There is none. That is, there is no evidence that greenhouse gas concentrations have caused the earth to warm in the past. There are correlations between CO2 and warming, but they have been an increase in CO2 after a period of increased warming, not the other way around. Of course, it makes since that it can happen, there is just no evidence that it ever has.
That's just sophistry. From a pragmatic point of view, most people have no choice about having to work in a capitalist society.
You can argue the various merits of different political/economic systems, but people are effectively forced to work in almost all of them.
The only solution in a communist system is to force people to do what is needed. You tell them "You must work or the state punishes you." Then, to make them work hard you tell them "You must meet these quotas or the state punishes you." Net effect? Low personal liberty, low motivation, and the perfect environment for a police state to grow in.
I think you have it backwards. People are compelled to work in capitalist societies, not communist ones: i.e., you have to work or you don't eat. Most civilised countries have a welfare safety net (i.e. they are a little bit communist) so it is more like you have to work or you don't get any toys.
What you are saying is that many "communist" states have not really been communist but have taken aspects of capitalist societies.
The USSR managed to take many of the worst features of communism and capitalism.
Indeed, and this is the enormous hurdle for any potential Facebook competitor; even something Google-backed has little hope of challenging the FB behemoth. The only way I can see a rival social network competing is if it offers a superset of features of FB and interacts seamlessly with FB (does FB's terms of service allow this?)
Like it or not, the majority of your friends will be using Facebook. In terms of social interaction it obviously isn't as essential as face to face meeting, but it is already rather more important than email or the phone system for many, if not most, young people. If I gave up Facebook (or email or telephones) tomorrow my closest friends would still stay in touch (somehow) but it would be making life more difficult for them and I'd disappear off the radar of my more casual friends (particularly those who don't live locally).
It would be nice if Facebook was replaced by an open social networking standard or was owned by a more ethical company but unfortunately it isn't.
Grapes were once grown in England and the Thames was once frozen solid. In other words, it has been hotter than it's been now, regardless of the supposed "hottest decade crap", and it's been colder before.
I can't be bothered to debunk the rest of the crap you've written, so I'll just respond to this bit. I assume the rest of the post is on a similar level.
Grapes used to be grown in England. Grapes are *still* grown in England. They're even grown in Wales. Vineyards are in fact becoming more feasible in Britain due to global warming. Google "English wine" or "British wine".
No doubt your tiny little brain can't cope with the complexities of actual science, so you prefer to base your beliefs on individual anecdotal snippets (which happen to be wrong!)
FAIL.
My point of view is that I'm open to be convinced, but at the moment it seems to me to be arrogance on behalf of we humans to assume we can have a significant impact, although I suspect we're contributing in a minor way.
It may be arrogance to *assume* humans can have a significant impact, but it is not arrogant to believe the *science* that indicates human have a significant impact. It is more arrogant to believe that one is in a better position to have a view on the issue compared to the experts who study it.
The problem is the whole topic is so clouded and has now been subverted by groups on both sides with ulterior motives, I don't know who or what to trust anymore.
Whilst it is not easy to get a good picture of the science through the fog of the media (which has indeed been subverted by various groups with different motives), how about trusting the scientists? Try believing the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
As for me, I'm inclined to think we do have some cause for concern, based on what little actual evidence I've seen from both sides of the debate. I'm by no means convinced that we have enough evidence to support one side or another.
Me too. I understand the science at a basic level (enough extra CO2 in the atmosphere causes warming), but who is to say what is the actual level of CO2 that will make warming significant? And how do all the feedback cycles and other variables fit in?
Wouldn't it be great if we had some sort of system, ooh, let's call it the "scientific method" or something similar, where people who have studied the field could argue with their peers and put forward competing hypotheses to explain what is happening? Also, we could set up organisations to tell the general public what has been concluded -- maybe called the "Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change" or something similarly poncy.
That way we wouldn't all need to make a snap decision on the issue based on an incomplete understanding of the issue.
Personally I'm unconvinced by climate change, just like I'm unconvinced that string theory is a viable theory, or many other advanced scientific topics. As I don't fully understand those fields however, I'm not arrogant enough to believe I know better than the experts.
[quote]I hate to break it to you but the NHS is the worst of all the western public healthcare systems.
I'll take the Australian, German or French system any day over the abomination that is the NHS.[/quote]
Come on, you can't be serious. You may prefer another country's system but to call the NHS "an abomination" is absurd. The NHS has massive popular support and is very effective.
We spend significantly less per capita on health than almost any comparable Western country yet still have comparable performance. France does slightly better on average but they spend about 50% more. The US spends something like 150%(?) more yet has higher infant mortality and a lower life expectancy.
Even those who would prefer a different system would describe it as "an abomination". Without exception, all the Americans I know living in the UK prefer the NHS to the American system.
The libertoons whinging about ID cards have no idea what they're talking about.
