Posts by Kracklite
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Bah!
Erratum before some smark-aleck responds:
I'm not going to repeat myself, because as you should know - but clearly don't - repetition does not make something false true.
... nor does it make something true more or less true.
-
But you have found a glaring error anyway, its an abstract and we all know that that they twist the results.
Oh, THEM again.
Peer reviewed journals accept papers that present falsifiable hypotheses, not because they are already assumed to be true.
seal level and temperatures in NZ.
Really? I've seen no data on how warm seals are in NZ nor how tall they are.
Seriously, local/global yadda yadda yadda... I'm bored.
I have produced actual data to support what i have claimed, only in regard to seal level and temperatures in NZ.
You have produced nothing except to deconstruct what "truth " means.Tinfoil certainly is damned effective. The army should see about using it as armour.
I'm not going to repeat myself, because as you should know - but clearly don't - repetition does not make something false true. Neither does THE USE OF CAPS.
Terence, I do like RNZ actually. Immensely. Maybe I'm just too cranky in the mornings.
-
ISNT called ...A selective presentation of an isolated phenomenon from second-hand sources with all inconvenient data removed, scientific illiteracy"
No, it's called something else: out of context and probably contested. The fact that it is not a fairy tale doesn't make it absolutely true as a description of the ocean's behavior. Reality ain't binary.
Compare this:
yes other places in the globe can show warming, but lets know more about our own backyard
With this:
a tiny piece of Antartica is allways used to show, warming, loss of ice, collapse of ice shelfs etc when the other 90% is getting colder
No contradiction?
Why is the data about "our own back yard" somehow more truthful than global data?
Also, it's been said again and again that GW is a global phenomenon (and please, for once look up the meaning of that word - hint, it's cunningly hidden away from prying eyes in any dictionary). Of course there will be local variations (a word also concealed by the vast global warming conspiracy in dictionaries) of climate (ditto).
Your whole argument, apart from the paranoia, is based on - by your own admission, indeed insistence - selecting specific data points and ignoring others, not on gaining an overall picture.
The adjustment to temperature records is a fact. Worldwide there is a lot of questioning about these adjustments
There's questioning about whether the earth is round too - by idiots. Your point?
All though an" Inconvenient Truth" did fit that discription.
[sic]
See above, re papers subsequent to the 2004 paper etc. OK, so Al Gore in his documentary fudged some individually facts and therefore he is "wacky" and by implication, the conslusions of scientists working on AGW is false? Ad hominem argument compounded by a non sequitur. You're ugly and your mother dresses you funny, therefore Francis Bacon wrote the plays of Shakespeare.
Well take the NZ records discussed, and please dont wave around red herrings about global conspiracy and illiteracy
If you present disingenuous pseudoscience and display complete ignorance of scientific practice and then claim that people all over the world are working in secrecy are altering data in order to present a coherent and co-ordinated picture of GW, then pointing that out is hardly a red herring.
you need to provide concrete facts and sources yourself.
I have, as have others, frequently. Neither your nor mine nor anyone else's isolated posts are complete hermetic presentations.
Your opinion doesnt count any more than some wacky US Senator.
Why not? If you follow the pseudo-democratic (or demotic or demagogic) principle of all viewpoints being equally worthy or worthless, why does yours have any value?
In fact I am (among other things) a cultural historian specialising in attitudes to science and my colleagues with whom I regularly work are physical scientists and that they don't laugh at me would indicate to me that I do not carry out original scientific research myself but that I am competent to make judgements of people's use of that.
-
first rank science journal
Oh, I love this. If it's apparently agreeable, then it's "first rate" and if it's not agreeable, then it's been fiddled by THEM.
rising at an average rate of 1.6 mm/yr
So, the fact that sea levels are rising means that there is no GW?
over the last 100 years ....
Um, have you heard of the Industrial Revolution, its extent and the range of deforestation it entailed and do you know when it started? Indeed, we can go back to the Agricultural Revolution for deforestation...
And it's one 2004 paper, I note. Well, actually it's not even a paper, it's an abstract, so the data isn't there to examine. Nor is there any reference in the post to subsequent papers, error bars, the principle of parismony, global observations...
As a general observation, one of my main beefs with science reporting is the assumption that if something is true, then it must be 100% true and proven and if it's 90% or whatever (as the conservative IPCC has it in the case of GW), then, OMG, they're not sure and in fact may be... probably are wrong!
It is as if "truth" was some hard but brittle block, so that it must be absolutely rigid, but if you tap it, it shatters into falsehood, whereas "truthiness" (like a conspiracy theory) is infinitely elastic when it comes to demands for evidence.
One of the great failings of human psychology is that we're very poor in our ability to understand statistics, probabilities and the long term while mistaking wishful thinking for high probability - if there's 90% probability of AGW, then one chooses the 10% chance that there isn't because both "uncertain" values were equivalent. This is also as if not changing policy was less of a gamble than continuing on the same path - the fallacy that the current position is some stable zero-state without consequences over time. This is absurd.
No scientist - probably not even a classical physicist - will ever will say that anything is absolutely certain. This is because in nature, multiple factors interact while empirical science usually proceeds by first isolating single variables before integrating them into an overall pattern. Prudence, or parsimony as it is usually called, forbids making positive statements about general phenomena based on single variables. The naive observer will take one single datum as absolute evidence - and they will thereby prove their iognorance and recklessness.
I'm on the side of AGW because the overall body of evidence (the "consensus", if you will) is for it, not because any single paper is for it or against it. I have no interest whatsoever in any single paper. Science in general is not some sub-Sherlock Holmes story where one discarded cigar butt reveals the identity of the murderer (nor, for that matter is real forensics and law).
