Australia makes into 2013 in good shape despite the carbon tax. How can this be?
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InsideClimateNews (who I've been unimpressed with before) via Brian at Eli's tell us that Exxon may claim to favour a carbon tax, but aren't exactly enthusiastic about it. Because someone else was saying it, my natural initial reaction was to disagree; but having poked their sources a bit, it looks…
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Information Overload is Pattern Recognition
October 27, 2013
Chuckles, COP19+, Bangkok, Post-AR5, Maldives, Potash, Energiewende
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I called it :-)
Beg all you like. Your past record of differing has been almost entirely Fail.
And begging doesn't change the fact that it's "unsporting" (in your idiom) to demand a do-over at the opponent's expense when you don't like the outcome. And that remains true even if you personally didn't witness the original.
You miscomprehend everything else, so why not this?
(And one notes that your hypocrisy is almost entirely unbounded - and apparently entirely unembarrassing to you.)
Your lack of comprehension leads you to claim facts that are not in evidence, Madame. But of course, you will deny that because you don't comprehend your own error.
Nope!
It refers back to my earlier unsuccessful attempts to educate you as to how it seeks to lead its readers down a particular pseudo-scientific path, all the while flattering them that they are deciding it all for themselves - and that they are doing a better job at science than professional scientists.
And those efforts pre-rebut your foolish statement:
But since copious evidence demonstrates that bamboozling you on scientific questions is ludicrously easy for anyone so inclined, and that you can't remember what you wrote yesterday let alone remember reading an argument that requires a little bit of thought to follow from weeks ago, you are not equipped to figure out that you are being manipulated and bamboozled or even recall that your claims were rebutted long ago.
C'est la vie.
lemme get this right .... brad keyes wants everyone to guess what he's thinking, and if they can't then people who accept that global warming exists and that it is something to worry about are wrong?
does bradley's wet nurse know that he's showing his willy to people on the intertubes?
Really Lotharsson?
Here is the Climate4you website:
http://www.climate4you.com/
Please explain how this website is a crank site or is misleading people or pseudo scientific or claiming that it does a better job at science than professional scientists.
Which 'professional scientists'' Lotharsson?
Also Lotharsson?????
I think Humlum IS ACTUALLY a scientist isn't he?
Or do you think his CV here is made up on the 'crank' website?
http://www.climate4you.com/Text/BIBLIOGRAPHY%20OLE%20HUMLUM.pdf
I also think he's probably classed as a 'professional scientist' considering he works in the field.
Your so called 'evidence' was a work in character assassination via some links to sites where we had people in overdrive practicing what Walter Starck (who is also a professional scientist BTW) calls "an academic pissing contest" over a particular paper.
There was no EVIDENCE about the claims you have made above Lotharsson!
And before you get yourself tied up in knots, I am NOT (repeat NOT) therefore automatically a blind faith supporter of Climate4You or Humlum.
I do however object to your attempt to practice character assassination and then claim you have based it on EVIDENCE.
That is UTTER TOSH! (to borrow a JeffH term)
And there we have - with apparently no trace of irony - an unsportsmanlike request for a do-over! You couldn't make this shit up!
(But chameleon can.)
The cranks site like Anthony Watts' WUWT or Jo Nova's crank site specialise in cranky blog posts littered with cranky comments.
Jo Nova's site is completely riddled with LaRouchian nonsense and crankery about how the...er .."banking families"...are behind the UN's Fascist-Communist Agenda 21 world-takeover bid.
And WUWT is ridiculous - there isn't a crank too cranky or an argument too illogical that they won't run it.
What happened when Anthony Watts' "Surface Stations" project proved the temperature record is sound?
What happened when the BEST temperature reconstruction confirmed the "Hockey Stick" was correct?
Watts just ignored it, pretended it hadn't happened and went into denial mode - the surest sign of a crank is self-contradiction and an unwillingness to learn.
If Chameleon wants to learn, she would ignore the untrustworthy and unqualified shonks to be visiting the following sites, run by qualified, trustworthy professionals:
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/change/
http://www.csiro.au/en/Outcomes/Climate/Understanding.aspx
These people are honest, professional and qualified.
The crank blogs are run by people without relevant qualifications who are in the business of political lobbying and misinformation.
Yes, Chameleon, Humlum is a crank.
Who is he?
Why would you go to some fringe Swedish geoscientist for beginner information on climate science instead of to BoM and CSIRO?
You have misinterpreted again. Read it again. And again. Until you understand your quote does not represent what I wrote.
Ouch! Sorry for that crime against readability! (Feel free to delete it, Tim.)
I'll try again:
@chameleon….
I'm reluctant to criticise a friend (elógialo en público/eviscéralo en privado/etc.), but, since friends owe each other the truth, my fellow denialista and #1 splendid-hued, swivel-eyed (in a cool way), coldblooded negatrix… you quadruply fail the same intelligence test I’ve been known to perseverate in flunking for hours on end. Like an idiot.
Without further ado, I present:
The Anatomy of Denier Fail.
**********************************
1. The affirmer @Lotharsson
—possibly a male, more likely a bug-ridden natural language worm whose “smarts” don’t even rise to the Turing pre-test of
NAMING JUST THREE (3) SCIENTIFIC THEORIES A MEAN OL’ ARCH-DENIALIST LIKE ME REFUSES TO BELIEVE IN
—types/echoes some string. (Usually long, and occasionally almost insane enough to make Wow look like he’s only going Part Retard, as he’s so fond of insisting.)
2. You read said string.
[Denier brain fail 1.]
3. You invest your own finite and precious time upon this mortal stage addressing good-faith, responsive thoughts back at LOTH4R++ in the childlike, evangelical faith that what you write is one day going to somehow budge the tape-head that is Lotharsson's nearest analogue to a mind.
Completely naive of you, of course. Learning difficulties much? [Denier brain fail 2.]
4. Rinse and repeat, substituting Wow for LOTH4R++.*
As above, you lose 2 Denier Brain Points, bringing you to −4.
(Don’t feel bad—my current lo-score is something like −12.)
*—Wow’s string isn’t as long as Lotharsson’s.
—Another difference is that Wow is definitely a real person; even bleeding-edge natural-language algorithms aren’t capable of 100% Retard performance yet. The technology is at least 10 years away, I’d say.
*******************************************
Give it up, girlfriend.
You are teh failing here.
Do something fun—I dunno, give any domestic pets you have some affection, read a book, make up an iTunes playlist of the all-time most ass-shitting Pantera and publish/share it with a single click. It’s That Easy.
Fuck those suggestions: listen to me now. Go read the fragnificent @tucci78’s latest at WUWT.
(I think it’s on the thread about “And They Wonder Why Climate Realist Sites Get More Traffic Than Gullibilist Sites…”.)
If you’re not familiar with Dr Matarese’s shit (he's a GP by day and is no relation to “Dr Maharaji,” Jeff) then I envy you, @chameleon, because you have ahead of you an awesome literary discovery.
Not to mismanage your expectations or anything, but imagine a cross between Hitchens and someone who learnt the scientific method. I hope he quits his day job. What happened to Hitch left a gaping, weeping hole in the world of letters.
So, go away. :-)
We’re only killing zomgies and time here.
Oh, fuck me. Failure to close italics carries over?
Test.
test.
Never mind ... that unclosed italics thingie can go on forever.
Until someone stops it. It's always fun to guess whether it will be your own post that is the stopper. (But I wouldn't expect it on a public holiday anyway.)
Yeah, mediocre blogging platform. Tim usually fixes close tag fails in the end.
And to my mind the overdone italics do rather seem to go with the pungent whiff of spittle-flecked rant anyway.
@ VINCE
WTF ????????????????????????
January 28, 2013
Yes, Chameleon, Humlum is a crank.
Who is he?
Why would you go to some fringe Swedish geoscientist for beginner information on climate science instead of to BoM and CSIRO?
I'm searching and searching and searching and NOWHERE can I find ANYTHING where I said INSTEAD OF!!!!!!!!!!
And Vince you bloody imbecile I googled the bloody Humlum CV
Did you bother to read it??????????
It doesn't say that " YES , HUMLUM IS A CRANK!"
Good lord!
What planet do you live on Vince?
There is absolutely NOTHING illegal,crankish or wrong with his quals nor is there anything amiss with his methodology or use of scientific data.
In fact IF YOU BOTHER TO READ THE WEBSITE, it is exactly the same climate data sources that most of the scientific community uses.
For fox ache!
And Vince!
I go to BoM and CSIRO far more often than Climate4you.
I actually live and work in Australia!
Some of my best friends work in those 2 institutions.
BUT VINCE????????
Is there some unwritten law somewhere that says I'm forbidden to look at other sites?
If I was paying attention to you, none of us should listen to or read anything that JeffH contributes because he works in Holland apparently.
As I told Lotharsson quite some time ago, many of my family members, friends and colleagues have a scientific background (including myself and my husband)
You folks at Deltoid are very amusing most of the time but I find your attempts at character assassination of perfectly legitimate people highly unpleasant.
And Lotharsson,
Forgive me once again for stating the bleeding obvious but you did indeed write this @ comment # 2 above:
…cheap shot on the Climate4you info.
Nope!
It refers back to my earlier unsuccessful attempts to educate you as to how it seeks to lead its readers down a particular pseudo-scientific path, all the while flattering them that they are deciding it all for themselves – and that they are doing a better job at science than professional scientists.
So this comment from you here:
@#7
Please explain how this website is … claiming that it does a better job at science than professional scientists.
You have misinterpreted again. Read it again. And again. Until you understand your quote does not represent what I wrote.
Is UTTER TOSH!
And Thanks for the advice BradK.
Can I have the money with just one answer?
And that answer is:
Drrrrrruuuuuummmmmm rrroooooolllllll
You have NOT (repeat not!!!) DENIED one single, solitary scientific theory.
It beggars disbelief how often these people here can write different forms of the word 'deny' in their comments and the write ABSOLUTELY EFFING STUPIDHEAD COMMENTS like the ones from Vince and Lotharsson above.
What's even more amusing is that they take themselves soooooooo seriously when they make those effing stupidhead comments.
No, I don't. Because you have not stated the bleeding obvious.
What actually is bleeding obvious is - as it was when I pointed it above - that you have misinterpreted what I wrote. You know, like you're famous for around these parts.
Read what I wrote again. And again. Until you understand how it differs from what you claim I said.
Hint: who is doing the deciding in my statement?
I'm with Loth - the permanent italics fit neatly with the current hysterical and over-wrought atmosphere that the same party has induced around here more generally.
I'm hoping that other things get rectified along with the tag closures. I doubt I'm alone.
Conversing among the choir. Boring.
Here's an open question that might get this party started again:
Why do organs of climate-alarmist discourse always seem to be irremediably slanted in their content?
Worse, the hypocrite goes all hysterical when someone DARES interpret what HE writes and DEMANDS that you show PRECISELY where those PRECISE words were said.
What makes it even more of an idiot troll fest is that the silly bastard never manages to say anything coherent, so interpretation into actual nominative English is required.
He loves to insinuate because he thinks he can never be found out.
Trouble is, we do.
Every time.
And then he throws a tantrum over it.
Really?
Let me guess: this is projection again, right?
Your track record on according reality in your posts the proper respect ensures that your piteous claims are dealt with in the correct manner: laughed at.
Tosh Lotharsson,
I copy/pasted your comment.
It's exactly what you wrote.
That time I was talking about chameleon. But the level of hypocrisy is much the same.
Ah, well, chubby has tried to pick up the "successful" (as long as you're an idiot troll) technique of Brat.
Yes, it is - which at this late stage is a crashingly idiotic observation. I agree that it is what I wrote. Nothing I wrote above indicates otherwise!
What I disagree with is your false interpretation. That's why I did not ask you to correct a misquote, I asked you specifically to re-read what I wrote until you understand how you misinterpreted it. But you even misinterpreted that simple request!
That's almost pathological.
Time for some more reality to counter the post-modernist like humbug of a hi-jacker.
The basis for this post has been around for awhile now but worth taking a look at a revamp, besides cham & co. would not know of the original anyway: 3-D Visualization of Arctic Ice Loss.
No warming huh?
"Why do organs of climate-alarmist discourse always seem to be irremediably slanted in their content?"
Aside from a few big words, this question could have come from Bill O'Reilly or some other dimwit pundit at Fox News.
The terms 'catastrophe' and 'alarmist' are straight from the corporate funded think-tank handbook. Great propaganda terms those; they say nothing about the science or the potential consequences of inaction. Instead they reek of anthropocentric arrogance qand techno-unrealism.
Brad, let me just say that you are heading for the sin-bin along with Jonas, Tim Curtin, and other time-wasters who have managed to get through the door soemhow and then waffle on endlessly about nix. It wouldn't be so bad if you showed that you'd read some of the primary literature - just a tad for heaven's sake - but your use of terminology suggests the closest you have come to the primary literature is WUWT, CA, Marohasy or Nova, Delingpole, Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Junk Science or Climate Depot.
In other words about a million light years from it. If Tim is peeking at this, he knows what advice most Deltoiders will give with respect to Brad and Chammy's scientific contribution. The referee is going to blow the whistle soon. It will be a game misconduct in addition to 10 minutes for waffling.
@chameleon, this one is dead or dying—go to the Ridley thread if you want my responses to your comments!
And then go do something better with your time.
Some evidence for the rational here:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Video-Climate-Change-Lines-of-Evidence-…
I don't think this will be a problem for the insane troll. They've hijacked two threads with complete bollocks, all that putting it in one separate thread would do is make it impossible to find any other thread because his ravings will continue unabated.
Insane, remember.
"Brad, let me just say that you are heading for the sin-bin"
LOL. Yes, I let you just say that opinion, but in the local dialect:
"Citation?"
The bottom line is, you're wrong... unless you're telling me Tim is:
1. a bad blog businessman
2. anti-debate
and
3. a coward and Lewandoskyist?
I've actually met him, and I have a rather different impression.
I could have grossly overestimated his intellectual integrity—it wouldn't be the first time!—but surely not as grossly as that.
"Aside from a few big words, this question could have come from Bill O’Reilly or some other dimwit pundit at Fox News."
Or the question could have been... I don't know... a pun? (Re-read it.)
Still, thanks for your response, as always.
It doesn't bother me at all that you're wrong about everything and that you wrongly think I'm wrong about everything—you have (and retain) my respect for speaking your mind.
:-)
Have you decided you'd like to find out how to convert ACC-is-a-hoaxers to ACC-existsers?
If you've accepted my offer, I didn't see it.
But that's probably because I've been distracted—will try and catch up with missed posts now.
I think we need some new threads. Even Jonas is not so verbose. I almost miss the guy, given what's happening on Deltoid over the past few days.
