Moderated Global Warming Discussion

[CapelDodger]

Could the thing in common that swings the balance of numbers be ownership by Rupert Murdoch.

I think it has an effect, if only as a brake on the increasing acceptance that something really is going on (and I don't mean a grand conspiracy ). His motivation is opposition to regulation in any form, of course.

 

[aleCcowaN]

I don't think Murdoch's influence on the masses can be easily dismissed. As a Brit I've had the opportunity to observe it longer than anybody but the Aussies and it's not been a pretty sight. Recent developments have been a setback for him but not as much as one would like.

But he hasn't had the social and cultural effect of a Hitler in Germany. Murdoch is just a big tree blocking the view and the real problem is the forest behind reaching as fas as the eye can see.

People tend to assume that newspapers can't just make stuff up (contrary to all evidence, of course, but that's people for you, sapiens sapiens my arse) so they tend to legitimise even silly ideas. Strike up a conversation at, say, a bus-stop and this becomes clear. Of course, in the UK such conversations tend to be about the weather and it's a short step from that to climate change and one's "beliefs" about it.

Here people tend to assume that newspapers, media and politicians twist the truth just to gather grist for their own mills.

What I find much more interesting than the masses (bless 'em) are the amateur activists who populate the comments sections on blogs and media sites. The main bloggers are easy to understand; they're professionals (such as Morano) or crave the attention (Watts, McIntyre). It's the tireless angries posting themselves to an early grave who are hard to explain. There are enough observations for me to form a sort of empirical mental model of their behaviour but the underlying mechanisms remain a bit mysterious.

The answer is in behaviourism: "the image of the enemy". They don't essentially differ from hooligans who support the Scheicht-ham Hotspur and hate the Assenal. Like a muscle, hate is trained daily and little adrenalin shots become addictive. We also have here one or two "warmers" that some time have indulged such a behaviour on themselves.

In other words, Anglo-Saxon hypocrisy. Perhaps there's less of it elsewhere; I'm not in a good position to judge, obviously . I have noticed that my French and Spanish friends tend to be quite open about just not caring but then that's probably be saying more about me than about the French and Spanish in general. They're as contemptuous of the Catholic Church as I am, for instance. And they're educated.

I knew I am the type of your friends. To be contemptuous of the Catholic Church is the national sport. "I believe in God but not in Church" is the motto of two thirds of the population, including the numerous Atheists. You don't hear that from local protestants as they'd be able to walk away if they wanted.

Speaking of the national prejudices regarding personal and public morality and behaviour that are so strong that they created such a strong AGW denialism (I consider it to be fact), my parents were living in the States for a short while years before my birth and while my father got his specialization my mother worked in an important huge company where she was forced to eat fish every Friday at lunch because she was a Catholic. They wouldn't allow for she to do different in spite of her protests -she was a typical Catholic- and that she explained that Argentines are excused from avoiding red meat but on Holly Friday as established by a papal bull from colonial times. They considered it to be a fake argument to avoid complying "the rules". And we are speaking of John Hancock Insurance, Boston and 1958.

The same way culturaly-catholics are enforced the ritual so they believe whatever they want in a way they can feel close to God or an impersonal spiritual force and give a darn about the church, what is not demoralizing nor degrading, my understanding is that the evangelical take of the protestant approach of reading the scriptures and develop a personal relation with "our saviour" make them feel they walk away from god if they don't comply with what the church (congregation) expects. So, voilá, they are born those alignments by interpretation and that need of faking and twisting the facts to sustain their beliefs so typical and so exploited by groups of interest.

I know I'm stretching too far my knowledge of the anglo-saxon culture, but articulated and extended denialism being a characteristic of that culture and fading away in the rest of the world is a fact. A fact that deserves to be analysed in the context of a AGW discussion.

And about Ruperto and certain world-views, well, as many denialists use to remember "the sky is blue and correlation is not causation".

 

[Dancing David]

Certainly the effect of FOX news can not be denied...

 

[Malcolm Kirkpatrick]

Any cheap fix that works will be embraced.
There are none.

This is explicitly not the case, given Mr. Alley's stated reason for his rejection, that ocean fertilization is a temporary fix. Dyson similarly observed that terrestrial sequestration in soil would moderate atmospheric CO₂ increase.

