PETA Invading WoW to Stop Baby Seal Slaughter

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kenyee

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Tuna isn't safe either but it's mainly because they're higher up on the food chain. I'm not convinced fish like shark/tile/sword aren't supposed to have a lot of mercury because they're high up on the food chain as well.
Ditto what solymnar said about eating food raw...people do it all the time. Sushi, carpaccio (italian), bibimbap (korean). Folks in Italy eat raw pork. Being unaware of all these just undermines anything else stated by a vegan... ;-)

 

WheelsOfConfusion

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[citation][nom]overloaded007[/nom]Your scientific concensus theory is totally not true, if you would stop letting msnbc & cnn make your opinions then you might learn some truth.[/citation]
I don't watch either one, actually. Careful making assumptions about others. No, what I do is get my information from the aggregated sources of scientists themselves most of the time.

[citation][nom]overloaded007[/nom]Do some actual research before you go stating garbage about the scientific concensus. It's completely divided when it comes to global warming. As I said stop getting your facts from Nat Geo, Discovery, CNN & msnbc. Do some actual research and read the info on the links from my last post! I dare you to spend 1 hour reading through the links from wiki, stop being a drone and try and make your own conclusionhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_ [...] [/citation]
Thanks for demonstrating your own inability to "do some actual research." There are less than forty names on that page, some of them are known to be unreliable (Sally Baliunas, Fred Singer, and Richard Lindzen are all terrible references for reasons linked in their own Wikipedia articles). Speaking of wiki articles, linked at the bottom is this one: Scientific opinion on climate change. Inside you'll find that no major scientific organization disagrees that the Earth's climate is changing with average temperature rising, and most agree that humans are a significant factor in the warming. Almost all the statements from the organizations disagree with your position, even (begrudgingly and with plenty of weasel-words) the known oil-softies from the American Association of Petroleum Geologists. Notice the surveys at the bottom, how consensus has been building for years. In the sciences, that tends to happen because an idea is well-supported by the evidence, rather than because of some kind of bias. The most recent survey is probably the most telling: "It seems that the debate on the authenticity of global warming and the role played by human activity is largely nonexistent among those who understand the nuances and scientific basis of long-term climate processes." Case in point, I suppose.

But don't worry, I'm sure your >40 names trumps all the thousand and thousands of other scientists' opinions, right?

[citation][nom]overloaded007[/nom]Like I said, Telling Obama lovers anything is near immpossible.[/citation]
Like arguing with a brick wall, isn't it? Stupid reality, getting in the way of your ideologies!




[citation][nom]solymnar[/nom]We just did the global warming thing thread 2 weeks ago.Facts are pretty simple.We are still coming out of an ice age. If the temprature doesn't steadily rise over the next few 1000 years it implies something is pretty messed up. Since none of us look at things in geological scales you have to be half retarded to claim you have a clue how much global warming is occuring naturally vs. man made over a paltry 10 or even 100 year time span.[/citation]
Read the links I just posted and tell me that all these scientists are being "retarded," especially about something they specialize in studying. In fact, I'm sure you can call some climatologists and tell them exactly how retarded they're being for daring disagreeing with you. Try it. Post here later and let us know how it went.

This is not a minority view, this is not a political ideology, this is the conclusion that thousands and thousands of scientists have reached by looking at the data and doing the math. I really shouldn't be shocked at how many people can dismiss the majority scientific opinion as if it weren't worth the paper their studies were published on, I really shouldn't. I suppose I have too much faith in people to keep an open mind about things they don't understand.
As for "we're coming out of an ice age," the reason that scientists (not politicians, not "greenies," not "the media") are concerned is because the global climate is changing faster than it should be. The only way they can get the numbers to match up well with the observations is to include the known effects of greenhouse gases, especially those that humans are digging up from geological lock-boxes and releasing through burnt fossil fuels. No other explanation works right, and they've tried just about everything they can think of (from volcanoes to the sun). If you want to claim that they're mistaken, do the legwork and publish your findings so they can see the error of their ways. Science is more than welcoming for people to tear down the established position, so long as they can check your work for mistakes.


[citation][nom]solymnar[/nom]20 years ago easily bendable scientists caved into popular will and a few claimed that we were in for major global cooling, which of course the media ate up and pushed. Same thing happens today but with global warming.[/citation]
You are wrong. Nobody "caved." During the height of the so-called "global cooling" school of thought, blown out of proportion by the lay media, you had about 7 peer-reviewed studies saying that cooling was likely, compared to more than 40 saying the opposite. "Global cooling" was never a majority view, and the reason it's fallen out of the (very limited) favor it once had is because the evidence for warming became practically insurmountable. Scientists, unlike some commenters around here, tend to back off an idea when it's demonstrably wrong. That's part of what it means to be a scientist in the first place. They don't let the media push them around when it comes to the conclusions they draw from their own damn work, and your lack of understanding couldn't be more obvious when you claim they can be.

