There are levels of skepticism. While I broadly agree with your points, the scientific issue comes down to one question and the political issue to another.

The scientific question is: how well do non-physical models allow us to predict in detail the response of a complex non-linear system like the climate to an additional 0.3% forcing?

The political question is: given that the uncontroversial answer to the scientific question is "not very well", what is the best policy approach to the risks presented?

My problem, as a computational physicist, is that the "scientific consensus" that supposedly exists seems to me to radically over-state the predictive power of non-physical climate models, and I am deeply concerned that as the supposed "hiatus" continues (http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=1460) the falsity of the over-stated claims will be used to attack science as such.

My problem, as a citizen, is that the political question has become parasitized by radical nut-jobs who would rather fight almost-irrelevant pipelines than promote nuclear power, research geo-engineering, or implement carbon taxes. The latter, especially, has proven to be an effective policy tool in reducing CO2 emissions (http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/the-insidious-truth-about-bcs-carbon-tax-it-works/article19512237/) and anyone who cares about reducing corporate and personal income taxes ought to be fully on-side with it.

Yet the best we could get in Canada from Greenpeace in 2008 was "qualified support" for the Liberal's proposed tax shift and we've heard almost nothing from the since. Why aren't they shouting from the rooftops that we could reduce personal and corporate taxes by taxing carbon? What better argument could their be for promoting and making permanently sustainable a carbon tax?

The whole "science is settled" nonsense is an attempt to shut down legitimate concerns about the predictive utility of non-physical models of a non-linear system that are routinely found to be wrong (http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/jan/01/climate-change-models-underestimate-likely-temperature-rise-report-shows).

And yeah, I know what the "direction" of the error is in most cases, but "better" and "worse" are not scientific terms, they are political terms. "More accurate" and "less accurate" are scientific terms, and a steady stream of news stories over the past decade has repeatedly touted the poor accuracy of GCMs.

Only in climate science are the conclusions of a model said to be more likely when the model is found to be wrong, yet that is what we routinely see: "climate models got near-term warming completely wrong so they are more likely than not correct about century-scale warming." But because climate is non-linear, it would be clearly and obviously anti-science and incorrect to claim that because the near-term error is one direction the long-term error must be in the same direction. There is simply no justification for that claim (nor the counter-claim, either, as Denialsts want us to assume.)

But the "science is settled" belief means that one can be a promoter of effective carbon tax policy, a promoter of building nuclear power plants and doing research in to geo-engineering (because really, if climate change could be a civilization-ending phenomena you've have to be utterly evil to not promote geo-engineering research, just in case) and still be an outcast to Warmists because you don't support the false belief that GCMs are very predictively useful.

Valid point.

True.

False.

Or: that word "you" keep using does not mean what you think it means. You have for some unaccountable reason suddenly started using "you" to mean something completely different from what everyone everywhere always has meant by "you"--a genetically and morphologically human individual, the offspring of human parents--to mean "an entity that will be designated as 'hydrogen' because there are more hydrogen atoms in it than any other type."

Or something like that. It would be as silly to insist on calling people hydrogen because it is our most common constituent as it would be to start calling people non-human because they happen to contain more bacterial cells than human cells. Yet studying and even classifying some aspects of our physical being based on our chemistry can still be useful.

The biological species concept, and therefore taxonomy as such, is pretty sketchy. But there is likely a lot more value in genetic taxonomy than morphological taxonomy, which is barely above folk taxonomy in many respects. Similar structures don't tell us much about evolutionary history, which is what we mostly care about as biologists.

And you would be wrong. At least, you would be wrong if you are implying anything other than the majority of rapes are committed by a small minority of predatory men.

How small?

75-80% of rapes are committed by 4-5% of men: http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=...

That's still seven or eight million men in absolute terms, of course, but far fewer than what is erroneously claimed by the old, failed, misandrist "rape is nothing less than a conscious conspiracy by all men against all women" model.

It is easy for us, as humans, to leap from "all rapists are men" to "all men are rapists". Even if the former proposition were true (it isn't) the latter is unrelated to it.

There is a population of sociopathic predators in our midst. Most of them are men. All of them are dangerous. Their victims are both men and women (we don't even know what the rate of male victimization in sexual assault is... all we know is that the reported rate is much lower than for women, but it would be, wouldn't it?)

Focusing on men vs women rather than citizens vs predators is exactly what the predators need to keep on preying on the innocent. It's time we stopped doing that.

