You’re talking about sweet corn (people food) as opposed to feed corn (cattle food), which can be used to produce biofuel. Once conversion facilities are available so that shipping isn’t so much of an issue, then biofuel can be produced locally in areas like here (Montana) on land that is currently not being used for crops. How, exactly, does that hurt anyone? And do you have any stats on feed corn to back up what you’re saying?
Did you even read what you’re responding to?
(a) I didn’t argue with your premise that money is considered a false god by some Christians.
(b) I asked for anyone that could support your “leap of faith” (cause it certainly isn’t a leap of logic) that goes from “some Christians consider money a false god” to “AGW is a religion.” You failed to provide anything that supports this.
Your personal belief that “X” is a false god does not in any way imply that belief in “X” is a religion.
Sure, I don’t want to oversimplify anything - indeed we don’t know for sure what other factors may have driven temperature changes in either direction in the past; what we do know is that CO2 is a greenhouse Gas, and that there appears to be a correlation (which, yes, might not demonstrate causation, but that’s not the same as saying it doesn’t) between recent rises in atmospheric CO2 and global warming.
I guess we could wait until we can prove it for absolute certain, but if we do that and it turns out there is a strong anthropogenic component, will there still be time to act and will we have the ability to do it?
You’d obviously need a lot more input than the yearly averages. A model that could predict the market would need economic data input, input on politics and other news (look how Nigeria affected oil prices), and whole bunch of other stuff. Given that, if we got one good match I’d be surprised. However, since the match would be to a within a certain range to be considered good, there might well be more than one model differing significantly on coefficients with low weights. All of those might work. Given that, and assurances that I’d be the only one with the model (since the existence of the model might affect the market) and that the model was not tuned with the later data, I might well bet $10K on it. I’d run some statistical analysis on the results first, of course, but I’d guess that under my very strict scenario p would be << 0.01
I’m not a climatologist, so I have no idea. Is AGW solely tied to a particular model? I’m all for opening the source code, though. However, if any model is open, and the way the coefficients get tuned based on historical data is clear, it should be possible to test any model in this way. I wouldn’t trust any model that didn’t pass this sort of test, which is different from saying that I wouldn’t trust any model at all in principle.
I was a bit unclear . . . the output would be the yearly averages.
We need to define what a good match is. Let’s do it this way: For any given year, it’s possible to bet whether the stock market will go up more than 5%; up between 0 and 5%; or down. A good match is a model that’s right more than 85% of the time. So in the years 2000 through 2006, it’s right 5 out of 6 years.
Obviously a stock market model that’s right more than 85% of the time would let you make a lot of money and is worth a good deal if you have exclusive rights to it.
If it’s not tied to a particular model, then it doesn’t really prove anything to show that a particular model fits a the data. It’s like painting a bulls-eye on the barn after you’ve fired your shot.
It really comes down to risk. If a hypothesis can’t be risked, then it’s probably not scientific.
As I have noted, climate models are different than the sorts of models that you are talking about. They are based on physical principles. They are not fits to data. And, there are so many degrees of freedom that one couldn’t possibly fit to all of them even if one tried. There are tons of things to look at to see how well a climate model is modeling the climate…and there are hundreds, if not thousands, of papers looking at these.
I told you that this was essentially done. You seem to be fixated on re-compiling the code and running it again when there is absolutely no reason one has to do this. The model was run for 3 different scenarios of forcings. One of the scenarios is actually very close to the reality that panned out. And, the results of this model show that the temperature trend predicted over the last two decades is in good agreement with the actual temperature trend.
It seems like you are just erecting artificial hoops for people to jump through in order to avoid accepting the results.
You seem to be good at coming up with excuses not to accept results. The point is that this comes as close to a “natural experiment” over a relatively short period of time to test if the climate responds to forcings in the way that the climate models predict.
Since we don’t have earths at our disposal to run AGW experiments on, this is the sort of testing that we can do.
Well, the point is that mechanistic models generally are tested differently than empirical models. One can focus on the individual mechanisms and whether they are being correctly modeled. One can also use data that is historical to test the model because this data was not directly used to “train” the model.
Well, for one thing financial markets don’t operate on fundamental physical principles. If the model was based on fundamental principles, if the model had very few parameters and these parameters were not able to be tuned to provide a fit to the historical data, then I would pay a lot for such a model. (However, I don’t think it is likely that such a model will be developed.)
If I have a black box with two holes in it, and every time I stick a pole into one hole, a ball shoots out the other exactly 0.25 seconds later and this has held constant for 1000 tries, I’d feel I had sufficient evidence that sticking the pole in the hole is what is making the ball shoot out even though I wouldn’t actually know what was happening inside the black box.