This lot fail to see that most non-Anglo countries have mandatory cards, and it doesn't bother anybody. The idea that an ID card and a record in a database somewhere means getting analprobed constantly by police officers in ski masks is riscible.
It's traditional in the UK for people not to have to carry identification. It used to be a source of pride that people could go about their business without such interference from the state.
Big countries just as advanced, free and democratic as the English-speaking world (perhaps more so), like France and Spain have got them. Why not make life easier for government agencies trying to enforce the law, prevent fraud, and prevent illegal immigration?
France and Spain don't seem to be more successful than the UK in this regard. ID cards will be very expensive so some benefit must be shown before introducing them can be considered. "Because other countries have them" doesn't seem to be a very strong argument to me.
The risks also seem greater in the UK. The government has a very poor record in recent years in keeping its citizens' data safe, and has more big brother tendencies than other European nations.
I was referring to fair elections. Obviously if elections are rigged then you could still have a situation where you had a dictator despite the presence of elections.
There are however no credible reports that Venezuela's elections were rigged. They had numerous international observers who declared themselves satisfied.
Even if you believe that Chavez is sufficiently corrupt to rig elections, there is no incentive for him to do so. He has massive popular support.
Chavez certainly isn't the first dictator who started out by getting elected.
-jcr
Plenty of dictators started out by getting elected, but the stress is on the "started out". You can only reasonably call democratically-elected people dictators if and only if elections are subsequently abolished. Leaders who are still serving a term for which they were elected cannot be called dictators, unless you are seriously stretching the use of language.
The reason Chavez in called a dictator (mainly in the American media) is because it easier to call someone an emotive word than discuss the issues; compare the use of the word "terrorist".
Maybe its a bug that only pops up on certain inputs. Maybe the researcher knows this and avoids those inputs (or wrote the program without intending to go anywhere near the input range where the code fails). This sees fine to me...researcher needs a one-off set of statistics and writes some quick and dirty code that does it even if it isn't robust or even efficient.
Sorry, but I wouldn't trust any code that fails on certain inputs!
I can accept code that isn't efficient, that's just not necessary. I can accept bugs in peripheral code (such as an added-on GUI) but the code that actually does the science really should be as good as the scientist can write. If it has known bugs they should be fixed before any research is published that is based on the code.
I speak as someone who has written code for scientific research.
Releasing this code is probably bad for two reasons. If the researcher is not aware of bugs outside of the exact inputs they used, they probably aren't going to disclose them--just wait until some amateur gets a hold of the code, runs it, and claims that all global warming data is questionable because this model has a bug or produces weird output.
Good. That means researchers will be more careful about the code they are writing, and we can all have more confidence in the science.
I don't expect researchers to write great code for everything...it may be repetitive or inefficient but they can usually tell from the result (and comparing it to other models) whether or not something went wrong.
Comparing it to other models? What if they are wrong too? Perhaps that's how they verified their results. Trying to tell if the program is correct from the results is even worse. You end up fixing bugs until the code produces the result you want.
I know that I write code at work (IANAClimate Researcher) that is quite sloppy or wasteful because I just want to see what the result looks like (and will never run the program again)
That's exploratory programming, and is quite fair enough (in fact I think people should do it more), but you shouldn't use such code to do anything important. Throw it away and start again.
You assume far too much. I don't trust an analysis of anything, by anyone, who doesn't know what they are actually looking at. In your example you can look and analyze but you don't need to understand what it is....
If the code is freely available and so are the data used, what is stopping you rerunning the experiment with the same data if you find a bug? No analysis comes into it: if the results are significantly different, you can show that the program is running incorrectly.
I'm seeing a pretty clear parallel between your view of how the code can be analyzed and the AGW ignoramus skeptic view of AGW science as a whole. I don't trust arguments for or against AGW that aren't by people with educations to demonstrate they at least *might* know what they are talking about.
A mathematician could point out flaws in the calculations of climate science, a physicist could point out problems with the understanding of the physics, a chemist could point out issues with the understanding of the chemistry... you don't have to understand an entire issue to notice problems with a subset of the science. I speak as someone who accepts the majority expert view of climate change.
Of all the stuff that's important in scientific computing, the code is probably one of the more minor parts. The science behind the code is drastically more important.
Usually though the code is a method of determining whether the science is correct. If the code is not correct, it's not possible to assess the science.
Sure, you could audit it, and find shit that's not done properly. At the same time, you wouldn't have a damn clue what it's supposed to be doing. Suppose I'm adding a floating point to an integer. Is that a problem? Does it ruin everything? Or is it just sloppy coding that doesn't make a difference in the long run? Understanding what the code is doing is required for you to do an audit which will produce any useful results.
I disagree. Provided the data used in the experiment are also freely available, it should be relatively straightforward to fix any bug that was found and rerun the experiment. You could then easily tell whether the bug made a substantial difference.
You must realize that the computer has it in for you. The irrefutable proof of this is that the computer always does what you tell it to do.