As I said, I shouldn't be shocked when I keep running into this "I know better than the scientists" attitude, but for some reason I continually am. The amount of hubris is breathtaking.
 

solymnar

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[citation][nom]WheelsOfConfusion[/nom]Nobody "caved." During the height of the so-called "global cooling" school of thought, blown out of proportion by the lay media, you had about 7 peer-reviewed studies saying that cooling was likely, compared to more than 40 saying the opposite. "Global cooling" was never a majority view, and the reason it's fallen out of the (very limited) favor it once had is because the evidence for warming became practically insurmountable. Scientists, unlike some commenters around here, tend to back off an idea when it's demonstrably wrong. That's part of what it means to be a scientist in the first place. They don't let the media push them around when it comes to the conclusions they draw from their own damn work, and your lack of understanding couldn't be more obvious when you claim they can be. As I said, I shouldn't be shocked when I keep running into this "I know better than the scientists" attitude, but for some reason I continually am. The amount of hubris is breathtaking.[/citation]

This is kind of funny. Scientists ideally do follow what you wrote. However, they have bosses and agendas and ultimately need to make money. That means whatever they are doing either has to be marketable or earn grants from sponsors. This unfortunately/fortunately is a huge factor in what a scientist pursues and of course the raw data generated is nearly always distilled through a combination of statisticians and marketing/political people before it reaches the masses. This is partly required since your average joe will not be able to begin to understand the raw data and conclusion from scientist x's experiments.

Regardless I feel you took the term "caved" the wrong way, my bad. The point still stands however that between media and a few statistics they had the general population believing in BS. Not at all unusual. The difference this time is that you have TWO arguments.

Global warming is happening.

We are the primary cause of it.

Those are not the same statement and most people mistakenly link them together. Most scientists that I talk to (myself included) and most people who do their homework on data collected so far would be hard pressed to say just how much it is that humans actively contribute vs. what is happening naturally.

And like I said to begin with...we're talking about something that occurs on a geological time scale. So its extremely difficult to say anything until we've been able to track things for a few 1000 years of industrialization to make a remotely decent comparison. /shrug
 

solymnar

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[citation][nom]WheelsOfConfusion[/nom]
Read the links I just posted and tell me that all these scientists are being "retarded," especially about something they specialize in studying. In fact, I'm sure you can call some climatologists and tell them exactly how retarded they're being for daring disagreeing with you. Try it. Post here later and let us know how it went. This is not a minority view, this is not a political ideology, this is the conclusion that thousands and thousands of scientists have reached by looking at the data and doing the math. [/citation]

I feel you're missing a lot of the point here wheels. You are under the assumption that we actually have a solid understanding of weather patterns and how the planet functions as a whole in terms of how much energy is trapped, dispersed, concentrated, and how the flow patterns work. We can't even say for sure if it will rain or not TOMORROW. And...unless someone came back from the future, we do not know how fast the earth is supposed to warm from year to year with or without human intervention. This makes it truly impossible to make an honest metric so that we can say exactly how much of an influence various things have in the long term.

While most will agree we have some kind of impact. The hard question is "But how much of one?" No one honestly knows, but a lot of people like to speculate and put together theories based on pooled data and resources, and because its in the best interests of A LOT of special groups and government, this gets A LOT of funding. Its been made into a popular thing. It doesn't mean that anyone is wrong, but its litterally impossible to say they are conclusively right. And I have had quite a few good talks with "scientists" on this. Especially around the time that the kyoto treaty was a big deal. A lot of improved modeling and research has been done since then. But none if it can truly negate the fundamental flaw that you have no control data set. That's a simple fact that anyone who is honest will admit.

Now you can get bent out of shape and sling some name calling if you like but it won't change the point that anyone who claims they know humans are causing x% of global warming is simply lying outright. Yes even the "specialists", partly because it gets them a paycheck and partly because they can get away with it right now because most people simply accept it and partly because you often don't get it strait from the specialist but instead got the word passed down and remixed through others first. This may come as a shock to you but many scientists (especially physicists it seems) really suck at writing something enjoyably readable by most people.

We can speculate on what percentage is caused by us and make a pretty damn loose approximation since we have no real baseline to work from. And then we can speculate off that speculation what the short term effects will be, then we can speculate off that speculation of a speculation to the long term effects.

And hey, we might even be right.

But no one really knows. There's quite a lot we don't know about our own planet and its habits, other than its astoundingly complex to model the tiniest fraction of it. You're milage may vary.

But put this feather in your cap before you walk off. Do a little digging and check out the models and predictions made by the climitologists and others durring the years. Then look at the actual world temprature. Most are off...many by more than a little. Enough so that it looks a lot like taking shots in the dark. Now if the first argument you want to make in their defense is going to be "but we know more now than we did 10 years ago". I fully agree, and it will still be true if you say that 10 more years down the road, but I will be willing to bet we still won't be able to say with any certainty if it will rain tomorrow or not. Our planet is rather complex. ;)
 

WheelsOfConfusion

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[citation][nom]solymnar[/nom]This is kind of funny. Scientists ideally do follow what you wrote. However, they have bosses and agendas and ultimately need to make money. That means whatever they are doing either has to be marketable or earn grants from sponsors. This unfortunately/fortunately is a huge factor in what a scientist pursues and of course the raw data generated is nearly always distilled through a combination of statisticians and marketing/political people before it reaches the masses.[/citation]
The problem you're having is that you seem to be under the impression that this will be able to make it seem as though there is nigh-universal support for something that really isn't there, among scientists, the world's most highly trained BS-detectors as a group. Keep in mind that a scientist's entire mission in life is to increase the accuracy and amount of our factual knowledge about the world, and that scientists come from every single religious, cultural, political, economic, and ethnic background.
What you're suggesting does happen, but nowhere near the scale needed to form a consensus in the real world. You're telling me, basically, that the entire community of scientists will lie and perpetuate the lie and have others go along with the lie even as they urge immediate public action, just for cash. It does not work like that, not on these scales. What's far more likely is that the very small number of dissenters are the ones who are being bought out, and in cases such as Fred Singer and Richard Lindzen we can be pretty certain that this has happened. At best, the combined misunderstandings and/or agendas of the popular press might convince most laypeople of something, but it won't convince the majority of the scientists because they're the ones looking at the data.