 

[Malcolm Kirkpatrick]

Alec,

Malcolm,
you started a raid on the field of marine biology¹ ...
They remain for a reason: They address obvious blunders in your posts₂...Nonetheless, I still think you are the 1,000,000th smartest person among all people who live a thousand miles around your home. And this one would be suspected as sarcasm.₃

1. Megalodon brought it up.
2. That's your explanation. Mine is moderator bias.
3. Here's a test. How long does that comment remain ("address the message, not the messenger" they tell me when they delete my posts).

 

[Malcolm Kirkpatrick]

An interesting analysis. I think it goes some way to explaining why the average Joe and Joanne might not "believe" in AGW, but not why some people get so exercised about it - the types who fill up Guardian comments with frothing fury whenever the subject is even mentioned. They identify intimately with their worldview, and it's a worldview which is undermined by AGW.

Libertarians and laissez faire types believe that the ideal economy is the sum of two-party contracts freely entered into; all of their analysis is based on that axiom. Externalities and third-party effects simply cannot be incorporated, and so must not exist.

In Europe it's very clear that the further right a party is, the more likely it is to make AGW denial a central plank of its policy (it's a certainty with unashamed fascists). I really don't know why that should be. Old-time Marxists have a big problem with it as well, because there's no room in their analysis for anything but capital and labour.

We have been over this. It's not in dispute. The point applies just as much to the proponents of AGW theory. One test of the strength of the (political cause of belief) hypothesis that I already suggested is the thought experiment: what if astronomers detected an asteroid that they predicted would hit Earth in ten years. You'd get general agreement on collective action. The difference between agreement on collective action in that case and not in the AGW case is the degree to which the science is accepted. Celestial mechanics is well-enough understood to allow probes to intersect the orbit of Pluto. AGW theorists have to adjust thermometer readings and exclude adverse tree ring samples to get agreement with their models.

 

[Malcolm Kirkpatrick]

Since this has already been explained in the thread, the challenge that Malcolm ran from should be really easy for him now. I'll just ask this:

Malcolm, would you still¹ assert - knowing that we know that it's false, and seeing as you are unable² to present evidence for it - that Freeman Dyson disputes the physics underpinning AGW theory?

1. "Still"? I never did. If you go back, I said that Dyson's position was that the concern was exaggerated. "The polar bears will be just fine".
2. It was easy enough to wait. Someone on your side of this discussion already did that work. I was going to hunt for his WSJ or NYT article, but since you guys found it in Wikipedia, I'll just leave it at that.

 

[aleCcowaN]

Alec,1. Megalodon brought it up.
2. That's your explanation. Mine is moderator bias.
3. Here's a test. How long does that comment remain ("address the message, not the messenger" they tell me when they delete my posts).

1) And, what matters who said what first? Why the raid if that is way out your sphere of knowledge?

And certainly your argument was that "C02 will eventually be biologically sequestered" without even bothering in analysing it deeply and adding "in the meantime, buckle up!".

You're line of argumentation was a combination of "in the end everything will be well" and assorted "cool news" in shorter terms which were strongly contested.

The bottom line is you can't -or you shouldn't- start a lot of arguments just to speculate if any of them sticks.

3) You fail to see when something is essential, complementary or, on the contrary, the only thing there. I had recently one of my posts deleted because it only addressed the posters manners. Others did worse but kept it on the subject's track so their posts remain. I'm not whining about.
2) bias, conspiracy and similar terms emerge from your "pen" here and there when you can't control what happens or you can't understand why it happens. I only can say "Grow up!"

There are multiple questions you asked and they were answered but there are another lot that you were asked and you simply disregarded. We have now to go back to what you haven't answered before moving to your next questions. You claim a fair playfield. So we do.

 

[aleCcowaN]

We have been over this. It's not in dispute. The point applies just as much to the proponents of AGW theory. One test of the strength of the (political cause of belief) hypothesis that I already suggested is the thought experiment: what if astronomers detected an asteroid that they predicted would hit Earth in ten years. You'd get general agreement on collective action. The difference between agreement on collective action in that case and not in the AGW case is the degree to which the science is accepted. Celestial mechanics is well-enough understood to allow probes to intersect the orbit of Pluto. AGW theorists have to adjust thermometer readings and exclude adverse tree ring samples to get agreement with their models.

You just didn't address CapelDodger's post. Did you read it? Your "It's not in dispute" contradicts your own messages.

 

[Malcolm Kirkpatrick]

Malcolm Kirkpatrick, you may be ignorant of a little thing called evolution and the role it has in making animals such as Foraminifera adapt to environmental changes such as the gradual change in CO2 levels in the Cambian over millions of years.

