He thought his beliefs about global warming were based on science. Science proved him wrong |310|

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Alex didn't come up with his book title for no reason.

By saying that, you're actually confirming my concerns about what's happening to the site - that it's becoming "scienceiswrong.com". That the party line is going to be that whatever science - or the establishment, or the government - says is wrong, and that you're going to be "passionate" is preventing the other side of the argument being communicated.

Of course scientists can make mistakes, and of course the scientific consensus can sometimes be wrong. But an attack on the scientific method itself - when applied in its proper sphere - is about as absurd as you can get.

That's what this site is in danger of becoming, in my view. And while it may win you some fans in strange quarters, it's a million miles away from the principle of "true scepticism" - of carefully examining the evidence and reaching an objective view on it. I believe it's the antithesis of the scientific approach to the paranormal, as developed since the foundation of the SPR.
 
PETHA has indeed been banned. On Saturday night, be reported over 100 posts by various people including two that referred to Alex! It took me considerable time just to process them all. I also had a number of complaints from other members of this forum. PETHA was not banned for his opinions.

So that's meant to be an explanation? You still haven't stated the reason why he was banned. Or was it because he took a presumably considerable time to gather the 100 posts to report, which obviously annoyed you.

Do you think he might have been doing something annoying because he got banned for a week for doing nothing except arguing intelligently an opposing position which you see as 'hogwash'? The vitriol is spewing from the page!

I wonder if any of the members of this forum that complained about PTEHA (behind his back) are pro AGW ? I suspect not, you're all a friendly little nest of backstabbers.

You should resign as moderator. Alax should apologise to PTEHA.

I should go also.

I think there is some very interesting stuff on the forum, and some very interesting people, but if this is how people are treated, you can stuff it.

Without honesty you're fooling yourselves, you won't get anywhere.
 
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So that's meant to be an explanation? You still haven't stated the reason why he was banned. Or was it because he took a presumably considerable time to gather the 100 posts to report, which obviously annoyed you.

Do you think he might have been doing something annoying because he got banned for a week for doing nothing except arguing intelligently an opposing position which you see as 'hogwash'?

It is quite laughable, really. Only yesterday David Bailey sent me a private message saying "Remember that if you are being hassled the best thing to do is to use the report button." Today he seems to be saying the reason that he banned PTEHA was because he used the report button too much.

Did it really not occur to David Bailey that PTEHA might have been using the report button to illustrate behaviour similar to that which he'd been banned for? But which hadn't attracted a ban because the moderator was "passionate" in his support for the other side?
 
It is quite laughable, really. Only yesterday David Bailey sent me a private message saying "Remember that if you are being hassled the best thing to do is to use the report button." Today he seems to be saying the reason that he banned PTEHA was because he used the report button too much.

Did it really not occur to David Bailey that PTEHA might have been using the report button to illustrate behaviour similar to that which he'd been banned for? But which hadn't attracted a ban because the moderator was "passionate" in his support for the other side?
Do you really think sending over 100 reports in the course of one evening is a reasonable way to use that resource? I spent about an hour yesterday, just processing all those reports (because otherwise, new reports can get lost in mess).

It might help if everyone here listened to the video I put up this afternoon by a physics Nobel Prize winner. It is excellent, and clear, and may make a few of you gasp.

David
 
The Internet now takes the place of the church and the town square where ideas are exchanged and popular consensus is reached. Popular consensus is the base of support for the exercising of power.

This has long been known and written about... Ender's Game written in the 80's foresaw the importance of Internet debate in relation to world power with the kid geniuses under pseudonyms "Locke" and "Demosthenes" teaming up to control discourse on the nets leading them to eventually rule the world.

Perhaps you'd care to comment on the graphs above? What do you think about IPCC climate models failing on the high side to track with measured values? Do you feel that the NOAA land based measured temperature increase of .07 C / decade is real or exaggerated by data processing? Do you feel that we can rely on the accuracy of global temp estimates going all the way back to 1880? If real, do you think it is significant and dangerous or just part of natural fluctuations in the earth's climate?

That may be but aren't they always growing or receding naturally? I mean we see many glacial valleys and lakes that were filled with ice thousands of years ago. We warmed up quite a bit since then and man obviously didn't cause that warming.

As I mentioned earlier in this thread the estimated rate is extremely small on the order of a few millimeters per year and the paper that reported this said the accuracy is suspect being measured from tidal measurements and bouys. The land and shore are always shifting so it is really hard to say how much the ocean is actually rising if at all.

