You're still failing to grasp the difference between what a published paper says, and what a scientist believes. These are two distinct things yet you're repeatedly conflating them.

"What the media states is that 97% of the climate scientists believe anthropogenic sources cause climate change, where the majority do not state it explicitly."

No, the majority do not state it explicitly in scientific papers. This says nothing about what they've stated their beliefs are elsewhere.

"Your statement is implying that those that stated no opinion really believe in it but withhold for more evidence, my statement states they didn't make a statement, it could be either way. Which position is more distorting?"

Yours is still more distorting for the aforementioned reason that it's a misleading by omission. My statement paints a balanced picture, as it provides a fuller set of information to the reader to make up their own mind, there is no omission.

But back to my original argument, and why the 97% figure can't be inherently written off is because we can still treat the papers as equivalent to a poll. We know that the papers that have expressed certainty will pretty much guarantee that their authors will fall on that side of the fence, but we don't know what the others think. If we were to ask the question "If you had to decide that either climate change is man made, or isn't man made, what would you choose?" forcing them to choose, then the 31.6% vs. 0.7% is equivalent to a poll of a large enough sample size that you'd expect the outcome to be 97.8% support vs. 2.16% deny with a margin of error for that sort of poll typically around 3%.

So saying 97% of climate scientists is quite a reasonable assertion statistically. I personally prefer to er on the side of caution and pick the lower bound when making an argument and even then give a bit more leeway, I think 90% gives ample room for statistical error whilst still making the same underlying point.

Again, this is how election polling works, this is how we know give or take a few percent what the outcomes are going to be, and yes election polling is maybe a poor example given how many fake polls there are out there (YouGov is notorious for doing polls for hire) but we're not talking about a slanted poll here that's had any kind of weighting applied, we're talking about the raw numbers being calculated directly.

So to argue against the suggestion that roughly 97% of scientist agree that climate change is man-made you need to provide a compelling argument as to why the statistical method is wrong, and why all those scientists who didn't express a view in the paper would, if asked to decide on the balance of evidence one way or the other what they believe would swing towards the not man-made camp when the vast majority of evidence swings towards the man-made camp.

Is there a good reason to believe that don't knows would turn into no it's not man-made in a drastically more prevalent fashion more so than yes it is man-made given the outcomes that we do actually know?

But this is already what is happening precisely because religion has equal protection to natural traits.

In the UK it is typically illegal to discriminate employment or provision of services based on sex or sexuality, yet religious institutions are allowed to exactly these things.

Which is why I suggested at an absolute minimum that even if you do protect religion it has to come secondary to natural traits. We should not in this day and age be allowing organisations to discriminate on sex or sexuality any more than we should on race.

But atheism isn't a religion so isn't typically as well protected anyway.

In fact, atheists are already prevented from working in some jobs, for example you can be discriminated against as a teacher seeking employment as a teacher at a Catholic school for example.

So this really flows into a further question about why religious folk should get protections over and above atheists also. You cannot for example run an atheist school and refuse a teacher employment for being religious, but you can run a religious school and refuse a teacher employment for not practicing that religion.

Not to intentionally defend the Tories, but this project also only exists thanks to the Tories:

http://alpha.openaddressesuk.o...

"How are you funded now?

Our current funding comes from the Cabinet Officeâ(TM)s Release of Data Fund. This fund is administered by the Open Data User Group and agreed by the Public Sector Transparency Board."

Oh how they take with one hand and give with the other!

They're only doing addresses by the looks, not names and addresses, so professions and so forth make no sense.

But most importantly it'd breach the Data Protection Act and be shut down with massive fines if it started bundling personal data like names of occupants along with addresses.

This is basically just a free competitor to the likes of Experian's QuickAddress service.

Yes, but this is a problem that's exacerbated even by governments.

For example, in most human rights legislation across the globe, religion, which is wholly a choice, is given the same level of protection as genetic traits that you do not choose such as race, sex, sexuality and so forth.

This is an inherently bad idea. Nothing that you can choose should ever be given the same level of protection as something that you cannot choose because it creates a paradox - how can you treat freedom of religious belief with equal protection as sex or sexuality when religious belief often preaches discrimination against them? Inherent natural traits are never in contradiction with each other, but choices are.

Thus the world desperately needs to erase protection of religion from all human rights legislation that places it alongside natural traits, or at least, demote it into it's own lesser category of protection where considerations are secondary to those of natural traits. It's the only sane way to solve the nonsense paradox that treating the choice of religion equal to natural traits creates.

