"Yes. Assuming it's a legitimate fossil, we're left with divine intervention (aliens), or time travel (the end of causality as we know it). Now, it just so happens that the falsification of evolution pretty much falsifies reality as we know it, which lets you know just how strong of a theory we're dealing with"

How would you know it was a legitimate fossil? You are just going to use that word to get out of any fossil I bring you. Give me a comprehensive definition of 'legitimate' both necessary and sufficient to rule out all reasonable null hypotheses. Seriously, go read Quine's work, "“Epistemology Naturalized” is a good placce to start, and you should probably read Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" as your approach to science is hopelessly outdated.

"But while we're on hypotheticals, are you willing to entertain the following notion:

[snip]"

Richard Linzen's hypothesis is legitimate but unlikely, that is the reason he continues to get funding for his work. Why is it unlikely, well for a start he put forward ways to test his hypothesis in a paper. This paper showed evidence for the hypothesis you list. Unfortunately this work was deeply flawed and a follow up study which Prof Linzen acknowledges addresses the flaws in his paper found that the impact of clouds on climate sensitivity did not reflect a large global impact of the mechanism he proposes. The relevant citation from Trenberth is below.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com...

I strongly believe Linzen should continue to be funded. Even with the studies conducted so far there may be non-linear impacts from cloud cover which could have some regulatory impact on the climate. A clear understanding of the effect cloud cover will make climate models more robust, reduce the amount of disagreement between them. So yes, I give that hypothesis more credence than the explanations for a precambrian rabbit.

But just like you made the perfectly reasonable operating assumption that time travel is impossible (even though there is nothing in the laws of physics to rule it out), you should also make the perfectly reasonable assumption that the impact on the sensitivity of changes in cloud cover can be reasonably inferred from the recent temperature record and that it is not crazily non-linear, especially given the paleoclimate record (why did this non-linear effect of cloud cover not impact previous hot periods in this non-linear way?). Doing that places an upper bound on how much the sensitivity can be impacted by the effect of clouds. Especially when we have results like Dessler's:

http://geotest.tamu.edu/userfi...

It isn't comprehensive but it suggests that, at least for current levels of warming clouds may exhasperate global climate change (water vapour is a green house gas).

Much of this is covered in the IPCC 5th Assesment WG1 report, which I provide a link to below.

https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5...

You want section 7.

I know you wont reflect on your position though, or read any of the citations I've provided, because I've interacted with you in the past and I strongly suspect you are a paid shill for the fossil fuel industry. So this is for anyone else reading this, look at which of the two of us is supporting their position with references to the relevant literature (be it the philsophy literature when it comes to the nature of scientific investigation, or the climate science literature when it comes climate science). hsthompson69 does not cite sources for hypotheses and claims he makes, he is likely doing this deliberately because unless like me you happen to be familiar with the literature it makes it much hard to check what he is saying, makes it hard to look up standard refutations and makes it hard to consult the relevant literature. He wont address any of the points I've brought up but will instead switch to a new set of canards and gish gallop.

"If life on earth was seeded by aliens in the precambrian, then you pretty much have to open the door to life being seeded on earth by aliens throughout the entire history of the planet.

Voila, you've got creationism."

How is this point relevant? Address the point I raised, and stay on point. Stop your gish galloping bullshit.

"As for finding fossils in odd places, evolution clearly doesn't exclude that - and certainly our interpretation of the fossil record is subject to modification at times. That being said, clearly, a modern rabbit in the precambrian is excluded. It's not just "odd", it forces you to resort to time travel explanations"

I wasn't forced to resort to time travel explanations. I gave an example of one explanation I found more plausible than evolution being incorrect. I would abandon the idea that time travel has not occurred before I would abandon evolution, because the evidence for evolution is overwhelming, and time travel is not excluded by the known laws of physics. That said the explanation I would find most likely initially is some weird convergent evolution.

"Oh don't be silly. The existence of CO2 doesn't logically lead to global warming the lack of modern, recent era creatures in ancient fossils does logically lead us to conclude that modern variants are in fact the result of selective pressures."