Already happened: http://news.nationalpost.com/2...

I've stuck my hand in liquid nitrogen (it feels strangely warm) and so can attest to the protective effect of the gas blanket (which is highly insulating) but it is insanely dangerous to pour a bucket of LN2 over your head, and doing so is an invitation to people who aren't as smart or careful as you to do even more stupid and risky things.

Donate to ALS research [*], by all means! But please, please, don't participate in this ridiculous pyramid scheme of increasingly dangerous stupidity.

[*] I do not donate to ALS because it is not one of my causes, but I encourage you to think carefully about what you care most about and sign up as a steady, long-term donor to a few causes that are really important to you... this is of far more long-term benefit than episodic giving. If ALS is what matters most to you, go for it!

Well, it's from the Bulletin of the Perrenially Dishonest, so what do you expect? A bunch of liars who dishonestly characterize themselves as somehow representing some part of the scientific community is hardly going to consist of smart people, are they?

I've not RTFM'd because I try not to let bulletinshit touch my eyeballs, but hypersonic technology certainly has civilian uses. The aerospike, for example, is an instance of hypersonic propulsion that has possible applications in satellite launching and realizing Willy Ley's old dream of an "antiopodes bomber" (which could as well carry passengers as bombs, of course.)

While I am generally in favour of keeping deadweight loss spending at a minimum, there certainly seems to be ample justification for civilian research in this area.

That statement is false.

Science is the discipline of publicly testing ideas by systematic observation, controlled experiment, and Bayesian inference.

There are many reasons why one might get the idea that past temperature records have systematic inaccuracies that may require correction. The urban heat island effect is one large one, which tends to produce higher uncorrected temperatures over time. The phenomenon is simple in principle: cities generate heat, have more dark surfaces, and trap heat in buildings etc which gets re-radiated at night. Weather stations sited near cities have typically become increasingly surrounded by them over the past century, because cities have grown.

Ergo, the instrumental temperature record from many stations needs to be corrected downward to account for this effect, if we want to pull out the environmental temperature (what we are generally interested in.)

This is what we do all the time in science. We start with a raw instrumental measurement and then apply various theory-dependent corrections to infer the underlying quantity we are actually interested in. For example, at the LHC, physicists measure the raw detection rates of various particles in multiple detectors, and then correct them for known background rates etc (frequently using ancillary measurements in the same detectors to determine those rates) to infer the presence (or absence) of the Higgs boson.

What you are saying is "never scientific" is in fact the core of the scientific process, and it makes no difference if the original data were taken today or fifty years ago: they are open to justifiable correction by anyone who sees fit. If you have the idea that the corrections applied are unjustified, feel free to challenge them, but please don't go promoting your fallacious vision of what science is and how it works.

And by the way, if you are interested in what an analysis of the uncorrected instrumental temperature record looks like at one particular station, here is an example: http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=...

I was at a home show a while back and talked to a guy whose entire business was "getting people out of timeshare agreements".

That's how awful time-shares are, and how effective they are at bullying people into bad decisions: breaking time-share agreements is a viable business model!

Understanding how this happens and effectively countering it is crucial to our future survival. My (highly speculative) contribution to the debate, in which I suggest that what you call an archetype can in fact be understood as a kind of living being pursuing its own evolutionary interests: http://www.amazon.com/Darwins-...

I'm actually a bit surprised that no one ever talks about using grid-connected electric cars as distributed storage. It would cut everyone's range down by a bit, but as more and more pluggable electrics and hybrids are manufactured, the ability to set the last 10 or 20% charge as on-demand storage seems like it might be viable.

It would require some pretty smart grid tech, but we are working on that anyway.

The problem with load balancing is real, though. In Alberta, they have already capped the fraction of supply from wind because basically all the wind in the province is in one fairly small area, and if it supplies more than about 3% of the total they have a lot of issues when the wind drops.

There are (almost) no muons produced by fission. Fission events produce energies of around 200 MeV. Muons have a mass of just over 100 MeV. The phase space available for muon production is essentially nil because so much energy is almost always carried away by the fission products. Basically, to make a muon you have to have everything else stand still. The production rate isn't quite zero, but is close enough to it to not matter.

The technology they are using in this case is to look at cosmic ray muons passing through the reactor core. Similar technology was used to look for undiscovered chambers in Egyptian pyramids in the 80's, if memory serves: cosmic ray muons have ridiculous amounts of energy (they are the bane of neutrino physicists because no matter how deep the lab the muon signal is still appreciable, even under a kilometer or rock. SNO, which is one of the deepest labs in the world, is 2 km down and muons are still detectable, although only at rates of a few per day if memory serves.