Now Chameleon has moved up in the world to Ole Humlum.
Sheesh. Another climate change denying blog.
Now Chameleon has moved up in the world to Ole Humlum. OK, he's better than Marohasy. JUST. Another guy with not that many studies or citations. But blogs are not where you will find science is done!
Sheesh. Another climate change denying blog.
Primary literature Chammy! Blogs are not the primary literature! I wann see primary studies!
That won't be easy for you, I know. It seems to me that the sceptics here (too kind a word, but let it go) have turned over every rock they can on the internet to find lonely voices crying out that it ain't so! It ain't so!
@JeffH,
In this comment, I will invite you to do a scientific experiment with me.
it's a depressing testament to the toxicity and bad faith of the whole Climate Debate that you're condemning so strongly.
We're not enemies in any way, and you're wrong to believe we are. (Whereas I'm correct in knowing we're not.)
I appreciate that everything you've ever been told—including by generally trustworthy sources—points to my being a bad person and your being a good person.
But they're playing you like a Monopoly car.
Here is a bet: if you and I met, and nobody mentioned the word "climate", we would be perfectly friendly and even, if events allowed, FRIENDS.
How do I know this? Because, when you're not wasting energy attacking me, you're telling me about your own values and experiences and where you come from.
So I know you fairly well!
You have relatively few true ideas, and many false ideas, about me—but that's not your fault, it's the context in which our attempts at acquaintance are taking place.
I have a fairly well-focused view of what your values are.
And as far as I can tell, THEY'RE MY VALUES.
Here's your chance to test this, if you think I'm full of shit:
Try to name a value we don't share. Keep guessing as long as it takes to find one.
Name a value of yours, and I'll tell you about myself in relation to it.
By "value" I mean an answer to a question like:
- what is good in life?
- how should a particular social groups treat another one?
- pushpin or poetry?
- is it better to be a pig contented or Socrates unhappy?
- what should politicians try to achieve?
- how important is money?
- what is man's role/relationship/responsibilities wrt the natural world
- how important is science to me?
- vinyl or DVDs?
.... things like that.
Even simpler idea: You can just ask me a list of values-questions without even telling me your own answer.
I'll trust you to say if I'm "same" or "different" in relation to your own answer.
I bet my answers will be pretty much how you feel on the same tiopic.
Bet ya can't stump me.
Bet we'll be simpatico.
Aha! It looks like Chammy found Humlums humbug through - you guessed it - Marohasy.
Oh what a tangled web of denial they weave!!! The deniers are so desperate they will scrape up anything to downplay AGW.
oh, how could I forget:
ethical values!
These are answers to questions such as:
in a given situation how should you respond?
I bet my answer to moral dilemmas will be the same answer you'd give.
"Here is a bet: if you and I met, and nobody mentioned the word “climate”, we would be perfectly friendly and even, if events allowed, FRIENDS"
Brad, you are right. I do have friends who question AGW. I disagree with them, and think that they have been misled somewhere along the line. Same with politics. I am sure we could be good friends.
But the main point I am making is that our species is at a critical crossroads. We've entered a bottleneck purely of our own making, and its going to take a lot more than our evolved intelligence and wisdom to get us through it and out the other side. I will have to be honbest and say that I do not envy those who have been born in the past 10 years. The planet they will inherit when they get to adulhood is going to be a very different one that I grew up in. By and large, most (though not all) people - at least in the quad - take a good lifestyle for granted. They assume that everything they received growing up will continue to flow to them, and possibly even get better for their own children (since western policy is primarily aimed at plundering from the resource-rich countries of the south, I cannot include thse unfortunates in my calculations).
This is evolutionarily programmed into us. Forty years ago meat was a once a week luxury, Now we can wolf it down every day in the west. Our societies are more materialistic than ever. Capitalism feeds off ever-increasing consumerism and its attendant economic growth, without reconciling this on the natural economy which provides it. Nerw technologies enable us to dig deeper, to go farther afield, to suck more resources from natural systems. They don't allow natural systems to replenish these resources any faster. That was one of Bjorn Lomborg's most massive mistakes, He argued that we are catching more fish than ever; what he didn't say is that this has come against the background of massive over exploitation of marine stocks, collapsing recruitment and imploding marine food webs. Jellyfish now occupy the terminal end of the food chain along much of the south Atlantic coastlines. This would have been unthinkable just 40 years ago. Overharvesting. A clear symptom of overshoot. Its so critical now that many oceanic piscivorous birds are doomed. Their just aren't enough fish for them to maintain minimum viable populations.
At the planetary level now 10-40% of well studied organisms are threatened with extinction. This means vertebrates and macrophytes. The list is swelling. Many species that should be on the endangered species list are not yet, simply because the IUCN is so slow to respond to demographic changes. Still, more than 1500 species of birds out of 9500 species world wide are on the list. We are Easter Island in macrocosm.
The Brundtland Commission said that 25 years ago to feed and clother all of humanity the economy would have to grow by a factor of 5. They failed to say that the quad (Japan, Australia, Europe and North America) would have to seek social justice and equity in their foreign policy agendas. Well, that is not going to happen ever. Why? Because western government and corporate planners know fully well that if everyone on Earth lived like we do in the rich world, then we'd need another 2-4 Earth-like planets to be sustainable. Last time I looked, Earth-like planets were in short supply. We have one. This explains why prominent US planners like Kennan, Nitze and others openly admitted that US policy should be to maintain wealth and resource disparity without threat to their national security. In otehr words, use slogans like 'democracy promotion, freedom, human rights et al' in speeches but don't in reality mean a word of it. British historian Mark Curtis goes a step further: he says that the only reason that Britain has existed as a state for the past 200 years is to support British corporations. There has been no other reason. Read some planning documents and you'll be hard pressed to disagree.
I give lengthy lectures on the relationship between global and regional economic policy and environmental destruction. Climate change is just a part of it. Its certainly clear enough to me that humans are sleep walking towards extinction. We have had 20-30 years to get it right, and in that time we have actually gone in the opposite direction. We have embraced, since Reagan and Thatcher's time, fiscal policies based on shock therapy and deregulatory free market absolutism, all which carry with them huge social, political, economuc and environmental costs. Since 1990, anti-environmentalism has really ratcheted up the agenda, and the internet has made it possible for all kinds of extreme ideas to become mainstream. There is abundant scientific evidence that we are sending the planet's ecological systems to hell in a handbasket and many people just do not want to listen. Those with power and priviledge are near the top. They like it the way it is and are investing heavily to make sure that things don't change.
I mayh be a party-pooper but sorry, I speak on the basis of what I have learned during my professional career. To reiterate: humans and nature are on a collision course. It is getting closer each and every day. What the consequences of this collison will be is hard to know exactly, but it won't be good. Our time for extinction as a species would come anyway, but why hasten its arrival?
“Here is a bet: if you and I met, and nobody mentioned the word “climate”, we would be perfectly friendly and even, if events allowed, FRIENDS”
Why the hell is that so important to the denier crowd?
I've not heard anyone say of Abu Hamsa "Well, if nobody mentioned islam or christianity, we would be perfectly friendly", do they.
Reality doesn't care if we're all BFF.
@Wow rightly observes that:
"I’ve not heard anyone say of Abu Hamsa “Well, if nobody mentioned islam or christianity, we would be perfectly friendly”, do they."
but the reason nobody says it is it's deluded.
It is absolutely not the case that a normal person could get on just fine with an Islamic fundamentalist so long as the concept of Islam were never mentioned or debated.
For one thing, Islamic fundamentalists are also wankers. (Studies show this.) They simply don't have the same values as the rest of us.
In order to avoid unfriendliness with such a person it is typically necessary ALSO to go out of one's way to avoid like the plague any mention of:
women
women's rights
women: how DO they force otherwise blameless men to rape them?
today's gainfully employed black: should he aspire to more than decapitator (and other jobs in the penal end-services industry)?
the Jew: acceptable nuisance, or a race whose tolerability has long run out?
the Jew: human, porcine or pongid?
violence, and its use in rhetoric
music: how can we get rid of it?
figurative art: bad
law and order, crime and punishment
pornography
the crime of domestic violence: an oxymoron?
whether it is morally halal and humanly possible to get through a pleasant evening's dinner WITHOUT mentioning Islam
..... the list goes on.
These people DO NOT share the same values as any decent human being.
Whereas Jeff and I ARE decent beings whose values are compatible with sharing a meal, and going to a movie, and EVEN the occasional, nonviolent exchange of views about climate—though it won't be as pleasant as going to a movie together
@Jeff H:
now that moderators have intervened, this won't make as much sense, but remember when nobody could switch off the italics around here? And how annoying and taking on the reading system that got, especially after the first dozen comments?
That's why I said "the content" at this "alarmist site" was "irremediably slanted."
Slanted? Geddit?
No big Alex-Jones-level conspiratorialism, no anti-environment hate agenda or anything like that.
Just a pun.
Hackles down.
@Jeff,
would love a link to your lecture slides/notes and even a URL or email number where I could give you my thought/reactions/responses/praise AFTER I read your material.
Cos we'll get further that way than we can possibly get here.
D'oh
"email number"
:-)
I sound like my grandmother.
BK
Now here is an idea BK. If you are as clever as you think you are why don't you simply look up the research that Jeff has been involved in, check out his papers and go from there. After all he has put up pointers to that here before.
Too difficult for you?
Too much work for you?
If you think that then just consider all the hours of often dangerous and uncomfortable work that the many thousands of field researchers have put in, in the field and then all the hours of data logging, data interrogation and careful appraisal to enable the hard worked papers that resulted.
Consider the huge totals of such peer reviewed papers that resulted and which were carefully analysed to produce the IPCC AR4 which tells you that you are wrong, wrong, wrong.
Now consider that all these years later much more such work has been carried out which will add to the Fifth Assessment Report and also the many more that have been produced but too late for even that. All of these too telling you that you are wrong, wrong, wrong.
"but the reason nobody says it is it’s deluded."
Sorry, do you know him socially?
How do you know he's not a nice person as long as you leave religion out of the conversation? Bought drinks with him? No? Then you don't know.
All you have is what you think is true.
So why should anyone give a shit about whether you are a potential friend or not?
Maybe thinking that would be deluded too.
"Now here is an idea BK. If you are as clever as you think you are why don’t you simply look up the research that Jeff has been involved in, check out his papers and go from there. After all he has put up pointers to that here before."
Out of respect for his judgement and sincerity, I had an even better idea!
Let JEFF HIMSELF decide which available work he thinks best captures his current view, and would be most helpful/relevant to the kind of disagreements he thinks he and I have.
I'm happy to just call up all his work, but I'm giving him the discretion first.
As to your other interpretations for the motive behind my request, would it be possible that you go fuck yourself please? That would be an equally important contribution to the goal the rest of us adults are trying to get to: an end to the Climate Shitfight and the real possibility of amicable climate bilateralism. That's my dream, and (dear readers) if it isn't yours, do the rest of us a favor and lurk but don't touch.
No, do your own homework you lazy bastard.
Jeff has PRODUCTIVE work to do.
"How do you know he’s not a nice person as long as you leave religion out of the conversation? Bought drinks with him?"
Have I gone out drinking with a fundamentalist Caliphatist mujahid?
Uh, no.
ROFLMAOAYCUFIOWYTA.
Wow, let me ask as gently as possible:
How much do you know about Islam?
About as much as you do about the climate debate, I'm guesstimating.
Seriously Wow, how much is Heartland paying you for this, and how can I get in on it?
@JeffH,
I'm really glad you agree that we could be friends.
If you think we are at existential threat from carbon-dioxide, then the worst possible things you could do are:
1. don't talk to me in a way you wouldn't talk to a friend.
2. stop avoiding my offer to explain what separates ACC-hoaxers from ACC-acceptors, and how to move almost anyone you'll ever meet out of the former position and into the latter.
That's insane.
That's no better than some of your fellow believers, who were up all last night and deep into the morning desperately running away from the easy money I was throwing at them.
It's anti-rational behavior.
It strongly suggests a fear on your part.
It strongly suggests that you would rather NEVER understand what the "other side" is trying to say, because you currently derive comfort, clarity, and power from continuing at all costs to MISUNDERSTAND the other side.
What do you have to lose from discovering how skin-deep our differences are?
Why does that information threaten you?
Would you lose your moral fire?
Well, you may think so now but trust me, having gained similar insights myself, there's nothing to fear; you don't get weaker by discovering how similar your "opponents" are to you—you stay just as strong, but smart about where to apply your strength.
Would you lose friends?
That depends—are you friends with a bunch of bitter fanatics whose favourite time of the day is Two Minutes Hate?
Then yes, possibly, if you realised how misguided that hate was, your fuckwit friends might stop returning your calls.
I'm sure you have plenty of other, better friends anyway.
Would you lose your job?
Hardly likely.
So why aren't you asking me what my technique is?
Your silence isn't a good look.
large swathes of what you just wrote are perceptive, logically waterproof and, overall, damn hard for any informed climate-debate junkie (like myself) to object to.
I say this just in case you thought I was being literal when I said you were wrong about everything, especially
Brad, if you were really interested in rational discussion, there are simple rules for such.
You are more in the breach than in compliance. By a long shot.
"2. stop avoiding my offer to explain what separates ACC-hoaxers from ACC-acceptors, and how to move almost anyone you’ll ever meet out of the former position and into the latter."
Stop being coy. If you have something cogent to say spit it out.
Asshole.
@Jeff Harvey:
Large swathes of what you just wrote are perceptive, logically waterproof and, all in all, damn hard for any climate junkie (like myself) to object to.
I say this just in case you thought I was being literal when I said you were wrong about everything, and that you were wrong to wrongly believe I was wrong about everything.
Hyperbole.
**************************************
And I meant to write this:
If you think we are at existential threat from carbon-dioxide, then the worst possible things you could do are:
1. talk to me in a way you wouldn’t dream of talking to a friend.
2. keep avoiding my offer to explain what separates ACC-hoaxers from ACC-acceptors, and how to move almost anyone you’ll ever meet out of the former position and into the latter.
Simple rules:
http://thoughtcatalog.com/2011/how-to-have-a-rational-discussion/
Jeff, thank you for your obviously heartfelt prognostication on the imminent doom of Mankind. However, as reported in National Geographic last December from "papers by nearly 500 authors in 50 countries. Spanning four decades of data, it represents the most comprehensive analysis ever undertaken of health problems around the world" it appears that there is Good News (sorry and all that):
"We're living longer. Average life expectancy has risen globally since 1970 and has increased in all but eight of the world's countries within the past decade.