I'd like to know why you seem completely unwilling to admit that perhaps these experts might really know what they're talking about, especially when they're all in general agreement with each other.


[citation][nom]solymnar[/nom]This is partly required since your average joe will not be able to begin to understand the raw data and conclusion from scientist x's experiments.Regardless I feel you took the term "caved" the wrong way, my bad. The point still stands however that between media and a few statistics they had the general population believing in BS. Not at all unusual.[/citation]
Who is "they?" Just look at the numbers I posted earlier: the global cooling school of thought was NEVER very large, and most scientists disagreed with it even at the height of its popularity. That is the exact opposite of the case for warming, especially today. You cannot compare then and now and say the same thing is going on and they're all following the wrong answer because they've been duped by the media. So no, you're plain wrong, no matter how you try to spin it.

[citation][nom]solymnar[/nom]The difference this time is that you have TWO arguments.Global warming is happening.We are the primary cause of it.Those are not the same statement and most people mistakenly link them together. Most scientists that I talk to (myself included) and most people who do their homework on data collected so far would be hard pressed to say just how much it is that humans actively contribute vs. what is happening naturally.[/citaion]
There isn't any reasonable doubt that we ARE significantly contributing, though, not among the scientists doing the work to sort it all out. That's my point: the doubt about our role in climate change is not scientific doubt.

[citation][nom]solymnar[/nom]And like I said to begin with...we're talking about something that occurs on a geological time scale. So its extremely difficult to say anything until we've been able to track things for a few 1000 years of industrialization to make a remotely decent comparison. /shrug[/citation]
That's like saying we have no idea that things can evolve unless we can track a few thousand years of evolution as it happens in the wild. Although the direct evidence for both (climate change and evolution) is out there, there is a lot we can already glean from the less direct data and from lab work on the basics (biology in the case of evolution, physics and chemistry for climate). We KNOW that CO2 is a powerful greenhouse gas, we KNOW that humans have unlocked enormous amounts of it and pumped it into the atmosphere since industrialization began, and we KNOW it's affecting the chemistry of the environment and thus re-balancing the physics. We have no reasonable doubt that we are significantly changing the climate through land use, agricultural practices, and fossil fuel consumption. It would be foolish to think that we aren't. And we can check our estimates of how much we should have an effect against the backdrop of real-world climate changes. No matter how else we account for it, the only thing that makes sense of the data is anthropogenic climate change.

[citation][nom]solymnar[/nom]I feel you're missing a lot of the point here wheels. You are under the assumption that we actually have a solid understanding of weather patterns and how the planet functions as a whole in terms of how much energy is trapped, dispersed, concentrated, and how the flow patterns work. We can't even say for sure if it will rain or not TOMORROW.[/citation]
The differences between making a precise short-term weather forecast and modeling the general climatic trends over a longer period of time are significant, and I think you're the one making invalid assumptions to compare the two. There is a lot that we don't know about climate modeling, but what we DO know is already useful in making predictions. We have ways of checking the models used to forecast the future of climate against the past and present climate, for example.

[citation][nom]solymnar[/nom]And...unless someone came back from the future, we do not know how fast the earth is supposed to warm from year to year with or without human intervention.[/citation]
We're not talking about "year to year." This isn't like Back to the Future where we need Biff to give us a book of sports info from 2015. We're talking about decades and centuries, whose general trends are simpler to predict because you can make generalizations. Look at the instrumental climate record for the past hundred+ years. Large variations year-to-year, but a very clear trend when you step back and take it in as a whole.

[citation][nom]solymnar[/nom]This makes it truly impossible to make an honest metric so that we can say exactly how much of an influence various things have in the long term.[/citation]
Step back a second and think about this argument you're making. The fact that we absolutely cannot have ANY knowledge about when any single nuclear particle will undergo some types of decay (it's truly impossible, not "truly impossible" as in impractical) does not prevent us from determining an extremely precise half-life for large numbers of radioactive isotopes together. We don't need to know "year to year" here. You're focusing on timescales that are too narrow.


[citation][nom]solymnar[/nom]While most will agree we have some kind of impact. The hard question is "But how much of one?" No one honestly knows, but a lot of people like to speculate and put together theories based on pooled data and resources, and because its in the best interests of A LOT of special groups and government, this gets A LOT of funding. ... Now you can get bent out of shape and sling some name calling if you like but it won't change the point that anyone who claims they know humans are causing x% of global warming is simply lying outright.[/citation]
I'm not appealing to anybody who says "we are having X% effect on global climate." I'm not saying we are having any certain amount. I'm saying we have a significant demonstrable effect on climate, and I can say that confidently without "a control group." The basic physics of the greenhouse effect have been known for more than a century now, and those early estimates were made with remarkable precision compared to modern ones. We know how much the CO2 concentration has changed over time because we have atmospheric sampling stations and paleoclimate data to check against. We can check what we predict against what we know. In fact, many people have done so, and you can see that much of their results overlap nicely with the instrumental data we have aside from their general agreement with each other.

[citation][nom]solymnar[/nom]But put this feather in your cap before you walk off. Do a little digging and check out the models and predictions made by the climitologists and others durring the years. Then look at the actual world temprature. Most are off...many by more than a little. Enough so that it looks a lot like taking shots in the dark.[/citation]
I wouldn't call it "shots in the dark." It's more like having a working knowledge of where the target should be and then trying to hit it through very dim light.