None. However, a few will be killed by C++ programmers. I say this as someone who has written code to guide surgeons, but my mantra was: "The surgeon is in control", and I have in fact seen surgeons over-ride the guidance information the software gives them.

Driverless cars are actually less likely than humans to screw up, I think, but it'll take another decade to prove that. Software engineering is still a nascent field, but in another generation or three it will be at a point where we can be somewhat confident in most critical code. Unfortunately, it will still be dependent on hacked-together operating systems and heuristically designed hardware...

We are having a bit of a moment with some wack-jobs in the "Conservative" Party of Canada at the moment, which is actually a radical populist party that is opposed to everything conservatism in this country has ever stood for (fiscal probity, institutional stability, Westminsterian democracy...)

A few of the loonier tunes, like Justice Minister Peter McKay, seem to believe that women have no agency (or at least that's what one infers from his attempts to push a "Swedish model" prostitution law through the system) and I believe former party leader [*] Stockwell Day is on record for a Young Earth.

This has more to do with the wonderful (and I do mean that seriously) randomness of our electoral system, which is capable of electing a majority government with 35% of the vote, as well as the institutional disarray of the Liberal Party in the past decade. We're reasonably likely to throw the bastards out next year, although the Liberals have more than a few loonies of their own.

[*] The history of the CPC is complex, but Day was the leader of one of it's fore-runners about ten years ago.

The report says nothing of the kind. Did you read it? GMOs and nuclear power are mentioned as divisive issues, but there is no data on the ranking of people against them.

The Globe and Mail article says, "Canadians also expressed the lowest level of reservation about science and its impacts. Compared with the U.S., Europe and Japan, far fewer Canadians said that they thought science is making our way of life change too fast."

Sounds about right.

Canadians are generally very aware that our lives would be miserable if it weren't for science and technology keeping us safe and warm and fed. We have our tree-hugging reactionaries, of course, but they have far less influence than you might think despite the vast amounts of noise (and I do mean "noise" in the information theoretic sense) they generate.

Why do you think that an unconfirmed anecdote being presented fallaciously as an argument is against everything /.?

It would actually be astonishing if no one had "seen it work a couple of times", for several reasons. One, if there were a 100% failure rate dousing would have been abandoned years ago. Even pre-scientific peoples mostly abandoned things that were never, ever correlated with their nominal goals.

Second, given humans are known to be prone to confirmation bias, we can predict that almost everyone who has ever seen a dowser identify one of the many, many places where water can be found will come away believing "dowsing works".

So a large number of scientifically illiterate people saying, "Hey I saw it work a few times that proves it's true so I believe it!" is exactly what science would predict if dowsing doesn't work.

If dowsing did work science would predict a bunch of peer-reviewed studies systematically detailing how accurate it is and investigating the factors that influence it's accuracy.

We see the former, not the latter.

Posts like yours actually constitute evidence that dowsing does not work.

First, E = 1/2 m*v^2, not m*v, although your later statement seems to acknowledge that.

Second: you are correct that the two situations are not the same, because the energy in the center-of-motion (zero momentum) frame of the two vehicles is what matters (you can think about this as the kinetic energy that is available to deform the vehicles in the crash, leaving them with a lot of bent metal and no momentum after the crash.)

With two trucks moving toward each other at equal and opposite velocities, the zero momentum frame is the just the ground, where the total energy is m*v^2 (twice the energy of each individual vehicle).

In the case of hitting a wall, the wall has effectively infinite mass, so the zero momentum frame is moving with an infinitesimal velocity toward the truck, and the total energy is 2*m*v^2 (where "v" is still 55 MPH and the multiplier come from squaring the factor of two in front of it to get the full 110 MPH of the single truck).

So in the case of hitting a brick wall, there is twice the energy available. This is quite different, conceptually, from the explanation you've given, which is wrong. In the case of a vehicle hitting a brick wall at v = 55 MPH the energy is just 1/2 m*v^2, not m*v^2 as in the case of two colliding vehicles, or 2*m*v^2 as in the case of a vehicle at 2v hitting the wall.

The history of science teaches us that what is intuitive to any particular person is unrelated to the best way of understanding the world, and your reasoning is a nice example of this: it got you part way toward a correct conclusion, but fell short of the full understanding that the general principles of Newtonian physics give us.