Both men and women are gaining years. From 1970 to 2010, the average lifespan rose from 56.4 years to 67.5 years for men, and from 61.2 years to 73.3 years for women.
Efforts to combat childhood diseases and malnutrition have been very successful. Deaths in children under five years old declined almost 60 percent in the past four decades.
Developing countries have made huge strides in public health. In the Maldives, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Iran, and Peru, life expectancy has increased by more than 20 years since 1970. Within the past two decades, gains of 12 to 15 years have occurred in Angola, Ethiopia, Niger, and Rwanda, an indication of successful strategies for curbing HIV, malaria, and nutritional deficiencies.
We're beating many communicable diseases. Thanks to improvements in sanitation and vaccination, the death rate for diarrheal diseases, lower respiratory infections, meningitis, and other common infectious diseases has dropped by 42 percent since 1990."
Of course, that might be Bad News for you because I gain the impression that you consider your fellow human beings to be a threat and a menace. So severe is your misanthropy that I tremble to think of what measures you might advocate in order to, er, save us all from ourselves! Personally, I am always a bit leery of people who claim to know better than me what's good for me. They tend to end up killing anyone who disagrees with them - er, not you, of course, but, well, I'm just saying like . . .
Sorry, forgot the link:
http://news.nationalgeographic.co.uk/news/2012/12/121213-global-health-…
@luminous beuty
Stop being coy. If you have something cogent to say spit it out.
Asshole.
No problem.
But you have to ask nicely.
Which you cannot do!
Therefore the offer is, practically, open only to decent human beings.
Just my way of keeping pigs from accidental pearl ingestion.
Pretty please, asshole?
That's what I was talking about, @luminous.
You are psychologically incapable of being nice, even when some really important information is at stake.
Your nastiness is inbred.
You can't help it.
You are not—ever—going to be an adult about this.
Though it's going to be funny watching you parody adults.
Brad,
I'll make a deal with you. I'll start being nicer, when you stop being so stupid.
It'll be easy to keep.
Brad's idiocy is bone deep...
:-)
Brad,
Just for the record; I am highly skeptical that anything you have to say about persuasion is going to be 'really important'.
The only thing of which you have persuaded me is that you are an idiot.
And an asshole.
"Your nastiness is inbred.
You can’t help it.
You are not—ever—going to be an adult about this."
Is this an example of Brad being nice?
To be clear, Brad,
What I'm pointing to is your tendency to obfuscate. A symptom of denial.
And what I mean by 'tendency' is full blown psychotic fugue of obfuscation.
My advice. Stop abusing drugs.
Remember, Joan has this down pat: if you don't say anything, you can't be shown wrong.
All they do is insinuate then whine and bitch when you put the missing intended meaning to their words.
Note they have NO problem in doing the same to everyone and everything.
I'm still flummoxed as to how the warm streak of piss thinks that the books in his doctor's bookshelf contain "evidence".
Evidently, never read one.
All you have to do is ask nicely, guys.
No.
So fuck of and die in a terrible accident you warm streak of piss.
I’m being way too generous and patient here, but…
Perhaps the following story/trivia will trigger the insight that finally shames one of you into behaving like an adult.
Tom Cruise hates this American guy called Nathan Jessup.
But one day Jessup had some information/paperwork that Tom Cruise needed. Of course, Cruise has the resources and connections to get it from somewhere else——hell, he could have asked his secretary to get it——but Jessup was offering the information on a silver platter.
Freely.
(A bit like a certain Climate Crazeeness Fast Money Dead-Easy Challenge that some of you may remember cravenly dodging and/or encyclopedically flunking.)
So: Jessup said he was happy to give out the information, adding “… but you have to add nicely.”
Now:
Bearing in mind that …
1. these guys have a personal animus from way back
2. Cruise pretty much hates everything for which Jessup stands; for example, he's essentially come out and said that Jessup is to blame for American soldiers being killed overseas
3. Cruise could have gotten the information elsewhere if he really needed
4. no matter what else you might think of Tom Cruise, you can’t begrudge the objective fact that he’s a high-functioning human and therefore, in evolutionary terms, a fairly well-adapted primate
… what do ya reckon Cruise did?
HE ASKED NICELY.
If you people’s form is any guide, I cannot help but conclude, with some disappointment, that every believalist in this thread is LOWER ON THE EVOLUTIONARY TREE THAN TOM CRUISE.
Feel free to prove me wrong.
D'oh!
I meant:
Jessup said he was happy to give out the information, and added “… but you have to ask nicely.”
Yeah you should leave and not let us see your "generosity".
Bye.
"I’m being way too generous and patient here, but…"
We don't deserve you, Brad.
Therein follows a transparently fallacious attempt at primary school level manipulation.
Does it actually work on the kind of people you normally hang around with, and is that why you continue to try it on here in the hope that - damnit! This time, surely this time it will work?
Good grief, your denial even extends to that. You really do have major problems with self-awareness, don't you?
Noting that that comment wasn't addressed to me, but my reaction is probably representative of most people here - you exhibit qualities here that I find repellent. You come across as a most hypocritical, manipulative and reality-untrammelled person who gives off the distinct whiff of being a congenital liar and a veritable plume of overweening self-importance wrapped in the gaudy garb of an irremediable Drama Queen.
For starters.
To put it in your simplified terminology, you are a wanker - one of the biggest wankers I've ever virtually met. I'd be very very surprised if these qualities did not also feature in your relations to people in meatspace. And most people don't choose friends with those qualities.
If you actually want to be friends with people, or even just have a frank exchange of viewpoints, don't be a wanker. And that includes following the rules luminous beauty linked to at #53.
lb FTW!
@Lotharsson, thank you for your question:
"Does [logical argument] actually work on the kind of people you normally hang around with, and is that why you continue to try it on here in the hope that – damnit! This time, surely this time it will work?"
Spot on.
It certainly does work—and with little difficulty—among the university graduates who fill most of my circle of friends.
It works especially unproblematically if they have any philosophy or science background.
But even my other friends, without exception, have the wit to understand an argument the first, second or (AT MOST!) third time it's presented.
You're also quite right in diagnosing me with an almost maladaptively powerful faith that if I just offer you believalist billy-goats one more example, if I just re-explain the argument in the right words, if I'm patient enough, then at one point, one of you is going to learn something.
Incurable optimist?
Guilty as charged.
So, your circle of friends is largely drawn from the most easily manipulated subset of university graduates...
...that totally fits.
And spare us the "wit to understand ... the first, second or ... third time it's presented". You've gone way past that number on several points that have been presented to you and you still show no sign of understanding them.
And since I was discussing how big a wanker you are, editing someone's quote without pointing it out is a wanker move, especially when you do so to give the impression they said the very opposite of what they said, and even more so when you use the false quote to dismiss their point via assertion rather than demonstration.
But I guess a wanker's gotta wank.
Humorless cultist
Eternal umbrage
Humorless cultist
Eternal umbrage
Thanks a lot, Lotharsson. Now I'll have the tune in my head all day.
Accusations of lack of humour - the ever so predictable last refuge of the wanker who is called out for it.
@Lotharsson,
I must say, old friend, you don't seem to have too high an opinion of philosophy or science as disciplines!!!
How revealing, if not exactly surprising.
I mentioned to you, regarding my always-smart and usually-tertiary-credentialed friends, the fact that,
"'[logical, nuanced and in-bona-fide argumentation of the quality with which you associate me for my comments on this blog] works especially unproblematically if they have any philosophy or science background."
You preceded to dismiss my science- and philosophy-trained friends as "the most easily manipulated subset of university graduates…"
Your comments do have some relation to the truth, I think. (That of reflection about the BS axis.)
Citation for your perverse belief, please?
"So, your circle of friends is largely drawn from the most easily manipulated subset of university graduates…"
I must say, your lack of comprehension is approaching chameleon-like levels. But hey, that's apparently what's necessary to "sustain" some of your "arguments", so why stop now?
FTFY
@Lotharsson, stop spinning. You're caught out.
*Writhing on the floor laughing my ass off at your hebetude.*
Have some dignity and cop it sweet.
Let the Unforgetting Eye of the Interwebs record, for now and ever, that the son of Lothar has freely proffered his laughable “idea” that people with a background in philosophy and/or science are the most easily manipulated subset of university graduates.
I’m not making this up, folks. (Scroll up and see for yourself, if you have the abs to withstand the laughability of Loth.)
Yep. This vile Viking of Bile thinks people trained in either or both of the traditions of human thought most intimately associated with Skepticism itself—philosophy[!] and science[!!]—are the most gullible.
That’s not a misprint.
I did not meant to write "least gullible."
Yes, it’s hard to believe, even by his Low, Low Stardards, but this fanatical idiot has somehow manipulated himself (teh irony it burns, &c.) into computing that having a background in either of the two great Skeptical systems—philosophy or science—makes you MORE, not LESS, credulous.
Has the mind of the religious cultist—in its infinite and wonderful capacity for self-sodomy—ever been so willingly offered up for inspection by the Unforgetting Eye of the Whole World Wide Web as by our village idiot Lotharsson this day, the 27th day of January, 2013?
LOL.
Dear, sweet, simpleminded bastard of Lothar, I hate to break it to you—actually, that's a lie, I'm enjoying every second of it—that the capnophobia cult you’ve wasted your life championing now flaps nakedly and spastically in the cyberwind…
…hoist by its own retard.
D'oh!
If I understand the local rules of logic, the final triumph (see above) over the forces of Full Lotharssonian Retard is completely invalidated by my denialist delusion about the date.
Lucky escape for you, Lotharsson.
But if history has taught us anything it's that victory always triumphs over defeat in the end, so enjoy your respite, moron—it's temporary.
(It was just a typo—but I wouldn't dare ask anyone to believe me.)
Like I said, enjoy your stay of execution, tard—it's temporary.
Yep that does appear to be the case here:
BradK @# 76:
It works especially unproblematically if they have any philosophy or science background.
Lotharsson @# 77:
So, your circle of friends is largely drawn from the most easily manipulated subset of university graduates…
…that totally fits.
But maybe, just maybe because those comments are chronological (one immediately after the other) , they maybe crossed?
However,
Luminous @#83 seems to indicate that there were no split hairs or crossed wires or whatever in this particular instance.
You have some serious 'nuancing' to do here Lotharsson.
It may actually be smarter and easier to apologise for an over emotional and thoughtless comment (I note that JeffH can manage to do that sometimes).
And BTW JeffH, how on earth have you deduced that I found out about Humlum from Ms Marohasy?
In this instance you appear to be labouring once again under the misconception that there is a highly organised 'climate change denier' organisation 'out there' which is directing me to certain people and certain links.
Do you think that Humlum and/or Marohasy directed me to the Australian Greens policy page or the Getup website or the ACF website or some of the other links I have put up here?
Has it crossed your mind yet that I am NOT your enemy or 'anti the environment' or a member of some denialsim organisation?
Has it crossed you mind yet that calling people silly names and tacitly supporting the use of sneering analogies by media and politicians is NOT helping your case at all?
BTW, for everyone's benefit:
Misanthrope or also Misanthropist: n. 1 A person who hates mankind. 2 A person who avoids human society.
From Greek : misos "hatred" + anthropos "man".
Yes on a reread of comments # 76 & #77 as well as Luminous' contribution at #83 it does appear that Lotharsson has some serious nuancing to do.
Mind you, it could be way smarter to just apologise for an over emotional and thoughtless response.
I notice that JeffH is capable of doing that.
BUT! I'm fascinated to know why JeffH is so certain that he has figured out how I came accross Humlum and the Climat4you website?
Does that then logically follow that Ms Marohasy (with whom I have no particular relationship) has directed me to the Greens Policy on 'global governance', the Getup website, the ACF website, the AEF website and several of the other links I have posted here?
I don't know why JeffH seems to think that I am his enemy and/or anti the environment and/or a member of some 'climate denialism organisation'.
None of those implied accusations are correct but of course now that I have tried to question an implied incorrect accusation or an implied negative statement it can now be argued that I have denied something or other :-)
BTW for everyone's benefit:
Misanthrope or also Misanthropist: n.
1 A person who hates mankind
2 A person who avoids human society.
From Greek: 'misos' (hatred) + 'anthropos' (man)
Good grief. He still doesn't get his mistake! I thought he was the smart one in the room? Isn't he always telling us that? Maybe he actually thinks I wrote the butchered quote he provided, and can't remember that he butchered it for his own purposes?
Sigh.
Yes, you are. And still apparently basing it on your miscomprehension. You're spending too much time basking in chameleon's adulation - her lack-of-comprehension skills are catching.
As I frequently say to chameleon, go read it again until you understand how your version differs from mine. (And if that's too difficult, get a high school English student to help you out. Or maybe even a smart primary school kid.)
Hint: for starters, one of your key instances of "the" in your latest revision refers to a different set of people than my "the" did.
(Which means any "retard hoisted" here is not me, but you.)
@chemeleon,
shall we collaborate on the next phase?
(And yeah, I did read between the lines of your faint praise, and I know exactly what you're saying—but there's a method to my Climate Madness.)
@chameleon, email me.
The "stem" of my address is my real name. If you don't know my real name, I can point you to the comment in which I explained to a certain avian idiot of our mutual acquaintance what my offline name is.
To address an email to me:
Type the full, formal first name.
So if, hypothetically, my parents had named me after a species of flightless, brainless bird, you'd type the seven-letter form (william) not the four-letter form (bill).
Of course, they didn't—that's just a frinstance.
Then type a dot between my first name and my surname.
Then type my surname.
Then type at.
Then type "gmail."
Then type a dot.
Then type "com."
The next phase will be fun.
And careful readers will note that Brad has doubled down and extended his "editing" of my quote in #81 after I objected to it earlier, and continues to use the edited version in his argument to try and bolster his interpretation of what I said.
Chameleon, of course, did not notice. But then she had no problem lying about what Richard Simons said either...
@Lotharsson,
Stop spinning mate.
You're giving Vortical Vince a run for his money in the vertigo stakes.
??????
Hint: for starters, one of your key instances of “the” in your latest revision refers to a different set of people than my “the” did.
????????
Lotharsson @#74:
Does it actually work on the kind of people you normally hang around with, and is that why you continue to try it on here in the hope that – damnit! This time, surely this time it will work?
BradK @ #76 In answer to that question:
It certainly does work—and with little difficulty—among the university graduates who fill most of my circle of friends.
It works especially unproblematically if they have any philosophy or science background.
Lotharsson @ # 76
So, your circle of friends is largely drawn from the most easily manipulated subset of university graduates…
…that totally fits.
Where is the misunderstood 'the' in any of this exchange?
Oops!
Lotharsson was at #77 for that last comment.
Comment #81 is not what 'the' problem is Lotharsson.
