Last warning: 10 years to save world

[qwerty]

Re: Last warning: 10 years to save world

"In modern times, it has been speculated that the more extreme practices of mortification of the flesh may have been used to obtain altered states of consciousness for the goal of experiencing religious experiences or visions;"
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flagellant)

Keep giving us the strokes Eric.


By the way, your doubting of global warming is the best piece of news I've had today.

Those simulations they've been cranking out (probably for twenty odd years now) have all been predicting warming. They (scientists) are pretty good at simulating the weather, nuclear detonations, spread of epidemics - what do you have against the global warming ones?

[Tet]

Re: Last warning: 10 years to save world

If I were the Ford's preparing to take my company private again, I would certainly want to buy the shares back at $7 or $8 instead of $30.

When I was at a conference in Atlanta a few years ago, I had dinner with a guy in middle management in Ford's financing department. He said, and I quote: "We don't make cars. We are a bank that lends money so that people can buy cars. We might as well be making soap."

Obviously Ford doesn't let the finance guys go to China, Ford makes cars in China in very highly advanced, highly automated, state of the art factories there. Yes I'm saying the Ford family doesn't care about the stock price, why would they they haven't sold a share since the company went public. The Ford's make their money on the dividend and there is a huge pile of loot sitting in China right now that the Fords would like to pay out as a private dividend rather than a public dividend. Yes the Fords are painting the picture that the company is being run into the ground. Why wouldn't they, they can buy the whole thing back on the cheap.

[jk]

Re: Last warning: 10 years to save world

tet, ford and gm can't get rid of the pension and health liabilities unless they take the companies through bankruptcy, at which point it's the bond holders, not the stock holders, who'll own it.

ej, i'll second qwerty here:

They (scientists) are pretty good at simulating the weather, nuclear detonations, spread of epidemics - what do you have against the global warming ones?

you'll be able to sail north from boston and around to alaska soon, watching the polar bears drown.

[Ann]

Re: Last warning: 10 years to save world

Spectator, see your skin was pricked by the psychologically burdensome content of iTulip. You must, I believe, admit that to read all posted here is some form of self-flagellation. You would be happier if you knew nothing of what is discussed on this board, wouldn't you? I would.

See the happy idiot,
He doesn't give a damn.
I wish I were an idiot.
My God! Perhaps I am.

-Anon:rolleyes:

[EJ]

Re: Last warning: 10 years to save world

"In modern times, it has been speculated that the more extreme practices of mortification of the flesh may have been used to obtain altered states of consciousness for the goal of experiencing religious experiences or visions;"
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flagellant)

Keep giving us the strokes Eric.


By the way, your doubting of global warming is the best piece of news I've had today.

Those simulations they've been cranking out (probably for twenty odd years now) have all been predicting warming. They (scientists) are pretty good at simulating the weather, nuclear detonations, spread of epidemics - what do you have against the global warming ones?

I love this kind of thread. We got some folks here saying we'd have to get the earth closer to the sun to warm it up, which I know isn't true–the theory that more heat gets in an atmosphere when there's more CO2 in it is provable. Then we got others who say global warming models have the predictive value of weather models. Weather models are good for looking out about two weeks into the future. After that, they get pretty bad. Ten years? Really not good.

If you look at the 163 comments over on Reddit you'll see the majority of this high tech centric group view global warming is more ideology than science. I'm pretty sure it's more science than ideology, but then as a lad in college I thought the Club of Rome "Limits to Growth" book was the last word on that topic. No matter how sympathetic I am with the issue emotionally–who isn't for not wrecking the environment?–I need to see clear, irrefutable causation before i defend the idea of global warming with conviction, and I don't see why that's so hard to come up with. Showing graphs of CO2 and noting that there's no snow in Maine or Finland in January and the ice caps are melting is not science. The ice caps have melted before and re-froze. It's been warm in Boston before, just not in the lifetime of anyone around today. When it was 70 degrees in Boston three weeks ago, everyone you ran into would say, "Wow. Global warming." Now it's friggin' 19 degrees out and the temp was 3 degrees the other day when I got up, but I don't hear anyone saying, "All clear. Global warming is over!"

The tobacco companies kept the anti-smoking groups at bay for decades with doubts. They were hammered with evidence. The story was broken by my friend Rob Stein at the Washington Post. The turning point, if you recall, was a whistle blower who revealed with hard evidence that the tobacco companies were in fact intentionally creating confusion. If the oil companies are creating the uncertainty that's causing policy paralysis on global warming, then where's the same level of evidence? Where are the whistle blowers?

