Pong: The future is in your hands.
A cross genre action-scifi-romcom with human drama and real meaning.

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You are suggesting that every single one of a multitude of completely independent temperature records are all wrong. You are trying to dismiss them on the irrational basis that they all point in the same direction by slightly different amounts.

Furthermore you are assuming that every single one of a multitude of completely independent temperature records are all wrong in the same direction, imposing your pre-determined bias upon them.

You are baselessly filtering out any satellite data that doesn't fit the story you want to hear.

You are baselessly filtering out ocean temperatures, which account for 90% of climate heating, because it doesn't fit the story you want to hear.

You are engaging in wild conspiracy-theoryism claiming (or implying) that some hundredthousand scientists are ALL too stupid to account for novice-level obvious measurement difficulties, or that they are ALL conspiring to deliberately lie.

And most of all you're denying THE LAWS OF PHYSICS.
CO2 lets sunlight in and blocks the escape of thermal radiation. There is no possible dispute there. End of argument. The science is utterly and unarguably settled. All that's left at that point is determining the size of the effect.

It's astounding that it somehow doesn't make it into your conscious awareness that you are baselessly ignoring anything and everything that doesn't fit the story you want to hear.

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Here are ALL TEN global data sets included in one graph. Every single one shows warming. Can you seriously look at that and still claim no warming over the last 18 years?

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Whine whine... the people complaining this character or that character is overpowered. Quit whining that everything has to be NERFED just because you suck and you lost the battle. The Superman character comes with a sysop root account on the game server. So what? Deal with it and quit whining.

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Correct. They adopted that statement (or a substantially equivalent statement) back in 2007.

Prior to that, they had a denialism statement. As I said, American Petroleum Geologists were the last scientific body of national or international standing to offer any hint of support to climate denialism.

There are many scientific bodies in unrelated fields that have never commented on the subject. There's the American Petroleum Geologists and perhaps some others with statements that carefully dodge having a position, but there's not one scientific body of national or international standing opposed to the effectively unanimous agreement by climate scientists that Global Warming is real and that it is directly a result of CO2 and other man-made causes.

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Let me help you with that.
Here is the graph you're looking for, showing continuous cooling trends from 1965 to 2013.5

The bottom line is that you have given absolutely no rational reason for ignoring vast bodies of data proving your assertion is false.

You eagerly embrace the RSS graph for the sole reason that, on this arbitrarily selected time interval, it happens to give a linear trend line with a small enough warming to dismiss as negligible.

I asked if you had an rational reason from selecting the RSS data set, and you had none. I asked what you would do if I selected a different time interval, one where RSS showed warming and UAH didn't. You did not deny that you would have irrationally reject the RSS dataset and irrationally latched onto the UAH set.

You are flatly ignoring a MULTITUDE of global surface data sets showing the earth has in fact warmed over the last 18 years.

You have flatly ignored the ocean data set, a data set which you have not contested carries 45 times more weight than any atmospheric data. A data set which reflects 90% of the climate warming as opposed to the 2% warming that happens in the atmosphere. A data set which shows a perfectly steady warming rate for many decades. A data set which shows there has been absolutely zero slowdown in warming over the last 18 years.

You ignored virtually the entirety of data. You latched onto one cherrypicked fragment that most nearly fit what you wanted to find, tailored to this utterly arbitrary 18 year example. You have given no rational reason for latching onto this cherrypicked datapoint.

Can you really not see that this is a textbook case of Confirmation bias?

Can you really not see that what you have just done is exactly what I did in the 1965-2013.5 graph I linked above?

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UAH NSSTC lower tropical global mean is also Satellite data.
Can you give me any reason..... can you give yourself any reason... why you ignored one set of satellite data and embraced another set of satellite data? Note that this is a past-tense question. If you research the UAH NSSTC satellite data and the RSS MSU satellite data, you'll find that they are substantially comparable satellites, and that they face substantially equal equal difficulties measuring temperature, and substantially equal corrections trying to fix serious problems of long term skew in the data. But for my question here, doing a new look up on the satellites is irrelevant. I'm asking, at the time you picked that ONE dataset out of a long list of data sets, did you have any reason from picking that one, other than the fact that it most nearly fit your prior position?