@Lotharsson, oops, I meant keep spinning.
:-)
@chameleon, remember what Napoleon said about interrupting an opponent when he's making a blunder.
And your time would be better spent working out my real name and shooting me an email anyway.
I wasn't as clear as I could have been, but this shouldn't have been too hard to see because firstly Brad set the terms of reference, which you quoted:
Note: Brad discusses "most of my circle of friends", and declares that they come from the unrestricted set of "university graduates".
And note what relation Brad specifies to people with "philosophy or science background":
There's no relation there to how many of his friends have that background. His definition has not changed - he is not now claiming his circle of friends is drawn from the narrower set of science and philosophy graduates. He is simply claiming that his manipulation "works" better on those of his friends with that background.
So it shouldn't have been too hard to see because secondly my response, which you quoted, echoed those same terms of reference defining the set from which the bulk of his friends are drawn. Echoing the same terms of reference is usually considered a strong indication that one is talking about the same concept, and not one with different terms of reference:
"Largely drawn from" corresponds to "most of my circle", and "university graduates" is identical to Brad's "university graduates". So which "subset" am I referring to? A subset that Brad defined using different terms of reference which I did not echo, and which Brad did not hold up as the source of "most of his circle"?
No.
My "the" refers to the subset of the unrestricted set of university graduates defined by their susceptibility for Brad's kind of manipulative "logic", regardless of their area of study.
(And it should be obvious from experience that in the rather large set of university graduates - or even in the still fairly large set of science and philosophy graduates - there are certainly enough who are susceptible to manipulation from which to form the bulk of a "circle of friends". One does not need more than a small fraction of the set to have a decent pool to draw from.)
And one would have thought an alleged philosophy graduate - a discipline that relies on hyper-fine parsing - would not have made such a gross parsing error.
Then again, there's been little evidence of Brad's ability to comprehend a whole bunch of things that competent university graduates usually manage to comprehend...
Great article on blog comments from a science viewpoint.
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/a-blog-around-the-clock/2013/01/28/…
I do think Deltoid suffers from being denier spammed too. I used to read the comments here most of the time, great gems from John Mashey et al enticed me back and back time again. But lately, endless reruns of same crank .. getting very difficult to wade through the pages, at several threads, after 2-4 days absence .. with little return but seeing same deniers.
Dave, useful article - and some good links. Maybe Tim should try the kitten setting?
Chebbie's the one on the right. Appropriately enough.
Hyper-fine bullshitting, more like.
Has anybody ever met somebody who studied philosophy who had anything useful to say for themselves?
Chameleon,
Marohasy has plugged Humlum's piffle.
It isn't that hard to discern how many of the AGW denial sites connect with one another. Its like something of a sad fraternity. Of course one of the reasons they do this is because they are so few and far between. So they often link back and forth to each other to bolster the myth that there's a huge scientific backlash against various environmental threats including GW.
Duff, I really don't like wasting my time with a guy who thinks Obama is a socialist/communist. It suggests their head isn't screwed on properly.
Still, your last post defines exactly the point I made in my longer post. These indicators you suggests in no way undermine the thrust of my argument. All they show is that we haven't passed the tipping point yet. Its Paul Ehrlich's building analogy personified. The planet still has sufficient natural capital to sustain humanity - just - and thanks to technology we have increased our capacity to sustain and improve the lives of those lucky enough to be the recipients (not those in the south, of whom a billion receive so little nutrition that their minds are literally wasting away).
But the main point is this: to generate these improving conditions, and through technology, we are living in deficit. We are co-opting more and more freshwater flows and net primary production, draining aquifers, felling more tropical forests, driving species and genetically distinct populations to extinction at rates hundreds or thousands of times faster than natural rates, and altering global biogeochemical and hydrological cycles as well as climate. Now you may think that the well is bottomless but it is not.
By any law of nature, we cannot go on the way we are. We know that the planet cannot generate ecological services like it did a century ago. But since systems do not break down linearly, we haven't on a large scale passed a tipping point yet. But if we continue to simplify the planet's life support systems we will. New technologies, as I said, are not enabling us to live more sustainably within limits set by the environment; all they do is allow us to dig deeper, and to extract resources faster. The resources necessary to benefit humanity are still there but they are dwindling. We are taking water out of the glass faster than the system can put it back in. We are a species living in deficit.
Now if this salient information does not register in that cranky old brain of yours then that is your problem. You just cannot understand the link between the material economy (or man) and the natural economy. You think humans are exempt from the laws that govern natural systems. Technology has allowed us to plunder nature more effectively but it does not allow for us to live more sustainably.
If you cannot understand this basic physical reality, then that's your problem. Scientists, for the most part do. You lack even basic wisdom.
Marohasy has plugged Humlum's piffle?
That's hardly a way to foster a civil debate JeffH.
What exactly is 'piffle' in terms of Humlum's research and work Jeff?
And how does Marohasy plug piffle?
And Vince?
Are you sneering at people who have studied philosophy?
Yes.
Piffle means nonsense, garbage, or bullshit.
Humlum hasn't done any research relevant to our discussion here, as far as I know, but he has published a fair bit of piffle.
Marohasy was paid for many years to plug political piffle by the IPA, for starters.
Yes?
Yes. Philosophy is bullshit. It doesn't build better planes or better bridges, and it doesn't advance medical science, or result in smaller, faster computers or robotic vehicles to explore the surface of Mars.. It's just a way to keep some fairly socially and intellectually worthless individuals out of the public service for 3 years.
Well said, Vince. If Humlum had anything uselful to say, he'd be doing it not through a blog but through the empirical literature.
What we are sayijng is that if you want to learn about the state-of-the-art, Chammy, then go to the primary literature, not to blogs in which it is ignored or downplayed. Also follow the credentials of the people involved. As I said before, most of the internet deniers have no scientific qualifications at all (Morano, Milloy etc) or else they are on the academic fringe (Marohasy, Humlum, etc).
To answer Chammy's question, I see that Marohasy has written commentaries in which she plugs arguments from Humlum as well as his site. Deniers do this all the time.
Pushing piffle is most uncivilised - especially after it has been shown to be piffle, and most especially when widespread acceptance of said piffle will ultimately have real deleterious consequences.
Not calling out piffle where it matters damages the "debate" part of your "civil debate", assuming of course you meant "rational debate".
Now if you prefer to have an irrational debate - perhaps because you know you can't put up a strong showing in a rational one - then piffle is most definitely a useful commodity, and Brad can teach you a thing or two about that.
This!
And to add to Jeff's quote in my previous comment, this is one way you can tell when someone is pushing pseudo-scientific piffle to unsuspecting marks. Take Lindzen for example. He is definitely a climate scientist and did some useful and important work in the past.
However when he talks to the non-scientific public these days he often makes claims, implications and speculations about climate that go against the consensus in the literature - and which he doesn't dare to try on in the peer-reviewed literature. Even if you can't follow the science itself, this is a giveaway that he's misrepresenting the findings of climate science when talking to the public. If he was able to substantiate those claims you can be damn sure he'd be doing so in peer-reviewed papers. (And if his case stood up to scrutiny, everyone on all "sides" would cheer a big sigh of relief because it would mean the problem's not as bad as is currently thought.)
The fact that he doesn't do this is "the curious incident of the dog in the night-time", a.k.a. "the dog that didn't bark".
Jeff, you raised the name of perhaps the worst forecaster in the history of the world since Nostradamus - Paul Ehrlich! Here are some of his efforts plus those of other 'seers' who all appear to be blind! Please, Jeff, do yourself a favour and don't join these obvious buffoons:
Claim 1970: “In ten years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish.” Paul Ehrlich, speech during Earth Day, 1970.
........................................................................................
“By the year 2000 the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people … If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.” Paul Ehrlich, Speech at British Institute For Biology, September 1971.
...................................................................................
The Limits to Growth (1972) – projected the world would run out of gold by 1981, mercury and silver by 1985, tin by 1987, zinc by 1990, petroleum by 1992, and copper, lead and natural gas by 1993. It also stated that the world had only 33-49 years of aluminum resources left, which means we should run out sometime between 2005-2021. (See Donella Meadows et al., The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind.
.....................................................................................
Claim April 1970: "If present trends continue, the world will be ... eleven degrees colder by the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us in an ice age." Kenneth E.F. Watt, in Earth Day, 1970.
Data: According to NASA, global temperature has increased by about 1 degree Fahrenheit since 1970.
.........................................................................................
Claim 1972: "Artic specialist Bernt Balchen says a general warming trend over the North Pole is melting the polar ice cap and may produce an ice-free Arctic Ocean by the year 2000." Christian Science Monitor, June 8, 1972.
Data: Ice coverage has fallen, though as of last month, the Arctic Ocean had 3.82 million square miles of ice cover -- an area larger than the continental United States -- according to The National Snow and Ice Data Center.
........................................................................................
Claim 1989: "Using computer models, researchers concluded that global warming would raise average annual temperatures nationwide two degrees by 2010." Associated Press, May 15, 1989.
Data: According to NASA, global temperature has increased by about 0.7 degrees Fahrenheit since 1989. And U.S. temperature has increased even less over the same period.
.....................................................................................
Claim: "[By] 1995, the greenhouse effect would be desolating the heartlands of North America and Eurasia with horrific drought, causing crop failures and food riots ... [By 1996] The Platte River of Nebraska would be dry, while a continent-wide black blizzard of prairie topsoil will stop traffic on interstates, strip paint from houses and shut down computers." Michel Oppenheimer and Robert H. Boyle, Dead Heat, St. Martin's Press, 1990.
Damn! Forgot the link again:
http://www.terry.uga.edu/~mustard/courses/e2200/pop.htm
...you don’t seem to have too high an opinion of philosophy or science as disciplines!!!
This is rich coming from someone who dismisses several disciplines of science that indicate how sensitive humans and non-human existence is to stable climate.
There are many hundreds, and indeed thousands, of scientists who have worked in various aspects of ecophysiology, and who have demonstrated that the magnitude of planetary temperature increase that humans have initiated is incompatible with the continued existence of many plant and animal species, either directly or through indirect bioclimatic effects. However, if you base your "optimistic" opinion on science (as surely you must, given your protestations to that end) you must just as surely have a detailed bibliography of scientific work that supports your case.
Please supply this list.
[20:00]
This is rich coming from someone who dismisses several disciplines of science that indicate how sensitive humans and non-human existence is to stable climate.
There are many hundreds, and indeed thousands, of scientists who have worked in various aspects of ecophysiology, and who have demonstrated that the magnitude of planetary temperature increase that humans have initiated is incompatible with the continued existence of many plant and animal species, either directly or through indirect bioclimatic effects. However, if you base your "optimistic" opinion on science (as surely you must, given your protestations to that end) you must just as surely have a detailed bibliography of scientific work that supports your case.
Please supply this list.
[20:00]
For anyone still wondering what Brat is doing here, he’s graciously consented to proving that he’s a denier, liar and idiot.
As he proclaimed when he offered his “deal”:
He’d agreed if he posted here afterwards, he was proving his denialism.
(please also note that despite his piteous calls for pity at how badly he's being treated here, he's still here.
Makes you wonder what sort of idiot he is, doesn't it.
Duffer,
Denialists 1992: The final nail in the coffin for AGW scientists
Denialists 1993: The final nail in the coffin for AGW scientists.
Denialists 1994: The final nail in the coffin for AGW scientists.
Denialists 1995: The final nail in the coffin for AGW scientists.
Denialists 1996: The final nail in the coffin for AGW scientists.
Denialists 1997: The final nail in the coffin for AGW scientists.
Denialists 1998: The final nail in the coffin for AGW scientists
Denialists 1999: The final nail in the coffin for AGW scientists
...
Denialists 2012: The final nail in the coffin for AGW scientists
Every year, wrong.
Denialists 1998: This record breaking year of temperatures means nothing, it's just an extremely strong El Nino and is not proof of AGW.
Denialists 2003-2012: The temperature hasn't risen since 1998!!!!!
Ridley 2003: Temperatures will rise by no more than 0.1C per decade from the 1993 temperature.
Roy Spencer 2003: Temperatures will drop and my fourth-order polynomial predicting this will be proven!
Roy Spencer 2005: My polynomial needs recalibrating.
Roy Spencer 2007: Temperatures will drop and my fourth-order polynomial predicting this will be proven!
Roy Spencer 2008: My polynomial needs recalibrating.
Roy Spencer 2011: Temperatures will drop and my fourth-order polynomial predicting this will be proven!
Roy Spencer 2012: My polynomial needs recalibrating.
Watts 2005: BEST is going to answer once and for all if the temperature record is reliable!
Watts 2010: BEST is a load of rubbish, they are all frauds!!!
etc.
Wouldn't that be using the power of consensus instead of evidence?
Surely not!
Duff,
Go back to your silly political theories. Your knowledge of the issues I discussed is kindergraten level.
I guess Paul Ehrlich was wrong. Today there are more starving people than there were people alive in the 1930s. Today there are more species teetering on the edge of extinction than at any time in recorded history. Since Ehrlich's predictions, all indicators of the quality of the planet's ecological systems have declined by 30-40%.Since the 1970s groundwater levels underlying the US midwest (the Oglalla aquifer) and the China Plain have dropped dramatically. Since the 1970s we've had the emergence of rapid climate change. Since the 1970s the amount of tropical forest left has been reduced by about 50%.
Now, an old codger like you might think this is all progress, and that humans can continue to spend natural capital like there is no tomorrow. You'd be wrong. That is quite simple, isn't it? Sure, new technologies have delayed the effects of human simplification of the biosphere. I don't deny that. What I do deny is that we can continue to plunder nature faster and faster and more effectively and effect humans to propser forever. We have thank mother nature for being reslient enough to have withstood the onslaught thus far and to be still functioning well enough to provide the services that underpin our existence. But nasty surprises are in store if we continue along the current course.
On "Paul Ehrlich, Speech at British Institute For Biology, September 1971"
All I actually see are links to people who say he said this.
Since these are ALSO blogrolls that say that Al Gore said that Florida would flood this century/soon/next 50 years BUT the transcript of AIT they insist this is said in does NOT give a timescale for this (merely states that if the WAIS and Greenland ice sheet melted that this amount of flooding would mean $THIS in Florida), I rather wonder if there's any primary source for this statement.
After all, these blogrolls and you duffski have form for telling lies about what people said merely because you hear one person say it was so and just gullibly fall for it.
Then insist that this consensus that it WAS said is proof it was.
It seems that the originator and second of this meme can't find the original either.
http://timpanogos.wordpress.com/2011/04/30/pure-political-smear-from-wa…
So where is the evidence?
Actually the list that the moron Duff has supplied is quite interesting.