[Jim Nickerson]

Re: Last warning: 10 years to save world

I love this kind of thread. We got some folks here saying we'd have to get the earth closer to the sun to warm it up, which I know isn't true–the theory that more heat gets in an atmosphere when there's more CO2 in it is provable. Then we got others who say global warming models have the predictive value of weather models. Weather models are good for looking out about two weeks into the future. After that, they get pretty bad. Ten years? Really not good.

If you look at the 163 comments over on Reddit you'll see the majority of this high tech centric group view global warming is more ideology than science. I'm pretty sure it's more science than ideology, but then as a lad in college I thought the Club of Rome "Limits to Growth" book was the last word on that topic. No matter how sympathetic I am with the issue emotionally–who isn't for not wrecking the environment?–I need to see clear, irrefutable causation before i defend the idea of global warming with conviction, and I don't see why that's so hard to come up with. Showing graphs of CO2 and noting that there's no snow in Maine or Finland in January and the ice caps are melting is not science. The ice caps have melted before and re-froze. It's been warm in Boston before, just not in the lifetime of anyone around today. When it was 70 degrees in Boston three weeks ago, everyone you ran into would say, "Wow. Global warming." Now it's friggin' 19 degrees out and the temp was 3 degrees the other day when I got up, but I don't hear anyone saying, "All clear. Global warming is over!"

The tobacco companies kept the anti-smoking groups at bay for decades with doubts. They were hammered with evidence. The story was broken by my friend Rob Stein at the Washington Post. The turning point, if you recall, was a whistle blower who revealed with hard evidence that the tobacco companies were in fact intentionally creating confusion. If the oil companies are creating the uncertainty that's causing policy paralysis on global warming, then where's the same level of evidence? Where are the whistle blowers?

Eric,

I am tired and may be wrongly reading the essence of what you wrote, but it brings to mind something I periodically go through with my dear wife.

Over my lifetime, I have developed a sense of not wasting things. I arrived at this not so much from concern about the waste of the stuff as I came to be concerned about the consideration of the waste of my money--but they are actually the same thing. If I suggest to my wife to turn off a light in the room, the invariable reply is, "It doesn't cost that much." But the fact, as I see it, is actually not the cost of the waste, but the immorality--which may or may not be the best word--of wasting anything. What is the value of wasting anything?

If I ask my wife to justify the waste of electricity she has thus far failed to do so, and she has become more attentive to not wasting electricity. Whether or not the world's behavior has caused climatic change that is going to greatly negatively impact the Earth's population is to my thinking a secondary issue. I think I know enough about you to say that you are motivated to do things because of the self-satisfaction of doing them, if I am incorrect, then please correct me. Should we as a society not seriously strive not to waste anything simply for the satisfaction of not being wastrels? With all the crap we waste in this country, does it make you proud to be an American?

I'll reference the "Peak Oil, Conservation 101" video again (incidentally, I do not see links in the Video Public Discussion Forums that allow one later to view a video after it has been removed from the front page of iTulip. Shouldn't there be a link in the discussion thread?). It clearly pointed out a better way to utilize energy for heat and electricity while cutting down on the presumed damage to the atmosphere. What is wrong with conservation? Nothing that I can write. The example in that video suggested to me it is reasonable to build a better "mousetrap" for energy utilization, why not do it?

Whether peak oil is real or not, perhaps attempts at scientifically determining the answer might never occur before it may become an irrefutable fact one way or the other. We can speculate, and someone will be proven right in time. But in the mean while, where is the value in wasting resources of any type?

There was speculation about Y2K calamity, and you placed your bet and your thinking turned out correct, but I expect someone else's thinking was wrong. I know I turned on my computer that night to see if it would work, and when it did, the answer was proven.

With regard to there being definitive evidence that global warming is just around the corner in some report, I would bet the report doesn't resolve the issue in a manner that will effect a worldwide change in behaviours, though it might clarify your or anyone's thinking on the issue. Those that profit from things being as they are will deny the validity, and those who worry about coming generations will assert the report corroborates a doomsday scenario. Probably time wil prove the truth. Were the report to prove to you definitively that global warming is a hoax, does it then justify society's wasting resources?

