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Comment Re:Paging Arthur C. Clarke... (Score 1) 534

Mormonism isn't orthodox Christianity.

If you ask the people who call themselves Orthodox Christians (yes I know you intentionally didn't capitalize it), neither are Catholics or any denomination of Protestants. If you ask Catholics, the so-called "Orthodox" Christians are unorthodox, and of course all the Protestant denominations as well. Both Catholics and Orthodox consider the other an unorthodox heresy which they excommunicated from their one true holy and apostolic church. Protestants meanwhile consider the Catholicism from which they descend to be a corruption of the original teachings of Christ and thus not truly Christianity at all, and it's very common (and just as annoying to me as GP's "Mormons and Christians" comment) to hear some denominations of Protestants speak of "Christians" and "Catholics" like they are non-intersecting sets.

And all those groups (and subgroups within them) dispute all many of points of theology, including some of the ones you list. Take for example the doctrine of the trinity: to copy from Wikipedia for ease, "Modern nontrinitarian groups or denominations include Christadelphians, Christian Scientists, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Dawn Bible Students, Friends General Conference, Iglesia ni Cristo, Jehovah's Witnesses, Living Church of God, Oneness Pentecostals, Members Church of God International, Unitarian Universalist Christians, the United Church of God and the Church of God (Seventh Day)."

Comment Re:Are scientists ready? (Score 1) 534

We have had plenty of speculation on the possibility of inorganic life, but to my knowledge (link me if I'm wrong here) there has been no scientific treatise on how a form of life could exist without carbon. It's one thing to say "maybe it's possible", and another thing to say "this is how it would work", and yet another entirely to say "look, here it is!", and without at least one example of the third or a complete explanation of the second, we still just in "maybe" territory, and science treats "maybe" as "assume not until shown otherwise".

Comment Re:Are scientists ready? (Score 1) 534

The scientific community would LOVE to discover proof of inorganic life. It would be a huge new field for biologists to explore! Right now we assume life will be carbon-based because that's the only kind of life we know is possible; we haven't yet conceived of how inorganic life might be possible, and we haven't seen empirical evidence that it is, so in absence of that we proceed as though it's not. But if we found empirical evidence that it was, scientists would jump at the research opportunities to figure out how it was. Science hates to be anthropomorphized, but it loves radical new observations that force us to rebuild all new models from scratch, because that's where all the fun is!

Comment Re:The whole article is just trolling (Score 1) 795

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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Comment Whine whine (Score 1) 50

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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Comment Re:The whole article is just trolling (Score 1) 795

https://dpa.aapg.org/gac/statements/climatechange.cfm
Is that the statement you were referring to?

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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Comment Re:The whole article is just trolling (Score 1) 795

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

The bottomline is there has been no warming statistically different from natural variation for at least 18 years

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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Comment Re:The whole article is just trolling (Score 1) 795

I prefer Satellite Data

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?

Satellite Data, it has been "corrected" as much

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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Comment Re:The whole article is just trolling (Score 1) 795

The article is kind of dumb.

Ad hominem.

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.

It's some guy who isn't a scientist and who doesn't really understand the scientific method arrogantly bitching about how everybody else doesn't really understand the scientific method.

Appeal to authority (arguing that the "authority" is unimpeachable).

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

That's the *actual* scientific method.

No-true-Scotsman fallacy.

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".

Controlled experiment may or may not come into it at all.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
Look at where it says "Testing".

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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Comment Re:The whole article is just trolling (Score 1) 795

I think he's saying that we shouldn't be using evolution as a talking point when we want to say "see science works!" because we have no proof that evolution indeed works as Darwin described.

(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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