I assume that was supposed to read "hasn't been corrected as much". Actually they are heavily corrected. Amongst other difficulties, the satellites are in decaying orbits which steadily skews their readings more and more each year. They also have a lot of difficulty separating the signal of lower troposphere warming from the cooling in the stratosphere (itself a central evidence of man-made global warming).

The satellite data is important, but like all methods of global measurements, there are challenges. That is why scientists don't cherry pick one data set, they take a comprehensive look at all data from MULTIPLE satellites and multiple means of ground measurements and from sea measurements and everything else they can get their hands on.

Why did you ignore one satellite over another. Why did you ignore all ground data. Why did you ignore the sea data I linked, especially after I pointed out that atmospheric temperatures only accounted for 2% of global heat being captured and sea temperatures accounted for 90% of the heat being captured.

Is it possible that you dismissed multiple lines of strong evidence because it doesn't fit your prior conclusions on the subject? Is it possible that you eagerly embraced the isolated RSS MSU satellite data set because that graph generated a negligible amount of warming on that exact 18 year time interval?

Question: If I select a different time interval than the last 18 years, and I show you that the RSS MSU satellite (the one you picked) graph shows warming or greater warming compared to the other (UAH NSSTC) satellite, would you ever arbitrarily abandon the RSS satellite data and arbitrarily embrace the UAH satellite, merely because it better fits the prior argument you wanted to make? Is that a reasonable, objective, unbiased evaluation of all available evidence?

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You really shouldn't try to use fancy words you don't understand, trying to look smart. That was not Ad Hominem. That was his opening comment giving his opinion of the article (not the person). He then proceeded to follow up his opening opinion with perfectly valid arguments.

You don't understand Argument From Authority either, nor do you understand when it is a fallacy and when it isn't.

Not only did you get No True Scotsman wrong, you actually have it backwards. It was the author of the "kind of dumb article" that committed the No True Scotsman fallacy. It was the article author who fallaciously tried to exclude science-he-didn't-like as not being "true science".

I suggest you look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S... where it says "Testing": Astronomers do experiments, searching for planets around distant stars.
Astronomers, geologists, paleontologists, climatologists, and countless other fields of science are testing scientific theories when they engage in measurements and observations of the real world, which test the predictions of those theories.

But I would like to thank you for pointing out that Wikipedia section. I can see how you could read that section and overlook the example illustrating that observations-testing-predictions are a form of scientific experiment. That section should definitely be more clear. I'll leave a comment to that effect on the Talk page. ~~~~

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(1) Actually he's doing the standard right-wingnut attack on any science they don't like, primarily evolution and climate, and every field of science that supports them.

(2) Setting aside the poor choice word "proof", I think you underestimate what we've got backing up evolution. We literally have mathematical theorems proving the information-creating process of evolution. Evolution is an applied science, used somewhere or other by a majority of Fortune 500 Companies. (Specifically, software genetic algorithms that evolve "digital DNA". It's a field of programming that can solve categories of Hard Problems that are effectively impossible to solve by any other means.) We also have a continuous and complete fossil record of tens of millions of years of evolution covering much of Phylum Foraminifera. Foraminifera are tiny aquatic animals, most smaller than the period on this sentence. They live in the oceans in vast numbers, continually dying and raining down into sea floor sediment. 1970's deep sea oil exploration started bringing up long drill-cores from the deep seabed. Each core is filled with thousands of perfectly layered Foraminifera fossils. We have an effectively limitless supply of these fossils. And it's not merely every transitional form species. We can continuously trace the transitional forms along a ~150,000 year transition as one species splits into two. The only limitation on time-resolution is the small amount of vertical-mixing caused by living animals which disturb the sediment surface.

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When one activist website tell you that the earth is warming, and another activist website tells you that the earth isn't warming, it's a good idea to check the actual scientific data to determine which activist website is getting the facts wrong. Here's an 18 year graph. The earth has in fact been warming over the last 18 years.

Here's the 50 year graph. That's a neat website that lets you generate graphs over any date range. If you want to play with it, just be sure to update the year-values for both series 1 (the red graph) and series 2 (the green graph).

There was also an unexpected surge in heat being pulled from the atmosphere into the deep ocean. This has recently pulled a vast amount of heat off of the typical graphs of surface-level atmospheric temperature. This is why air-temperature-graphs gives a false impression of somewhat slower warming the last few years.

