Actually, on re-reading, I would be more comfortable with the truth of this sentence I wrote if I added the word “proven” in front of “factual errors”.
So Jshore you still can’t provide any evidence of factual errors despite claiming repeatedly that you know they exist. You didn’t claim that he used selective evidence. You loudly and repeatedly made the ignorant claim of factual errors. Now you can’t support thsoe assertions.
Instead we see more of the same. Vague, unsubstantiated allegations of some sort of sloppiness in the work or criticism of what he should have morally done in response to use of his data. Not even a hint of what actual facts that are wrong, despite persistent assertions that such exist.
Your repeated assertion of factual errors in Lomborg’s work doesn’t convince me. Nor does your posting that he is ‘cavalier’ convince me of the existence of factual error.
I’m funny like that.
I can only assume that someone calling him cavalier has convinced you that there are factual errors in his work. If that is the case then I can only conclude that you didn’t take much convincing.
Either cite or get off the pot jshore.
Oh my goodness. PMSL. Now we have jshore claiming loudly that he has evidence of factual evidence that he can’t produce when called on it. So then he changes his tack and says that the factual errors are there but they can’t be proven.
As an example, we have the quotation from Harvard biologist E.O Wilson that I gave you previously:
Now, admittedly, this is not a proven factual error. The vast majority of respected scholarship may indeed be wrong. By the same standards however, the claim that the earth is 6000 years old is also not a proven factual error. This estimate is at odds with the vast majority of respected scholarship on geology but it is not, strictly speaking, a proven factual error.
So Jshore you still can’t provide any evidence of factual errors despite claimng repeatedly that you know they exist. You didn’t claim that he used selective evidence. You loudly and repeatedly made the ignorant claim of factual errors. Now you can’t support thsoe assertions.
Instead we see more of the same. Vague, unsubstantiated allegations of some sort of sloppiness in the work or criticism of what he should have morally done in response to use of his data. Not even a hint of what actual facts that are wrong, despite persistent assertions that such exist.
Your repeated assertion of factual errors in Lomborg’s work doesn’t convince me. Nor does your posting that he is ‘cavalier’ convince me of the existence of factual error.
I’m funny like that.
I can only assume that someone calling him cavalier has convinced you that there are factual errors in his work. If that is the case then I can only conclude that you didn’t take much convincing.
Either cite or get off the pot jshore.
Lomberg’s reply to the SA criticism. The whole SA article smacks of “not their best criticism”.
The economist put it best:
“The replies to Dr Lomborg in Scientific American and elsewhere score remarkably few points of substance. His large factual claims about the current state of the world do not appear to be under challenge—which is unsurprising since they draw on official data. What is under challenge, chiefly, is his outrageous presumption in starting a much-needed debate.”
Wilson really has not supported his figures or established that Lomberg is wrong. I’ll also check my copy when I get home since I think that Lomberg never actualyl “establishes” the figure Wilson credits him with. Its farily typical among Lomberg bashers, I honestly think these guys have had a free ride for too long and their too used to the easy road of critic attacking instead of data analysis. Lomberg has put up a heck of a fight.
However, we only have Wilson’s word that the ‘vast majority’ of respected scholarship is saying this. To my knowledge, there seems to be quite a bit more controversy than Wilson is letting on. Since Wilson’s figures of “hundreds-of-thousands of species lost every day” are the main target of Lomberg, he might not be on as solid gruond as he thinks.
Lomberg, IIRC, arrives at the extinction figure from the known numbers that he had. He admits as much that they are incomplete, but they aree least based on honest figures. Wilson’s figures, by comparison are based primarily on extrapolation from figures that were intitially guesswork. Lomberg points this out in the book.
So how does Wilson react to Lomberg’s derived figures? Debate? No:
"the extraordinary amount of scientific talent that has to be expended to combat [him] in the media…[Mr Lomborg and his kind] are the parasite load on scholars who earn success through the slow process of peer review and approval.”
