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Comment Re:A question for all the"deniers". (Score 1) 497

It's important to understand that the primary determinant of the amount of water vapour in the atmosphere is temperature, which means that other GHG gases impact the amount of water vapour and thus amplify their own effect. That's why water vapour doesn't get much consideration: it has a short cycle, it acts primarily as a feedback system, and have no feasible ways to directly increase or decrease it, unlike the other GHGs like CO2 and methane.

Comment Re:Science by democracy doesn't work? (Score 1) 497

It should be named anthropogenically accelerated global climate change, as there is no question whether the climate is changing---one cannot expect that the actual climate will last forever, it has changed before and will change again. The question is whether climate change is (a) global, (b) faster than it would be natural, and therefore (c) caused by the man.

I guess, they should have named it anthropogenically inverted global climate change, then. The natural trend is about -0.03C degrees C per century, when you add in the anthropogenic impact the current trend is around +2.00 degrees C per century.

Windows

Microsoft Reveals Windows 10 Will Be a Free Upgrade 570

mpicpp was one of many to point out this bit of news about Windows 10."Microsoft just took another big step toward the release of Windows 10 and revealed it will be free for many current Windows users. The company unveiled the Windows 10 consumer preview on Wednesday, showcasing some of the new features in the latest version of the operating system that powers the vast majority of the world's desktop PCs. The developer preview has been available since Microsoft first announced Windows 10 in the fall, but it was buggy, limited in scope and very light on new features. Importantly, Windows 10 will be free for existing Windows users running versions of Windows back to Windows 7. That includes Windows 7, 8, 8.1 and Windows Phone. Microsoft specified it would only be free for the first year, indicating Windows would be software that users subscribe to, rather than buy outright. Microsoft Corporate Vice President of the Operating Systems Group Joe Belfiore showed off some of the new features in Windows 10. While Microsoft had already announced it would bring back the much-missed Start Menu, Belfiore revealed it would also have a full-screen mode that includes more of the Windows 8 Start screen. He said Windows machines would go back and forth between to two menus in a way that wouldn't confuse people. Belfiore also showed a new notification center for Windows, which puts a user's notifications in an Action Center menu that can appear along the right side, similar to how notifications work in Apple OS X. Microsoft Executive Vice President of Operating Systems Terry Myerson revealed that 1.7 million people had downloaded the Windows 10 developer preview, giving Microsoft over 800,000 individual piece of feedback. Myerson explained that Windows 10 has several main intents: the give users a mobility of experience from device to device, instill a sense of trust in users, and provide the most natural ways to interact with devices." More details are available directly from Microsoft.

Comment Re:And? (Score 1) 448

No. You just have an expensive plan imposed on you by a local monopoly at gunpoint. You are stuck with that plan regardless of how effective or responsive it is.

Actually, that's not true. The average American pays (considerably) more for less service than the average Canadian, and it's not just Canada. Every country in the world pays less for health care than America and many of them also get better service. Last time I checked the American health care was the most expensive in the world. As a country, the U.S. spends 50-100% more (17.9% of GDP) than other first world countries (9%-12% of GDP) on health care and Americans get the 38th best health care in the world.

I would rather spend my own money as I see fit.

Of course you would and that's why medical expenses are one of the leading causes of brankruptcy in the United States. People like you gamble and when they lose, they stick everyone else with bill. Frequently while braying endlessly about how everyone else should take personal responsibility for their actions.

Planned economies often miss important details (like flouride toothpaste) or drive away useful goods and services.

We're not talking about planned economies but rather universal health care and anyone who isn't lib-tarded should recognize that you can't have a fair market when the first question is "how much will you pay to not die today"?

Comment Re:How perfectly appropriate - (Score 1) 341

The refutations are listed chronologically. "Letters" is a term used to describe a type of peer-reviewed scientific document format in certain scholarly journals such as Nature. These original research articles should not be confused with "Letters to the Editor".

Not particularly important since it was never printed.

They are not simply "nit-picking" but criticizing the papers for completely misrepresenting the actual positions of scientists on this issue.

Actually, most of the listed papers are nit-picking. For instance, one of them complained that one of the papers misreprented expertise on the topic of climate change because they used a metric based on number of papers published in the field of climate science to measure expertise. The complaint was that since the vast majority of scientists working in the field believed that climate change was a real phenomonom that the paper looking at what the vast majority believed was biased towards what the vast majority believed. Shocking.

None of the criticism presented look particuarly compelling or notable, which seems to be why no one else is paying much attention to them. They are underwhelming and overhyped by your site.

Comment Re:How perfectly appropriate - (Score 1) 341

Well known skeptic or not, the author in question directly contradicted the abstract of the results for his own study. It's right there for us to read and we can easily verifiy that his statement to your site was false according to the abstract of his study. So either the abstract is wrong and the author made a msitake in his paper or the author is wrong about his own paper, neither situation bodes well for the criticism. It's been known to happen, particular among so-called "skeptic" scientists where their public posturing is frequently different from their scientific results, possibly because their co-authors are less biased or they know their actual results will be rigorously reviewed unlike comments delivered to a blog of no particular noteworthiness.