Now the same thing with Global Warming. If I can experiment on how light behaves in air that contains X mix of gaseous compounds and be able to tell you what will happen if you change the compound as you change it towards Y based on experimentation, then that’s a viable proof. We know what compounds are being released into the air due to human technology, so we know what should happen. Given that what is happening is following the prediction, that’s pretty darned good proof.
You have a hard time sticking to your own arguments, don’t you? First it was Evil Scientists, now they are poor deluded fools being duped by some Evil Politician - I’ll speculate you are referring to Al Gore here but I’m willing to be corrected.
You’re great at asking for proof from others and not so great at providing it yourself for your wild assertions. I bet the other AGW deniers are embarrassed you’re in their camp.
what IS the “reason a rich evil member of a political party has a advantage to strike fear in the heart of the general public”?
“he offers hard working, but barely making it scientist a bribe, maybe cash, or nice cushy government job or grant, to research AGW in a way that favors that end” - any evidence whatsoever for this vicious allegation? Does this person really have the resources to bribe virtually every working climatologist in the world, not one of whom had the integrity to refuse, and/or expose the corruption and graft?
How do you explain your move from Evil Scientist to Poor Hard Working Scientist in the space of a single day? Is it just that you realised how evil, vile, and flat-out unsubstantiated your accusation was, and so have picked a more universally hated target?
Is it inconceivable to you that these people came to their conclusions by honest intellectual endeavour and hold the positions they hold because it seems to them to most likely be the truth?
Is your only method of argument to demonize (literally in your case) your philosophical opponents?
“lower class people corrupted by the rich is not unheard of in human history” - oh really? Name, say, 6 occurrences. Note that if you can, you are acknowledging that these occurrences become public knowledge - if so why has this not occurred in this case?
Well, at the risk of actually returning to the OP, this thread is supposed to be about laymen. CO2 and the “greenhouse effect” are certainly in the mainstream press, I think I’ve seen the positive feedbacks I mentioned earlier in the mainstream press, but negative feedbacks, not so much.
Agreed. And that point should be well known to laymen also!
I don’t know enough about the area to comment, I’ll leave jshore and intention to fight that one out. Posts 185 and 193 from this thread don’t inspire confidence in some of the models, if they’re true.
The whole climate change debate has picked up a lot of baggage;- political, economic, and unfortunately moral. Historically, environmental activism has concerned itself with such issues as pollution, deforestation, pesticides, hunting to extinction. Activists have regarded themselves with a fair amount of justification as the good guys battling the bad guys;- greedy, cynical and unscrupulous organisations, corporations and governments. A battle worth fighting, and having a large dollop of romantic appeal into the bargain.
This history seems to have spilled over to the climate change debate. Good versus Evil. (Read some of the “global warming denial machine” thread I linked to above for examples of this!) I suspect a lot of people take AGW on faith, not out of deference to authority but because they want to be on the side of the “good guys”. I get the impression that in the USA, being an AGW sceptic lumps you in with Republican homophobic pro-war anti-abortionists…
It may very well be. In another thread, the following experiment was proposed:
Take three or four sealed terraria (containing dirt, rocks, and water) that are the same except that they have varying amounts of carbon dioxide. One has 280 ppm, one has 350 ppm and one has 450 ppm. Put them all in front of a full spectrum lamp and measure their temperatures over a few days.
I predict that there will be no significant difference in temperature.
Define “significant”. Obviously, the smaller the test environment, the smaller the temperature variance will be. I suspect that, in the case of terraria, the temperature variance will be so small as to be undetectable. But then, I’m not a climatologist.
Besides, if this simple test could yield useful data, why hasn’t it already been done?
What about the temperature after, say, twenty minutes? That they will all reach similar peak temperatures eventually doesn’t mean they all have the same response. Apart from that, it sounds like a really poorly designed experiment anyway.
That ‘model’ is so unutterably simplistic that no result it came up with would tell you anything whatsoever about AGW. That you can even propose this with a straight face suggests you do not have the understanding or knowledge to have an opinion on the science. Get back to us when the Earth is encased in a dome though.
AGW is not a belief.
That carbon dioxide is one of the many greenhouse gases is also a fact. It is up to deniers, (who IMHO should be treated with the same scorn and derision creationists and Holocaust Deniers are met with) to explain why carbon dioxide, methane etc are not functioning as their chemistry dictates.
Deniers are the one making the outrageous claims so it’s up to them to come up with the extraordinary proof.
It’s funny you should say that, because pro-AGW posts are sometimes just as simplistic. From this very thread:
Can I take it, then, that ijn your opinion, anyone who makes arguments such as the one I quoted above likely does not have the understanding or knowledge to have an opinion on science?
Or do you reserve ad hominem attacks for people you disagree with?