In other words, “how dare he!” This after refering to Lomberg as a “scam”. This is not an open mind we are dealing with here.
Again with the cheap-shot creationism comparison attempt! Your comparison is not even close!
Actually Blake, Jshore’s criticism of Lomberg has nothing to do with factual errors. You might as well put that straw dog away. It’s about his methodology.
Science is method.
Jshore, You might as well give it up. Blake and Miskatonic will, presumably, be around long enough to experience the results of their politics. The real problem here is universal suffrage.
As for myself, I really don’t give a damn about Lomberg and never heard of him before I read this thread. Hopefully, I will never hear about him again.
The “accolades” for Lomberg continue to roll in from his scientific peers!
So Jshore you still can’t provide any evidence of factual errors despite claimng repeatedly that you know they exist. You didn’t claim that he used selective evidence. You loudly and repeatedly made the ignorant claim of factual errors. Now you can’t support thsoe assertions.
Instead we see more of the same. Vague, unsubstantiated allegations of some sort of sloppiness in the work or criticism of what he should have morally done in response to use of his data. Not even a hint of what actual facts that are wrong, despite persistent assertions that such exist.
Your repeated assertion of factual errors in Lomborg’s work doesn’t convince me. Nor does your posting that he is ‘cavalier’ convince me of the existence of factual error.
I’m funny like that.
I can only assume that someone calling him cavalier has convinced you that there are factual errors in his work. If that is the case then I can only conclude that you didn’t take much convincing.
Either cite or get off the pot jshore.
Wow, Blake, your cut-and-paste abilities are impressive. Maybe someday you will actually address the substance of my posts rather than clinging to the one thing you have left which is that we haven’t come up with any proven factual errors in Lomberg (where you seem to consider proof basically in a mathematical sense…making it rather hard to apply to any inductive scientific enterprise).
‘The smell of monoxide was considered the smell of progress, and the landscape was the poorer for it’
Are we talking about Carbon Monoxide here? If so, the gas has no smell - it’s rather famous for this when you do analytical chemistry!
My take on the climate situation is:
Is the world getting warmer? - Probably, we’re just coming out of the Little Ice Age.
Are mankind’s activities having any effect on this? - Hard to tell. Water Vapour is the dominant greenhouse gas; all others contribute very small extra effects, mankind’s addition is hard to distinguish from system noise
Is there anything we can do about it? - Nothing with our present knowledge. The precautionary principle doesn’t apply - for all we know cutting back on some emissions would make things worse, not better, so there is no way ahead we know is safer. The best guess from any dispassionate reading of the figures, is that mankind has no impact on climate at a global level compared to the other natural forces.
Notice I said ‘at a global level’. At a local level mankind unquestionably has an impact, and I am all for cutting back on local plumes of smoke and other unpleasant substances, and taking the politics out of research so we can get some better data to make our decisions on.
Thanks for your opinions, Mogadon. But don’t expect us to give them the same sort of weight one would give the opinions of the IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change) or the National Academy of Sciences report on the subject which are very much at odds with what you say.
By the way, water vapor may be the dominant greenhouse gas but it has a much shorter lifetime in the atmosphere (and there is so much of it that man’s contribution to it doesn’t change the level much). By contrast, CO2 and other greenhouse gases have much longer lifetimes…on the order of several decades to centuries. And, the fact that CO2 has increased significantly (about 30%) over baseline pre-industrial levels of the mid-1800s — and is at unprecedented or nearly unprecedented levels over the last hundreds of thousands of years (if I remember the timescale correctly) — is something that is very well established. The order of magnitude of the “radiative forcing” that this will introduce on the climate system is also well-known, even if the exact number is debated (due to various feedback effects…including the effect of water vapor; i.e., although man can’t significantly change the amount of water vapor directly in the atmosphere, we can indirectly by changing the CO2 levels and then the resulting warming feeds back and causes a change in the equilibrium water vapor levels).