Part of that could be natural climate cycles. Part of that could be due to geoengineering (cloud seeding off the coast) and part of that is certainly due to the fact that the population has exploded since the 70's but no new reservoirs have been built.

I'm not interested in the popular concensus and not interested in the version of the popular consensus on a forum like this one here. I'm not a culture warrior. Please feel free to believe in whatever strikes you as being correct. If you are a culture warrior, then please don't worry yourself about me or mine. Here is my take on Climate Change: I think about what sorts of plants I can support on minimal or no water. I think about ways to reduce the amount of water I need to wash and clean. The part of Germany that I plan to live in some day, experienced drought this past summer and record hot days. For the first time in anyone's memory the hills there went brown, instead of the luscious green color they should have been. I need to keep that in mind as well when I think about moving there. Climate change already is a daily practical matter for me. Arguing over how many millimeters matter, or how many fractions of a degree matter or don't matter, doesn't matter to me. Cheers.
 
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PETHA has indeed been banned. On Saturday night, be reported over 100 posts by various people including two that referred to Alex! It took me considerable time just to process them all. I also had a number of complaints from other members of this forum. PETHA was not banned for his opinions.

You think people who are against CAGW are deluded or even in the pay of big oil. I guess I have made the comparison with the scientific treatment of ψ enough already, so let me give you another interesting example of the corruption of science. A few weeks ago, a report was released in the UK reducing the safe limits for drinking alcohol. The impression was given that even a small consumption of alcohol incurred some danger, and that cancer was a particularly high profile risk.

In the newspaper stories about this issue a book title appeared:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Good-News-...1680791&sr=8-1&keywords=good+news+about+booze

Despite its title, much of this book is somewhat technical,and it goes through the statistics about the medical effects of alcohol, collected over many years. The book meticulously quotes the research papers on which it is based. On the basis of these statistics, it paints a vastly different picture of the effect of drinking alcohol. People drinking large amounts, are obviously putting themselves at great risk of a variety of medical problems, but in fact those drinking moderately - even those drinking rather more than the old safe drinking limits - actually live longer and suffer less disease than teetotallers, or (obviously) those who veer towards excess.

The author explains the stark contrast between the experimental facts and what has been told to the public by pointing out that many of those responsible for the final advice had been GP's earlier in their career, and had seen too many people who had become alcoholics.

However, it is surely reasonable to ask if it is right to feed the public a fantastic distortion of what the science actually says, because someone decided it would be better for them to be fed lies! Furthermore, I would hazard a guess that those who would take notice of the new advice, and maybe stop drinking, would be exactly the ones who would drink moderately and reap the benefits that the evidence shows this confers. It is really worth reading this book and comparing it with the public advice given out in Britain.

This is an interesting, but probably well meaning bit of scientific deception, but it illustrates the way in which those at the top of large scientific organisations see fit to twist the truth as they see fit. It is also easy to see that after a while scientists may feel locked into a lie because they can't explain what evidence they ever had to justify their original advice.

Most science is now organised on a very hierarchical basis, and control is exerted on potential mavericks using the peer review system, and the grant system.

Lot's of people have speculated over the origins of CAGW, I have heard it suggested that it arose out of a drive by the nuclear industry to promote its power stations. Another possibility is that it arose as a way to sell expensive electricity rather than cheap electricity - soak the poor to increase the wealth of big business. It may have been done - at least in part - to deflect the Green movement from things that really mattered.

I know you think we are just a group of people who know nothing about science, so here is a Nobel Prizewinner in physics espousing similar views:


http://www.mediatheque.lindau-nobel...ver-global-warming-revisited/laureate-giaever

Please, please listen to this speech - it is very clear and impressive.

Martin, Hurmanetar, and others - please save this link - it is the best I have discovered.

(He also resigned from the American Physical Society because of their championing CAGW without indicating the level of dissent on this subject).

Freeman Dyson - another revered physicist - has expressed similar views. It is noticeable that both of these men are retired, and thus beyond the reach of the sanctions that can normally be applied to those who step out of line on such issues.

There seem to be a whole set of scientific issues of this type, where either a mistake was made and subsequently covered up, or a deliberate bias was introduced for one reason or another. Alex didn't come up with his book title for no reason.

David

I don't have time to reply to all that at the moment (huge comment!) - why was PTETHA banned? For reporting too many comments?

My point was that I worry that your opinions on man made climate change make it difficult for you to moderate fairly on this particular topic, that's all.
 
Do you really think sending over 100 reports in the course of one evening is a reasonable way to use that resource?

Well, I'll repeat my question, as you quoted it without answering it.

