Turns out Exxon was far more evil than we knew!

Datsun1500 wrote: I just want to make sure I have this correct. The science in door number 1 is wrong, but the science in door number 2 is right. If you have shown that the science and/or opinion from 1975 was in fact, wrong, 30 years later, why are you not willing to believe that the science/opinion from Today will be proven wrong in 30 years?

Maybe we have a misunderstanding, that's not what I'm saying. Doors 1 and 2 aren't both science. Door 2 was science, Door 1 was hogwash, perhaps dressed up as science. Also we shouldn't group science and opinion together. Opinions are dead wrong all the time. Science has been on a steady trend toward being less-wrong throughout history.

Some of the details of today's knowledge will prove to be wrong compared to better answers we come up with in the future, but we shouldn't expect any massive turnarounds (Edit: At least for things that are well understood now. Something like dark matter is anyone's guess).

HiTempguy wrote: I have honestly never met a single person that doesn't agree with this. Even redneck hillbillies in the middle of nowhere don't argue against "pollution is bad, mguay?" That is pretty straightforward.

I have, online anyway. It'd take ages to find because I have only the basest of search terms to go by, but I've seen the opinion that China has jobs and China has pollution and it is reprehensible that we have clean air and water because it means we don't have jobs.

The way I see it, the kind of jobs China has couldn't exist here. We concern ourselves with the wage gap in the US but it is a tinyk crack compared to the wage grand canyon in China. That isn't a society I would want to live in...

^I've also seen people sincerely state that we should move to domed cities, cooled suits, and artificial farming environments instead of doing anything about global warming. All the people who can't afford those things be damned I guess.

I've also seen a lot of the "I'll be fine where I am" opinion used non-jokingly. You can't run from global warming, the problems gon' find you (even the refugee crisis in Europe was partly triggered by climate change). Although if you hole yourself up in a self-sufficient survivalist camp now, you can minimize the change

I just farted and felt a warming sensation.

Datsun1500 wrote: In reply to GameboyRMH: Your door #2 of Today is door #1 in 30 years. You are defending the science you believe in, just like the guys in 1975. You look back and say what fools they are. People might look back in 30 years and say what you believe right now, was a stupid thing to believe. I'm just not waiting 30 years to say so.

Oh we had no misunderstanding then. You're super, super wrong. You can't tell good science from some guy saying something dumb and getting a lot of media attention over it. A Kardashian in a lab coat is apparently as good as a Nobel prize winner in your book.

GameboyRMH wrote:

Datsun1500 wrote: What happened to the Jacksonville Florida orange groves? Why is it now too cold to grow Oranges in Jacksonville? Global warming is all about money. Once the "science" was proven to be shaky, it became "Climate change" You can't firmly state the "science" was bad then without being willing to admit the "science" could be bad now.

You're just super, super wrong about all of this. I'm willing to debate why with you, but it would be such a monumental task from this starting point that I think you should learn how science works first. For example, why is modern medicine different from the village healer shaking chicken bones over you 8000 years ago? If science works like opinions, how was this progress made?

Oh perfect, we’re going to discuss how REAL science works now….that’s great because I’ve got over a decade of experience teaching and applying advanced experimental methods in a heavily regulated industry so I can really help here.

First, we need to perform a power calculation to determine the appropriate sample size for our experiment. For this, we need to measure the historical variance, determine the level of confidence we require, and define what effect size will be deemed meaningful.

I just crunched the numbers and found that we require 26 earths. Now, let’s randomly assign 13 earths to the treatment group and 13 earths to the control group (sorry but everyone on the control group earths needs to die instantly). All we need to do now is wait a million years and preform T-Tests and F-Tests to compare their P values against our pre-established Alpha levels…anything less than this is less than true science.

I believe the climate is changing (no E36 M3, all dynamic processes change, that’s why they’re called dynamic) – I believe human activity is playing a role (no E36 M3, all actions have a reaction otherwise they wouldn’t be actions) – I believe there are tipping points that will cause nonlinear relationships between GHG levels and the climate so we need to be really careful – I believe we probably won’t recognize the tipping points until we’ve passed them so we need to be really, really careful.

However, what is the point in forcing me to live like a caveman while China and India are not only given a complete pass but allowed to INCREASE their GHG emissions over current levels far into the future and only then level off at ridiculously high levels.

Berkley it, I’m being handed a forced choice between living large and having the planet trashed in forty years or living like a caveman and having the planet trashed in 45 years…I’ll take the forty year plan.