[citation][nom]solymnar[/nom]Now if the first argument you want to make in their defense is going to be "but we know more now than we did 10 years ago". I fully agree, and it will still be true if you say that 10 more years down the road, but I will be willing to bet we still won't be able to say with any certainty if it will rain tomorrow or not. Our planet is rather complex.[/citation]
And you still seem to be confusing meteorology with long-term climatology, which was one of the things pointed out in the recent survey of scientists discussed in the wiki article. They are not the same, and treating them as though they were is wrong-headed. You will not be making a convincing argument as long as you're confusing the guys who predict long-term climatic trends with the weatherman on TV.
 

Mennoknight

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Wow. Let's stop fighting about Global Warming, Scientific Consensus, Unnecessary Capitalization In Sentences and whatnot (Tom's is not the place for idiocy to be displayed so gloriously) and let's get back to doing what's important: slamming PETA.

Anyone have a Youtube Vid Link of the occasion? I want to see what happened!
 

solymnar

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[citation][nom]WheelsOfConfusion[/nom]among scientists, the world's most highly trained BS-detectors as a group. Keep in mind that a scientist's entire mission in life is to increase the accuracy and amount of our factual knowledge about the world.[/citation]

I feel you are a bit out of touch with reality if you think this is how things work. Intern at a few companies and see how the actual gears turn or work with a team or two. You will be pursuing specific avenues to earn grants or make the company money. Period. You want to just read over a paper of another scientist's work? Pay up bucko, that's not free either. Projects carried out by teams of people absolutely MUST produce some kind of usable result if they expect to get any funding for future projects.

Scientists are not crusaders of truth and righteousness. They are people who have interests in topics that require research and procedure to study effectively and are willing to put the time in to be able to do just that. Then after they get a degree/s they need to make a living.

[citation][nom]WheelsOfConfusion[/nom]
You're telling me, basically, that the entire community of scientists will lie and perpetuate the lie and have others go along with the lie even as they urge immediate public action, just for cash.[/citation]

Its not so much lying as it is distorting the significance of results. Which is done regularly. The other avenue is that an item that is popular will get more funding and thus more studies are done on it. Teams often go where the money is, or a recruited specifically for providing analysis on x thing, by a company or special interest group etc.

Once a project is done, the conclusions had better be meaningful. And there are lots of ways to make them look more meaningful than they are without lying. Sometimes followed by a special interest group taking the pieces that support what they want to "prove" and focusing on those. Watch a few debate rounds on plans to deal with global warming. You'd be floored with how the work of science is abused. And then they start arguing who has more scientists and which ones are better and blah blah blah.

[citation][nom]WheelsOfConfusion[/nom]
At best, the combined misunderstandings and/or agendas of the popular press might convince most laypeople of something, but it won't convince the majority of the scientists because they're the ones looking at the data. [/citation]

What it does is make focusing research on items that are likely to support a popular opinion more lucrative. I don't need to lie about anything if I'm targeting a venue of research that is likely to support what I want to conclude. Just because I put together reasonable data and made a reasonable conclusion doesn't mean I went about it in a remotely unbiased manner or in a manner that included all outside considerations (which is rather impossible to do thus a degree of bias is always present for better or for worse to simplify given data/equations/experiments/etc).

[citation][nom]WheelsOfConfusion[/nom]
I'd like to know why you seem completely unwilling to admit that perhaps these experts might really know what they're talking about, especially when they're all in general agreement with each other.[/citation]

If you were trying to understand what I have been saying you would already know that answer. A lot of experts do know what they are talking about and within the boundaries of the experiments and analysis they've conducted there is a lot of solid research to suggest quite a lot of things. Its just not enough to make and sweeping conclusive results, but I'll try to explain what I mean more specifically further along.

[citation][nom]WheelsOfConfusion[/nom]
Who is "they?" Just look at the numbers I posted earlier:You cannot compare then and now and say the same thing is going on and they're all following the wrong answer because they've been duped by the media. So no, you're plain wrong, no matter how you try to spin it.[/citation]

OK...if you choose not to get it after this time around I'm going to stop bothering explaining it to you. The point is simple. Data and analysis do not always lead to an accurate conclusion, but if its in the interests of someone it can be pushed out and greatly exaggerated. In the case of cooling the media took some studies and ran away with them for a bit and convinced a lot of people it was truth. This isn't unusual. If you really think the media doesn't exaggerate or dramatize different studies about global warming then I am disappointed in you. Granted its not quite as ludicrous as it was 10 years ago because the great disasters and plagues that were supposed to happen by 2010 don't appear to have happened...and we still have california. /shrug


[citation][nom]WheelsOfConfusion[/nom]That's like saying we have no idea that things can evolve unless we can track a few thousand years of evolution as it happens in the wild.[/citation]

Its not remotely similar. In terms of evolution we not only have historical data points from both fossils and genetic patterns but we have MANY end results of those trajectory lines living and are actively able to study them. Additionally we can manipulate and MASSIVELY accelerate generation cycles to get quick results. In terms of earth we have 1 planet, as opposed to a variety to study, and we can't exactly isolate a part of it and then speed up the climate to assess actual long term results.

[citation][nom]WheelsOfConfusion[/nom]
We KNOW that CO2 is a powerful greenhouse gas, we KNOW that humans have unlocked enormous amounts of it and pumped it into the atmosphere since industrialization began, and we KNOW it's affecting the chemistry of the environment and thus re-balancing the physics.[/citation]

Powerful compared to what? Water vapor makes up by far the lion's share. Enormous amounts of it compared to what? Re-balancing the physics how? What is the point of equilibrium where temperature is more or less stabilized and negative feedback balances out? Where is the steady state equation that clearly or at least roughly shows us these things?