Does it really not occur to you that he made those complaints because he felt he had been unfairly treated and that the people on the other side had behaved just as badly without being penalised?

And another question, just out of interest. Have you penalised anyone at all on your preferred side of the argument?

Do you feel a moderator has any duty to be even-handed, or do you think it's quite in order to punish people on one side just because you believe "passionately" in the other?
 
Just to let everyone know: I never report anyone for anything. If they attempt to wind me up or troll me, I simply ignore them.

God save us all from people who think they know. The things anyone knows for sure could be written on the back of a postage stamp: mine would say only I know I'm conscious. All else is varying degrees of opinion shaped by life experiences. Mine lead me to believe that CO2 for the most part has beneficial effects, and that if anything we currently have too little of it in our atmosphere. Others believe that anthropogenic CO2 is destroying the planet, meanwhile de-emphasising real environmental issues and thereby--probably unintentionally in most cases--supporting policies that are making them worse.

As many will know, I'm not into conspiracy ideation. A word I've learned from Bernardo Kastrup seems more appropriate to me for describing what goes on in many aspects of human affairs: stigmergy. This word was originally coined by Pierre-Paul Grasse in the 1950's to explain how social insects seemingly manage to coordinate their activities: see http://www.stigmergicsystems.com/stig_v1/stigrefs/article1.html.

I'm not suggesting that we are incapable of coordinating our human activities, only that in many areas we don't need to in order to explain how they can be interpreted as "conspiracy". Sure, there may be some actors who consciously try to shape events, but their effect may, overall, be nugatory except insofar as people are able to call on them as "experts" or "opinion shapers" who provide a seemingly coherent picture one can identify with. And that concept, identification, signifies something we possess in a degree that insects don't: the ability to self-reflect and hold opinions at all.

Those opinions tend, for the sake of perceived consistency, to take into account many factors that, strictly speaking, have little to do with the actual issues under consideration: issues spiritual, political and economic, for instance. That is why it's pointless arguing about AGW. My views in these other areas help shape my attitude to it in the first place, and the same is true for anyone, whether or not they agree with me.

We are immersed in an environment that is saturated with information: this information tends as never before to lead to polarisation of opinion: to diametrically opposed "termite mounds" if you like. One opines that AGW is bullshit, whilst another takes it as gospel. In between, there are some "termite mounds" where opinions are more nuanced, of course. I, for instance, count myself as a lukewarmer: anthropogenic CO2 may have raised temperatures a little, but if so, we're still coming out of an ice age, and so I see it as a positive rather than a negative. Warmer temperatures, more plant food: what's not to like?

Real environmental problems such as global scale land use changes, anthropogenic pollution (CO2 is definitely not a pollutant!), deforestation and so on are ones that genuinely concern me and all the brouhaha over global warming is simply distracting us from addressing them: diverting much-needed resources into issues that I see as totally irrelevant.

I don't deny the possibility of some AGW: what I deny is CAGW, which despite all protestations to the contrary, is what is being implied: if catastrophe isn't on the table, then what the heck is all the fuss about, and why the heck would it raise such passions?

Ivar Gaevar, the Nobel physicist, puts it all very simply in this video:

 
I don't deny the possibility of some AGW: what I deny is CAGW, which despite all protestations to the contrary, is what is being implied: if catastrophe isn't on the table, then what the heck is all the fuss about, and why the heck would it raise such passions?

Michael, how about the time delay from cause and effect in CO2 injection into the atmosphere giving global warming effects? From Skeptical Science (2010).

http://www.skepticalscience.com/Climate-Change-The-40-Year-Delay-Between-Cause-and-Effect.html

This seems key ...

With 40 years between cause and effect, it means that average temperatures of the last decade are a result of what we were thoughtlessly putting into the air in the 1960’s. It also means that the true impact of our emissions over the last decade will not be felt until the 2040’s. This thought should send a chill down your spine!

Obviously there are global climate effects now (who can deny this, honestly?), but if one can scale the climate effects now (due to 330 ppm in 1976) to what will happen in 2056 (because of 400 ppm now) can one at least proportionally say there will be at least a 400/330 = 1.2 increase in effects climatically in 2056? That would be huge.
Perhaps the increased injection of 400 - 330 = 70 ppm doesn't even scale linearly in terms of climate effects. Worse perhaps? Much worse?

Now that opens up the severe possibility of dangerous climate change.

Those figures here from Mauna Loa.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mauna_Loa_Carbon_Dioxide.png
 
I put Ivar Giaever (Nobel man), the video above, into the search box for the site Skeptical Science (my comment just above) and this is one that popped up:

Ivar Giaever - Nobel Winning physicist and climate pseudoscientist (2012).