I speculate that the best that can come out of the report is information that is so scary that it will force governments to change whatever their tunes to something seemingly oriented toward long-term preservation of life on the planet. Not many bad things in life seem to go away without something forcing a change. Have people stopped screwing without regard to preventing AIDS? It will only happen when populations are so devastated that it provokes serious attention to self-protection, unless that natural sequence of events is aborted by medical progress.

If science came up with a magic gas that negated the effects of increasing CO-two, would it justify society continuing to waste energy by its inefficent use?

To me personally, I don't care what the report shows. My mind is that we, all socieities, need to wisen up and stop poorly utilizing our resources based purely on how much profit is to be made one way or the other. How condemnatory of the so-called progress of science is it if we only utilize technology if someone can get rich doing so, and to hell with the fallout to society in general if science that advances quality of life is not profitable enough for Wall Street to promote?

Let's see. We could use energy in Combined Heat and Power production, but we, the TXU capitalists, will make more money if we continue to build 12-15 coal burning generation plants in Texas, which by the way will eventually suffocate all of the high school dropouts here, but unfortunately too those who got all the education they could afford to borrow.

[qwerty]

Global Warming and The Scientific Method

The tobacco companies kept the anti-smoking groups at bay for decades with doubts. They were hammered with evidence. The story was broken by my friend Rob Stein at the Washington Post. The turning point, if you recall, was a whistle blower who revealed with hard evidence that the tobacco companies were in fact intentionally creating confusion. If the oil companies are creating the uncertainty that's causing policy paralysis on global warming, then where's the same level of evidence? Where are the whistle blowers?

It's not a conspiracy here on the part of the oil companies suppressing hard evidence. It's not a puzzle it's more like a mystery (just like Enron) : All of the evidence is out there, it's just people disputing its meaning.

But anyway, hard evidence is not usually come across in many situations although we all believe in the explanations.

For examplle, say you deny a kid vitamins and watch them come in under normal growth rate for a few months. Does that prove that the lack of vitamins is stunting their growth? No! It could be something else, or it might just be random growth variations. Would we all believe that the lack of vitamins had stunted their growth? You bet! BECAUSE science has a predictive theory about how your body grows, and the role of vitamins in the body.

There would be another, statistical way of proving this, and that would be to run hundreds of kids without vitamins for quite a while until the statistical results were considered too significant to discount as random.

(Come to think of it, where's the evidence that the Moon causes the tides? Has anyone ever tested that claim? How come there's a high tide on both sides of the earth, even the one farthest away from the Moon. How do they explain that! Could be something else doing it. [N.B. That was satire] )

At the present, with global warming you have IMHO, those two kinds of support for CO2 triggering global warming. The one, predictive type is based on simulations using the known physical processes operating on the planet and some starting assumptions about how much of what stuff is where. The second type is statistical analysis of what's happened so far; Does what's been happening recently look particularly odd compared to what's happened in the long term?

Simulations can suffer from a number of things, not the least group-think in their design when it comes to making assumptions about starting conditions and some kinds of planetary processes. But, I read that when they run thousands of simulations with varying assumptions, the vast majority of them when modelling the rapid increase in CO2 levels of the kind observed, turn out producing global warming. This is what we should be taking a good, critical look at IMHO. Simulation, by the way, is very predictive and can be used to test theories about large or complex systems where it would not otherwise be possible to test (e.g. nuclear warhead detonations. new aircraft aerodynamics, etc). And we are not talking about modeling weather fronts and clouds out 50 years. The simulations are not at that level of detail in space or time, so it's a canard to think that accuracy is diminished with time as it evolves.

The second kind of support, statistical analysis, hasn't gotten through to me convincingly (yet). This might be because I tend to think there are a lot of poor statisticians around But we can't knock down statistical trends over several decades by appealing to the innumerate masses talking about last month's weather. (By the way, the simulations predict a rising temperature trend, but also greatly increased local volatilily. It's the VOLATILITY in the weather these past few years which should be intriguing people).

Anyway, there seem to be a couple of eye popping statistics banded about of the kind: CO2 has risen to a level seen only once before and that was such and such million years ago and it came with a high global temperature, and it took N hundred thousand years to reach that level whereas we have just seen the same level reached in 100 years. Stuff like that makes me stop and think.

I think there is a lot of poor scientists and bad PR guys for science labs, jumping on the bandwagon, but that kind of thing will happen and it's unfortunate because non-scientists, who are not competent to judge the merits of the competing stories, can point to this as doubt on the part of science about what's considered correct. If you get a bad car mechanic who trashes your gearbox instead of fixing it, that's not proof that no one really understands how cars work.