I’ve lived in California my whole life and the collective mindset out here is “we have to start somewhere – we have to set an example”. No, actually we don’t…what we need to do is conduct a rigorous Cost / Benefit analysis and determine what we need to do to truly solve the problem in the fairest, least disruptive, and most economical way possible on a global level.

I don’t appreciate being ridiculed for not buying into crap science, I don’t appreciate being asked to shoulder the burden just because it’s politically easier.

Berkley it, really solve the problem or leave me alone!

aircooled wrote: I hate to say it again, but: The term changed from "Global Warming" to "Climate Change" because most people could not grasp how global warming could cause some places to become colder under certain circumstances. One of the general theorized effects is that weather will become more extreme (heat = energy) and weather is not always warm. That said, drawing conclusions from short term observations (plus or negative), seem pretty silly at this point.

The term "global warming" got spun into "Climate Change" by Frank Luntz. Luntz was on Colbert Report years ago, helping Stephen set up a Super PAC.

COPY & PASTED FROM AMAZON BOOK REVIEW:http://www.amazon.com/Words-That-Work-What-People/dp/1401302599

"Others have crept into common usage less dramatically but just as effectively. Take "exploring for energy" instead of "drilling for oil", "tax relief" in place of "tax cuts", or "not giving" emergency hospital care to "illegal aliens" instead of "denying" it to "undocumented workers". Words, or rather the slicing and dicing of them to fashion our subliminal responses, do work, particularly when tried and tested in Luntz's two-hour "dial sessions", where volunteers convey their responses by turning a dial up or down in reaction to what they are seeing and hearing.

In reply to RX Reven':

You designed the swing axle didn't you.....

Put me down in the "yes climate change is real, yes humans are largely (though not entirely) responsible for it, but nothing we do locally (install solar panels and drive hybrids) will make a bit of difference" camp.

Massive overpopulation and overconsumption is the problem and anyone who doesn't see that is purely delusional. Knowing human nature as well as I suspect I do there is a 0.00000001% chance that encouraging people to voluntarily stop breeding would be successful (even if it was given a serious try which it won't because: personal/religious/economic reasons)

What does that leave? Plague. Famine. War.

Much like we are seeing in California with the wildfires burning through forests where the forestry service has kept low level minor fires from getting out of control far decades. They are now positively FULL of fuel for the fires which we are now seeing. Had we allowed smaller fires to clear the debris occasionally, things wouldn't be bad now. Now apply that same logic to modern medicine. We give antibiotics for the sniffles enough times and when the wildfire of disease strikes next, we as a species are in for a good and thorough berkeleying. For those who survive it will be a rough row to hoe. Beneficial to the species, but traumatic.

Aren't I just a bundle of laughs?

RX Reven' wrote: I just crunched the numbers and found that we require 26 earths. Now, let’s randomly assign 13 earths to the treatment group and 13 earths to the control group (sorry but everyone on the control group earths needs to die instantly). All we need to do now is wait a million years and preform T-Tests and F-Tests to compare their P values against our pre-established Alpha levels…anything less than this is less than true science.

We use sim-earths as controls, and we can have as many of those as we want. Best we can do. Same as astronomy and a few others. I'm glad we seem to agree that global warming is quite real.

RX Reven' wrote: However, what is the point in forcing me to live like a caveman while China and India are not only given a complete pass but allowed to INCREASE their GHG emissions over current levels far into the future and only then level off at ridiculously high levels. Berkley it, I’m being handed a forced choice between living large and having the planet trashed in forty years or living like a caveman and having the planet trashed in 45 years…Berkley it, I’ll take the forty year plan. I’ve lived in California my whole life and the collective mindset out here is “we have to start somewhere – we have to set an example”. No, actually we don’t…what we need to do is conduct a rigorous Cost / Benefit analysis and determine what we need to do on a global level.

You're mostly right about this as well, but you don't have to choose between living large for 40 years or living like a caveman for 45 years. More like choose between living large for 40 years or living like a German for...a very long time, leaving the planet in usable condition for future generations. You don't need to live in a mud hut. You just need to run the stuff you have now on cleaner energy sources. China's actually working hard toward reducing their (massive) CO2 output, building many nuclear reactors to replace their coal plants.

etifosi wrote:

aircooled wrote: I hate to say it again, but: The term changed from "Global Warming" to "Climate Change" because most people could not grasp how global warming could cause some places to become colder under certain circumstances. One of the general theorized effects is that weather will become more extreme (heat = energy) and weather is not always warm. That said, drawing conclusions from short term observations (plus or negative), seem pretty silly at this point.