A considerable amount more is known than you think about what effect cutting back in emissions will do.
A good source of information on this is the IPCC website at www.ipcc.ch. I’d recommend you read about the state of the science there before you get into expressing your own opinions…at least if you want your opinions to be taken with anything more than a grain of salt.
On the IPCC data: (source: economist, 11/8/2003, Economics Focus: Hot Potato REvisited):
A study by Uan Castles (former head of Australia’s Bureau of Statistics) and David Henderson (former chief economist of OECD) criticized the IPCC’s methodology. The extrapolation method is to measure the difference between incomes of poor and rich nations, then assume the gaps will be almost eliminated. 2 flaws in the reasoning used: first, the income differences were based on market currency exchange rates, not purchasing-power parity exchange rates (and thus fails to take into account the fact that services and non-importable goods are cheaper in poorer countries; anyone who wants a more detailed explanation, go ahead and ask). Thus, the catching up projections involve a lot more growth than would really occur, and a corresponding overestimation of emission growth. Second, and worse: though the IPCC gives a range of emissions scenarios, even the ‘optimistic’ scenarios that give the lowest guess about emissions quantities are absurd. “Even the scenarios that give the lowest cumulative emissions assume that incomes in the developing countries will increase at a much faster rate over the course of the century than they have ever done before. Disaggregated projections published by the IPCC say that–even in the lowest-emission scenarios–growth in poor countries will be so fast that by the end of the century Americans will be poorer on average than South Africans, Algerians, Argentines, Libyans, Turks, and North Koreans.” So even the IPCC low-end figures are based on economic projections that seem, at best, questionable; further casting doubt on the issue, “the horde of authorities [working for the IPCC] is drawn from a narrow professional milieu. Economic and statistical expertise is not among their strengths.”
On an unrelated note, but still relevant to something mentioned earlier: I can’t find my source right now–when it turns up, if I remember, I’ll come back with the cite–studies in France indicate that oil spills have little to no lasting ecological significance. An oil spill several years before the Exxon Valdez, and several times larger, occurred off the coast of Brittany. Within seven years, the fish and bird populations had recovered almost completely, and the salt-water marshes had repaired themselves (if I remember correctly, it took 5 years for marshes to repair themselves, 7 if aided by human cleanup crews. Yes, that’s right, it took longer when people pitched in to help). Sorry about the lack of cite again–I’ll try to get it to you when I find it.
I did find the cite I was looking for. This information came to me by way of PJ O’Rourke’s All the Trouble in the World, and is drawn from a Congressional Research Service July 1990 report by James E Mielke, * Oil in the Ocean: The Short- and Long-Term Impacts of a Spill.* The spill I referenced in the above post was the Amoco Cadiz in 1978. The spill was six times as large as the Exxon Valdez’s at 1,635,000 barrels of oil on the shores of Brittany. No long term effect on birds or fish; “little evidence of histopathological and biochemical damage” to the oysters. “Marshes where no attempt was made to remove the oil were ‘restored by natural processes within 5 years, whereas in cleaned areas, restoration took 7 to 8 years.’” I apologize once again for not having the cite in the original post.
One more random factoid that I recall–and I’m not going to look this one up at the moment–comes from an Economist article a couple of months ago. They’ve come up with a cost-effective method of producing oil from Canadian tar sands, which have a reserve capacity of something like twice the stated reserves of crude oil (more, if the claim that all oil reserves are overstated is true). The main concern about these enterprises is that Saudi Arabia will put them out of business by flooding the market with cheap oil (they’re profitable, but marginally), but if the Sauds really are running at full production, that won’t happen and we have a huge new supply of oil. If we’re overfrightening ourselves and the Sauds are about to put Canada out of business, then 1) we have pleny of oil left to get from the Middle East, and 2) when that does eventually run out, we can still go back to the tar sands of Alberta.