Comment Brilliant (Score 1) 458
So by giving the Australian government more ammunition to pass this piece of legislation, how does this help?
Again, true. However, when it comes to AGW and the scenarios being reported - and acted upon by politicians.
Acted upon by politicians? That's almost a Contradiction in terminis!
the ONLY data behind those scenarios is the output from models
Yes, that's why there are thousands of pages in IPCC reports..
Wrong. You're either ignorant or lying deliberately. Why?
You know we can start insulting and name calling here, but that won't do any good in any way.
From my point of view I could use the exact same sentence back at you.
As for my "reality has turned out worse than predicted" comment, just look at all the IPCC reports. Every time they release a new report, roughly their worst cases turned out to be the best case in the next report.
You're assuming we know of all the inputs and outputs to Earth, which we don't.
Like I said before, science is always a best guess.
If you want a 100% accuracy you'll have to wait until it's too late to do anything, does that sound rational to you?
Your position is however the same as the one behind AGW - "something happened and we don't know the cause - it must be due to us!" which is, of course, laughable.
No, my position is: when you look at the correlation between CO2 and temperature, which records, theories and models suggest to be tied together, and then look at the -huge- increase of CO2 released since the industrial revolution, then you should be worried.
If climatology wasn't so extremely infected by a "holier than thou" attitude
Pot.. kettle?
and if some of its proponents stepped down from their ivory towers
I'm sure a lot of people who didn't believe in it before believe it now. What's your point?
[with regards to the debate about climate change being "over"]
Well I think this is mainly because we seem to have a short time frame to take any meaningful action. People get emotional when they think time is running out and people aren't listening or simply don't want to listen.
It's gotten to the point where talking about climate change is almost a religious discussion.
I don’t believe the vast majority of climate scientists think this. This is not my view. - Phil Jones, CRU
Most seem to disagree with him: http://tigger.uic.edu/~pdoran/012009_Doran_final.pdf
I do. Science is based on observation, refutation of hypothesis etc. Creating a model and claiming that it's science even though it hasn't been validated in any way (anyone can fit an algorithm to historical data - that's easy) is a sham, however.
So you're assuming that climatologists don't make observations, don't form hypothesis which they then peer review? Are you for real? There's more to climatology than just "a model" As for validation, the models that climatologists have been using have not been correct over time, that's true. Reality, so far, has turned out to be worse than predicted. (and no one cold winter doesn't mean anything about -global- temperature) Besides all that, what you expect? Double blind tests? We only have one world! Science is always about best guesses, and this is our best guess. To ignore and belittle it is unwise to say the least.
Btw, the last part of your post is in error. It's not easier to predict global changes and the world (of which I assume you mean the Earth) is absolutely not a closed system.
In a sense, when comparing climatology to meteorology, it is. Because at a global level you can determine, roughly, what the heat input and output is. And when you take that into account, anything you do from then on is essentially a closed system. At a local level -nothing- is isolated. That's why climatologists are way more certain about global trends compared to local trends. I may not have been correct to the letter when I said that, but I'm certainly correct in what I was trying to convey.
the numbers strongly suggest
Numbers from models. Models without predictive power.
That these models have no predictive power is your opinion. These models where designed to make an attempt at predicting the future of climate with the current day knowledge, so these are actually a best guess at what's to come. Can we ask for anything more? And don't confuse with predicting global temperature change with predicting the weather. Local changes are harder to predict than global changes, since the world as a whole is, sort of, a closed system.
Do science.
Good advice, maybe you should take your own.
First alarmists were preaching global cooling, then global warming.
Keep in mind that journalists don't always convey what the scientific community is trying to say very accurately. I'll try to explain it to you. In the last 20.000 the climate has been really stable, ridiculously stable compared to the climate before that. Before the temperature would go up and down like a roller coaster ride, I'm not talking about centuries here, I'm talking about periods of decades to years The thing that keeps climatologists up all night is that the numbers strongly suggest that human activity seems to bringing us back to this unstable climate. Why is that bad? Well it would, for example, make modern agriculture extremely challenging, and feeding the world would become more and more difficult over time.
and now that global warming is proving to be a farce
And it looks like the propagandists are getting better and better at their game. And you fell for it.
Climate science is in its infancy
Are you kidding? Climate science goes way back to at least a hundred years ago!
... as anyone who has been really following the "Global Warming" debate knows
The problem is that the "debate" is 99.99% among the people who have no background in the material (or worse; have a reason to bring confusion into the 'debate'), and then make all kinds of bold claims without working through the details.
but the greenhouse gas aspect of it is still very much up in the air
No, that's actually the best understood part of Climatology, and it's not "up in the air" at all. Did you know the greenhouse theory is already more than a 100 years old?
Any shareholder
No it's not foolish, it's short term thinking. The same kind of short term thinking which is the norm in, oh, just about everything we've been doing the last 20 years or so. It gave us such wonderful things as the financial crisis, our addiction to oil and the continued destruction of the eco system we actually happen to live in. Okay.... I take that back, it IS foolish
No, it means that the monopoly provider of the world's computer desktop software is greedy and takes profits at the expense of progress, interoperability and stability.
Oh please, so all software bugs are suddenly the fault of microsoft? I've seen plenty of bugs in open source projects and I'm pretty sure no microsoft engineer had anything to do with that
Well, you don't hear many jokes about Poland, The Netherlands or Belgium being invaded by the Germans.
The Netherlands never stood a chance. We had canons more than a century old for protection! When we refused to surrender they just completely levelled Rotterdam and threatened to do the same to other major cities. If we continued to fight, there wouldn't have been much left of the Netherlands and we'd still have lost.
You argue that latency is not going to be overcome anytime soon.
Yes, pretty soon now we'll just increase the speed of light... oh wait
I've noticed several design suggestions in your code.