Law should never be written to create a paradox else it becomes meaningless as it's then wholly arbitrary as to which way you decide to apply it making it no different to not having it written in law at all, yet that's exactly what legal protection of religion placed alongside natural traits grants.

No, you absolutely did distort, to quote again:

"Of the 32.6%, 97% said humans were responsible, which yields 31.6% believe humans are causing global warming, or less than one-third."

Your implication is clearly that less than one third of scientists believe humans cause global warming. That's clearly not a fact based on the data you provided. Less than 1 third of scientific papers explicitly claim that humans cause global warming, but that tells us nothing about what the people who wrote those papers think.

Scientific conclusion requires a far higher standard of evidence than personal opinion, so even if a scientist is 95% confident that humans cause global warming then many will avoid explicitly concluding this in a scientific paper until there is a much higher degree of certainty based on their explicit experiment.

But as I said, more fundamentally what your figures show is that there is a massive trend amongst scientists towards believing global warming is man made rather than against. It's very clear that the scientific community is swayed far more towards it being a man made problem than against. So even if your interpretation of the figures was correct, you still have a problem of making a misleading statement by omission - yes if your original premise was correct it would indeed mean that less than 1/3rd believed that it was man-made, but it'd also mean that less than 0.7% believed it was definitely not man-made. When you include that latter factoid in the sentence it creates a completely different impression. It goes from making the impression that a minority of scientists believe it'd man-made and that the amount that believe it's not man-made is an unknown that may be higher, to making it clear that the amount of scientists who believe it's definitely not man-made are an order of magnitude smaller again in number.

Yes exactly. Chemical production in plants doing things based on time of day such as opening flowers or generating nectar is typically based on levels of light of particular wavelengths that will change throughout the day as the sun rises and sets.

So the mechanism here is almost certainly simply that some members of this species weren't producing nectar until they got more light in a particular wavelength (probably red) than others. Those plants just happened to get more nutrients as a result and simply grew stronger, bloomed better and spread their seed more successfully as a result of that increased nutrient intake from the ants making this the increasingly dominant trait in the population.

The mutation will likely therefore have been one that simply requires an increased (or decreased) amount of light of a certain wavelength required to trigger nectar production delaying the time at which production typically began to a point in the day where the required wavelength was more (or less) prevalent and nothing more than that. As you suggest, it's likely this wasn't a single mutation, but simply the genetic drift of the population as random variation led those that produced nectar ever later to be more successful than those that produced earlier.

Because it's all part of the fundamental question of what thinking really is.

You might equally argue that when someone "thinks" they're hungry it's actually just a natural chemical change in the brain to a change in chemicals in the body so they're not actually thinking at all.

It's all just chemistry at the end of the day, when does chemistry change from just chemistry to thinking? The only difference is complexity of the system and where does level of complexity cross the line from being simple chemical reaction to being "thought"?

There's actually a deeper point to the use of the word thinking here, and it's something professional biologists through to neuroscientists through to AI researchers will sometimes equally use given the unsolved nature of the question of when we deem something to be thought as opposed to merely chemical reaction.

Yes, you're right Woosh. I totally didn't see it coming that you'd try and pass off your stupid comment as a joke in a desperate attempt to stave off your own embarrassment that you posted something so wrong in the first place.

You know Woosh isn't just a thing you get to post to make yourself no longer an idiot after you posted something stupid right? You know you're still clearly the idiot here yes?

"Python - No way in hell .. the language has to bend to my will, not me bending to its will."

Few languages bend to your will, some learning is always required. I'm not terribly convinced the learning curve for Python is less than for PHP/Javascript given that those two have so many dangerous nuances that it takes years to truly understand them and develop with them without falling victim to their countless pitfalls. If you don't like the syntax of Python that's fine, but it's hardly a compelling technical argument not to use it over PHP and Javascript.

"Java - Antiquated and full of perversions, along with the spectre of Oracle hanging over you."

Java is antiquated? It was first released in 1995. That's the same year that both PHP and Javascript turned up you realise?

As for perversions, what perversions exactly? It's a pure OO language and sticks to that properly. Compared to Javascript that really doesn't know what it is and has functionality that's basically broken like closures because it tried to do away with explicit pass by value and pass by reference meaning you need to do horrible hacks to force creation of a new scope if you want to pass by value into a closure rather than have a variable captured.

