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Comment: Re:What if the person is innocent? (Score 1) 643

by phlinn (#43907921) Attached to: SCOTUS Says DNA Collection Permissible After Arrest
Depends how you define murder. Killing someone who breaks into my house and is armed shouldn't be considered murder, but is in some jurisdictions I have a duty to retreat. If the government either denies me the right of self defense or selectively enforces the law (lynchings for instance), then it is indeed suspicious.

Homicide is not the same as murder, but I'm pretty certain you were thinking of the latter.

Comment: Re:Yeah... (Score 1) 1105

by phlinn (#43813233) Attached to: 97% of Climate Science Papers Agree Global Warming Is Man-made
I'm considering their arguments on their merits, not taking things on faith. Wattsupwiththat provided quotes from authors (unless you really believe they just made up the quotes, those should be pretty authoritative for their papers at least), and now has a link to an author's page. Rankexploits used numbers extracted from the original review site, and some quotes from a leaked copy of forums. The leaked forum information is a bit more untrustworthy, but as far as I know has NOT been disputed by anyone yet so I'm accepting it for now.

Comparing the past behavior of skeptic and alarmist sites, I am more slightly prone to assuming good faith on skeptic sites. As a general rule, the skeptics are far more likely to provide the full detail of their investigations up front, while the alarmist tend to balk. "why should I share my data with you, you'll just try to find something wrong with it?" That doesn't mean the skeptics are necesarily correct, but they certainly appear to be more open.

Comment: Re:Yeah... (Score 1) 1105

by phlinn (#43804985) Attached to: 97% of Climate Science Papers Agree Global Warming Is Man-made
You put far too much faith in peer review, without examining the substance of the arguments. Peer review is a dodge. At most it means that the reviewers didn't produce any damning critiques of it OR the editor chose to publish anyways.

Consider that three of the authors of a paper that was claimed to endorse AGW thinks their papers do not endorse AGW. Does that cause you to question the validity of the consensus claim at all? 3 papers out of 65 is roughly a 5% difference.

Comment: Re:Yeah... (Score 1) 1105

by phlinn (#43773747) Attached to: 97% of Climate Science Papers Agree Global Warming Is Man-made
I don't think neutral is the same as irrelevant, but would accepting otherwise for the sake of argument, would the point that the supposedly independent reviewers weren't independent affect your opinion of the paper?

Really, the paper tries to get a lot more out of the opinions of reviewers on the internet than can possibly be justified.

Comment: Re:Yeah... (Score 5, Informative) 1105

by phlinn (#43752835) Attached to: 97% of Climate Science Papers Agree Global Warming Is Man-made
Unfortunately, this paper wasn't particularly scientific. It's got the characteristics of a push poll, in that the most appropriate choice wasn't an available option for the survey. It was based on reviewer's opinions of the articles, with no controls on who was doing the reviewing. Only 68 papers out of 12,000 asserted greater than 50% of the cause to humans, while 78 explicitly rejected it.

This number appears to be as flawed as the "98% of climate scientists" number a few years ago, where they didn't like their initial results and excluded a number of papers to bring the consensus amount up.

Comment: Re:Mularkey (Score 1) 696

by phlinn (#43711473) Attached to: "Dramatic Decline" Warning For Plants and Animals
For global warming alarmists to be correct about what we need to do, all of the following must be true.
1. The globe is warming.
2. The warming is caused by us.
3. There are not sufficient negative feedbacks to halt it.
4. The net effect is bad.
5. The proposed solution is better than leaving the status quo in place.

It's not dishonest to note problems with all of those points, even if for the sake of discussion you occasionally stipulate one of the other points as true. Each has problems. Note that I'm not claiming the skeptics are right on every point, only that it's not dishonest of them to note problems with each of the above steps.

1. Seems to be at a standstill. It appeared to be waming before, but almost all of the warming (USHCN at least, haven't double checked GHCN) was present in the adjustments not the raw data. Those adjustments can be questioned. My personal suspicion is that the mathematical model they use to adjust for Time of Observation bias magnifies the existing data. It's not a good sign that the successive iterations have had the warming in adjustments go up, while the rate of warming in raw data hasn't shifted significantly. Compare USHCNv2 to v3 sometime. If those adjustments need to be made according to the physics, than that's fine, but it still qualifies as deeply suspicious, and was a legitimate point of contention.