Balchen wasn't a scientist but a Norwegian Olympian, USAF Colonel, pioneer polar aviator and adventurer who won the DFC during WW2. He died in 1973 at the age of 74 shortly after the claim was made.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernt_Balchen
Rather than this being a failed prediction, it would have to be considered remarkable insight. The actual article is behind a paywall so I cannot tell what observations led him to make the comment.
According to this reconstruction, the sea ice minimum may have been apparent to an astute observer in the late 1960s.
http://tamino.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/polyakfig2.jpg
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2010/10/16/history-of-arctic-and-antarctic-…
the reduction in the Arctic sea ice minimum
And also was it impossible in 1972 for an ice free Arctic Ocean to occur in 28 years?
If so, please show us the reasoning and evidence behind that claim.
If not, then his statement was correct.
Duff with more bubkas:
You just don't get it do you Duff, it was late last evening when I saw this latest of yours and I do note a long tail of replies since, but here I go ahead with what I had in mind to hit you with.
Here is the scenario. After many years of trials and tribulations with near fatal experiences and thwarted loves a fellow is driving along in his super-sports coupé singing ecstatically for his wife has just given birth to son and heir.
As he wallows in joy progressing along a narrow track of a road he is approaching the brow of a hill on a bend, life is just sweet and dandy but then suddenly ......
Do you have the imagination to complete this story Duff? Do it.
Well here is a clue in answer to one of the silly and short-sighted items in your list, this one:
Here is one answer to that that: Imminent Water Crisis in India,
and things have not got any better since India’s blackout exposes choice between water & electricity.
And in western country the idiots-in-power wish to waste huge quantities of a scarce resource (drinking water) with fracking and also risk contaminating that in existing aquifers.
And don't bother with the smart quip about how much water has descended on the UK this last twelve months. I wonder how those communities experiencing flooding get on with potable water not contaminated by sewage.
I here from Cornwall that many old mine workings are filling up and in cases overflowing - potentially, and probably actually - and spreading quantities of toxic chemicals across the landscape and get into water courses which are sources for water treatment works for providing drinking water.
The effect of such pollution on wildlife is of course another looming problem.
Never mind any fiscal cliff humanity and many of the species around humanity are heading for another cliff - a resource shortage cliff.
We are mining Earth's natural resources as well as its minerals. Do you understand what that means Duff? Don't juts answer yes but qualify your answer.
And I doubt the veracity of this statement:
Provide evidence to support that statement Duff.
You do live in your own little bubble of ignorance and delusion don't you Duff.
Looks like the old Duffer scrapes under every rock to find his nonsense. Here's where he dug up his latest stuff:
http://www.terry.uga.edu/directory/profile/mustard/
A right wing business economist from the notorious U of Chicago? Who'd a thought? My guess is the Colonel oops Dr. Mustard has no background in environmental science or ecology. Doesn't stop him from putting up a lot fo simplistic drivel, does it.
It's also available here:
www.duffandnonsense.typepad.com
though it's so infrequently visited, you need to go several pages of google later to see the first link to that site.
What is it with these economist types?
Duffandnonsense, now I wonder if he has ever studied his way through Dawkin's 'The Ancestor's Tale'? He should do.
"A right wing business economist from the notorious U of Chicago?"
This coming from someone who spent 2 years at U of Wisconsin?
"My guess is the Colonel oops Dr. Mustard has no background in environmental science or ecology."
And my guess is that Dr.Pachauri has no background in environmental science or ecology....
GOOD NEWS!!!
"The Earth’s mean temperature rose sharply during the 1990s. This may have caused us to overestimate climate sensitivity."
"their findings indicate a lowered estimate of probable global temperature increase as a result of human-induced emissions of greenhouse gases."
"even if we do manage to cut emissions of sulphate particulates in the coming years, global warming will probably be less extreme than feared."
http://tinyurl.com/aej9pka
Notrice what our old denier left out of his link:
"Climate issues must be dealt with
Terje Berntsen emphasises that his project’s findings must not be construed as an excuse for complacency in addressing human-induced global warming. The results do indicate, however, that it may be more within our reach to achieve global climate targets than previously thought.
Regardless, the fight cannot be won without implementing substantial climate measures within the next few years".
Funny how Betula leaves out this important bit.
No, he was an oil man, which is precisely why the Bush administration had him appointed.
Turned out he isn't as dishonest as they would have liked.
...hence the need to engage with him in the form of personal smears...
I guess when you deniers have no facts to argue your case...
And if he HAD been an environmentalist or ecologist, well, he's in it with the rest of them, right?
Given that you'd have a complaint no matter what, is the complaint that he has those qualifications or that there's the job there at all?
It's pretty obvious your problem is with the job being there at all.
@Johnny Drama:
Fixed this for ya:
Most of what passes for CLIMATE "SCIENCE" is bullshit. It doesn’t build better planes or better bridges or help us understand the environment, and it doesn’t advance medical science, or result in smaller, faster computers, falsifiable predictions about nature, or robotic vehicles to explore the surface of Mars.. It’s just a way to keep some totally socially and intellectually worthless, immoral individuals out of the productive economy for 22 years and running.
Oops!
You veer off into wrongness with your very first sentence.
Crank blogs such as the crank blog called WUWT run by the crank called Anthony Watts are packed full of bullshit.
Genuine, professional science as summarised by the IPCC in their reports is the very opposite of Anthony Watts' bullshit.
Trust an idiot who wasted 3 years at Uni learning nothing and doing nothing to get that arse-about.
Brad,
That comment you just pasted is so baseless and ignorant, I just wonder what worthless piece of biomass could make it.
Essentially, what the person is saying is that in their opinion we get nothing out of learning about the natural world or our impact on it. A person saying this is totally and utterly unable to comprehend the link between human welfare (the material economy) and the natural world which permits us to exist and persist (the state of the natural economy).
The statement suggests a person living in a metaphoric ivory tower - a city block cut off from the vagaries of the real world. They ought to learn some basic environmental science before spewing their own brand of bullshit again.
Here is an explanation for Brad's apparent immunity to fact or shame:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=tGB8Uuffi4M
I dunno.
Have you seen what Brat yabbers on about in HIS version of climate science?
No evidence.
No thinking.
Complete bullshit.
Teabaggers like yourself, right?
Poor inane Bradmoron doesn't seem to realise that his ever more vacuous assertions'n'inversions carry no weight whatsoever. 'Cos he's that smart, y'dig?
@Drama:
Why "for 22 years and counting”, you ask disingenuously?
Stop spinning and do teh maff yourself.
Take the average of:
25 years ago—when the non-scientist Tim Worth and his failed-scientist accomplice James Hansen, arguably the most important descientists in recent world history, childishly sabotaged a certain air-conditioning system in order to prostitute climatology, disfiguring it and removing any claim it once had on being an honest system of inquiry
18 years ago—when climate science qua science was finally found comatose and unresuscitable in the ancient and beautiful city of Madrid, Spain.
Finally (if you understand how) round up the answer.
No evidence. No thinking. Complete [spoonfed] bullshit.
Corrected that for you Wow.
Oops
Damn Wirthless spell-checker
! :-)
@Jeff H,
sorry if you didn't understand my point.
Consider this: if you believe, as Vortical Vince claims, that we would have ever have got to the point of having modern medicine or rovers on Mars without philosophy, then I politely put it to you that you've never learned what the blood-relation of science to philosophy is. Primarily, you're naive in something called epistemology.
But that's not because you're naive or stupid.
You're a smart guy, and I could teach you the outlines of the whole topic over a couple of beers, if you had any curiosity about it.
Remember the friendly sit-down we were thinking about? If I ever get to the Netherlands, I'm holding you to it!! :-)
And remember, the first one's on me—you impressed me with your utter repudiation of Michael Mann's brand of "science," and I won't forget your noble words lightly.
Nope. Nothing you scribble is ever likely to interest me.
Oooh, look - a false assertion. Did you learn about strawmen in 3rd-year, or did you have to do a post-grad year to get to that?
I would have thought that somebody who spent three years not learning anything useful at Uni could at the very least learn some basic English, such as, perhaps, getting a grasp on conjugation?
Hmmm?
A false assertion Vince?
I think you might benefit from
a) Looking up what that means and
b) rereading your own comments re philosophy, Humlum, Climat4you etc.
Brad , have you considered a change of career? Perhaps something like smuggling Toblerones through customs anally?
You're bound to find it more comfortable than acting out the tired ol' denier handbook here, as you're presently and tediously doing. Yes that's right - you're not even entertaining in your psychosis, in the the way that our pet Jonarse in the basement is.
I suspect Brad doesn't get to do a lot of conjugating, Vince.
"Notrice what our old denier left out of his link".......
"Regardless, the fight cannot be won without implementing substantial climate measures within the next few years”.
Um, if it was left out of the link, then where did you read it?
Chameleon once again offers us a view into her idiosyncratic grasp on the concept of reading comprehension
a) Projection. Look it up yourself. A false assertion is when somebody (ie Brad) asserts something that is false.
b) Here's a massive hint to you, dingbat: check the tenses used in my statement and Brad's dishonest misrepresentation thereof.
You still on about that crank Humlum and his crank blog jam-packed full of piffle he doesn't publish in professional science journals?
Why?
@Johnny drama either believes or pretends I've misrepresented him:
"if you believe, as Vortical Vince claims, that we would have ever have got to the point of having modern medicine or rovers on Mars without philosophy,"
Oooh, look – a false assertion.
They don't pay me enough for this, Drama, but since there's apparently no other way to get you to an intellectually house-trained state, I guess I'll have to rub your muzzle in this little accident you had on the carpet:
"Yes. Philosophy is bullshit. It doesn’t build better planes or better bridges, and it doesn’t advance medical science, or result in smaller, faster computers or robotic vehicles to explore the surface of Mars.. "
Now you obviously have never been to college so I'll put all this down to innocent ignorance on your part, but THIS IS THE LAST TIME.
So for fuck's sake, try and follow this recap of the plot EVERYONE ELSE already understands:
Medical science, computer science, Mars rovers, and so much of the science and technology that has kept you alive past the age of twenty would not exist if not for philosophy, you dumb animal.
Sorry for the uncontrolled italics, Tim / moderators—feel free to delete that.
@Johnny drama either believes or pretends I’ve misrepresented him:
“if you believe, as Vortical Vince claims, that we would have ever have got to the point of having modern medicine or rovers on Mars without philosophy,”
Oooh, look – a false assertion.
They don’t pay me enough for this, Drama, but since there’s apparently no other way to get you to an intellectually house-trained state, I guess we'll have to rub your muzzle in this little accident you had on the carpet:
“Yes. Philosophy is bullshit. It doesn’t build better planes or better bridges, and it doesn’t advance medical science, or result in smaller, faster computers or robotic vehicles to explore the surface of Mars.. “
Now you obviously have never been to college so we can probably put this down to innocent ignorance, but YOU"RE STRETCHING THE PATIENCE OF THE ADULTS, Johnny boy.
So for fuck’s sake, try and follow this recap of the plot EVERYONE ELSE already understands:
Medical science, computer science, Mars rovers, and so much of the science and technology that are going to keep you alive past the age of 20 would not exist if not for philosophy, you philistine.
Please notice how even @Lotharsson, the fanatical anti-recruiter of your cult, IS NOT GOING TO PRETEND TO AGREE WITH YOU ON THIS, Drama.
That ought to tell you something, surely? Or have I somehow managed to overestimate even YOUR low, low, rockbottom Climate Crazy mental skillz?
FTFM:
"@Lotharsson, the fanatical anti-recruiter of your cult"
->
"Lotharsson, the recruit-repelling Chief Hate-Skokesman of your sad, monotonically-shrinking cult"
PIMF.
D'oh!
Third time lucky?....:
Lotharsson, the recruit-repelling Chief Hate-Spokesman of your sad, monotonically-shrinking cult
Happy, everyone?
More projection from the bradmeister. What else?
And @Johnny, just in case your attempts with chameleon are you laying the groundwork for a retrospective tense-narrowing defence, like the unteachable cur you are, IT WILL NOT AVAIL YOU.
Let's talk about the Mars rover, Rover.
Let's not even ask how on Earth it got to Mars in the first place (which feat educated people know is due to astronomy, which science educated people know used to be called a Natural Philosophy, which name educated people know it bore for a good reason, which reason is for educated people to know and you to find out—I'm not your bloody governess).
Let's just talk about how it manages the superhuman (or at least supervincentian) feat of getting over and around obstacles without pissing itself.
Ever heard of "artifical intelligence"?
If you know what artificial means, which you obviously do, and if you know what intelligence means, which is somewhat less certain, then you kind-of know what AI means.
But it's a term of art, so even if you knew what "intelligence" meant you might not know, without the benefit of college and books and shit, that AI is a BRANCH OF PHILOSOPHY.
TODAY.
Not in the past.
In the present. Which, if I recall correctly, is the tense you used: "philosophy IS bullshit", you cretinously opined.
I hasten to stipulate that artificial intelligence is not "merely" philosophy.
It is simultaneously a branch of Computer Science, which is, in turn, a branch (or fruit) of mathematics + epistemology. And not to rub your nose in your own waste again, but epistemology is a branch of... can you guess? Philosophy, dog.
But hey, it's a free country, there's no law against idiocy (though if I were King...)
...so go ahead, keep telling us how your Martian co-canine isn't a tribute to human philosophy.
By the way, I'm not a Mohammedan—I've got nothing against actual dogs. I prefer them to some humans.
I do, however, have a normal, healthy dislike of metaphorical bitches, like our friend Drama.
This most definitely is not your therapy class Brad.
Vince,
Please don't be as ridiculous as Lotharsson on this one.
It would be much smarter to retract your very silly, over emotional and thoughtless satement re philosophy.
This is indeed what you wrote:
Yes, philosophy is bullshit..........
Quibbling over the TENSE is just as ridiculous as claiming a misinterpreted 'the'.
I also do suggest again that you
a) look up what false assertion means
b) reread your comments re philosophy, Humlum, climate4you etcetera and
c) see if you can figure out what that little idiom/epigram re pots and kettles actually means. (especially in relation to your repeated 'assertions' that I am 'denying' science)
Can I also politely ask you what 'science' you keep asserting I am denying and what therefore causes you to behave so very emotionally and defensively?
because Vince
a) Humlum is far from a crank:
http://www.mn.uio.no/geo/english/people/aca/geogr/olehum/index.html
b) Climate4You is an evidence based website that uses the same climate/weather data as the bulk of the rest of the science fraternity.
Not to put too fine a point on it but it certainly appears to be more evidence based than the deltoid blog/site appears to be
http://www.climate4you.com/
and, as Brad K has just started to 'assert':
c) The study of philosophy is far from bullshit and has definitely been a player in some of humanity's greatest achievements.