PHP? It's about as perverted as you can get. It started out basically like C for the web, but without the difficult stuff. Then it did exactly like C++ and tried to glue OO on top, only C++ kinda worked because it was done by a competent computer scientist whilst PHP had it's OO tacked on by a mob of wannabes.

Out of the 3, Java is no older, and is the only one that actually determined and stuck with a consistent and planned design philosophy. Your criticism therefore seems to be wholly nonsensical in the context of comparison against Javascript and PHP. The very fact that Javascript was rushed out with a similar name in the same year as Java to cash in on it's hype should at least tell you something about the quality of Javascript as a language if nothing else.

"C/C++ - I know it is done, but would you?"

It really depends what you're doing and how competent you are.

"C#/VBV.Net - Even with MS opening up things .. "It's a trap" /Ackbar"

If it's a trap then it's a pretty poor one because they keep on open sourcing more and more of it. First they go and make the language a real actual standard, and then they start open sourcing the framework whilst giving Mono their explicit blessing.

Microsoft now isn't Microsoft the 90s, it has realised that it needs C# to be runnable in as many places as possible like Java, hence why they opened up the core and plan to open up more and more of it. Nadella knows they lost the smartphone war, and he knows that Windows Server hasn't taken over the server world. He knows that the only way to get a foothold in these areas is to at least take what it does well there - development tools and technologies. The newest version of Visual Studio even supports Android development.

You seem to have pulled together a list of pretty weak criticisms of each language and pretended that's justification not to use them over PHP and Javascript despite PHP and Javascript both having glaring deficiencies that make the negative considerations you pass off as fact above wholly irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.

Each technology has it's merits, but saying I'm going to use a technology with 100 deficiencies because the alternative has 1 deficiency seems to me to be a bit short sighted (no zealots, please don't take the 100 to 1 literally, it's intentional hyperbole to make a point).

At the end of the day we're stuck with Javascript on the client for the foreseeable future and that doesn't bother me too much. But why use it or PHP on the server when there genuinely are just all around better alternatives for that particular case?

I don't even buy the Javascript on the server because you can share code with the client thing either - your server objects automatically serialize into JSON, and deserialize from JSON without a single line of code in most modern frameworks using the above technologies now and the whole point of Javascript not requiring predefined types is precisely so it can interoperate effortlessly with that sort of thing - the point being you can fairly seamlessly share code whatever you use on the server if you trust the server most and let that define any interfacing objects, which you really should anyway if you give a shit about security.

"Of the 32.6%, 97% said humans were responsible, which yields 31.6% believe humans are causing global warming, or less than one-third."

You've made a classic attempt to distort the figures. One could just as equally make an equally valid loaded claim such as:

97.8% of scientific papers that expressed a position on climate change believe it is real. Of those 94.8% claim it is man made.

This is correct based on the 32.6% vs. 0.7% divide you suggest amongst those who have take up a position.

This is ultimately similar to the election polling problem, sure the don't knows are a largely unknown quantity but unless there's sufficient reason to believe the unknowns would tend towards rejection of climate change if they had to make a choice then the most likely outcome is that the don't knows would follow the same trend with a few percent margin of error and you'd end up with a fairly similar final result.

Of course the meta-study is based on outcomes of formal scientific papers which is different to the opinion of scientists themselves. Just because someone is erring on the side of caution in a formal scientific paper doesn't mean that they don't believe that the actual weight of evidence suggests one outcome more than the other.

So sure his 99.9% may be made up, but it'd appear plausible that it's a whole lot closer to the actual figure than the alternative theory that there are plenty of scientists against would pose. Given the figures it seems statistically highly unlikely to expect a massive swing towards anything more than around 10% of scientists believing global warming is not a man made problem.

It's pretty clear however you spin it that scientific consensus tends far more towards climate change being real, and likely man made than it does any other outcome.

And why do you feel that defeating cancer isn't already part of the research into helping us live longer?

You can make the same argument about all of it, the longer you live the more likely you are to catch any deadly disease. The longer you live the more likely your heart is to give in. The longer you live the more likely you are to suffer a stroke. The longer you live the more likely you are to go deaf and lose your vision.

Cancer is no different, increasing age increases the chance of suffering all these things. Part of living older is defeating or delaying each and every one of these possible threats. What makes you think that cancer is somehow a distinctly different problem on the way to the same goal as the rest of it that means that it should be singled out and held up as a possible problem of increasing age more than anything else?

"Given I've already told you in this thread that I've contacted my MP to raise concerns over surveillance powers available to the security service your continued claims that I'm an apologist merely expose your own ignorance and blindness to bitter realities."