A quick review of your site show it to be "politically independent" much like Fox News is "Fair and Balanced".

Comment Re:How perfectly appropriate - (Score 1) 341

You're linking back to the same site, with the same problems.

The first "peer reviewed rebuttal" listed there is a complaint that Science refused to publish a letter that claimed that one of the studies was wrong. That certainly convinced me. I mean, a letter that wasn't ever published? What could it be more devastating? If they're starting with the strongest evidence, I am seriously under whelmed.

The second one is from Energy & Environment the editor of whom has admitted that she picks articles to further her political goals (which include opposing environment groups and activity).

Several of the papers listed in the linked blog post are from the exact same people who complained about the Cook paper in the previous link you posted.

The remaining are nit-picking papers complaining about how this or that metric used to measure expertise is not perfectly accurate.

Over billed and underwhelming, as usual.

Comment Re: noooo (Score 0) 560

First of all, they're posted on "Watts Up With That?" and that's never a good place to start.

The central problem with "no global warming since 1997" is that 1998 was an unusually warm year due to an unusually strong El Nino effect (which started in 1997). When you start your trend line with exceptional data, you will always get garbage results and it doesn't matter what trend you're trying to measure. Interestingly enough the years 2005, 2010 and now 2014 are all warmer than 1998 and none of them feature a strong El Nino like we saw in 1998. Since a strong El Nino will raise global atmospheric temperatures by around 0.5 degrees, that means we have definitely seen warming when the year-to-year noise of ENSO (El Nino and La Nina) effects are accounted for. There's also the little tidbit that 1998 is only year in the top 10 warmest years that not in this century, which makes the "no warming since 1998" seem a bit bogus, doesn't it?

You don't have to take my word for it, though you can read more about it, if you want.

Comment Re:How perfectly appropriate - (Score 1) 341

Wow. A biased, conservative, science-denying site says the paper is unreliable, imagine that. The paper hasn't been demonstrated to be fraudulent, it's been claimed to be fraudulent by some guy writing for a web site. He's managed to find a whole 7 people who disagree with the classification of their papers. 7 out of 11,944, clearly an error rate of 0.05% is unacceptable.

I should note that at least one of the disagreements was erroneous, the abstract from the author's paper directly contradicts the author's claim and supports the categorisation given to by the Cook study. And another claims that the referees made him take out the unjustified conclusions that he wanted to include that would have made the paper less supportive of AGW, if only his conclusions could have been justified with actual science. Of course, those errors mean that the author of the blog post denying the Cook paper has at least a 28% error rate, but clearly that's acceptable when it's supporting your particular views.

Comment Re: noooo (Score 4, Insightful) 560

I'm not anti-nuclear, but requiring other people to agree to your solution before you'll admit the problem exists is pretty pathetic bullshit.

How about we agree there's a problem and then start determining what the best solution will be? I'm pretty sure it will include nuclear power, so there's no reason to be an asshole about it.

Comment Re:How perfectly appropriate - (Score 1) 341

You will find plenty in each of those fields who have written papers on each side of the debate.

Actually, you won't. 97% of the papers that took a position on global warming between 1991 and 2011 support it. Out the 11,944 papers published between 1991 and 2011 that mention climate change or global warming, only 83 rejected the central premises of AGW, while 3894 supported the premise (the remaining 7967 mentioned climate change or global warming but did not expressly support or deny it). So if you consider 0.7% to be "plenty", then I question your mathematical abilities.

Comment Re:The Pope's doubling-down on irrelevance, I see (Score 3, Informative) 341

Skeptical Science is neither. It is a propaganda website, run by the innermost clique of fraudsters accused of manipulating data, "hiding the decline", and suppressing all dissenting evidence.

Actually, that's just wrong. Skeptical science was started by a cartoonist, and the people involved there are mostly not climate scientists, so your first claim is obviously false.

Of course they publish work that supports their own opinions.

The link from above is merely an explanation of why the claim that warming stopped in 1998 is wrong with actual links to the peer reviewed science to back up the facts used in the explanation.

Those idiots actually still support Mann's Hockey Stick - what may be one of the most thoroughly disproven claims in modern science.

Actually, it may surprise you but is has not been disproven at all. In fact, "[m]ore than two dozen reconstructions, using various statistical methods and combinations of proxy records, have supported the broad consensus shown in the original 1998 hockey-stick graph".

It's be more remarkable if Skeptical Science ever admitted to error, or allowed dissent.

If have seen both, what they don't allow is people to post demonstrably false information, go off topic or dip into personal insults.

The fact is that every single climate model predicted major increases in temperature that have not occurred. Yet somehow these models are still supposed to be correct?

That's a claim, not a fact, and Skeptical Science has a debunking of that claim too.

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