Does this mean there’s a greater, or lesser chance that they might all fall off the edge of the world into the orbiting sun?
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Oh, for fuck’s sake… at what point does it become justifiable self-defense to shoot these clow- I mean, uh, buffoons?
EDIT: And something that bears repeating: Science is not a democracy! Even if they’d voted that it IS caused by humans, the whole exercise is absurd. Only in America is climate science somehow a partisan issue.
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How would it be possible for anti-scientific people to “win” anything? If science is understood as the art of understanding reality - well - reality is going to win every time, regardless of what anybody might prefer. Let them chase their pie-in-the-sky while the non-delusory crowd keeps it real regardless.
I don’t agree with him on everything, but… you speak truth:
I’ve made this same counterpoint to that idea before, but never with this wonderful video:
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Care to elaborate? Or are you a ninja troll, striking once never to be seen again?
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I wouldn’t call it winning, but Cambodia under Pol Pot was a triumph of anti-intellectualism. Anti-science killed a tremendous number of people. When I fear for our country in the face of the tea party, I think about Cambodia.
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alternate title:
“Congress licks the asshole of the oil & gas industry”
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That little fantasy of yours depends completely on who holds the purse strings. When anti-science nutsacks hold the purse strings, which they seem to do disturbingly often, the consequences for reality can be appalling. They might be objectively ‘wrong’, but they can spend an awful lot of money and cause an awful lot of collateral damage ‘proving’ they’re right.
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Solar, Space, and Terrestrial Weather: Some Reflections – by Stephanie Osborn
Surprise! A polymath scientist and friend have some different thoughts on anthropogenic climate change - warming or cooling.
Our Congresspeople may be idiots, but they may not exactly be wrong on this issue.
I really wouldn’t bet the species on that, chief.
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Wow, impressive. Starts with a the climate has always changed false equivalence; moves to an extremely trumped up no data is trustworthy, and then follows with a but there are cold winters to dismiss the actual trend. Then we switch to proposing solar variability is behind everything, for which all concern over nitpicking measurements or even giving numbers is abruptly gone, so that some vague description of warm and cool periods in local areas are enough to claim “higher correlation”.
Meanwhile, warming from carbon dioxide is simple thermodynamics, well-established in all sorts of prehistoric records; an anthropogenic spike in the one is unquestioned, a corresponding warming is very apparent in any but the most cherry-picked data. No researcher has ever given any even half-accurate model of the changes we see save by connecting the two, and the dearth of serious attempts is telling.
Setting disingenuous polymaths aside, at least half the congresspeople are exactly wrong on this issue, and I suspect most know it. It’s only lies so the money addicts can ignore the externalities they throw on everyone. Eppur si muove, stronzi.
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Did you know that this great scientist who happens to say everything you believe in works as a science fiction writer? Not surprising, although I hope her books are better written.
I’ve done a bit of googling, and nowhere lists actual, verifiable credentials. Everywhere has the same claim that she has “graduate and undergraduate degrees in astronomy, physics, chemistry, and mathematics”. What does that mean? A real scientist is more precise than this about…anything. Heck, an art history major would be more informative about the specifics of their education. What is she hiding? It’s a great example of using words to hide more than show.
She cherry-picks examples, and I’ll bet if we looked at the real numbers in her examples they wouldn’t say what she says they do. Because scientists all over the world agree that the data in general doesn’t say what she says it does.
That was so laughable. Is it really enough to convince you everyone in the world is wrong?
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Whew! What a relief. Now, if only they would vote that there is no such thing as human caused discrimination, exploitation, class-ism, poverty and ghettos, and I’ll be fit as a fiddle!
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I saw this, and was like, again? Kind of idiotic to post this and not note when it happened. Also, where’s the link to the product this is promoting, Mark?
This is a classic example of motivated reasoning. After reading that, I can’t help but notice that she studiously ignores the thermodynamics behind the greenhouse effect, and the fact that we can observe the predicted spectra here on earth, and that we can observe that effect on Venus (which is hotter than Mercury due to, guess what, CO2) and that we can see the other side of one part of that effect in stellar absorption spectra.
Also, despite claiming degrees in statistics, she says
“The notion that the last couple of decades has continued a purported warming trend is patently false. Temperature deltas have flatlined for nearly two decades now. And this is demonstrated by examples of unusually severe winter weather (sometimes NOT in winter) all over the world. Here are a few headlines as examples.”
The few headlines as examples are really not worthy of a statistician, and when you add energy to a dynamic system, you expect more extremes.
Most notable it the claim that “The notion that the last couple of decades has continued a purported warming trend is patently false. Temperature deltas have flatlined for nearly two decades now.”
I just pulled the up to date temperature anomaly data for the past two decades from NASA’s website and tossed it in Python and plotted it. Here is the resulting plot:
The 95% CI is the shaded area.
I also checked the p-value of this regression and it is 1.5e-15
For the uninitiated, that means that there is about one chance in 600,000,000,000,000 that these data were not the result of an upward trend.
Seeing as your friend claims to have degrees in statistics, but did not directly address the obvious conclusion that anyone with a basic grasp of stats would draw from these data, I can only conclude that she is deliberately lying, either about her qualifications or the data, and you would be wise to interpret anything else you hear from her in that light.
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I can’t imagine how anyone who’s ever been in an airplane and looked out the window could actually believe this. Inhofe must be lying.
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That’s not how it works…that’s not how any of this works…
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Until she retired, she was a NASA rocket scientist at Huntsville. She’s now a more-or-less full time SF writer, among other things, and her work is quite good and quite popular.
She’s well known in multiple circles, both scientific and literary, and highly thought of in all of them.
What’s laughable is your handwaving, and your lack of knowledge about the data she’s talking about. Try a lot more googling before you make any more silly statements. She’s not cherry-picking examples, she’s giving examples, that’s what examples are. If you want all of the data she’s talking about, go read all the bookshelves of stuff she read before she wrote that piece; it sure wouldn’t have fit in an article-length piece.
The data problems she’s talking about have been widely covered, and she’s far from the only one scientist concerned with them, or the ignorant insistence that humans are the main, or only, cause of climate variation. At the moment, the sun-caused climate variances she describes appear to be the most likely single major agent for climate variations - there are others, of course, because the Earth’s ecosystem is incredibly complex, and certainly human activity has had some effect, although it appears to almost be lost in the noise among other ongoing causes when you step back and look at the big picture. Certainly the CO2-scare theories are unproven and even somewhat unlikely, given that ice core samples appear to show that CO2 buildup follows, rather than precedes, global warming periods (although that’s still being argued about).
When fronted with this argument, my reply is ‘Ozone layer’.
The response is usually inaudibly muttered.
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