Well no actually, if anything it just demonstrates that you're either a very contradictory person or you're simply full of shit. Whether you've written to your MP or not makes no difference to the fact you're making apologies for MI5 and defending it's request for more powers whilst inadvertently admitting that if they need anything it's not more powers, it's more staff, because they already can't get through the data they harvest with the powers they have as is.

"No. Do I want ubiquitous surveillance? No."

It may not be what you want, but it's exactly what you're defending and asking for. You're saying it's okay that MI5 wants more power because their job is difficult whilst arguing that what they actually need is more manpower.

"Is the answer to pretend that the collective security services don't need the ability to monitor communications? Join the real world you idiotic twat."

Okay I can see this is beginning to make you cry now, you're obviously one of those irrational types who just no matter what cannot admit they've made stupid arguments. But here's what's odd, you create a great long rant about how you don't want ubiquitous surveillance and you then say it's somehow necessary in the real world, so what you're saying is you do want ubiquitous surveillance, that is the only logical conclusion of your argument.

It's the logical conclusion of your argument you see, because security services already monitor all communications, they already have the power to invade the privacy of suspects to whatever degree they require, and that's okay, because that's what they need to do. They can already do all this - targeted surveillance of threats to national security isn't illegal and isn't what they're asking for.

What they're asking for is the ability to access every digital communication of every person in the country at will, regardless of whether they're a suspect or not. You're defending their request for something you previously said you're wholly against. This is why between all your bile spewing you also come across as not only completely out of control of your emotions, but wholly confused also.

So there's one of two conclusions we can reach here:

1) You're making contradictory statements because you seem to admit you've no idea what the job of the security services are, and because you clearly have no idea what they're asking for given that you're defending their request whilst arguing you don't want what they're requesting

2) You do actually finally concede that you were wrong, but are one of those people who just can't say it, no matter how much bile they start spewing and how much nonsensical rubbish they keep throwing out which makes them look more and more irrational and crazed so continue to spout falsehoods and nonsense alongside comments that agree with everything I've been saying all along

But whichever doesn't really matter, the point is that you've highlighted full and well that you were wrong either way. Spewing bile everywhere and contradicting yourself doesn't change that, and if you think that you doing that is somehow my problem rather than yours, well, I genuinely feel sorry for you - you clearly have anger management issues.

"but then that really is a can of worms, and a lot of the people who pushed for Amendment 1 or Article 10 to protect their right to express their views really don't want to eat their own dogfood"

This shows a complete ignorance of historic context and is a rather unfair portrayal. The European Convention on Human Rights was drafted in the years that followed World War II and the lessons learnt from that. It was put together explicitly to try to prevent a repeat of things like the persecution of the Jews.

There was an explicit recognition at the time that much of what happened in Nazi Germany happened because the Jews had no external recourse against their own fascist government. The government's word was supreme and there was no higher international power they could appeal to in the face of wrongdoing by government. There was a belief that if you could give the people a last resort against government, a higher international order that held oppressive governments to account, that you could prevent a repeat of Nazi Germany's concentration camps.

Just because that has been perverted somewhat now and attempts at further perversion are growing doesn't mean those in charge have always succumbed to modern authoritarianism. Post-war was a period of relative political enlightenment in the West, but unfortunately due to the weight of the cold war, it was far too short lived. The ideas and intentions of leaders at the time were genuinely quite noble - look at the reasons behind the creation of the European Court of Human Rights too for example, it was all part of the same noble goal - to attempt to give the oppressed by government a voice against government.

It wasn't a complete failure, the European Court of Human Rights still does a great job in many cases of upholding the rights of citizens against overbearing government and corporations using the convention as it's guiding principles. It's imperfect but we can thank it for putting things like Phorm in the UK to death for example calling it out as the blatant widespread invasion of privacy that it was after the government refused to deal with it and instead opted to allow it.

People often cherry pick cases where it protects the bad as well as the good, but it has to, because once you start differentiating between people on fundamental rights it's not long before everyone falls into some exception category rendering the whole thing useless. But it was a good idea, pushed through with good intentions, by people who saw genuine horrors that even they knew must never be repeated. It's for that reason that we should not take it for granted, or belittle it, or claim it as a trap by the elite - on the contrary we should be pushing to keep upholding it and fighting to reclaim it as a charter for everyone, all the time, not just as something that governments can pick up and put down as and when it suits.