Yes, it is - this was data from the 1980s, that had been stored on tape at best or not even archived in many cases, since no one at the time thought that it would be worth the money and effort required to archive it effectively. Understandable, really, given that everyone /aside/ from the wingnut deniers are pretty much happy with the processed data that /was/ archived.

himi

I did a quick search of google groups for the term 'climate change' from around 1990-91, and found masses of hits - it was obviously a common term even back then, even being used in government reports of the time. The only reason climate change has become more visible (and suffered bullshit attacks like yours) is because the whole issue has become much more visible.

Your ignorance is not a good basis for this kind of attack.

himi

Yeah, and despite that Linux has an ACPI implementation provided by Intel, and (as far as I know) fully compliant with the spec. The problem Linux has is that most OEM implementations /aren't/ compliant - they're implemented to run with Windows, and debugged with Windows, which means that any time Windows allows them to get away with a shortcut they'll take it, and when it bites Linux's ACPI implementation in the arse they can feel safe in the knowledge that users will blame the problems on Linux.

We've been dealing with this kind of crap through Linux's whole history - traditional BIOSes are notoriously buggy, APM implementations were buggy and had lots of OEM specific crap, and now ACPI implementations are just as bad. The only way that this will change is if Windows stops being the standard against which everything else is measured.

himi

So has he? Has he gotten anything that he wouldn't have had anyway with his extensive connections?

Somehow I doubt it, since that would surely have been discovered by some of the whackjobs who hate him, and publicised far and wide long ago . . .

himi

. . . okay, so you were deliberately putting up a strawman argument in response to a perfectly reasonable post - that just confirms you being a moron.

As to context, I've read most of your posts on this thread, and most of the responses, and somehow or other they haven't improved my opinion of your intellect or intellectual honesty. I stand by my original post: you're not worth arguing with.

himi

So what you saying is that any scientist can make a claim, refuse to give the supporting data and it is up to other scientist to prove or disprove his claim without any insight to the data or methodology. This doesn't sound like the science they taught me in school, I will write them a not as soon as I remember how to write in cursive and tell them they need to change the text books to this new science.

Moron. The 'insight' into the data and the methodology is provided in the paper - the peer reviewed paper published in a journal. The fact that you don't know this simple, basic fact indicates that you're too ignorant to argue with.

himi

ummmm . . . . . . I just typed "noaa temperature data" into google, and the first result had a large collection of data available. If this isn't good enough, what exactly do you want? Raw satellite feeds?

himi

Or, alternatively, Watts could simply be a troll who's really sensitive to criticism. Given what I've seen of the quality of his arguments I know what side of the fence I'll get off on . . .

himi

Did you notice the Party Line in the US in the previous administration? Did you notice any particular change in the output of the climate scientists during that period, aside from making even more dire predictions? Does that confirm or deny your hypothesis?

himi

So Gore is putting his money where his mouth is - what's wrong with that? Is T. Boone Pickens a hypocrite because he's promoting natural gas as an alternative to oil, and he's invested billions in natural gas?

Gore believes this is a major issue, and he's not just talking about it, he's investing in ways that match his talk. That's what people /should/ do, and using it as an argument against his beliefs is just plain stupid.

himi

That period in time (usually 196x to 199x/2000) is the "stable weather-utopia" referenced to as 1988 in my post. 1988 being the year James Hansen invented the global warming scare as a career move.

My /god/ you're an idiot. Global warming has been theorised about for a hundred years or more, and there have been papers written for government consumption dating back to the /fifties/ warning that if we continued to burn fossil fuels the way we had been we'd be creating warming conditions. Hansen didn't get into climatological research until the consensus in the field was that warming was going to happen - Hansen's famous contribution was to demonstrate that it was happening /then/, rather than in the future.

This one comment of yours marks you as a denier, not a skeptic. It's also, as I said, outstanding evidence that you're an idiot, a moron, and and imbecile.

himi

Considered all of that, how the fuck does that help to know that watching TV is correlated to asthma?

Maybe, if you'd thought to read a little further, you'd have noticed that the research uses TV viewing as a /proxy/ for sedentary behaviour? And also, if you'd read a little further, you'd have noticed that the research proposed a number of mechanisms to explain why sedentary behaviour might result in increased risk of asthma?

Maybe, just maybe, you might want to /learn something/ before you start spouting bullshit.

himi

I strongly recommend that you look just a /tiny/ little bit deeper than the summary of the article. This was /not/ a study about asthma - this was a single result from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (google it), which is a large scale, long term study of children, their parents, and their environments (~14,000 kids, studied since pregnancy in 1991/1992, and still ongoing).

This kind of study /can't/ realistically make recommendations, unless the correlations they see are so strong that they can be confident of the causation without further study. What this (and other studies like it) are about is finding correlations that then drive further research - the further research is where recommendations come from.

Oh, and the notion that a study with only 3000 data points can't reliably tell us anything about the general population is pure ignorance on your part. Go look up a little bit about statistics before you spout any more crap like that.

himi

So the question remains the same and is still unanswered by this stupid study: Does enough early live exercise prevents people from getting asthma ? ... or is this study only watching a third factor, that influences a degree of child's exercise and asthma induction simultaneously ?

What makes you call this a stupid study? Did you actually read the article?

The 'stupid study' is the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children - http://www.bristol.ac.uk/alspac/. There's nothing stupid about it - this is exactly the kind of study that's /essential/ to help us understand the details of how living affects us. This particular result is a tiny, trivial part of the overall study.

Whine about correlation versus causation all you want - these kinds of studies and the correlations they discover are /vital/ to identifying cause and effect in complex systems like growing kids.

himi

To put it simply, would you say that every scientific study following the Scientific Method will produce true/correct facts? I was saying with sarcasm, NO, even faithful use of Scientific Method will sometimes produce bad science.

How do you judge the success or failure of the scientific method? Given it's an iterative optimisation method, it seems to me that the only valid measure of success or failure is the long term trend - the scientific method is successful if, over time, the trend is towards increasingly successful explanations for observed reality. I don't think it even has to be a monotonic improvement to justify being called a success - the biggest gains often come when particular theories 'fail', suggesting that both the immediate successes /and/ the immediate failures contribute to the success of the scientific method.

That measure of success suggests two things: firstly, that the success of individual theories is /not/ ultimately relevant to the success of the scientific method, and secondly, that 'stopping the clock' is /not/ a valid way to argue about the its success.

The scientific method is /not/ about 'outcomes', it's a process of continual improvement, and one that is astonishingly successful. The closest thing I can think of to a failure of the scientific method is the screwed up biological sciences that pertained in the early USSR, driven by political forces. Even there it did eventually correct itself when given the chance, and that localised failure did not affect the rest of the world. There are probably other examples of localised failure, but as with individual theories, that sort of failure doesn't indicate a failure of the scientific method.

It probably seems like I'm wiggling the goalposts around to make my argument easier, but I'm not really - the issue at hand is the success or failure of the /scientific method/, not 'science', or some particular set of theories or ideas. The state of the process at any instant in time does not reflect on the success of failure of the process - only the long term behaviour does. The process is as close to infallible as I can imagine, given enough time and diversity of practitioners.

himi