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Comment Re:Help me out here (Score 1) 541

Yes, I used the term "continues to swell" to summarize what I've perceived recently with heavyweights (Curry, Lintzen, Nielsen-Gammon, etc) and numerous field-related PhDs chiming in reciprocating to essentially cry wolf with abuses occurring in the scientific process. Your comparison to Creationism was ridiculous and insulting. Furthermore, your question of "what percentage of qualified climatologists deny that AGW is occurring" is a straw-man. Crackpots aside, the mainstream concern (i.e. the Lintzen camp) lies with uncertainty underlying temperature reconstructions, the relative amount of anthropomorphic contribution, and the GCM-assumed response sensitivity -- i.e. whether there are grounds to say "crisis".
Read Curry's blog. There are egregious flaws in the machine and changes are a'coming.

Comment Re:Help me out here (Score 1) 541

Good one, my favorite, the false analogy to creation science. How 'bout I quote Wikipedia bio for Judith Curry, who's been writing scathing reviews of essential AGW underpinnings over the last 6 months:

"Judith A. Curry is an American climatologist and chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her research interests include hurricanes, remote sensing, atmospheric modeling, polar climates, air-sea interactions, and the use of unmanned aerial vehicles for atmospheric research. She is a member of the National Research Council's Climate Research Committee.[1] Curry is the co-author of Thermodynamics of Atmospheres and Oceans (1999), and co-editor of Encyclopedia of Atmospheric Sciences (2002), as well as over 140 scientific papers. Among her awards is the Henry G. Houghton Research Award from the American Meteorological Society in 1992."

Oh and the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT, essentially another young-earther. Yep, all these scientists who are working to seek higher standards in peer review and advocate reassessment of uncertainty are just like the creationists. Glad the world is so simple for you to figure out.

Comment Re:Help me out here (Score 1) 541

Well, more recently, the 2009 UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen where delegates from 183 countries negotiated approaches to reduce CO2 emissions by between -25 and -40% below 1990 levels by 2020. Based on studies like this, we can take on a great deal of pain ourselves but there will still be plenty of pea in the pool if the effort isn't unilateral.

Comment Re:Denial's not a river in Egypt (Score 1) 541

Give me a break. Your condescending obfuscation aside, the fact remains that contradicting data was obscured from policymakers so not to 'confuse' them. That fact that you and other 'alarmists' (since we're building bridges now by assigning labels like 'denialist') continue to defend this type of behavior is extremely illuminating.

Comment Re:Help me out here (Score 2) 541

If you think adding barriers to the access of third world countries to the cheapest and most readily available forms of energy will not adversely affect their technological advancement, I really have nothing more to say. It's their development that will dominate the CO2 output over the next 50-100 years. But hey, we got ours, right? Now they can suck it up.

Comment Re:It's amusing (Score 1) 541

The trouble is, a lot of the population are easily convinced by ($easily_discredited_propaganda_talking_point), because soundbites and well-funded media talking heads and purchased senators are easier to understand than the often complex science, and the less-than-media-savvy scientists working in the field.

True, true, case-in-point, "A Convenient Truth."

Comment Re:Help me out here (Score 1) 541

The 20th century had two main warming phases, one between 1910 and 1940 and one between 1970 and 2000, both with a warming rate of approximately 0.15C/deg while the former period had much less AGH forcing than the latter. This raises questions (by the likes of Judith Curry) regarding the underlying causes of the warming. Regarding the 1000 trend, the following except from Raymond Bradley (contributing IPCC TAR author specializing in dendrochronical reconstructions) is illuminating:

"Furthermore, it may be that Mann et al simply don’t have the long-term trend right, due to underestimation of low frequency info. in the (very few) proxies that we used. We tried to demonstrate that this was not a problem of the tree ring data we used by re-running the reconstruction with & without tree rings, and indeed the two efforts were very similar — but we could only do this back to about 1700.

Whether we have the 1000 year trend right is far less certain (& one reason why I hedge my bets on whether there were any periods in Medieval times that might have been “warm”, to the irritation of my co-authors!). So, possibly if you crank up the trend over 1000 years, you find that the envelope of uncertainty is comparable with at least some of the future scenarios, which of course begs the question as to what the likely forcing was 1000 years ago. (My money is firmly on an increase in solar irradiance, based on the 10-Be data..)."

Comment Re:Help me out here (Score 0, Troll) 541

Meanwhile, the number of scientists expressing significant issues with that '95% confidence level' continues to swell, most recently Judith Curry, chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech, who maintains the blog Climate Etc.

The real problem is the mass suffering in third world countries will be less mitigated as we throttle back technological advancement to set policy in line with shoddy politically-driven characterizations of the science (i.e. like truncating, splicing, and smoothing two data sets to 'hide the decline' or to put it more precisely, hide correlation issues with a proxy). Not to mention the blow that science will take when it's announced that "whoops, there's no crisis."

Comment how big? (Score 2, Interesting) 506

I recall reading a Scientific American article that indicated that the Universe had infinite size and mass, meaning that probabilistically, the exact construction and configuration of our observable universe would repeat itself (infinity tends to have nasty implications like that). Or to put it another way, another you is reading this somewhere (actually, an infinite number of you's, to be precise).

But crazy conjecture aside, does this talk of the 'full size' of the universe mean that the article even had its starting premise wrong?

Comment next plot (Score 1) 640

I reread the 1-3 plot summaries at Wikipedia. It will be interesting to see where things go now that Trinity is dead, Neo has had his ‘real’-world eyes gouged before apparently dying(?) from his final sacrificial encounter with Smith in the matrix. And apparently the 3rd movie ended with the machines and humans at peace and with the Matrix intact (although all humans who want to be free were to be unplugged).

My guess is the next Matrix plot will revolve around the ‘real world’ being yet another Matrix and perhaps Neo and Trinity are still alive in the ‘next layer up’. After a bunch of intense special effects, it’ll end with the philosophical implication that reality is simply an infinite regression of higher states – i.e., every state of being is nested by yet another ‘higher reality’.

In that vein, a cool alternate ending to the movie Inception would have been for Mal (Leonardo DiCaprio’s wife), upon jumping off the building in her attempt to ‘wake up’ from the real world, indeed wakes up in a higher reality. She then continues to keep killing herself and increasingly progressing herself out of nested dream states. After a few hundred deaths, she goes crazy and takes up drinking.

Or maybe that will be the sequel. Inception 2 and Matrix 4-5 will need to have a race to get released first.

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