No, no it doesn't. Their lack could be due to some physical distortion of the fossilisation process. Or perhaps due to chemical properties unique to so-called 'modern' adnimals which prevented them from showing up in the fossil record. Or any number of other explanations. You can never do what you are trying to do, outline a test of a theory which does not rest of assumptions about some other aspect of a theory. No scientific theory rests on one observation or fact, or even isolated collection of facts.

And the properties of CO2 implies the greenhouse effect, it is trivial physics to see this. I would be willing to reconsider the consensus on global warming if you could show physicists were wrong about the chemical properties of CO2. In this sense it is clear that the theory of global climate change is more falsifiable than evolution as I am hard pressed to come up with a set of experiments which I would accept as meeting any falsification criterion. The reason for this is simple, evolution is basically the observation that there is life, that it reproduces with variation, and that the laws of thermodynamics hold. To falsify it you really need to find some experiment which shows one of those is false. This is way harder than just showing every physicist ever has been wrong about the properties of CO2.

Let's say we found a single fossil which appeared to be a modern rabbit in the precambrian. Are you now willing to assert that the theory of evolution is falsified? You wont entertain any of the possibilities I put forward or some other explanation in which evolution is correct, but some other theory in science is incorrect?

Incidentally I expect you to answer that last pair of questions. Failure to do so will just result in me posting the same question over and over again in reply to you until you do.

"If we found a modern rabbit fossil in the precambrian tomorrow, and it wasn't obviously faked, then you're looking at a refutation of natural selection and evolution. That observation is completely excluded by the hypothesis."

No it wouldn't. It could indicate that just the rabbit population was seeded by aliens, or that the lineage of the modern rabbit is incorrect, or that some unknown physical process caused rapid fossilisation, or be a really fluky example of convergent evolution, or it could be the result of time travel. I'm more inclined to believe any of those than that the theory of evolution is wrong. And we have found a fair few fossils in odd places. This paper for instance:

http://www.nature.com/nature/j...

Did that finding falsify evolution? It was a fossil we weren't expecting to find where we did. What's your excuse for why that does not falsify evolution? Keep in mind that you must make your falsifiability criterion both necessary and sufficient to your own absurd standard. (Note: I'm a biologist, I'm point out how the parents logic is identical to that used by creationists)

The theory of global warming can (to the same extent that evolution is falsified by pre-cambrian rabbits) be falsified by showing that CO2 does not have the properties it is currently believed to have in regards to interacting with light. But no one observation would falsify either.

Fortunately military hardware floats between bases and battlefields rapidly on magic pixie dust, so a functioning modern armed service does not require things like the interstate highway system. We've known a functioning modern road system was necessary for national defence since the battle of the taxi cabs, so you are only a century out of date on your understanding of logistics.

If we found a modern rabit fossil in the precambrian tomorrow you know damn well it has likely been faked, or represents some other fluke event. I'm not abandoning the theory of evolution based on a single observation. Science does not work that way and you are using the falsifiability criterion to engage in special pleading. Have you not read Quine?

YEC is falsifiable (at least the young earth portion), you can tell it is falsifiable because it is widely held to be false. Many institutions which used to endorse it, no longer do. Do you have a peer reviewed statistical analysis showing that the consensus position on climate change has been falsified? Don't like to a blog. Don't link to a newspaper. Peer reviewed journal article.

If you cant do that don't gish gallop again, give me a peer reviewed paper or I will just keep replying to you like I did last time and we both get to lose a heap of karma again. I'm happy to to stop you spreading your propaganda.

You know you probably agree with the other poster right? He didn't ask for atheism to be taught in science classes, and most secularists would object to any statement in science classes promoting atheism beyond "The existence or non-existence of a generic god is not presently falsifiable, as such no evidence establishing the claims that a generic god exists or does not exist can be scientifically demonstrated at this time".

Yes because what matters is what is written on a piece of paper and not how things work in practice. The worlds republics and constitutional monarchies both have issues, but I will take a paper thin veneer of feudalism the UK has, something which would vanish the second someone actually tried to apply it, to the corporatist state the US has become with massive legalised bribery.