In the mass media, reporters want certainties (and usually a different, contradictory certainty again the next day). Sean Plunket is one of the more egregious examples here: I've often heard him interviewing scientists and interpreting caution is deliberate shiftiness and then agressively pushing a point to extremes before implying that it's all a load of nonsense. Well, I suppose he could be worse - most reporters just grab the soundbites.
Behaviour like that and worse is why I've given up entirely on newspapers and TV and why I'm likely to give up on RNZ soon too.
-
adjusting the previous temperature records ... downwards
This is just laughable. Apart from the fact that the site is highly selective with some obvious lacunae (and Steve is trying to extrapolate the general from the specific... again), the implication is that 'adjustment' is and can only be imposed by some sinister conspirators.
Could it be because there are perfectly good reasons to recalibrate? Nah, because that wouldn't be evil.
Indeed, this tendentious, selective site is a perfect example of 'adjusted' information.
you're all taking one tiny piece of the puzzle,
Steve - you know why it's called *global* warming right?
No, they don't, or choose not to.
I see this again and again and again. A selective presentation of an isolated phenomenon from second-hand sources with all inconvenient data removed, scientific illiteracy, deliberate misinterpretation and then the paranoid overt claim or insinuation that all data supporting climate change is the result of some deliberate censorship while that denying it is an example of a brave independent researcher evading that censorship (or Men in Black or whatever), no matter how sloppy and disingenuous they may actually be.
You would think that people realise that life isn't The X-Files, but you just can't argue with a conspiracy theorist. If it rains, it's because an evil government conpiracy made it rain and they're going to make it rain again tomorrow... and when it doesn't rain the next day, the evil government conspiracy has concealed the evidence of rain to discredit the conspiracy theorist.
Tinfoil hats truly are impenetrable.
-
the pixies have never been confirmed
>but that would make the entire grunge movement >a hoax...
the Zen approach to consciousness
Nirvana?Maybe they have Bar Mitzvah instead of confirmation?
Humidity turns me into a disrag and all I can do is procrastinate and avoid all the course outlines that I have to read. Really interesting thread, this one. Must... find... energy... to... participate... again...
-
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian is indistinguishable from an asshole.
No argument there...
As a corollary to Clarke's third law, Gregory Benford proposed that technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
-
I am really enjoying it.
You're welcome. I'm enjoying it too, especially hearing a real engineer confronting theory.
Odd thread in which to have the conversation tho'
-
'lime green'?
Can't resist: 'gan green' maybe? All the bilious shades from infradig to ultraviolent perhaps? (Tip o' the hat to the shade of Douglas Adams.)
Anyway...
Kracklite, there's a place for thought experiments. I don't think this is an example of it.
Well, maybe thought experiments are koans. Deconstruction of their premises is productive and that can be their utility too. Knowledge is ultimately advanced and so on. Thought experiments aren't blueprints for actual experiments, but if there is a critical divergence between a thought experiment and the physical world, then something's awry with the thought experiment - fair enough.
Chomsky's take on it being nearly synonymous with recursive language use, is what separates us from other animals, and so it is also a huge part of our humanity.
I heard a Kim Hill interview before Xmas with someone who I'd describe as a fundamentalist anthropocentric behaviourist. His thesis was that animals 'don't think' and his response to any counter argument was to drawl 'Nonsense!' in his awful mid-Atlantic accent, without following up that assertion. What frustrated me was that he didn't define 'thinking' but implied that it was formal symbolic reasonic with grammar.
This seems to me a thoroughly ignorant position as it's becoming increasingly clear that consciousness has many modes and phases.
I think it's pretty much a continuum - that reason and intuition are tightly bound together, and intelligence spills over boundaries that are not defined by our skins.
That would be pretty much my position too.
That I think most thought is quite possibly undefinable in a practical sense and thus perfect communication is impossible does not mean that I think communicating and thinking are a waste of time
Alas, many postmodernists let their enthusiasm get the better of them in the 80s 'Science Wars'. I watched a documentary on Derrida a couple of years back, made by a very earnest American and the voice over was like a prayer. Derrida himself was a joker, running rings around his interviewer without them even knowing it. French philosophy in my opinion still bears the imprint of the Enlightenment salons hosted by the likes of Madame Pompadour where debate was a stand-up performance and eloquent hyperbole and wit were essential. Americans, basing their learnings on texts, tend to miss the point. Indeed, Sylvere Lotringer, publisher of the periodical Semiotext(e) in the States, complained at a lecture on a visit here that they misinterpreted Baudrillard (as did the Warchowski brothers).
So,
If I have to wear the label of modernist and incur the wrath of hundreds of thousands of angry post-whatnots in language I can't understand, so be it.
In fact what you're saying is quite congruent with what a lot of postmodernists have been saying (which is what I suggested above with the 'thus were launched...'). Donna Haraway's writing in particular, though you may find it hyperbolic, and the architect Daniel Libeskind's 1987 Venice Biennale installation, 'Three Lessons in Architecture' expressed the intermingling of thought and mechanism by reference to Mediaeval and Renaissance memory theatres.
-
I wonder if we really need them any more.
As any Pratchett fan knows, Librarians Rule OOK.
Dealing with librarians as a course co-ordinator (back when I had a full-time job), I had to arrange seminars for the librarians to explain laboriously to the godda- I mean sweet and fluffy undergrads the use of databases and search engines and so forth.
Their job has certainly expanded in the internet age rather than been made redundant. There's a vast academic Web (after all, that's what the WWW was intended for) accessible only through subscription and they spend a lot of their time managing that for university use - Is it worth investing in this e-journal subscription? Are people using it? How does the budget stretch? What about rights? Etc etc.
Then there's the reading and literacy programmes for young people and so on and so on. Really, it's a complex information resource management job and there's far more to it than just shelving!
I'd never piss off a librarian. Especially not a hairy orange one.