They don't have one and don't know. And until they do its a lot of rampant speculation. Generating climate equations that predict that the earth will turn into venus isn't practical but that's what most of the ones created so far do. This is my no 1 reason for taking all claims that x group knows what the temperature should be "roughly" in 10 or 50 years.

How will changing technology, availability of natural resources, population, etc. effect these derived equations? These things are not static and have their own negative feedback and balancing points inter related. And most equations generated thus far don't really take that into account very well.

What will be the long term effects? This once again is a place where rampant speculation occurs. If you read the correct article we should be in the middle of a near apocalyptic situation triggered by disease alone due to global warming. This clearly has not occurred. The coastlines are not submerged, etc. etc. While I won't say that scientists are lying I will say they have very foggy support for many of the claims of the actual impacts...which are often dramatized.

[citation][nom]WheelsOfConfusion[/nom]
We have no reasonable doubt that we are significantly changing the climate through land use, agricultural practices, and fossil fuel consumption. It would be foolish to think that we aren't. [/citation]
Significant compared to what?

[citation][nom]WheelsOfConfusion[/nom]
And we can check our estimates of how much we should have an effect against the backdrop of real-world climate changes. No matter how else we account for it, the only thing that makes sense of the data is anthropogenic climate change.[/citation]
Right but now you're talking about things like measuring gas concentrations trapped in ice and other substances to guess the temperature at a certain period of time based on partial pressure vs. temp modeling. Its a fantastic idea...so are most of the others. At the end of the day though you have no idea how accurate those techniques are because its very difficult to replicate the scenario you are measuring and account for all variable properly. And so we get an idea on a geological scale. And try to distill it down to be relevant on a 10 year basis. Which is a bit of a stretch...and why its not surprising that most predictions end up being off. They should slowly get better overtime of course.


[citation][nom]WheelsOfConfusion[/nom]The differences between making a precise short-term weather forecast and modeling the general climatic trends over a longer period of time are significant, and I think you're the one making invalid assumptions to compare the two.[/citation]

And you are cetainly entitled to do so. The comparison for me is valid because both involve trying to make a prediction where there are too many variables involved to hope to accurately keep track of them all. Which is why predictions for either tend to be shaky and wrong the further out one tries to predict and are also often wrong even on short term scales when unpredicted events over ride them. Granted the focus and techniques of study are vastly different between the two. But perhaps the reason for my comparison makes more sense to you now?

[citation][nom]WheelsOfConfusion[/nom]We're not talking about "year to year." We're talking about decades and centuries, whose general trends are simpler to predict because you can make generalizations. Look at the instrumental climate record for the past hundred+ years. Large variations year-to-year, but a very clear trend when you step back and take it in as a whole.[/citation]

Yet they DO try to make effectively short term predictions, which I agree is silly. Not decades...but a single decade or less sometimes. And yes I've seen probably close to 60 or so charts calculated by various means to generate temperature history. Some which conflict, others that agree with each other. Most of the short range 150year ones show a decline followed by an upswing timed about 40ish years ago.


[citation][nom]WheelsOfConfusion[/nom]Step back a second and think about this argument you're making. The fact that we absolutely cannot have ANY knowledge about when any single nuclear particle will undergo some types of decay (it's truly impossible, not "truly impossible" as in impractical) does not prevent us from determining an extremely precise half-life for large numbers of radioactive isotopes together.[/citation]

I feel this is another poor analogy as there are very few variables involved in radioactive decay and it happens fast enough that we can measure it easily with the right equipment in most cases. Which is the exact opposite of estimating climate.

[citation][nom]WheelsOfConfusion[/nom]We don't need to know "year to year" here. You're focusing on timescales that are too narrow.[/citation]

Not at all. I fully agree short time spans are pointless as the variables flux too much and the read becomes too sporadic. But I also suggest there are too many variables to predict 50 years out as well. And no model yet has dared to try to predict out much further than that nor has anyone figured out where the turn around temprature should be where negative feedback takes over.

[citation][nom]WheelsOfConfusion[/nom]I'm not appealing to anybody who says "we are having X% effect on global climate." I'm not saying we are having any certain amount. I'm saying we have a significant demonstrable effect on climate[/citation]

Significant compared to what? How significant are we compared to the last major volcano eruption and its following effects? What is the temprature supposed to be right now without our contribution from the last 150 years?

[citation][nom]WheelsOfConfusion[/nom]I wouldn't call it "shots in the dark." It's more like having a working knowledge of where the target should be and then trying to hit it through very dim light. And you still seem to be confusing meteorology with long-term climatology, [/citation]

Its guessing where the target is based on where it was before you lost sight of it on a windy day. At point blank range you can't miss. A little ways out and you can be drastically off, further out you have a general direction but your chances of actually nailing it are slim and you can't take the blindfold off to check for sure.

I already explained the reasoning for my comparison between predicting weather and climate.
 