So Brad the arch-hypocritical Drama Queen is still projecting on to others, still promoting really really poorly thought out denialist assertions as argument despite copious counter-evidence, and still smearing everyone he disagrees with.
(And we all notice that he's totally ignoring yesterday's fetish where he proclaimed loud and long that I was "anti-science" because he couldn't apply basic skills required by philosophy students to written English.)
(And when is the wailing smearing man-toddler going to get his own thread so the grown-ups can have a decent conversation?)
BTW, it's most amusing to see that when Brad's evidence-free style of "argument" is turned back on himself by substituting "philosophy" for "climate science" in his assertion thereby suggesting his pet discipline is worthless on the measures that his own statement used to assess worth, he throws a little tantrum and tries to argue the case.
I don't think he's realised yet that the contrast between his lack of arguing the case re: climate science, and his attempts to do so for philosophy, are most illuminating of his "methods". Subconsciously if not consciously he knows that cases needs to be argued rather than merely asserted, but only chooses to try and argue his claim for one discipline, thereby revealing that he almost certainly knows that his other assertions are bullshit.
(And speaking of bullshit, commenters have barely yet touched upon his incorrect application of the metrics chosen in his quote to measure "worth", let alone the rather limited selection of potential worthiness that it deigns to consider. How much wrong can one person pack into a single comment?!)
So well played, Vince! (I'm not sure Brad realises yet that he has been played. I won't tell him if you don't.)
When a putatively male person applies a derogatory term for females and the name of a non-human species to another putatively male person...one generally starts pondering the implications re: the undesirable psychological state of the former (and what may have caused it) which leads them to feel the need to feminise and dehumanise the latter. One also wonders if the former person has any inkling of how revealing this is.
And when chameleon acts out Pot. Kettle. Black. for the umpteenth time, this time about "false assertions" in a comment where she's making assertions that are widely considered false, one generally starts to ponder if there is some kind of impediment to self-comprehension, let alone to cognition.
The critics rave:
So Brad, please let us know exactly how much Natural Philosphy there was in your 3 years of talking bullshit at Uni?
How much Astronomy did you cover in your tutorials on Descartes and Spinoza?
Unsuprisingly, intellectual pygmy that you are, you are advancing the argument, philosophy was useful prior to the 17th Century invention of modern science
therefore
philosophy is useful now, (even though the use it once had is now contained in a separate discipline called 'science')
Chameleon, what a surprise - another day, and another lesson in reading comprehension is needed.
In the context of a contemporary study at University: Philosophy is bullshit.
Brad's answer: Philosophy hundreds of years ago wasn't bullshit.
Chameleon's anticomprehension:
So, you can't spot logical fallacies, then, Chameleon. That's why we advise you to stay away from liars like Brad and away from cranky people like Humlum who fill up their crank sites will all sorts of crap they can't publish professionally.
Come one, Chameleon, think: Why does Humlum keep his stuff away from professional publications? Think of any reason?
Piling on to Vince's observations:
Unsurprisingly, the misinterpreted "the" has been demonstrated to Chameleon and Brad (as well as the importance of the tense in question), but she still asserts it is "ridiculous" to say it wasn't misinterpreted whilst Brad has thus far held his tongue. (Well, at least we have an idea of who is the smarter one in their partnership.)
Bear in mind that this is the judgment of the commenter who alleges a particular Delingpole article quotes Flannery using the term "fleeting fancy", when the article in question does not contain the word "fleeting" and does not contain the word "fancy" - and despite having had this falsehood pointed out several times, still refuses to withdraw the claim.
I notice Brad then alters his argument to,
The obvious question is,
- Of the team who designed and implemented Curiosity, Spirit and Opportunity,
- How many had Arts degrees with a Philosophy Major?
- How many had science degrees with majors in maths, physics, chemistry, or engineering?
And a follow-up thought experiment:
- Strand 10 physicists, biologists and chemists on a desert island
- Strand 10 Arts students on a desert island
>> 100 years later, which island will have the better medical care?
Chameleon, perhaps you can ask those Canberra Uni researchers you're meeting next week how NOT publishing defensible research might enhance their careers, and suggest that they too consider NOT publishing their future findings.
But please - make sure none of them are eating or drinking when you ask them.
And just in case the indignant flurry of defensiveness from Brad resulted in anybody missing this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=tGB8Uuffi4M
Vince @#65
Come one, Chameleon, think: Why does Humlum keep his stuff away from professional publications? Think of any reason?
Ummmmm Vince?
He doesn't:
Please note the section here on publications in peer reviewed journals:
http://www.climate4you.com/Text/BIBLIOGRAPHY%20OLE%20HUMLUM.pdf
Also note the previous link which explains where Humlum works.
None of this EVIDENCE (which is entirely googleable) is indicating that Humlum is anything but a practicing scientist who also publishes some of his work and also does so in collaboration with other well respected scientists in his country and in other countries.
As well as that he also has a website (Tim Lambert does too).
BTW, just so we're very clear, this does not automatically mean that I see Humlum (or any other person) as some type of demi god who holds a type of magical and undeniable predictive/projective/postdictive crystal ball.
Yes, a bunch of geoscience papers.
What have those papers got to do with the cranky nonsense about climate that he has on his website?
She misinterprets a question asking why various claims and implications on Humlum's website don't appear in his published scientific papers as implying that Humlum doesn't publish anything at all, and then uses that to evade the question itself.
Her Misinterpretation On Demand Superpower proves its worth again!
@Lotharsson kindly draws Johnny Drama's ongoing behaviour to my attention:
"So Brad the arch-hypocritical Drama Queen is still projecting on to others
Der, Lotharsson. That's what Jonnny does. Where do you think he got his nickname?
Ah, that Brad. Still blissfully unaware that he's by far the biggest Drama Monarch in the room! Still, I guess it beats admitting errors.
It would be almost cute if he weren't over six years old. (You are over six years old, right, Brad?)
@Lotharsson, noted for his principled and unfailing practice of arguing without being personal or nasty about it, rightly pulls me up for this phrasing:
"I do, however, have a normal, healthy dislike of metaphorical bitches, like our friend Drama."
You're right, that could be misconstrued as sexist. Sorry.
That's the last thing I'd ever want to come across as. You won't find anyone with more contempt than I have for that mangy pederast Muhammad, who was a misogynist AND a misocynist. (not to mention something of a 7th century Lotharsson: a bigoted, ratmatic zealot.)
So let me be a bit more PC:
"I do, however, have a normal, healthy dislike of metaphorical bitches and/or bitchssons, like our friend Drama."
I notice that Jonas seems to be emulating Brad's penchant for very high numbers of posts with very low substantive content, if the recent-commentometer is any indication.
I have no desire to enter the fray there, although it's been the source of much mirth for a couple of colleagues who have spent their lunchtimes spraying lunch over my monitor (damn the cordless mouse), but I would like to make a point...
Jonas was too scared to enter into any of several wagers with me on the most obvious near-term indication of rapid (human-caused) global warming - to wit, the melting of the Arctic ice cap. I have no illusions that Jonas will have battled his cowardice and now be prepared to stand up with his money, but perhaps he will accept a second challenge.
I want Jonas to list the various climatologists whom he believes have not actually performed the attribution work that demonstrates the human caused of global warming. He can start with the people mentioned by Wyvern last year: by way of example</i<, Jonas might say:
This is an important exercise, because I want Jonas to go on record detailing the scientists who he claims have not done the work that so many on this thread keep pointing him toward. Jonas is happy enough to claim that the attribution work has not been done - let's see him list those people whom he claims have not done the work that is credited to them.
Once Jonas has listed the scientists that he believes have not conducted attribution work, I would like Jonas to prepare a letter to be sent to these scientists. To date Jonas has, by all apparent measures, not actually contacted any of the scientists that he accuses of fraudulently attributing to human the observed global warming, so I would like Jonas to spell out for us (and for the scientists he claims have not done any attribution work) exactly what his grievances are - liberal use of references examples is encouraged.
This lack of direct contact of climatologists is a grievous omission that needs to be corrected, so if Jonas can gather his thoughts and coherently and succinctly summarise his claims, I will send them on his behalf to the scientists that he lists as described above.
Alternatively, we could post Jonas' letter on a forum such as RealClimate or Skeptical Science, which most climatologists should be happy to visit in order to provide an authoritative response.
This is not an exercise that requires Jonas to risk his money, nor is it an exercise that requires five hundred posts about how many angels may fit upon the point of a needle. It's simply a way to clarify Jonas N's exact claims about who has and has not done what work, and what work does and does not qualify as attribution of warming to human activity.
The defensibility of Jonas' claims way back at the birth of this thread will be tested by his response to this challenge.
Dammit.
That's what happens when you let postgrads sit at your desk.
The above comment was me.
I'm referring of course to a comment in moderation....
Chammy,
Humlum has a mediocre academic and publishing record. He's no luminary in his field. Publication and citations are relatively low. Also, he hasn't published much in the way of papers countering AGW. That's his hobby horse.
Give it a rest.
Yeah, but philosophy IS a load of crap, though, innit.
Look at what it did to Brad for a start...
Yeah, given there's no evidence that Brat here has had their own thought ever for himself, I guess the implicit assertion that this was self-made bollocks rather than predigested vomited bollocks that he choked down because he thought it was nice was not supported.
Ta.
@Jeff Harvey, I hope you're still around!
Remember when I bet we could be friends?
“Here is a bet: if you and I met, and nobody mentioned the word “climate”, we would be perfectly friendly and even, if events allowed, FRIENDS”
Here's what Lotharsson thought of my suggestion, Jeff:
"Good grief, your denial even extends to that. You really do have major problems with self-awareness, don’t you?"
Here's what you thought of my suggestion, Jeff:
"Brad, you are right. I do have friends who question AGW. I disagree with them, and think that they have been misled somewhere along the line. Same with politics. I am sure we could be good friends."
Brain teaser:
1 of us three—you, me or Lotharsson—is a hateful, cultlike zealot.
Who?
..and just in case anybody's in any doubt as to where Brad is coming from:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=tGB8Uuffi4M
Sheesh. Brad can't even apply the word "hateful" correctly, let alone "zealot".
Either that, or he's just a wee bit paranoid...
You.
Sorry, was that meant to be rhetorical?
Sheesh - those alarmist climate scientists. Not.
Yep, I reckon ESLD is one of the most striking and persistent phenomena of the climate debate - and there's only 1 side doing it!
Heartland 'scientists' / GWPF 'scientists' / Monckton / Delingpole / Morano 'erring on the side of least drama?' When the NaziCommunoUNRapistDeath-PanelHordes are veritably on Our Very Doorsteps? No freakin' way... Won't somebody Think of the Children?!
The real science community's innate conservatism and fear of being seen as gauche or partisan is part of the reason we're still having this Mickey Mouse debate about short-term surface temp trends while the globe's been relentlessly storing heat in the oceans.
Oh, and morons, of course. One must not forget the morons. Not that there's any danger they'd ever let us...
Hmmmm?
I think Wow missed the brain teaser question entirely.
Are you saying that Jeff Harvey did NOT write this Wow and Lotharsson?
" Brad, you are right. I do have friends who question AGW. I disagree with them, and think that they have been misled somewhere along the line. Same with politics. I am sure we could be good friends.”
Or that Lotharsson wrote this to the same comment of Brad's?
“Good grief, your denial even extends to that. You really do have major problems with self-awareness, don’t you?”
Also Bernard,
Who is Jonas?
I have not noticed a comment from someone called Jonas at this thread?
Are you asking because you can't read chubby?
Vince,
Yep, and those of us have been around on this topic for more than a dog-watch (counted in years rather than hours) know this only too well. Most of us having visited Amazon at some time and seen the tactics. Amazon need to do something about this as it undermines the usefulness of reviews and star rating for ALL products.
But of course this does not apply to the likes of BK, chamy & co who can only ever value the width rather than the quality.
And then there is Duff, always a special case.
Why do you think this is the only thread in existence on the entire planet and internet thereon?
chamy:
Your powers of observation really are THAT poor are they not. Do you never look around a page and note the entries in the side columns? You should, 'twill broaden your horizons no end.
@Vince?
What does Tim's work have to do with the stuff on his website?
How come Tim doesn't publish what he puts on this website?
How come SS and Rabbet and RC and Tamino ecetera don't publish what they put on their websites?
Is there a point of difference in your criticism re Humlum?
Is there now something wrong with Geoscience?
So very blissfully, pig-ignorantly unaware, eh Cammy?
SkS references the science, it doesn't publish it, or make shit up like your preferred sources .
RC is the collective blog of publishing scientists - Gavin Schmidt of NASA for example
Rabbet is a publishing chemistry professor
and Tamino is also a frequent publisher.
And note that they publish in mainstream journals not Mickey Mouse ones that make E&E look like Nature.in comparison
He does: on this website. Duh.
They do: on their websites.
Yes.
Humdrum doesn't do science at all on his website, but pretends what he does there is science. Unlike Tim, Rabett and Tamino. Tamino also puts some of his science on his website.
Others like Monbiot put the science of others (science that is published in the science journals and letters) on his web site.
Humdrum doesn't.
I think it's futile.
Chameleon is a bottomless pit of incomprehension.
Cheap malt, or basket?
Tamino doesn't publish? Or the guys at RC?
You have got to be freakin' kidding me?!
(And you clearly have no idea who Eli is!)
Christ, John and Dana and Rob P from SkS have been publishing! (And in my view this paper completely wipes the floor with the 'warming pause' BS)
The real question is: why are we wasting our time 'debating' such outright and pitiable fatuity?
My mistake, I wasn't aware of that.
Gotta have a day job.
And what a distinct lack of width it is in their case...
Indeed!
(Did you encounter our 'Atmospheric Chemistry Graduate' a few days back who was running the 'OA ain't acidification because the pH will still be above 7' line? As well accusing the actually-practising folks of more-or-less making it up?)
And naturally I wasn't directing my incensed incredulity at you, chek.
I was referring to Eli's comment (previous page) above, but 'indeed' works just as well for Loth's.
You mean, how come he doesn't publish these articles in the peer-reviewed scientific literature? Because "publishing" in the original context you refer to means "in the scientific peer-reviewed literature". And Tim's not adding to scientific research. He's critiquing pseudo-science and the media coverage of science. In order to do that he generally relies on published and generally accepted scientific findings, so he doesn't need to re-publish the same material to get it re-peer-reviewed. It already has been.
How come you don't understand this distinction, given that you were happy to wave around your claim to have "academic scientific credentials"?
Yes.
