Dude did you learn nothing from the article? it is pointless to use logic when engaging with Denialists.
I guess I missed the part where the US has annexed sovereign states by force, or systematically imprisoned, impressed into forced labor, and murdered millions of people based solely on their ethnicity.
Really? Are you saying that your history class literally failed to cover the Mexican American War, slavery, and the systemic genocide of the native population? These were standard topics in American History when I was growing.
What sexconker is actually doing is demonstrating the fundamental premise of the article. People that fully ignorant aren't going to have strong opinions about something. But as soon as they start to learn just a little they become very dangerous in advancing specious arguments like
"Hey if there's so much plastic trash in the ocean, then somebody can make a lot of money recycling it" or "The second law of thermodynamics disproves evolution" or today's special: "CO2 is plant food, therefore the greenhouse effect doesn't matter"
All of these bullshit arguments require some basic amount of knowledge to process. And the more knowledge somebody has, the better quality bullshit they can generate.
The number 1 green house gas in the atmosphere is water vapor.
That's 1 greenhouse gas. Another is CO2. They both effect temperature directly and the water vapor in the air is an endogenous function of CO2.
The only way to make CO2 into a problem is for the modelers to pull a positive feedback coefficient (for water vapor from CO2) from a dark place
Gotta love that one. It's the modelers that are making CO2 into a problem. It's not the greenhouse effect that's the problem. It's not increased temperatures we're seeing after dumping 32 billion metric tons of CO2 into the air every year that are the problem. The climate modelers are just making a big deal by describing a positive feedback loop.
Plants need CO2 to live. CO2 + H2O + Sunlight == glucose. Your CO2 is waste to you. It's mana from heaven for plants. Global warmers are some of the most scientifically and agriculturally illiterate people I've ever encountered
Plants also love shit. And yet somehow this fertilizing mana from heaven is considered pollution. PARADOX. We even have laws preventing people from dumping raw sewage into public waterway for some sort of environmental reason.
The part about going from TRACE_AMOUNT to 2x TRACE_AMOUNT is just not all that persuasive of an argument that we are about to become Venus.
On a per molecule basis there isn't much CO2 in our atmosphere compared to everything else. But the primary components of our atmosphere, Nitrogen and Oxygen, are not greenhouse gases. The second most abundant greenhouse gas in the atmosphere is CO2. CO2 is directly responsible for 25% of the greenhouse effect and the CO2's contribution to warming also indirectly adds to the greenhouse effect by increasing the amount of water vapor in the air. Without our CO2, the earth would literally be a ball of ice. Tt doesn't matter if CO2 is a "trace amount" in absolute terms because ALL greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are in trace amounts.
I recognize that Minger doesn't think myocardial infarction belongs in a disease cluster with other diseases of affluent nations. But since myocardial infarctions, aka heart attacks, have long been one of the most common causes of death in the Western nations and not in poor nations, then Minger is obviously wrong on this point. If you think she's right, then show me validated data that demonstrates that the prevalence of heart attacks is greater in poorer countries than in richer countries. If you can do that then I'll accept Minger's criticism as entirely valid and I will even actively inform all my peers of what a bad book the China Study is. I'm waiting.
Look, you've clearly got your mind made up about Global Warming. If you want to pretend that the warming trend we've been experiencing my entire life has nothing to do with the 32 billion metric tons of greenhouse gases that we're dumping into the atmosphere every year, then you're making that decision. And the real question is this: is there any evidence that the climate denial community would ever accept as definitive proof of global warming? And the answer is no.
Moving on, here's Gary Taubes in his own words: "Lord knows I don't want to tell anybody not to eat their fruits and vegetables."
So it looks like you're completely full of shit, once again.
Name any combination of global average temperature and global average CO2 that would serve as a falsification of those models if observed next year. Models that are not falsifiable are not scientific.
Temperature is a realization of a stocastic variable and the underlying dynamics take more than a year's worth of data to assess. But at this point you can go back to papers written decades ago and validate their accuracy in predicting the warming trend we have experienced.
The absurd proposition has always been "fruits and vegetables are good, and animal meats and fats are bad".
Not even Taubes goes so far as to say this. You are, of course, free to invent delusional ideas of your very own, but not even your idol is going to back you up on that one.
I'm a little confused here. You just wrote several posts assailing Campbell claiming that he basically rigged the study by his method of clustering. Do you believe that Campbell's clustering should be based on rates disease prevalence or not?
That contradicts your statement that "There are a massive number of ways to cluster the data." Minger clearly shows that his arbitrary choice of clustering was just that - arbitrary. Expecting to find wisdom in a cherry-picked conclusion that can be refuted by the same data used to generate it is foolish.
No, there's no contradiction. There are massive number of stupid ways to cluster the data, but there is exactly one way to cluster the data by diseases of affluence vs diseases of poverty: examining the prevalence of diseases. How else would you do it? To cluster by any other method would be to inject subjectivity into the clustering. What Minger and you want to do is to develop some subjective criteria about what should constitute a disease of affluence rather than just looking at the prevalence of diseases and accepting the them for what they are. You and Minger are the ones promoting cherry picking because you want to subjectively exclude certain diseases from being considered diseases of affluence and introduce them into their own separate category.
BTW, Minger never claimed that Campbell's clustering was arbitrary, she just claimed that her way would be better than Campbell's. But Minger didn't show her way was better quantitatively, she just asserted it without any evidence whatsoever.
What Minger points out is that there were other statistically significant results Campbell *didn't* highlight, that contradicted his basic premise that plant-based diets were superior for health.
No, Minger didn't show any other clustering would have statistically significant results. She didn't do statistical analysis whatsoever. I'm beginning to wonder if you even read her critique.
Campbell was concerned more about his career than with science. The scope of his project was arbitrarily limited to avoid any contradictory information to his basic conceit. Don't you see that as a problem?
In the early 90s there was a major question as to why affluent countries suffered much higher rates of certain diseases than impoverished countries. This study addresses that critical question and does so in the natural way. The NIH made the right call to fund this work to address this question and Campbell properly executed the research and obtained valuable results. The scope of the research was chosen by the NIH and Campbell to address this mystery of diseases of affluence. I don't know what "contradictory information" you think the NIH wants hidden, but maybe you or Minger could actually do some analysis of the data rather engaging in conspiracy theories about the NIH hiding data?
What you've been doing is giving Campbell a pass, for what I'll assume is either naive deference to authority, or some sort of ideological alignment with his basic conceit.
No, if I was giving Campbell a pass I would have just informed you that Minger has zero formal education in the field while Campbell is an established expert and then I would have called you a dipshit and left it at that. But in fact I patiently drudged through Minger's bitching and then looked up Campbell's paper and then read it and then and then found, lo-and-behold, that Campbell made exactly the right call in clustering the diseases according their prevalence in affluent versus impoverished countries, and then I patiently explained this to you twice appealing to your sense of reason. If you call that "deferring to authority" then up must be down in your world.
No amount of careful planning will ever replace dumb luck.