WheelsOfConfusion

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[citation][nom]solymnar[/nom]OK...if you choose not to get it after this time around I'm going to stop bothering explaining it to you. The point is simple. Data and analysis do not always lead to an accurate conclusion, but if its in the interests of someone it can be pushed out and greatly exaggerated. In the case of cooling the media took some studies and ran away with them for a bit and convinced a lot of people it was truth. This isn't unusual. If you really think the media doesn't exaggerate or dramatize different studies about global warming then I am disappointed in you.[/citation]
Did the media fool the scientists in that case? No, the scientists seemed to basically ignore the popular attention that "global cooling" was getting and get on with their work, which pointed in the opposite direction by a wide margin. And which one do you think would have been more lucrative to pursue? Warming would be a lot harder to combat than cooling, and cooling would allow more scientists to cash in on fossil fuel industry hand-outs to fund studies that concluded we were in danger of freezing over, so that they could emit as much GHGs as they wanted and be thanked for it. If scientists wanted to follow the money, they probably would have had a better ride going with the "OMG WE GOAN FREEZ!" line that the media was playing up. Hell, since most of the research predicted warming, it would even have appealed to the iconoclastic drive in sciences to tear down popular wisdom and replace it with something new and controversial. Problem is, science generally has to match up with reality in the long term. That's probably why the long term has borne out the anthropogenic factor in climbing climate.
A lot of people have already gotten rich raging against the "establishment" of warming. Fred Singer and Richard Lindzen, for example, both directly received money from ExxonMobil and work closely with think-tanks and pseudo-grassroots organizations which received hundreds of thousands from Exxon. They also both received similar funds from tobacco companies when they tried to claim that the dangers of tobacco were overblown. But people like Singer and Lindzen are in the minority, which happens to be what I would expect of scientists: the ones who are pure bullshitting for money are small in number compared to the ones who really want to find out how stuff works (because most science doesn't pay well, people don't go into it expecting to get rich).




[citation][nom]solymnar[/nom]Granted its not quite as ludicrous as it was 10 years ago because the great disasters and plagues that were supposed to happen by 2010 don't appear to have happened...and we still have california.[/citation]
How many of these great disasters and plagues were being predicted by large numbers of specialists studying them? Did any of these predictions ever reach the level of consensus, as anthropogenic climate change has? Or were some of them perhaps just like "global cooling is gonna bring us into a new ice age," perhaps predicted in a few papers and spun off by the lay press? Did most geologists REALLY expect California to just fall off the map? Perhaps your own impressions are a bit distorted. It happens; after all, a whole lot of people are convinced that science was predicting a new ice age back in the 70s.

[citation][nom]solymnar[/nom]Its not remotely similar. In terms of evolution we not only have historical data points from both fossils and genetic patterns but we have MANY end results of those trajectory lines living and are actively able to study them. Additionally we can manipulate and MASSIVELY accelerate generation cycles to get quick results. In terms of earth we have 1 planet, as opposed to a variety to study, and we can't exactly isolate a part of it and then speed up the climate to assess actual long term results.[/citation]
The only really significant difference you've pointed out is that we can do evolution in the lab or in by closely studying quickly-generating populations. But we don't need either one of those to be reasonably certain about the veracity of evolution (just MORE certain).

[citation][nom]solymnar[/nom]Powerful compared to what? Water vapor makes up by far the lion's share. Enormous amounts of it compared to what?[/citation]
In terms of raw warming power, it's the second most powerful next to water vapor. It's also the second most abundant, behind water vapor again. But water vapor concentration depends on temperature and density and generally cycles out back into liquid or solid water, and does this pretty damn quickly. Water vapor as clouds also helps reflect solar energy back into space, and as ice keeps the land and sea cooler.

CO2 stays in the atmosphere for decades, perhaps even centuries. It does not reflect radiation back out into space, it does not prevent sunlight from reaching the ground or the ocean. It's a problem that accumulates more quickly than water vapor, and sticks around longer than methane.
As to the enormous amounts we're contributing, the concentration of atmospheric CO2 has increased approximately 100 ppm, or about 28%, due to human activities compared to ice core samples from 1832. Despite its low absolute occurrence in the atmosphere, CO2 accounts for a disproportionate amount of greenhouse effect (estimates range from 9 percent to almost thirty). And unlike water vapor, we might actually be able to do something about the CO2 problem.

[citation][nom]solymnar[/nom]Re-balancing the physics how?[/citation]
By increasing the amount of infrared radiation trapped within the atmosphere. More CO2 absorbs more IR from the sun and the Earth and keeps it from escaping into space.

[citation[nom]solymnar[/nom]What is the point of equilibrium where temperature is more or less stabilized and negative feedback balances out?[/citation]
We've already passed that point. Some of the factors that have acted to cool the Earth by preventing solar radiation from reaching the ground (then being re-emitted as IR to the atmosphere), such as particulate pollution, may have been negating some of the upward temperature change for decades, but it's been suggested that they're now overwhelmed by the greenhouse effect, partly because we don't pollute as heavily as we used to and the "global dimming" effect is diminished.

[citation][nom]solymnar[/nom]Where is the steady state equation that clearly or at least roughly shows us these things? They don't have one and don't know.[/citation]
Arrhenius came up with a simple equation to determine the effect of CO2 on climate some one hundred years ago actually.

Climate models nowadays might be more complex because they consider more and more lines (and quantities) of data, and with the benefit of enormously powerful computers they can provide better resolutions.
Perhaps you'll stop talking out of your ass? I hope so, because I really don't feel like continuing this conversation with somebody so determined to not get it. You seem to be confusing the limits of your own understanding with the limits of climate science state of the art.

[citation][nom]solymnar[nom/]Generating climate equations that predict that the earth will turn into venus isn't practical but that's what most of the ones created so far do.[/citation]
Do those models predict that Earth will turn into Venus?