Oh, wait...you want us to explain it more than it already has been?
Tim's critiquing science coverage by applying respected science.
Humlum's (implicitly or otherwise) critiquing respected science by applying non-respected methods and claims. His critiques haven't passed the initial filter that must be passed in order to be taken seriously as scientific claims.
You should wonder why he hasn't published them. If they are defensible his reputation would be advanced by having additional respected publications - especially publications that show other understandings to be wrong which are huge scientific reputation enhancers. And even better, by surviving scrutiny before and after publication his views would gain scientific legitimacy that they currently don't have.
As I suggested, try asking those Canberra researchers if they had defensible research showing some current understanding to be misguided whether they would stick it on a website or publish it in the peer-reviewed literature? Ask them which one would be better for their careers, and which one would gain their views the most scientific legitimacy.
How come you don't understand all this, given that you were happy to wave around your claim to have "academic scientific credentials"?
Why does Humlum refuse to take actions on those claims that would benefit his reputation and give legitimacy to those claims?
Is there any better answer to that question other than "because he knows they aren't defensible in the literature and would only hurt his reputation"?
You might ask Lindzen the same thing about the claims and implications he advances when talking to the general public, but will not attempt to publish in the peer-reviewed literature?
There's nothing wrong with it. But it doesn't have the implications you seem to think it does.
Just because one is (say, for the sake of argument) the most highly respected geoscience researcher the world has ever seen does not mean that one's unpublished claims suggesting that significant parts of the published scientific literature are mistaken should be taken as anything more than indefensible bluster. Unless and until he publishes, those claims are not even candidates to be considered as serious scientific claims that potentially might change scientific understanding.
You can bet your bottom dollar that Humlum knows this, or ought to, but he puts them up anyway. One can only conclude he is deliberately pitching indefensible pseudo-science to non-scientists.
How come you don't understand this, given that you were happy to wave around your claim to have "academic scientific credentials"?
Here you go.
His claim is complete with the slimy assertion that only bad chemists use the term "acidification" (and that he's a good chemist).
I guess one could call it 'de-basicification'...
The basic English problem with Latimer's claim is that "neutral" in chemistry is a term that has no concept of relative degree ("neutral" is properly understood as a single point on a scale), whereas "acid" and "alkaline" or "basic" do (they are regions of that same scale).
Accordingly it's quite difficult to allege that the proper term for the process is "neutralisation" because that ought to mean moving to the neutral point. One might argue for "moving towards neutralisation", but that's clunky compared to "acidification" and isn't what Latimer alleged.
@bill nails it:
"(Did you encounter our ‘Atmospheric Chemistry Graduate’ a few days back who was running the ‘OA ain’t acidification because the pH will still be above 7′ line?)"
How long until this phraudulent ”pH 7.0” phallacy has insinuated itself into every single corner of the Faux Skeptic flat-earthosphere?
Poor, poor denihilists. So close. You would have had, at long last, a valid and devastating argument on your hands, and those venal alarmist sudoscyentiztz would have been shame-bound to concede that the entire mendacious language of “acidification” was nothing but science-as-an-extension-of-politics…
… if only you’d known a basic scientific fact which, uh, most 13-year-old children know. If only you ‘d known what actual, er, experts think the pH of a neutral solution is.
It’s remarkable that anyone claiming to be scientifically-literate could have gotten this wrong—nevertheless, dear, denihilist dilettantes, read it and weep weakly acidic tears:
"Yet its rain had a measured pH of 4 or less (neutral pH is 6, ordinary rain is around 5); one sample measured 2.85—about the same as lemon juice, acidic enough to bum a cut."
—Professor N. Oreskes [Merchants of Doubt”, p. 67]
Professor of History and Science Studies, UCSD
George Mason Center for Climate Change Communication “Climate Change Communicator of the Year”
Lecturer, George Sarton Award Lecture, American
Association for the Advancement of Science, 2004
Fellow, American Philosophical Society Sabbatical Fellowship, 2001-2002.
Winner, National Science Foundation Young Investigator Award, 1994-1999.
Recipient, National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for University Teachers, 1993-94.
Winner, Society of Economic Geologists Lindgren Prize for outstanding work by a young scientist, 1993.
Fellow, Ritter Memorial Fellowship in History of Marine Sciences, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, 1994.
Brad continues to vigorously over-interpret what appears to be a typo.
Why am I not surprised?
Yeah, books of that length hardly ever contain errata.
A false attribution to Keynes and all. Tsk Tsk.
I don't see any Philosophy qualifications there, so what can you expect?
Blow me down, upon a quick re-scan I do see Philosophy quals! Must be expecting a call from the space program any minute...
This is Brad.
See Brad pwned.
Pwned, Brad, pwned...
By the way Brad, what is neutral pH?
Don't you know BJ?
Hint:
It's not 6 :-)
So, who thinks chameleon will provide a better reason for Humlum not publishing his website stuff in the peer-reviewed literature than "he knows it won't pass muster"?
Oh, I know the answer very well Chameleon.
I'm just trying to see what Brad Keyes knows.
Lots of comedy gold over at the Jonas thread. Jonas has painted himself into a corner and he's getting desperate. He steadfastly refuses to tell anyone where he was educated and what sources enabled him become such a climate science genius.
Now here we have Chammy trying to give the impression that a web site run by a contrarian (Humulm) has some good stuff on it. At least Humlum does some science. Its just too bad that almost all of his climate change denial views are restricted to his web site and aren't published in the empirical literature.
O, yes, Natural Philosophy! The epistemology that gave us astrology, alchemy, galenic medicine and the geo-centric model of the universe. That Science.
Lotharsson continues to vigorously defend someone who appears to be a pseudo-scholarly conspiracist crank. How surprising.
Brad continues to vigorously over-interpret what appears to be a typo.
Well, that WOULD be surprising if it were true, Lotharsson—since I know I trivially misexpress myself just as often as the next person (and, unlike Oreskes, I don’t have a co-author and the editorial army of Bloomsbury Press to correct me when I do; but then again, would any among them be intellectually arrogant enough to dispute the claims of someone so far above their own expertise level?)—and am generally happy to overlook such trivia in others. For example, I think it’s lame and silly to pretend President Obama’s “the other 47 states” → “the other 57 states” was anything but a speako.
On the other hand, was it just a typo when Oreskes characterised beryllium as “a heavy metal” instead of a “a really, really light metal”?
Or is it a knowo, as it appears to be? (One almost has to wonder how competent a geologist she was.)
Was Oreskes’ description of Ben Santer—“he’s thoroughly moderate... soft-spoken, almost self-effacing ... you might think he was an accountant”—a mere writo, an expresso?
Was she in fact aware, and did she really mean to say, “he’s thoroughly immoderate… fantasises in emails about beating the crap out of a skeptical State Climatologist and having a talk with those [readers of ClimateAudit] in a dark alley … you might think he was a union enforcer,” but somehow managed to give precisely the opposite, delusory impression?
Whatever the reasons for it, why is this laugh-out-loud mischaracterisation not mentioned on the novel’s Errata page?
What about Oreskes’ apparent confusion of reactive oxyen with radioactive oxygen (p. 28)?
Shall we chalk this up to a simple, could-have-happened-to-anyone-who’s-unfamiliar-with-the-field-she’s-commenting-on, reado?
Or is it a symptom of the kind of encyclopaedic ignorance of biochemistry that might allow a person to believe DDT “was not a magic bullet to cure malaria that its advocates are claiming”, as Oreskes has publicly claimed?
Again, it’s possible that, despite appearances, Oreskes has some grasp of the rudiments of biochemistry. (Surely it would behoove her to learn the basics of a field before injecting herself into the public conversation about it, wouldn’t it?)
If you don’t know what’s wrong with Oreskes’ claims, here are some hints:
1. DDT certainly was a “magic bullet” of chemical design, and the humanitarian miracle made possible by DDT was recognised by the award of a Nobel Prize to its inventor, Paul Mueller
2. DDT was never intended, claimed, promoted or thought (by anyone but Naomi Oreskes, apparently) to “cure malaria,” or even to treat malaria, or treat any disease* at all!
* As far as I know, the only use to which DDT has ever been put in a medical context was as a safe and efficacious antidote for people who’ve overdosed on barbiturates.
But the most scientifically-illiterate falsehood I’ve encountered in Oreskes’ oeuvre is probably:
“What counts as knowledge are ideas that are accepted by the society of experts.”
Either this is a double-grande expresso, or Oreskes genuinely has failed to grasp a principle every scientist in the last 250 years has understood! (Because you can’t do science otherwise.) Richard Feynman put it best:
"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts."
This definition is, of course, jocular, but it isn’t a joke.
If you don’t understand the dead-serious epistemology behind it, if you think Feynman was kidding, then you don’t get how science works.
And if you don’t know how science works, we can hardly blame you for being gulled by the pseudoscience that underwrites climate Angst, can we?
Stop the presses! Ben Santer beats the crap out of <a href="http://climatecrocks.com/2010/12/08/did-ben-santer-finally-beat-the-cra… Micheals.
Brad seems to think that vector control of disease transmission has no medical context. Curious that.
Brad misinterprets Feynman to mean the 'ignorance of experts' is absolute ignorance.
Brad is wronger than wrong
http://climatecrocks.com/2010/12/08/did-ben-santer-finally-beat-the-cra…
@Jeff Harvey,
I suspect you’re still around—reading, if not writing, about the moral abyss I’ve just exposed between you and a certain (ostensibly ipsilateral) fanatic.
I hope so, because I wanted to comment on your revelation that:
“I do have friends who question AGW. I disagree with them, and think that they have been misled somewhere along the line.”
I don't think you quite mean this!
As you know, precision is imprescindibly important among scientists, so please excuse my pedantics ’n’ semantics.
You hardly strike me as the kind of person who disagrees with questioning AGW. In a word, you hardly strike me as agullibilist.
In fact I know you were, in a past career, and hope you are, in the present conflict, the opposite of a gullibilist: a skeptic. A scientist.
Therefore I think you agree with questioning AGW. In fact I’m pretty sure you questioned AGW once.
That’s what scientists do. They ask questions first, believe second. Or disbelieve second.
So I reckon you meant:
“I do have friends who deny (disbelieve in) AGW. I disagree with them—I do believe in AGW—and I think that they have been misled somewhere along the line.”
So far so good.
Like you, I’ve met the occasional person in meatspace who opines that “AGW is a myth”, “a scam”, or “imaginary / unreal / counterfactual.”
My experience has been that, in virtually 100% of cases,
1. they only hold this view as strongly as they formed it carefully—which is to say, they arrived at it carelessly and are fairly weakly attached to it.
2. a friendly 10-minute discussion about the case for AGW is all it takes to change their mind.
3. nobody feels the need to raise their voice during this process.
I’m curious as to why you have friends (plural) who still disbelieve in AGW after what I presume would be a similar effort on your part to convey the arguments/evidence to them, especially considering your scientific “fluency”, particularly when it comes to things ecological and atmospheric. It’s surprising. May I ask: what reasons do these friends offer against agreeing with you, or perhaps I should say: what arguments do they present in favor of their own positions? I rarely ever hear such arguments, hence my curiosity.
But hey, it could happen to me. I might have a friend someday who remains unmoved by the cogent, airtight reasoning I adduce ... if I say so myself :-)!
If I still couldn’t change this AGW-denying friend’s mind over a couple of beers, how would I react?
Maybe I’d feel a number of these:
— frustrated at my failure to articulate the evidence properly
— genuinely curious about the “evidence” or “reasoning” behind my friend’s continued disbelief, just in case it was somehow far, far better than I thought—for instance, have I missed some revolutionary paper that changes everything?, etc.
— sad for my friend’s hebetude / contrarianness / disingenuity, which is totally not like him/her
— thirsty
How would it affect the friendship? Or the prospects for friendship, as the case may be?
Minutely, if at all.
With apologies to Phelim McAleer, I would simply think my drinking companion was wrong, but not evil, on climate change.
As would you, I think, Jeff.
Your being a normal, decent person.
Tragically, though, decent human beings aren’t the only human beings.
Take fanatics, for example. The cardinal sign of fanaticism is ectopic moralisation. Due to some poorly-understood ethical oncogene, the good-bad axis is somehow transposed onto the correct-mistaken axis.
The affected person can’t even begin to speculate what “not evil, just wrong” means. To a fanatic it’s just word salad.
Never mind how big and complex the question: the only decent thing to do is to come to the conclusion X (and anyone who concludes Y is clearly up to no good!), where X = whatever the fanatic believes.
For example, in Lotharsson’s ontology, it is bad of any able-bodied, educated, informed adult to be mistaken about climate change. He has yet to meet—because they can’t possibly exist!—a morally good person who makes an informed choice against believing [some climate doctrine].
Therefore, by simple propositional calculus, our planned symposium for two is an absurd and repugnant dream. Even when I go to Holland we can’t possibly share those beers, because that would represent the absurd spectacle of good making friends with evil.
Sorry Jeff! :-( LOL
(Dunno about you, but I was kinda looking forward to it.!!)
:-)
"Brad seems to think that vector control of disease transmission has no medical context. Curious that."
Har har. Zing. You got me there.
Don't be deliberately obtuse, luminous. Our/your/everyone's inadvertent incomprehensions are annoying enough without you going out looking for something to misunderstand.
The only THERAPEUTIC context in which DDT has ever been used, as far as I know, is in barbiturate overdose
Happy?
You do not GIVE DDT to patients with MALARIA.
Got it?
Good, Now you understand more than Naomi Oreskes.
"Brad misinterprets Feynman to mean the ‘ignorance of experts’ is absolute ignorance."
No I don't.
What made you think I did?
Given that you claim to be a philosophy graduate but loudly crow about "conclusions" you draw from failing the basic philosophical skill of parsing English sentences, you might want to ponder the semantic differences between what you reported Oreskes saying and what your version says.
You are smart enough to see there are significant differences, right? You did pass high-school English at least, right?
Your (1) is completely irrelevant - so it's unsurprising that you'd spout it.
Your (2) relies on your mad skillz at not being able to find stuff, therefore concluding it doesn't exist. You know, like that word in the dictionary you couldn't find. And those real world applications of the term "denial" to concepts that you thought did not exist. And all sorts of things that one may find via Teh Google. (And it also relies on your mad misinterpretation skillz too! Not every use of the word "cure" in English applies to a medical case. A competent graduate of a philosophy degree ought to understand that.)
But it is interesting to see you agreeing with Oreskes when she debunks that claim. Trouble is, she seems to be debunking the claim whereas you merely seem to deny it exists - and you seem to think that she's wrong.
Your re-assertion that "accepted scientific theory" and "scientific consensus" are radically different concepts is noted. It hasn't changed since the last time, so there's no need to respond further.