There is an ethos in science and its methods which bases the whole enterprise on objectivity and truth. I don't pay too much attention to those French post-modernists who say science is just all sociology. (Although it does exist and has even had a good run recently even in physics, the most nakedly objective science, with the take-over by String Theory)

I think that you need to listen to the big guys in science who seem to be coming over more and more to the greenhouse gas belief. It might be group-think but I'm afraid there's not going to be any "hard evidence" and maybe we are going to have to be convinced some other way. That's the problem.

[PS. I think it might be interesting to look at the historical record for the story of the ozone hole. I thnk it started with some physicists saying that all those freons from fridges and deodorant sprays would destroy the ozone layer, starting above the poles. Ha ha ha. Then the holes were found above the poles. Ho Ho Ho. Maybe they've always been there! Still controversy. Holes gets bigger. Few years until the big guys knock strongly enough on the pols desk, and then action is taken. Freons phased out. Holes dimishes (gone even?). Happy ending.]

[jk]

Re: Last warning: 10 years to save world

When it was 70 degrees in Boston three weeks ago, everyone you ran into would say, "Wow. Global warming." Now it's friggin' 19 degrees out and the temp was 3 degrees the other day when I got up, but I don't hear anyone saying, "All clear. Global warming is over!"

the information content of a piece of data is a function of its improbability. [the inverse of the log of its probability, if i'm not mistaken.] thus, as naive as the behavior you describe appears, there's actually some merit in it.

[WDCRob]

Re: Last warning: 10 years to save world

What would someone blow a whistle on, EJ?

Saying global warming isn't happening and actively hiring and funding compliant or minority-view scientists to tout what they believe (thus elevating a fringe position to one of near parity with the scientific consensus) isn't a crime.

The difference with tobacco is that the issue was much simpler to know with certitude -- nicotine is addictive. No serious scientist believed otherwise. But the tactics, sowing confusion about the science to protect profits, are the same.

Global warming is obviously much more complicated and until very recently there was a minority of legitimate scientists who seemed to have real doubts about global warming. The oil companies hired and funded those folks not out of a desire for good science, but to ensure they held off reform for as long as possible in the event that global warming was a fact.

Not sure if you're arguing they didn't do this, or that it's ok that they did, but either way I disagree.

[Jim Nickerson]

Re: Last warning: 10 years to save world

Thanks, EJ, nothing like bits of good news to wrap up a nice weekend.

Did you ever see the pictures of some Muslims somewhere marching while lashing their own backs with chains I believe it was. Is such self-flagellation presumably of value? I am beginning to think reading iTulip is a form of self-flagellation; however, so far I remain in the dark as to its value.:confused:

When I wrote this the other night, I was aiming at joking. I, for one, am not into all the crappy stuff that makes it into the news that might categorized as "feel good" about the economy. If bad things are happening economically, I hope either EJ and his staff will post them or that others will in new threads or work them into existing threads.

[freedomofproperty]

Re: Last warning: 10 years to save world

Eric (EJ) and everyone who is open to a more rigorous analysis of global warming, check out this interview (audio) with Dr. Richard Lindzen the climate expert from MIT.

http://www.punditreview.com/2006/08/...s-us-straight/

You'll be blown away by how calmly and a-politically the professor addresses the data and evidence. He even reveals how he was forcibly ejected from the Democratic party because of his honesty on the issue, and how that has not altered his scientific analysis.

Have patience (and try a different browser if the built-in audio application does not work). This is probably the most important data point you'll encounter in helping you make up your mind on the issue, Gore's video included.

[WDCRob]

Re: Last warning: 10 years to save world

Money talks...

"In November 2004, climate change skeptic Richard Lindzen was quoted saying he'd be willing to bet that the earth's climate will be cooler in 20 years than it is today. When British climate researcher James Annan contacted him, however, Lindzen would only agree to take the bet if Annan offered a 50-to-1 payout."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/st...552092,00.html

Also...I'd be interested in reading his presentation in a peer-reviewed science journal. Can you provide a link? Or a title so that I can look it up in Lexis-Nexis?

[qwerty]

Re: Last warning: 10 years to save world

Models 'key to climate forecasts'

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6320515.stm

[jk]

Re: Last warning: 10 years to save world

{post#18} you'll be able to sail north from boston and around to alaska soon, watching the polar bears drown.