[citation][nom]solymnar[/nom]This is my no 1 reason for taking all claims that x group knows what the temperature should be "roughly" in 10 or 50 years.How will changing technology, availability of natural resources, population, etc. effect these derived equations?[/citation]
Generally speaking predictions are made with certain caveats about the initial assumptions and the conditions under which the simulated results can be expected, which might vary from team to team and paper to paper. You're asking me things you can probably find out easily enough by looking at the papers wherein the simulations are published. But if you feel that things like projected fossil fuel use aren't being taken into account, you can always talk to a climate scientist about it, I'm sure.

[citation][nom]solymnar[/nom]If you read the correct article we should be in the middle of a near apocalyptic situation triggered by disease alone due to global warming. This clearly has not occurred. [/citation]
Which article is that? And has the conclusion of that article reached consensus?

[citation]The coastlines are not submerged, etc. etc. While I won't say that scientists are lying I will say they have very foggy support for many of the claims of the actual impacts...which are often dramatized.[/citation]
See above. Who is making these predictions that we should already be drowned and diseased and so on and so forth?


[citation][nom]solymnar[/nom]At the end of the day though you have no idea how accurate those techniques are because its very difficult to replicate the scenario you are measuring and account for all variable properly.[/citation]
I think we have a working knowledge of how to reconstruct paleoclimates, since we do check our models against historical and instrumental records. I'm not going to say it's perfect, but it's probably pretty serviceable.

[citation][nom]solymnar[/nom]And so we get an idea on a geological scale. And try to distill it down to be relevant on a 10 year basis. Which is a bit of a stretch...and why its not surprising that most predictions end up being off. They should slowly get better overtime of course.And you are cetainly entitled to do so. The comparison for me is valid because both involve trying to make a prediction where there are too many variables involved to hope to accurately keep track of them all. ... Granted the focus and techniques of study are vastly different between the two. But perhaps the reason for my comparison makes more sense to you now?[/citation]
You think that by basically repeating the claim I'm just going to roll over and buy it? You're still saying "we can't predict the general climate trend because we can't be 100% certain of rain in the afternoon next Tuesday!"

[citation][nom]solymnar[/nom]Significant compared to what? How significant are we compared to the last major volcano eruption and its following effects?[/citation]
Define "the last major volcanic eruption." We can look at the data on atmospheric conditions for several large volcanic eruptions and draw conclusions from them. We know a lot about the effects of Mt. Pinatubo, for instance. C'mon, you can find this stuff easily.

[citation][nom]solymnar[/nom]I already explained the reasoning for my comparison between predicting weather and climate.[/citation]
And I explained why it's probably faulty. You think this is like shooting targets a few tens of yards apart? Short-term meteorological forecasts and long-term climate models are extremely different from each other. It's like asking a high-energy particle physicist to write up a synthesis reaction for S-Adenosyl methionine. The physicist studies things on one scale and the chemist studies them on another, but that doesn't mean that one can do the other's job based on their own specialties, it doesn't mean that isolating the tau lepton is fundamentally the same process as creating a specific amino acid. Failure to do one does not imply that the other is equally impossible. Basically, your reasoning is shit.

This point was emphasized in the article I posted about the survey of scientists on climate change: [citation][nom]The Article[/nom] "The petroleum geologist response is not too surprising, but the meteorologists' is very interesting," said Peter Doran associate professor of earth and environmental sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and one of the survey's authors.

"Most members of the public think meteorologists know climate, but most of them actually study very short-term phenomenon."

However, Doran was not surprised by the near-unanimous agreement by climatologists.

"They're the ones who study and publish on climate science. So I guess the take-home message is, the more you know about the field of climate science, the more you're likely to believe in global warming and humankind's contribution to it.

"The debate on the authenticity of global warming and the role played by human activity is largely nonexistent among those who understand the nuances and scientific basis of long-term climate processes," said Doran.[/citation]
Well, what do you know? Here we have a non-climate scientist, unfamiliar with the field, voicing his apprehension about the conclusions of climate scientists, just as he predicted.
 

solymnar

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This has become somewhat pointless. I feel you either are failing to grasp what I'm trying to explain to you or (more likely) are intentionally misinterpreting what I am saying. For what?

There is practically no one left reading this thread beyond you and myself. You still act as if I haven't read the articles and seen the math behind them etc.

You still act as if I think that global warming isn't happening and that I think the human population has no effect on it. Despite stating it directly.

You're argument about why you don't like my comparison of weather vs climate didn't even remotely apply to what I was talking about, you focused (again) on mechanism of study and data sets when I was purely making reference to volume of unknowns and subsequent effects on prediction accuracy. Which suggests strongly you are more busy thinking about your response than you are actually reading anything I've written.

So what is the point? If you don't honestly listen no real conversation emerges. You continue to write with an acidic tone as if I've done you some personal wrong.

You talk about things like simple ideal gas law equations and throw around insults expecting to accomplish what? Who are you trying to impress?

You don't seem to understand the comments I made on negative feedback and the prediction models turning earth into venus etc. which leads me to believe you may have a limited grasp of the articles and climate models you are making reference too.

The simple point that you stated that we've already surpassed all negative feedback responses would imply that if all human supplied CO2 into the atmosphere was stopped RIGHT NOW, that the global climate will still spiral completely out of control.

Something you should consider just applying the basic partial pressure equations is that increased global temp = increased sea temp = increased vapor pressure = increased water vapor concentration = increased cloud formation among other things. One of many reasons for speculations on how much energy is added into the weather system directly, but also a possible negative feedback balancing point. (Additionally I would find it ironic if the increased weather energy eventually becomes harnessed to balance a reduction in use of fossil fuels. But that's a ways off topic.)