2. Really hard to establish, since we know non human variation has included periods of much greater and lower warmth and CO2 concentrations. Even establishing climate sensitivity is iffy, and the number has changed several times over the past couple of decades. Protestations to the contrary, the form of the equation they use for climate sensitivity is not well sourced.

3. Again, hard to establish. They net direction of water vapor isn't known for certain since more vapor -> more clouds, and clouds are cooling agents. It might not even be unidrectional. It could act as warming at some points, cooling at others. Gotta love chaotic systems. The recent unpredicted pause is evidence that there are negative feedbacks which have not been handled correctly or not included at all.

4. Well, take a look at the warmlist sometime and see if you can understand why this claim is not trusted. Almost all claims on this point don't even acknowledge the possible positive effects of warming. http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/06/winter-kills-excess-deaths-in-the-winter-months/ is one example argument that warmer temps cause fewer deaths.

5. Lots of arguments can be found about adaptation being more effective than cutting CO2 emissions. Certainly more politically achievable in many countries. YMMV.

Comment: Re:That's nice (Score 1) 717

by phlinn (#43654683) Attached to: The First Fully 3D-Printed Gun Has Been Successfully Test-Fired
Yes, actually. You can find the basic argument here, but before I saw other takedowns I took the numbers from the reference article in the JAMA and plotted total murder and firearm homicide rates versus the legislative score he gave, and against the best numbers I could find on actual ownership rates. Lots of other graphs in there as I poked at the numbers out of curiosity. Total suicides not just firearm suicides go down with greater gun control efforts, which surprised me because I expected guns to mostly be a substitution rather than addition. Still lots of confounding variables left unaccounted for. The suicide rates in Alaska and Wyoming probably have more to do with them being more depressing places to live for people, and both depression and attitude towards guns are likely related to living in a sparsely populated region. Deliberate homicides and murder rates aren't the same thing because of self defense laws. Legitimate self defense is still included in homicide numbers.

The distinction matters, because people usually support gun control because they are worried about being murdered, not because they are worried about killing themselves. The association that does exist between suicide rates and ownership isn't all that strong. Lots of variance, and the suicide rate goes from roughly 10 per 100,000 to 15 as ownership rates climb from about 12% to 55%. Given that auto deaths completely dwarf accidental firearm deaths, are you going to support a ban on vehicles? How about swimming pools?

One of the most interesting things in the original JAMA article is that he found a negative correlation between certain types of gun control and gun homicides. I give him props for including that information.

Comment: Re:That's nice (Score 1) 717

by phlinn (#43643389) Attached to: The First Fully 3D-Printed Gun Has Been Successfully Test-Fired
Stop including suicides and defensive homicides in there, and we can start having a real discussion about the impact of guns on crime. There are major problems with comparing across location in any case, due to the confounding influence of culture. Even given that caveat, state by state in the US there is no significant relationship between gun ownership rates or gun control laws and homicide or murder rates.

Comment: Re:That's nice (Score 1) 717

by phlinn (#43642925) Attached to: The First Fully 3D-Printed Gun Has Been Successfully Test-Fired
You can fix those if you also fix the districts created to give seats to democrats. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_Texas_redistricting is pretty strong evidence that it does go both ways, although I'm not aware of any objective measure of which party benefits more from the practice. It probably varies from year to year.

Comment: Re:Watch the total absence (Score 1) 1109

I would dispute fascism being right wing. I wouldn't really place it on the left either. Argumentum ad populum is a fallacy. Just because it is commonly believed doesn't make it true. On economic policy, they were more left than right, but that isn't their sole determining characteristic. Deciding where exactly to place them is a pointless argument in the first place.

In any event, my original point, that mass murderers aren't more likely to be right wing, still holds true. I used the term 'arguably' for the people on that list I linked to for a reason, because it usually isn't clear even with significant markers one way or the other.

Comment: Re:Watch the total absence (Score 1) 1109

James vonn Brunn: FrontPage Magazine has a rundown, although perhaps slanted. From his own words, he was anti-capitalist and pro socialism, but I'd accept an argument the was more plain crazy than left wing. Here are some addtional examples of people initially speculated to be right wing that weren't. Out of the 8 examples, 5 were arguably left wing. From your examples, white supremacism doesn't really fit cleanly on a left/right axis, and really, left/right is inadequate but I was responding to someone using that axis. Anti-abortion is usually right wing, but not always.

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