I was a Biology major before I switched to Math. I read G.G. Simpson (The Meaning of Evolution, Horses, This View of Life) in my teens and Darwin (The Voyage of the Beagle, Coral Reefs, On the Formation of Vegetable Mold through Action of Earthworms, On the Expression of Emotions in Animals and Man, the Autobiography), Dawkins (The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, The Ancestor's Tale), and Ridley (Genome, The Agile Gene, The Red Queen, The Origins of Virtue) more recently. Two factors that affect the pace of evolutionary change are the amount of material (population size) and the length of the life cycle. Both considerations imply that plankton will adapt fairly quickly. As I said earlier, they've been through periods of high CO₂ (and rapidly rising or falling CO₂) before, and adapted.

You may be ignorant of a little thing called "civility", but moderators aren't. They just apply the rules selectively.

 

[aleCcowaN]

1. "Still"? I never did. If you go back, I said that Dyson's position was that the concern was exaggerated. "The polar bears will be just fine".

No, in fact, you really didn't. The problem here is that most of the fellows are well versed in science but not in dialectics (though for that sake these threads are more strict than a drill sergeant). In fact you conceded that by playing the induced inference game when you replied bit_pattern's message in your post #5588.

You simply took a detour that reads “I give weight to opinions from Matt Ridley and Freeman Dyson because proponents of the AGW theory insist that the basic physics is "rock solid" ” and you were asked more than twice about the same and forgot to answer. That is just manipulation of the discourse. The question remains, can you reason scientifically? I don't think you can maybe because science is something way out of your experience and perhaps you are some kind of a lawyer. Believe me, that is not "addressing the arguer" but just trying to explain to you how "adversarial" look your paragraphs here. Science has a way to arrive to the "scientific truth" and there's a bonafide component in it that is impossible to disregard. On the contrary "adversary" tries to win no matter what. If within the adversary system of justice, you have some rules about what you can do to "win", and the result will be "the truth in the record of the case". They are to different kind of "truths".

My take on this whole subject is "like denialists can't take away the scientific truth to date, with its inner dynamics, they try to make it and adversarial process so they can present a state of "record of the case not closed yet". That's why the constant snow job that can't erode but does spoil the visual.

 

[CapelDodger]

But he hasn't had the social and cultural effect of a Hitler in Germany. Murdoch is just a big tree blocking the view and the real problem is the forest behind reaching as fas as the eye can see.

We certainly shouldn't exaggerate Murdoch's influence. His first objective is achieved if he can persuade politicans that he can deliver the masses - or turn them away - at the polls. That's when he takes effect and can further his megalomaniacal programme.

I mean that literally : Murdoch is a megalomaniac. He checks every box.

Here people tend to assume that newspapers, media and politicians twist the truth just to gather grist for their own mills.

It's the same here but they still balk at the idea that they just make ◊◊◊◊ up.

The answer is in behaviourism: "the image of the enemy". They don't essentially differ from hooligans who support the Scheicht-ham Hotspur and hate the Assenal.

They called us the Yids, we called them the Nazis, we were both right in the main. Not that I follow football, you understand, but one does naturally identify with one's peer-group .

Like a muscle, hate is trained daily and little adrenalin shots become addictive. We also have here one or two "warmers" that some time have indulged such a behaviour on themselves.

There's some discussion on these lines at SkS http://www.skepticalscience.com/Vivid-demonstration-knee-jerk-science-rejection.html (you may have seen it). Comment 39 by Kevin C is worth a look.

"When communities face problems they tend to find outlets for that pressure, in the form of a response which is some modified form of violence. Often this involves the creation of a victim or class of victims (the scapegoat) on which the problems can be blamed. To avoid compromising our own humanity, dehumanisation of the victims is usually a part of the process. The victimisation process release the tension and builds common cause within the community. We all do this, it's our anthropology."

"The paper is very easy to play as a tool for dehumanising skeptics: 'They can't help being skeptics, it is because they are psychologically predisposed to conspiracy theories'. Put like that you can see why it would go down badly. Worse, the more insecure members of our community can use it to reason 'we are rational thinking individuals, they are controlled by their psychology'. That the 'controlled by their psychology' argument cuts both ways is no doubt obvious to a psychologist like Lewandowsky, but it is a common mistake."

I think he's right that we should not fall into dehumanising any group.

I knew I am the type of your friends.

I never doubted it.

... Argentines are excused from avoiding red meat but on Holly Friday as established by a papal bull from colonial times.