We often see scientists from non-climate fields who believe they have sufficient expertise to understand climate science despite having done minimal research on the subject; William Happer, Fritz Vahrenholt, and Bob Carter, for example. As he admits in his own words, Nobel Prize winning physicist Ivar Giaever fits this mould perfectly.

http://skepticalscience.com/ivar-giaever-nobel-physicist-climate-pseudoscientist.html


 
As he admits in his own words, Nobel Prize winning physicist Ivar Giaever fits this mould perfectly.
http://skepticalscience.com/ivar-giaever-nobel-physicist-climate-pseudoscientist.html

Yes - I'm still trying the work out the logic behind people whose mantra is "Science is Wrong" invoking the authority of a Nobel Prize winner.

But perhaps if you have that attitude, it helps if it's a Nobel Prize winner who hasn't actually done any work in the field in question?

Still, wouldn't it be even better to invoke the authority of someone who wasn't a scientist at all? A second-hand car salesman or a taxidermist, perhaps?
 
I put Ivar Giaever (Nobel man), the video above, into the search box for the site Skeptical Science (my comment just above) and this is one that popped up:

Ivar Giaever - Nobel Winning physicist and climate pseudoscientist (2012).

We often see scientists from non-climate fields who believe they have sufficient expertise to understand climate science despite having done minimal research on the subject; William Happer, Fritz Vahrenholt, and Bob Carter, for example. As he admits in his own words, Nobel Prize winning physicist Ivar Giaever fits this mould perfectly.

http://skepticalscience.com/ivar-giaever-nobel-physicist-climate-pseudoscientist.html


When all else fails, resort to ad hominem.
 
When all else fails, resort to ad hominem.

You think it's "ad hominem" to point out that someone being invoked as a scientific authority has never actually worked in the field he's commenting on? Really?

But on that subject, presumably you missed my question above. Why did you accuse me of being a troll when I asked you a civil question? And - just out of interest - did David Bailey contact you privately and ask you not to do it again?
 
When all else fails, resort to ad hominem.
That's not good enough and clearly those who have linked to the Giaever videos haven't seen this ...

During a historic European heat wave, 36 Nobel laureates signed a declaration on climate change—and tried to shout down the science-denying claims of one of their own (that's Giaever) ..... from Scientific American 2015

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-chatter-dominates-island-of-nobels1/

Now surely all these Nobels are not ad hom - ing him?
 
Obviously there are global climate effects now (who can deny this, honestly?),

I don't know of any evidence of unusual negative climate changes. In some ways it seems better: there's been fewer and less severe hurricanes and tornadoes lately. But the landscape and climate is always changing somewhat. The dustbowl in the 30's, Venice wasn't always underwater, the Sahara wasn't always a desert, the Great Lakes used to be full of ice, etc.

but if one can scale the climate effects now (due to 330 ppm in 1976) to what will happen in 2056 (because of 400 ppm now) can one at least proportionally say there will be at least a 400/330 = 1.2 increase in effects climatically in 2056? That would be huge.
Perhaps the increased injection of 400 - 330 = 70 ppm doesn't even scale linearly in terms of climate effects. Worse perhaps? Much worse?

It doesn't scale linearly because the atmosphere is already opaque to radiation in the CO2 absorption wavelengths. Adding CO2 should theoretically slightly increase the band of wavelengths absorbed which in turn slightly increases the altitude at which heat is radiated to space. The effect is very small and there are also natural buffer systems on the temperature rather than negative feedback systems which is probably why the IPCC models failed to pan out over the last 20 years.
 
The part of Germany that I plan to live in some day, experienced drought this past summer and record hot days. For the first time in anyone's memory the hills there went brown, instead of the luscious green color they should have been.

And you're sure a local drought is due to AGW and CO2, how?

Droughts have occurred for millennia. In the Bible we find in the story of Joseph a 7 year period of plenty followed by a 7 year drought. Droughts are mentioned throughout historical records. There was a drought in the 30's called the dustbowl. Why are the droughts we see today automatically assumed to be due to CO2?
 
It doesn't scale linearly because the atmosphere is already opaque to radiation in the CO2 absorption wavelengths. Adding CO2 should theoretically slightly increase the band of wavelengths absorbed which in turn slightly increases the altitude at which heat is radiated to space. The effect is very small and there are also natural buffer systems on the temperature rather than negative feedback systems which is probably why the IPCC models failed to pan out over the last 20 years.

Ah - if only the IPCC had had the assistance of the gifted amateurs on this thread!
 
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