You acknowledge that 10year climate predictions are shoddy because there is too much variance on such short terms, and you have no solid argument for why major adjustments in technology/population/etc or negative feedback responses won't completely skew any long term predictions other than saying "its not the same as the weather" or "go ask a climatologist".

You acknowledge that scientist/s teams with conclusions you don't like have to make money to live but somehow think that others do not and make some comment along the lines of how good scientists don't care about money. Which is absurd since you can't exactly carry out an experiment with no house, no food, no location and no equipment. Lets not forget about the wife, kids and your hobby/ies either.

Seriously. If you want to have a conversation then have one. If you want to insult and bludgeon people in an attempt to cow them then you are wasting both your and my time. It seems you have never actually worked with a team to develop something or design and carry out an experiment.

But to be very specific, you have models made by various climatologists teams (IPCC) that claim the global climate has risen a range of .56 to .92 C in the last 100 years, that's near a 50% margin of difference which is completely and totally unacceptable in most scientific disciplines.

Now their current predictions for the next 100 years?
1.1 to 6.4 C increase.
We're talking about a more than 500% difference in range of predictions. Nothing you do in life right now would you trust to that. You're salary, your mortgage/rent payments, your car milage, the fuel to launch a rocket, the effectiveness of a vaccine. None of it would you even pretend to vouch for if it had a greater than 500% uncertainty. Good experiments typically can be repeated and run in a range of about 5% difference or less in final results...some much much much lower than 1% difference.

There is another avenue of science that gets similar flux in the accuracy of their predictions despite the vast difference in how those predictions are made. That would be meteorology. Thus the comparison in prediction accuracy despite vast differences in both data, and technique of study.

There is enough of a spread between the climatologist predictions that the high end of the last 100yrs combined with the lower end of the next 100 years becomes virtually flat acceleration. The only consensus that you trump about is that global warming is happening and we do have some effect on it. Which I haven't once argued with yet you keep bringing it up as if I have.

Now are the climatologists that predict different changes in temperature all lying? Or is it simply that they used different techniques and assumed different biases when creating their simplified equations? I'm going to vote on option number two since outright fabrication of data is more than a little strongly frowned upon in the community and can end any scientific career.

Don't tell me "well you can look it up". I have read this information already. Those questions were posed to you. I wanted you to try to quantify the generic terms you are using and make them more objective.

I would suggest to try harder in the future to actually both talk and listen if you are truly interested in a subject. I also suggest finishing your degree and spending some time as a scientist in the field before you go off on a tangent about how life as a scientist is.

Not that the ideal vision you have isn't a nice thing and often a primary starting point for many people growing up. Its the curiosity and desire of mastery that fuels much, but this usually is tempered by realization along the road on how little we actually know about things. And then you simply hope to be able to make some kind of progress that someone else will be able to stand on the shoulders of.

I want to cure cancer turns into "I will study using virus machinery as vectors to inserting modified proteins into cells to aid a plan that may cure certain types among having other uses."
I want to make new transport systems becomes "I will study coating processes on crystalline metallic surfaces to create an inexpensively producible material to aid in making the next transport system among having other uses".
I want to make nanobots that are powered off human chemistry becomes "I will advance enzymatic mechanism used as solutions in industrial chemistry experiments to further our ability to manipulate them" and so on.
Even then its a lot of being at the right place at the right time. Few musicians actually get to be major players. Few scientists actually get to lead their own teams and projects of their choosing. Luck and major sacrifices are usually both involved.

In any case if you still feel that insults etc. is the best way to discuss something then we'll just have to agree to disagree. And you will likely continue to get short responses from members with minus marks and possibly think to yourself that everyone reading is a jerk that doesn't get it. Which will probably make you just more emotional and insulting.
 

n3ard3ath

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Wow, damn big discussion going on here. I've read some of it, and would love to take part into it, but since my english is too poor for some^, I'll just abstinate myself. Sometimes I feel like crying a river for being of a foreign first language. I love intelligent discussions, but that one seemed like a continuous denial anyway.
 

n3ard3ath

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Well, fuck it, I'll give my 2 cents about the rising climate matter anyways. It's hard to jump to conclusions when you're not a meteorologist and your thoughts are only based on what scientists, other 'specilists' and politicians are making public. It's even harder when there is 2 camps telling you different facts which are in oposition. What is obvious is that there is a trend in politics to fall on the 'pro climate change due to CO2 emissions' camp side. And I don't trust today's world politicians. If anyone have heard of a CO2 taxe current US gouvernment administration wanna push, they'll understand what I mean. I would not have any problem with it if the people they actually taxed were the big oil monopoles, but it is'n the case (no wonder concidaring banks and oil compagnies are closely connected, and have obvious and questionnable influance on world politics), it's the honest people they wanna taxe. Notice I keep using 'world politics'? I, and others, strongly believe it's what we're coming to.
 

n3ard3ath

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[citation][nom]the_one111[/nom]Yeah, our country is going to crap and we care more about animated seals.Pathetic.[/citation]

That is coming from the fact some humans are jerks and have no pity for anything, while all animals are fuel by instinc and are for the most part in harmony with nature's balance. Thus why there is a trend towards that kind of thinking. I find myself thinking that way too, even though it's not right. But animals can be jerks too, like trained guard dogs, I would kill one that attacks me with a knife without any remorse. I would even enjoy it. Thing is, the trend your describing is very wrong yes. I'm starting to be aware there indeed is questionnable organisations like PETA pushing that kind of thinking into some people's head. Overpopulation of humans could be another argument for other organisations of that type to fuel human hatred of each others too.
 
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