial by some leaders on the right. That is, smart people who understand that anthropogenic climate change is real still work to discredit it because they fear what would happen economically and politically if people like the author were able to use climate change as a way to galvanize public opinion.
And there are conservatives who accept that we're changing the climate but don't necessarily buy into Hansen's Venus Syndrome and other doomsday predictions. They think climate change will be slow enough that we can adapt to the change with less pain than if we tried to reverse it. In other words, the cure might be worse than the disease. That view does not garner as much attention as outright denial but it's probably a lot more common.
Tony_Tarantula on 6/4/2015 at 21:36
The correlation is stronger than you think:
Quote:
The thing is one giant straw man with some magical thinking thrown in for good measure. I mean '300year heartbeat'. Hard evidence based rationalist my ass. He presumably knows what happened after the Soon and Balunias paper and to the journal that published it.
So your entire refutation is to just fling around insults and name calling? It might be "cool" in your social circle to respond to any criticism with logic-free snark but you're not convincing anyone here.
Quote:
Although flipping the script to say that climate scientists are looking too short term when talking about solar irradiance (which is completely missing the point about why irradiance is a debatable indicator, but anyway...), instead of everyone but climate scientists are looking too short term like usual - doing that is cute, I'll give it that.
You were saying about straw men....
So what you're saying is that criticism of one side of an argument is equivalent to endorsement of the other side? He mentioned climate scientists, not "everyone but climate scientists". If you actually read it instead of just spouting off half cocked you'd know that he thinks the overwhelming majority of people only think short term.....both climate scientists and everyone else included(which, incidentally, is the reason why most economic theories are bullshit).
Inline Image:
http://i0.wp.com/armstrongeconomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Empires-Rise-Fall-Armstrong.jpgbjack on 6/4/2015 at 23:34
Tony_T, I have spent far too much time looking over climate science over the past couple of weeks. I have read papers on pro and con and countless idiotic comments sections that sound just like this thread. I see cherry picking on both sides, yet not one reasonable answer to the "pause", other than, "well the extra heat is in the ocean." Why would the ocean not absorb the extra heat before, but it is now just at the time the AGW is falling apart? Next it is going to be that the extra reflectivity of concrete in China's cities has reduced the warming… And so it goes.
The topic has become a political football and religion. It is now dogma and cannot be argued without the pro side resorting to nothing but name calling. They refuse to refute any "negative" evidence. It is "settled" and thus the whole topic is closed to ALL debate. I now am starting to think these people also hate Israel and are sorry Hitler didn't win. That type of rhetoric is just as ridiculous as "you are all idiots!", but I thought it would have a nice home here. :D
The dilettantes spoken of at the start of the thread were people that refuse to vaccinate their children. That is a pretty simple argument and one that shows very clear outcomes. It has been shown that vaccines do not cause autism, yet people still want to be cautious at the risk of everyone else. Climate Change is a far more complex situation.
All I can say is if someone can read some of Tony_T's links and the links within those links and still insist they see the ghosts, then they are truly delusional.
Back in the 1970's I was a super environmentalist. I thought CFCs were going to ruin the planet. I was freaked out about every little thing on the news. The oceans were dying. The birds were all going to fall out of the sky. The bomb was just a finger press away. I pleaded with my parents, teachers, all sorts of people… WHY! Oh why won't you do something about this? The general answer? "It's all bull shit."
Follow the money people.
zombe on 7/4/2015 at 08:51
Quote Posted by bjack
I have spent far too much time looking over climate science over the past couple of weeks. I have read papers /.../
I seriously doubt that.
Quote Posted by bjack
I see cherry picking on both sides, yet not one reasonable answer to the "pause", other than, "well the extra heat is in the ocean." Why would the ocean not absorb the extra heat before, but it is now just at the time the AGW is falling apart?
Holy fuckballs, that shit again.
Since you refuse to actually read anything that does not conform to what you want to believe and keep repeating the ubiquitous and vague denier repertoire - some drive-by attempts to clear things up right here under your nose:
* "pause" - i do not like this word as it is misleading by implying "stopped". IMHO, more correct would be "slowed down" because there is no indications it has stopped. The timeframe is too short -> all you can say is that, statistically speaking, it has slowed down (not warming in general of course, just surface warming).
* "well the extra heat is in the ocean." - well, the extra heat is indeed most likely in the ocean (+ other effects). We can directly measure what earth radiates away and we can directly measure what sun gives -> we know earth is keeping more than it is giving out. It goes somewhere. Oceans seem to be the most likely place (among other things ... amusingly, one of them being the CFC ban you mentioned in an unrelated line).
* Since you were not clear in your implied inquiry about the "pause": (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming_hiatus) - why is any of this "yet not one reasonable answer"? What is unreasonable? How do you justify your claim of its unreasonableness?
Sidenote: I wonder if some of it is caused by temperature differences getting stuck in phase transition of ice - that would imply increased rate of melting (which might be hard to ascertain). Anyone encountered anything about it?
Quote Posted by bjack
The topic has become a political football and religion. It is now dogma and cannot be argued without the pro side resorting to nothing but name calling. They refuse to refute any "negative" evidence. It is "settled" and thus the whole topic is closed to ALL debate.
Dunning–Kruger effect is too strong with you for any meaningful debate. Debate, as in: attempt to establish and exchange information and understandings derived from actual scientist in the relevant field - something you consistently seem to refuse to do from the get-go making a "debate" impossible by forcing us to the "debate"-position of perpetually wading through an incoming stream of shit. At this point, you would have to show some effort of yours first - and no, sticking your fingers in your ears and proclaiming LA-LA-LA does not count.