The term "global warming" got spun into "Climate Change" by Frank Luntz. Luntz was on Colbert Report years ago, helping Stephen set up a Super PAC.

Both are valid scientific terms that were in use long before that, but yes the popularization of "climate change" was done by a US right-winger to make it sound less bad than it is.

yamaha wrote: You want to adopt 15 kids because you're good hearted, go for it, but you're paying for them.

Not trying to derail this thread, but I can't leave this one alone.

That is a monumentally offensive and (hopefully) ignorant statement.

You are either advocating:

1- Leaving them in foster care and/ or institutional care which is exponetially more costly, or

2- Euthanizing them, which is not acceptable.

We can disagree on the population issues, but adoption is not a problem. It is a solution, which needs to be encouraged.

< rant over.>

In reply to GameboyRMH:

sim-earths?

My Uncle spent 60 years of his life creating climate modeling programs. The one thing he taught me about that was that very few people understand the vastness of the variables.

Sim-earths will behave exactly the way they are programmed to behave, not necessarily the way real Earth does. They are very useful tools, but quite limited in their ability to predict the impact of climate change on the planet.

A million year model with an accuracy rate of 99.999999% would be really far off in it's predictions.

For the record, I don't believe in euthanasia/mass murder/pandemic as a population control measure. A lot of people assume that's the only way whenever the topic comes up for some reason. All that's needed is birth control. In fact with birth control, decent living conditions and a good education, people tend to do a decent job of managing their own population levels.

Yes some cultures use family size as an indicator of success. They'll have to find a different indicator of success to use, it's happened before. Thank goodness no cultures arose whose indicator of success was causing nuclear reactor meltdowns!

In the early 1900s a lot of western culture saw driving "non-useful" creatures to extinction as an indicator of success, and in the mid-1800s air pollution was seen as an indicator of success. Good thing we got over that (I think).

GameboyRMH wrote: You're mostly right about this as well, but you don't have to choose between living large for 40 years or living like a caveman for 45 years. More like choose between living large for 40 years or living like a German for...a very long time, leaving the planet in usable condition for future generations. You don't need to live in a mud hut. You just need to run the stuff you have now on cleaner energy sources. China's actually working hard toward reducing their (massive) CO2 output, building many nuclear reactors to replace their coal plants.

I'm sorry, but literally everything you have said in this thread is strictly your opinion. rxreven's post is much closer to how we would actually have to live. Sure, China is reducing emissions, so what? They literally double overall GHG emissions compared to the USA, the two largest world economies account for about 1/3 of global GHG.

So until the USA and China deal with it, it doesn't matter. And the argument can be made that since China puts out almost double what the USA does, until China deals with it, it doesn't matter. If all of Europe and Russia emitted ZERO GHG, that wouldn't even be half of the USA's emissions.

Now, if we were one big happy world governed society, this wouldn't be such an issue. But I disagree with destroying our economies so others don't have to, to save a planet that is in need of saving because of theoretical models built on a computer.

By all means, if you have the ability to account for the infinite amount of variables that effect global weather, including theories on how issues outside of our own planet effect it, I am all ears.

I also do research based work, and let me tell you how wrong it is all the time due to the assumptions we have to make. Science is about being wrong, not about being right. And you implying that it was a couple of people who drove the global cooling deal is baloney. It was ran with, and subsequently proven wrong. That is how we progress.

SVreX wrote: In reply to GameboyRMH: sim-earths? My Uncle spent 60 years of his life creating climate modeling programs. The one thing he taught me about that was that very few people understand the vastness of the variables. Sim-earths will behave exactly the way they are programmed to behave, not necessarily the way real Earth does. They are very useful tools, but quite limited in their ability to predict the impact of climate change on the planet. A million year model with an accuracy rate of 99.999999% would be really far off in it's predictions.

You're right, but that's what we have, and it's been working pretty well so far. The accuracy of "sim-earths" can be tested against the real thing by feeding them partial historical climate data and testing them against real observations.

Luckily we don't need to know what's happening a million years into the future and/or past either, future forecasting of climate change is usually done for a few hundred years at most. Even past ultra-short-term forecasts of 5-20 years, which is microscopic in climate terms, has been very accurate so far.

GameboyRMH wrote: Both are valid scientific terms that were in use long before that, but yes the popularization of "climate change" was done by a US right-winger to make it sound less bad than it is.