The Church was more understanding of economic realities in those days, and more flexible (for a consideration, you understand, a dip of the beak in that colonial gold). The cattle ranchers had connections, and with any luck a cardinal or two in the family.

My grandfather was a sailer and Boner's Airs was one of his regular runs, shipping out sheet metal (for tins) and shipping back corned beef (in tins). Capitalism at its most efficient .

They considered it to be a fake argument to avoid complying "the rules". And we are speaking of John Hancock Insurance, Boston and 1958.

"Boston" explains a lot of it, and 1958 most of the rest. That and US Americans all being crazy, which goes without saying.

 

[aleCcowaN]

You may be ignorant of a little thing called "civility", but moderators aren't. They just apply the rules selectively.

You may add to it a couple of phrases and discover the practical synthesis of antimatter.

I was a Biology major before I switched to Math. I read G.G. Simpson (The Meaning of Evolution, Horses, This View of Life) in my teens and Darwin (The Voyage of the Beagle, Coral Reefs, On the Formation of Vegetable Mold through Action of Earthworms, On the Expression of Emotions in Animals and Man, the Autobiography), Dawkins (The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, The Ancestor's Tale), and Ridley (Genome, The Agile Gene, The Red Queen, The Origins of Virtue) more recently. Two factors that affect the pace of evolutionary change are the amount of material (population size) and the length of the life cycle. Both considerations imply that plankton will adapt fairly quickly. As I said earlier, they've been through periods of high CO₂ (and rapidly rising or falling CO₂) before, and adapted.

And you had nothing to say about reproduction being sexual or asexual.

Could you describe the process that makes a polar bear to become black and then again white? In case you don't know what I am talking about, I'm not joking. Not by dyeing but by dying and surviving, as ole good evolution is: Could you describe the process that makes polar bears to become black and then again white? Or you are going to repeat "polar bears will be OK"?

 

[Malcolm Kirkpatrick]

Your "It's not in dispute" contradicts your own messages.

Not at all. I have consistently agreed that people accept a lower burden of proof for assertions that support their preconceptions (or interests) than those assertions that are contrary to their preconceptions or interests. To say "free marketeers are over-represented in the class of AGW skeptics" is impliitly to assert that socialists are overrepresented among AGW believers. You cannot have it otherwise, mathematically. Overrepresentation in one direction is just as much evidence for political determination of belief as is overrepresentation in the other direction.

 

[Malcolm Kirkpatrick]

...Could you describe the process that makes a polar bear to become black and then again white? In case you don't know what I am talking about, I'm not joking. Not by dyeing but by dying and surviving, as ole good evolution is: Could you describe the process that makes polar bears to become black and then again white? Or you are going to repeat "polar bears will be OK"?

1. Offspring resemble parents but not exactly (traditional. Known for thousands of years).
2. More are born than can survive to reproduce (Malthus).
3. Heritable differences influence reproductive success (Darwin).
4. The Earth is very olf (Lyell).
That's enough. Given that, you'd need Divine intervention to keep evolution from happening.

 

[jimbob]

You may add to it a couple of phrases and discover the practical synthesis of antimatter.



And you had nothing to say about reproduction being sexual or asexual.

Could you describe the process that makes a polar bear to become black and then again white? In case you don't know what I am talking about, I'm not joking. Not by dyeing but by dying and surviving, as ole good evolution is: Could you describe the process that makes polar bears to become black and then again white? Or you are going to repeat "polar bears will be OK"?

1. Offspring resemble parents but not exactly (traditional. Known for thousands of years).
2. More are born than can survive to reproduce (Malthus).
3. Heritable differences influence reproductive success (Darwin).
4. The Earth is very olf (Lyell).
That's enough. Given that, you'd need Divine intervention to keep evolution from happening.

And what about the substantive point that this is a long term process, and the polar bears mightn't have time to adapt. Meanwhile the polar bears will end up intruding on the environment that Grizzlies are already adapted to, so will tend to lose out in competition with them.

 

[aleCcowaN]

Not at all. I have consistently agreed that people accept a lower burden of proof for assertions that support their preconceptions (or interests) than those assertions that are contrary to their preconceptions or interests.

Once again you and the precious art of replying a different thing or moving the goal posts.

To say "free marketeers are over-represented in the class of AGW skeptics" is impliitly to assert that socialists are overrepresented among AGW believers. You cannot have it otherwise, mathematically. Overrepresentation in one direction is just as much evidence for political determination of belief as is overrepresentation in the other direction.