Quote Posted by bjack
All I can say is if someone can read some of Tony_T's links and the links within those links and still insist they see the ghosts, then they are truly delusional.
All i have seen has been garbage - blatantly so. Also, the mass-copy-paste denier blogosphere is a dreadful mess to link to and they, unsurprisingly, have never anything new to say. All hail the same crap.
Quote Posted by bjack
/.../I thought CFCs were going to ruin the planet./.../
A shining example of discovering a disaster in the making, studying it, understanding it and taking steps to amend it - and observing the disaster subsiding in accordance. A triumph of science over politics.
... don't say you have a problem with CFCs too :/
Muzman on 7/4/2015 at 10:09
The trouble with fixing large problems before they wreck everything is you create a market for the idea that there never was one.
Quote Posted by Tony_Tarantula
The correlation is stronger than you think:
So your entire refutation is to just fling around insults and name calling? It might be "cool" in your social circle to respond to any criticism with logic-free snark but you're not convincing anyone here.
Insults, name calling and the fact the research he is basing his "argument" on, such that it is, has been discredited a decade ago. That article is offensive and insulting itself. It deserves nothing less than derision in return. It offers no arguments or information of anything concrete. It either lies about or misrepresents scientific research, or worse is basically dismissive of many fields based on some un evidenced intuition about systems he shows no knowledge of. Plus a little anecdote designed to libel environmentalism by showing its 'true colours' or whatever.
This garbage doesn't even rise to the level of "criticism".
Quote:
So what you're saying is that criticism of one side of an argument is equivalent to endorsement of the other side? He mentioned climate scientists, not "everyone but climate scientists". If you actually read it instead of just spouting off half cocked you'd know that he thinks the overwhelming majority of people only think short term.....both climate scientists and everyone else included(which, incidentally, is the reason why most economic theories are bullshit).
I don't think you even understand what he is writing about. I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt. If he's going to bring up Balunias and then say climate scientists don't think long term enough - a statement that is ostensibly idiotic, since the entire global warming debate has been a story of people saying "Haha Winter! No AGW!!", "Warming has paused! Not AGW!!!" and scientists saying "sigh, no. think longer term" over and over and over again ad nauseum - The irradiance argument is one of the few where people often use short term analyses to show that no direct indication can be found to relate to recent warming. The decadal fluctuations don't really line up or correlate very well with temperature.
Balunias is a strong advocate of the long term solar irradiance pattern, naturally. It's not a zero effect, but the correlation to temperature averages isn't strong enough
without atmospheric and other forcings. That has been the long term wash out of the notion.
I have to bend over backwards to pull that much implied reason and relevance to the overall debate out of there. I'm doing him a big favour.
In virtually every instance the climate scientists are the long (very long) term thinkers. Christ, the whole debate about predictions and modelling comes from these atmospheric reconstructions going back hundreds of thousands of years. That is how we say we know what CO2 does to climate. That is ground floor, point one of the whole thing: Do long term climate reconstructions show us the forcing factor of CO2? Climate scientists mainly say yes, and adding this much will screw us. Alternate theories look for some other factor.
That's THE debate.
To come up and accuse the whole field of short term thinking is fundamentally absurd. It's not even wrong.
That graph looks like it might as well be Astrology too. Have people tested it against Saturn rising in Gemini? Wouldn't want to miss that factor in the whole thing.
DDL on 7/4/2015 at 11:40
Quote Posted by Muzman
That graph looks like it might as well be Astrology too. Have people tested it against Saturn rising in Gemini? Wouldn't want to miss that factor in the whole thing.
Also, a Y-axis scale might've been nice, but I guess that was too much like proper science.
heywood on 7/4/2015 at 12:09
It's a hand drawing.
You guys are wasting your breath arguing against a hand drawing and some hearsay from a con man with no background in climate science.
Martin Armstrong spent a decade in jail for running a ponzi scheme. And before that he was nailed for mail fraud and tax evasion. His forecasting genius led him to bankruptcy in the 1980s and then he lost hundreds of millions of Japanese investors' money making more bad bets. His claim to fame is "discovering" that the average length of the business cycle is 3141 days (8.6 years) which is supposed to be profound or something because of the superficial resemblance to pi. Never mind that the actual average length of the business cycle is more like 5.8 years. He also claims to have a super-computer model that predicted the 1987 NYSE and 1989 Nikkei crashes to the day amongst other things, but there is no evidence of him making those predictions in advance. As far as I know, there is no evidence that this computer model actually exists, although he claims the CIA and Chinese were after it. :rolleyes:
If this is the kind of person Tony and bjack look to for wisdom on climate change, there really isn't any point in making counter arguments. We may as well be debating aliens or religion.
faetal on 7/4/2015 at 12:13
This is why I've stopped expending the keystrokes. When debating with people who can't tell the qualitative difference between shitty conjecture and robust research, you're not debating, you're just engaging in a "who can keep raising new objections for the longest" contest and the person with the least knowledge will always win, because returning search results for leading terms (e.g. proof against human climate change or similar) is a lot less effort than making a non-biased pass at the current research. So people like Tony and bjack get to feed their cognitive dissonance with stuff which sounds sciencey enough to satisfy them and let them keep ignoring the actual data and research. End result? Pigeons shitting all over the chess board and thinking they, the plucky underdogs who weren't sucked into the dogma of chess, just won a chess game.
It's stupidity at its most basic level to think that when a field is more than 90% agreed on the basic premise of something, then this implies dogma and the <10% are the ones who must be on to something. Too many movies, too few books.