Air is extremely low density. Very little of the global heat resides in the atmosphere, and what does show up in the air is extremely variable as heat shifts between the air and the land&sea. In fact the atmosphere only accounts for 2% of global heat content. The land surface temperatures are about 8%. The massive oceans account for 90% of the planet's heat content. Here's a graph of ocean heat over the last 50-odd years. The vast majority of heat ultimately goes into the oceans. That graph shows that there has been absolutely no slowing in the rate of global heat increase. Global warming hasn't paused. Global warming hasn't stopped. Global warming hasn't slowed.

There doesn't exist ONE scientific body of national or international standing that still denies man-made global warming. The last national or international scientific body to dissent was, comically, the American Association of Petroleum Geologists back in 2007. Yep, even the oil geologists stopped denying it seven years ago.

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The only true theists I have known flew airplanes into buildings.

I have also met a lot of people who describe themselves as theists, but I am so blinded by my own ideology that I am utterly incapable of understanding anything outside it, therefore I just fucking made up my own definition that fits into my dysfunctional understanding.

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No, you're missing his point.
He's an utterly awful excuse for a human being. He has absolutely no understanding of, and absolutely no interest in, any moral framework that isn't based on obedience to a precivilized mythological authority.

When someone vigorously makes the argument that they would be utterly selfish people who murder rape and steal if they were an atheist - therefore atheists are immoral - the proper response is to point out that makes THEM vile evil people, not the atheists.

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Translation: You don't understand atheism, therefore your personal religion gets to claim all credit for any and all positive common-sense-truths.

Christianity incorporated things that were widely accepted as true or good long before Christianity existed, and which are widely accepted as true or good in societies that have never had contact with Christianity.... and you want to claim Christianity somehow "owns" them, and that atheists cannot interdependently agree with them.

I do not need to believe in Native American animal spirit guides to come to the conclusion that it's a good idea to avoid violence.
I do not need to believe in Reincarnation to come to the conclusion that it's a good idea to avoid violence.
And I sure as heck don't need to believe in your even sillier walking-talking snake stories to come to the conclusion that it's a good idea to avoid violence.

There are pure-logic reasons to come to that conclusion.
There are good reasons to come to that conclusion which may range beyond a strict definition of "pure logic", which have absolutely nothing to do with invisible mystical magical beings.

One of the great things about atheism is that we see absolutely nothing wrong with adopting anything in Christianity that is true or good. Just as we see absolutely nothing wrong with adopting anything in Judiasm that is true or good. Just as we see absolutely nothing wrong with adopting anything in Islam that is true or good. Just as we see absolutely nothing wrong with adopting anything in Native American religion that is true or good. Just as we see absolutely nothing wrong with adopting anything in Buddhism that is true or good. Just as we see absolutely nothing wrong with adopting anything in Hinduism that is true or good. Just as we see absolutely nothing wrong with adopting anything in Confucianism that is true or good.

Atheists don't define "morality" as obedience to some random religion's claims about what some invisible-silent-magical-man wants. We are free to accept the best examples of morality and the best teachings on morality and the best reasoning on morality, from anywhere. Jesus said a lot of very wise things. Buddha said a lot of very wise things. Confucius said a lot of very wise things. I see no shame as an atheist, taking the best that Christianity has to offer. But there's no way in hell you can claim Christianity has some monopoly-ownership on the idea of non-violence.

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Agreed. It's awesome how science is getting a better and better understanding of how much of the universe is hospitable to us-like life. But it's always mentally-painful when stories like this make loudly-screaming-assumptions that we are a typical, or exclusive, model of what life in the universe looks like. The most trivial problem with the current story is that undersea or underground us-like life won't be much bothered of the atmosphere gets nuked with radiation. Stretching things a bit, we have no idea if gas giant planets could support some sort of life in the ocean-like depths of their atmospheres. And to go onto the deep unknown, there's about 6x as much dark matter as regular matter. The little we do know about dark matter does give some cause to doubt it's suitability for life, but our understanding of dark matter and our understanding of unlike-us life is far too thin to make any reasonable assumptions on the subject. Is there life out there? It's looking increasingly inevitable that more us-like life does exist, but we still know far too little to presume that we aren't a wildly a-typical form of life.

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I don't know why the hell they went with Oracle.
I'd have taken the job for $201 million dollars.

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