Maybe so, but "change" is still a more useful term since there seems to be a pretty large number of people that can't understand how global warming can make for cooler winters in some locations. I am not implying BTW that any recent weather is any sort of proof, it can (but probably shouldn't) be used as an example though.

Always the same shiny happy people on these threads. So what--you think you're bulletproof because years of annoying a community with your biased sanctimoniousness has given you massive post counts?

Step the berkeley off. I'm tired of monitoring your playground. Would be much easier to just close it for you.

Margie

SVreX wrote:

yamaha wrote: You want to adopt 15 kids because you're good hearted, go for it, but you're paying for them.

Not trying to derail this thread, but I can't leave this one alone. That is a monumentally offensive and (hopefully) ignorant statement. You are either advocating: 1- Leaving them in foster care and/ or institutional care which is exponetially more costly, or 2- Euthanizing them, which is not acceptable. We can disagree on the population issues, but adoption is not a problem. It is a solution, which needs to be encouraged. < rant over.>

I usual agree with your comments. However, i think you are lookng at this one from an interesting perspective.

I took the comment as... If you can't afford 15 more mouths to feed, don't ask for 15 more mouths to feed.

I do agree with your general feeling. My wife and I have adopted 5 fur babies (NOT THE SAME, I KNOW!).

I read somewhere that the people who are the most confident in their beliefs and ideas are the ones who should step back and re-evaluate them the most.

Several of us need to stop and think a bit more before we post.

Thanks for the opportunity to say that Margie!

In reply to wvumtnbkr:

I get where you are coming from.

There is such a massive shortage of adoptive homes, that I don't have a problem with assistance. I think it's a pretty high calling, and in most cases much better for the kids than the alternatives.

Adoption addresses problems that contraception can't ever address, and it really doesn't relate to the overpopulation problem.

Adopting fur babies is a honorable calling too.

wvumtnbkr wrote:

SVreX wrote:

yamaha wrote: You want to adopt 15 kids because you're good hearted, go for it, but you're paying for them.

Not trying to derail this thread, but I can't leave this one alone. That is a monumentally offensive and (hopefully) ignorant statement. You are either advocating: 1- Leaving them in foster care and/ or institutional care which is exponetially more costly, or 2- Euthanizing them, which is not acceptable. We can disagree on the population issues, but adoption is not a problem. It is a solution, which needs to be encouraged. < rant over.>

I usual agree with your comments. However, i think you are lookng at this one from an interesting perspective. I took the comment as... If you can't afford 15 more mouths to feed, don't ask for 15 more mouths to feed. I do agree with your general feeling. My wife and I have adopted 5 fur babies (NOT THE SAME, I KNOW!).

Bingo, that was exactly the meaning to my post. Because of that and the threadlock is why I politely sent a PM to Paul to ask for his interpretation of what I typed versus what was intended to diffuse any misunderstandings. I am by no means the most eloquent writer so these things can happen.

In reply to yamaha:

I'm not sure what this has to do with Exxon, but since we are on the topic....without state assistance my wife and I would't be able to afford supporting the kids we foster, and three more kids would be left without homes. Fostering already takes up 90% of our free time and energy (notice how my Midlana build has languished for the past year), and your position is that it should cost us financially too? Keep in mind that the group homes that they would otherwise be sent to also take (probably more) state funds than we receive, and what we do receive doesn't even cover the costs for clothes, food, transportation, etc that we incur.

Glaciers "retreating" was noted in the 1880's in Canada.

In the late 1920's through the 1930's it was HOT. Temps on the 100's in the NE and then it cooled down. Jan. 1970 the temp never got above 0 for the whole month.

so I guess we have climate change . All the time.

In reply to bgkast:

You are only getting a snippit that could easily get taken out of context. Please see the full quote of mine below. And FWIW, population control was an idea on how to lessen impacts on the environment.

yamaha wrote:

Enyar wrote: In reply to yamaha: I would vote for phasing out the child tax credit or exemptions for anyone with over 3 children. You're welcome to have as many as you like, but we will only pitch in for 3 max. Adopted children would still be eligible.

Other than I'd cap it at 2(perhaps a cap of 4 on adoptions) period, this is exhibit A for how a compromise could get struck. You want to adopt 15 kids because you're good hearted, go for it, but you're paying for them. You want to have 15 kids because you're religious, go for it, but you're paying for them. You want to have 15 kids by 15 different baby daddies, go for it, but you're still paying for them. *Previous three examples are something I have seen first hand just in the immediate 10mi radius from my cornfield.....