What an amusing misconception.
I'm beginning to doubt you passed philosophy. Your parsing skills seem to be subordinated to your prejudices.
Brad,
Hate to mess up your 'simple propositional calculus', but evil is the intent to do wrong. Being wrong about climate change is not evil per se. The consequence of being wrong about climate change does risk the very high likelihood of very bad things happening. However, continuing denial of the potential risks of human caused climate change after being advised of those potential risks, could be said to be evil.
Apparently Brad, in his infinite medical wisdom, has never heard of the terms preventative or prophylactic therapy.
I'm beginning to think Brad's infinite wisdom is like an infinite mesh. Sure, it's infinite in extent - but it fails to cover an infinite area.
Brad,
Read the Asimov essay. You are wronger than wrong.
@Lotharsson,
"Your re-assertion that “accepted scientific theory” and “scientific consensus” are radically different concepts is noted."
Thank you for sharing this hallucination with us.
Let me explain why you write this.
Your fanaticism is causing you to see disagreements where none exist.
I didn't say what you think I said. Let alone twice.
I didn't assert it. Let alone re-assert it.
I don't even believe it. Let alone re-believe it.
"Accepted" is a sociological word.
"Consensus" is a sociological word.
Let's imagine the vast majority of scientists believed the theory that X.
I'd call this a "consensus of scientists", wouldn't you?
I'd call X an "accepted [by the majority of scientists] scientific theory", wouldn't you?
Interesting that Brad feels the need to cut and paste and half-baked Koch-funded smear on the excellent Oreskes.
Let's not forget why Brad is here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=tGB8Uuffi4M
"Apparently Brad, in his infinite medical wisdom, has never heard of the terms preventative or prophylactic therapy."
Lol.
I've not only heard of those terms, I can tell you with some confidence that a residual insect spray on a wall would NOT be considered a form of preventative OR prophylactic therapy.
But don't give up.
Go on, hit me with some more TV-gleaned, quick-googled medical sophistry!
Bradspeak,
Some confidence = none
Since several people here - perhaps even a majority of commenters - apparently share this "hallucination", Occam's Razor suggests that I might not be fanatical but rather your explanation might need to be improved.
Over to you.
And you should know sophistry.
Brad Keyes.
What is neutral pH?
Ah, I see the garrulous narcissist is back to clogging the threads.
These sub-Nietzschean Tea-Partyite - and all-round dotty - rants are just dull dull dull.
This one needs to be confined to its own thread, where those who wish to goad it, marvel at the sheer scale of the inverse relationship between competence and arrogance, or who simply cannot let immovable stupidity go unchallenged can contend with it without necessitating that every other dialogue being hopelessly skewed by the spirit of Andrew Breitbart.
Isn't there a separate thread for people who want to discuss the tea-party-invented "DDT Ban" myth?
WTF?
Look it up BJ!
It is entirely googleable!
Here for fox ache!
http://www.elmhurst.edu/~chm/vchembook/184ph.html
Cammy, you might like to bear in mind that you're talking to some professional scientists here.
When a teacher or instructor asks you a question, it's not because they>/i> don't know the answer., Just like with Bernard's question, they're ascertaining your knowledge. Or lack of, in this instance.
Context: Infernc... inferan... innferen.. think out things hard: Hurt Chebbie! Chebbie like Typing. Typing Good. Type Type Type
Oh?
I'm sorry?
Is BJ BK's professional teacher/instructor?
BTW, @ Jeff Harvey,
I am VERY interested in YOUR answer/reply (as in Jeff Harvey's answer/reply) to Brad K @#23.
I don't see why he'd bother, Chameleon, when it should be patently obvious that
"to question AGW"
is not the same thing as
"to ask questions about AGW"
Considering Brad's entire post depended on his dishonest conflation of the two, that leaves nothing to respond to.
What did you think of Brad's mate in this video?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=tGB8Uuffi4M
Imagine that - people deliberately polluting the internet with lies in order to advance their false beliefs?
Not interested in your reply Vince,
I am however interested in JeffH's.
You have done a spectacular job of missing the point and apparently forgetting the comments to which Brad is specifically referring.
Rain getting heavier as temperatures rise
Giant heatwave delivers hottest January on record
Remarkable indeed.
All the fires and floods may well help explain why the Potty Peer's Grand Tour of The Antipodean Colonies Anno Domini 2013 , which was inaugurated, doubtlessly with much ceremony, on the 28th, appears to have been studiously ignored.
He may have to resort to sky-diving again... ;-)
Also: Give us a break, Barry O'Farrell!
Chameleon, stop being a twit.
As has already been said to you, I want to hear Brad's opinion for a very specific reason. It's telling that he's suddenly gone quiet on the subject - perhaps it's a sign that he knows he's stepped on the quicksand.
You are better off just shutting up. You're out of your depth on this subject - which is ironically apropos as I've previously encountered this same ignorance of the subject from other denizens of the swamp.
So Brad, what is neutral pH?
James Delingpole - a class act
https://twitter.com/suzanne_moore/status/297132097364180992
@Anthony David
And Delingpole's 'apology' reads like a further dig:
https://twitter.com/JamesDelingpole/status/296942824035852288
It's not often one encounters someone who genuinely merits the adjective 'vile', but Delingpole is, fortunately, of a type one does not encounter often.
Well, BJ, p and H are the first two letters of 'philosophy', and 'neutral' is, um, neither one thing nor the other.... so it's sort of like being a lukewarmer genius? Yeah, that's it!
@Lotharsson,
Oreskes' reference to DDT as a purported cure for malaria was, in the most generous interpretation, solecistic. Your apologetics for her are now touching in their desperation:
"(Not every use of the word “cure” in English applies to a medical case. A competent graduate of a philosophy degree ought to understand that.)"
No need to explain that to me—in fact, I was writing to a fellow student of this blog not 2 days ago and had occasion to recruit the word in question extra-medically, in service to this metaphor: "Together, we can find the cure for climate alarmism."
But climate alarmism is not a medical condition (is it?), and it should therefore be pretty obvious that I had in mind a non-medical, metaphorical “cure.”
Unfortunately for Oreskes—and you, now—all readers of this thread know that words operate in the context of other words and that when the verb “to cure” takes the name of a medical condition as its object, as in this predicate:
“was not the magic bullet to cure malaria its advocates claimed”
… the concept is unambiguously medical.
So, which advocates of DDT made the claim that it could cure malaria, as Orekes alleges?
(Not “extirpate,” “control,” “prevent,” or any other verb—“cure.”)
No medically-literate person would make such a claim, as Oreskes would know if she’d taken the time to acquire the rudiments of medical theory before pronouncing on it. And as you would know if you were medically-literate.
'Cure' is a perfectly acceptable word in the context. An outbreak can be cured without necessarily meaning everyone affected received personal medical attention.
So last week it was attack the consensus, this week it's attack Oreskes, but curiously you have nothing to say about the actual subject of her book which has inspired all that denier petty parsing.
You're nothing if not predictable "Brad".
Earlier Brad said,"On the other hand, was it just a typo when Oreskes characterised beryllium as “a heavy metal” instead of a “a really, really light metal”?"
Are you aware that beryllium is known as a heavy metal because of its toxic properties? http://chemistry.about.com/od/chemistryglossary/g/Heavy-Metal-Definitio…
Brad you say "Or is it a symptom of the kind of encyclopaedic ignorance of biochemistry that might allow a person to believe DDT “was not a magic bullet to cure malaria that its advocates are claiming”, as Oreskes has publicly claimed?"
Where did Oreskes make this claim?
From Turboblocke's link, which came up at the top of my own 'heavy metal definition' Google search, too.
This 'heavy metal' thing is the most pointless pedantry imaginable. The MoD errata acknowledges that by the 'atomic weight' definition this is technically incorrect. But in general English usage 'heavy metal' meaning 'poisonous' is completely legitimate.
Trying to turn this into an indicator of, what, lack of actual scientific knowledge(?) or a deliberate attempt to mislead(?) is merely comic - and rather ironic in the circumstances coming from someone whose schtick is all bluff - but I guess that's basic projection for you.
I'm sure we all look forward to reading any of The Philosopher Prince's forthcoming 300+ page tomes - for, with such an incomparable mastery across disciplines little seen since Renaissance times there will doubtlessly be many - which will certainly be without error, or maladroitisms.
Oh, and note the airy 'chemical expertise', and the unsurpassable grasp of "medical theory": is there anything our dazzling savant cannot turn his hand to and make fruitful?
This pointless 'cure' thing isn't even a joke. What a waste of time and pixels. So, Brad, are there excrements in Paradise?
[Tap, tap - is this thing on...?]
Hey Brad, what is neutral pH?
It's exactly the same strategy as was applied to Mann et al., especially via the ClimateGate beat-up.
If their main claims appear to be robust, find whatever other point you can even if it's entirely peripheral or your attack on it is purely sophistical, and use it to smear the reputation of the individuals involved so that people discount their main claims based on the smear regardless of how robust they are.
And if Brad's style of "analysis" was applied to his own output at Lewandowsky's or here, he'd have to rule his own arguments out within the first five minutes. The irony of someone who is so frequently wrong or misleading implying that someone else's work should be entirely ignored because of peripheral issues - most of which seem to be desperate beat-ups - is overwhelming.
You'll also notice he ignores many rebuttals of his points and instead of figuring out how they affect his argument he simply shifts to the next point. He's not debating in good faith.
So, wait, wait...I know this one!
"Surely it would behoove herBrad to learn the basics of a field before injecting herselfhimself into the public conversation about it, wouldn’t it?"
Nah, I guess not. His purposes here don't require credibility or accuracy.
...which seems rather a lot like the No True Scotsman fallacy. But let's assume it to be true for the sake of argument.
In that case, Shorter Brad:
"Anyone who repeats a medically illiterate claim made by someone else, even to disagree with it, is themselves medically illiterate".
OK. So Brad has just repeated a medically illiterate claim, and even did so to disagree with it, therefore by his own standards he is medically illiterate. Thus his claims about Oreskes being medically illiterate are grounded in his own medical illiter...oh...wait...
Er...this Brad bloke doesn't seem too good at this "logic" thing. Either that, or he has great contempt for his readers. Or both.
Since Brad's presence raised memories of Lewandowsky and conspiracy theorising and stuff, from here (including more in comments) Anthony Watts has guest posts written by conspiracy theorists including one author who says the moon landings were faked...
Pfft. Have you EVER been to the moon yourself?
No?
Then how do you know the moon EXISTS, huh?
This will incur the wrath of the bozo-brigade:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/climate-scientists-esld.html
@All
Link to James Randi video. "James Randi Exposes the TRICKERY of Making People 'Believe'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDbuf6d3xm8
Nice quote about 36min mark on wardsw - "Scientists, like the rest of us, have an uncanny ability to find what they are looking for, whether it's there or not"
Worth bearing in mind when visiting sks and digesting their output. A pinch of salt should be applied..
Yes they do, GSW. As Sagan indicated that's why we do science - to avoid fooling ourselves.
And that's why we try to explain to chameleon that you don't mindlessly accept the untested claims of any scientist. You look for claims that have survived scrutiny - that are the outcome of the scientific process.
Maybe you'll have better luck explaining that to her.
'sfunny how it's not your preferred scientists who do this, innit.
And who is this James Randi?
what's funny about dellingpole's notpology is that he's among the FIRST to fly off the handle if you call him a denier.
Really? He shows very little actual skepticism.
More contrariness.
I guess to old and stupid people these seem like skepticism and even wisdom.
They aren't.
Now, can you explain what that youtube post is supposed to say, because it doesn't help your case at all, really.
You just (ironically enough) believe it to be, apparently.
This may help you see what you're trying to hide.
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/12/16/say-it-aint-so-randi/
And this bit has a belter for YOU, Brat:
http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.co.uk/2009/12/james-randi-global-war…
Appealing to a consensus?
Surely not, Brat. Surely not!
http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/swift-blog/1779-the-skeptical-disco…
But you didn't know that his entire presumption that GSW was pronouncing like The Word Of God was based on solely that.
Maybe YOU need to be a little skeptical of the denier talking points.
Problem is that most of those who are AGW deniers or skeptics are not scientists at all and have no formal training in any relevant fields. Which therefore begs the question: why do they hold such views? It cannot be on the basis of a strong grasp of the science. It must be therefore based on something else. And what else is there? Ideology. In other words, an irrational fear of government and a perceived threat to our way of life posed by actions to deal with AGW as well as other environmental problems.
It's also probably a large parcel of self-serving.
a) combating AGW will cost them now to save everyone in the future.
b) doing nothing different will make them wealthier now at the cost of everyone in the future.
Pretty easy to figure out.
Some of the richer ones make modify (b) slightly by maintaining that if THEY are rich, their children won't suffer the problems either).
I've just popped back in to point out that Bernard J is still waiting for Brad to answer his question.
And James Randi taken in by as cheap a ruse as the Petition Project! Such old news! Disappointing, maybe, but not to the extent that Monbiot being initially taken in by Climategate1.0 was.
It's notable that no-one who wasn't already a regular imbiber of the Kool-Aid was taken in by Climategate 2.0, which goes to show we learn and move on...
And I'm sure GSW will now link to the papers that provide the scientific basis for the following remarkable statement of Randi's -
Otherwise you might think it was a case of some old guy weighing in on an issue he knows bugger-all about...
@Brad,
Randi didn't say he was a climate sceptic because 32,000 individuals signed a petition. He refers to that, and the IPCC consensus in the essay, but ultimately he chose to side with the evidence - he didn't think AGW would be a problem
Another nice quote from there too,
"Happily, science does not depend on consensus. Conclusions are either reached or not, but only after an analysis of evidence as found in nature."
;)
You've got your very own stage to strut now, Princeling: off you pop.
Tim, when you have a moment...
I've just popped back to point out that some of us are still waiting for JeffH's response to BradK #23.
I guess we can now pop over to the other stage/playing field for that response?
BTW the answer to BJ's question is 7 or if we want to use ranges it is 6.5 - 7.5
Does that help?.
6 is definitely outside the accepted defined nuetral ph range.
Brad.
Is there a particular reason why you're having such difficulty answering my question about what neutral pH is?
"Tim, when you have a moment…"
Ah, the alarmistic way of having a debate. When you are out of arguments, then ban your opponent.
"Is there a particular reason why you’re having such difficulty answering my question about what neutral pH is?"
Because it's devastating to his spiel.
Note: Not "case", he has none.
Chubby: Does that help?.
Not unless you're Brat.
Testing
Table
R1C1
R1C2
R2C1
R2C2
OK, so it doesn't like that tagging...