And here is your problem. Nothing meets your falsifiability criterion. Young Earth Creationism is demonstrably falsifiable. It claims the Earth is 6000 years old and we have loads of evidence that it is over 10,000. Your falsifiability criterion is specifically designed to ignore advances in the scientific epistemology since Quine so that you can shill for the fossil fuel industry.

Well we can start with opertunity costs. Many of our smartest minds are directed not towards determining what the best allocation of resources is 6-12 months / 2 years / etc. down the line, but how best to use priviledged access to the stock market to make a thousandth of a penny on over a microsecond.

If I present to you two pills. Both have been exposed to ebola but one has been put into a chamber which is linked to a computer. 97% of the time when I hit the enter key on the computer the chamber is flooded with gamma radiation killing every living thing in there. I hit the enter key, remove the pill and give both to you. I now through some form of compulsion require you to take one of the pills. Which one are you going to take?

There are lots of problems with your question. A big one is that person 1 is a logical contradiction and cannot exist. It is not possible to 'believe in' evolution any more than it is to believe in the hypothesis that the historical Jesus drank wine. Jesus drank wine is very likely to be true given the culture he existed in and there is evidence to suggest as much. There is no faith or trust involved here, it is a descriptive statement. Institutions, people, articles of faith, statements with spiritual components, these are things you believe in. I believe in my family. I believe in western democratic institutions, at least compared with the alternatives. I believe in the scientific establishment, again at least compared with the alternatives. I believe that the modern synthesis of the theory of evolution is the best explanation for the observations of the natural world that we have. I don't believe in evolution, evolution isn't the correct kind of noun for someone to believe in. A person who 'believes in evolution' is a square circle or a married bachelor. So if my only options are 1 and 2, I will take 2 because 1 doesn't exist.

The normative component of your question is a silly strawman, to see how it is a silly strawman work out why this characature of religious folk is stupid, then apply the same reasoning to your person 1:
2. Good party-line believer who recites a firm belief in YHWH but has shaky hands.. but who cares, after all your brain is just material and your spirit is eternal, so why should it matter? Don't you BELIEVE in YHWH?

See how stupid that is? See why it is stupid. Well now you know why your question is stupid. I don't think religious people are stupid, I think they are wrong about one very specific part of their belief system. I do however think your arguments are weak and that it is best to engage people with an open mind and as much respect as practical, especiallly if you are looking to convince them. In this regard your efforts here have failed utterly.

There are experts on various scriptures, they are things like academic historians, philosophers, scholars in theology. Of course most of them say that the widely held interpretations of those holy books are questionable.

You can. For me the primitives are a pain to work with compared with matplotlib. Not that anything I've used has good 2D primitives for plotting, just gradations of less crappy.

Sorry but I use both R and python in my work as a biomechanist and while I love working with python and hate working in R, R is not only less verbose for this task, but it is more consistent, intuitive and better documented. Very few languages beat python for simple, easy to read code, but it is not up to the task of doing general purpose statistics. To see why this is the case consider a problem with that blog post. All the diagnostic plots I need to do to check the regression are missing, no qq, no cook's, not even something simple like fitted vs. residual. Now consider what happens when I notice that while the fit is decent the residuals depend on what subject I'm looking at and I need to vary the error term. Or need to switch to a mixed effects model because there is clearly a dependence on the intercept by subject.
Seriously when i say I hate R, I mean it. The code is ugly, it can be hard to read and woe betide the poor git who makes the mistake of needing a plot more complicated that something lattice can do. It is still better than python for statistics.

I'm opposed to the death penalty on pragmatic grounds and I agree it is basically classist and racist as applied, but your opening argument is just daft. Why? Well you said:

"If it is illegal to kill, it should be for the state as well"

The same argument works for:

"If it is illegal to restrict someones freedom of movement, it should be for the state as well"
"If it is illegal to take money from someone, it should be for the state as well.

Your argument suggests prison and fines shouldn't be possible. Part of the point of having a criminal justice system is to provide a careful way for the state to violate certain rights of those people who have failed to respect the rights of others for reasons including deterence, rehabilitation, punishment, recompense and prevention. The reason to be opposed to the death penalty is that it sucks for many those things.