And you switched to math? The phrase "free marketeers are over-represented in the class of AGW skeptics" only means that you find a much higher percentage of them among AGW skeptics than among the whole society. What has that to do with with socialists among the crowds of AGW "believers"? How does your mind work? Is everybody forced to 1) be a free marketeer or a socialist 2) have an opinion about AGW? Your phrase "you cannot have it otherwise, mathematically" is a travesty!

I already told you "it was a case of ceteris paribus on demand" and I add "it was a case of population exhaustion on demand", the kind of thing WE correct in our students for them to progress. Are you sure you want to keep saying you have some sort of education in math following a major in Biology? (you said you "switched to" it but you didn't say you study it). Have you ever worked in the Math area? Education? Uh?

 

[aleCcowaN]

1. Offspring resemble parents but not exactly (traditional. Known for thousands of years).
2. More are born than can survive to reproduce (Malthus).
3. Heritable differences influence reproductive success (Darwin).
4. The Earth is very olf (Lyell).
That's enough. Given that, you'd need Divine intervention to keep evolution from happening.

You are not answering the question at all but with general knowledge of the discipline technically equivalent to a high-end platitude (there are more fabric to cut in there, but that's another business).

I asked how polar bears (ursus maritimus) become black and then become white again. Feel free to imagine a region of the world where being white is an advantage and some change makes the region different and now being black is an advantage -imagine colour is the only thing that divide famine from success, all the other environmental and systemic considerations are ceteris paribus for this sake-. Imagine that later the first conditions return and now it is essential again to be white.

All these "things" have names, but I'm not using them to avoid you or others to look them up in Wikipedia and other sources of prêt à porter intellectual rags. In this very experiment I'm more like "hey kids, your teacher said you are a great crowd, let's sing".

C'mon, it's simple! Allow yourself to speculate about. No problem, no shame, if you are honest. It's just to trigger reflection.

 

[Malcolm Kirkpatrick]

You are not answering the question at all but with general knowledge of the discipline technically equivalent to a high-end platitude...

The general outline of the theory suffices to answer the question, in general.
"Platitude"? Certainly. That's what a simple (in broad outline) and generally-accepted theory will resemble. Darwin wrote somewhere that he worried that he'd hypnotized himself and was not sufficiently open to doubt about his theory when he found himself seeing confirmation for the theory everywhere he looked.

 

[Acleron]

I was a Biology major before I switched to Math. I read G.G. Simpson (The Meaning of Evolution, Horses, This View of Life) in my teens and Darwin (The Voyage of the Beagle, Coral Reefs, On the Formation of Vegetable Mold through Action of Earthworms, On the Expression of Emotions in Animals and Man, the Autobiography), Dawkins (The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, The Ancestor's Tale), and Ridley (Genome, The Agile Gene, The Red Queen, The Origins of Virtue) more recently. Two factors that affect the pace of evolutionary change are the amount of material (population size) and the length of the life cycle. Both considerations imply that plankton will adapt fairly quickly. As I said earlier, they've been through periods of high CO₂ (and rapidly rising or falling CO₂) before, and adapted.

You may be ignorant of a little thing called "civility", but moderators aren't. They just apply the rules selectively.

The rate of phenotypic evolution of calcium shelled plankton is impossible to predict. Lenski has been tracking E. coli for a relatively simple 2 gene mutation and it took nearly 25 years of continual culture to observe it. We are talking about a catastrophe that will take merely four times as long.

But worse than that, you will know that evolution is undirected. What if the calcium sequestering organisms mutate to lose the carbonate shells in response to increases in acidity? Then the problem becomes exacerbated, the oceans will then produce CO2. Relying on evolution to solve these problems is foolish.

And you seem to think that uninformed people with an agenda match up to full blown scientists. They don't for many reasons. If you had continued with biology and entered into a research project, you would have become aware of the immense efforts, scientists take to make sure that the effects they observe and the hypotheses they generate are correct. They have to publish their work in peer reviewed articles and again you probably don't know that research scientists are savage with each other, especially if they can spot somebody has got it wrong. The average research scientist is under continuous review from his superiors who are anxious to avoid their name being besmirched by bad science, by their co-workers who are often in competition with them and by their juniors who are looking to make a name for themselves. All this is before they publish to the wider world. Having been put through that mill, there is still room to doubt somebody's work but in the area of climate change, so many people have replicated analyses and acquired new data that confirms those previous results the science is as rock solid as it is possible to be. When a scientist is found to have falsified results the response is draconian, they are unlikely to work in research ever again.

Second raters like McIntyre whose main argument is the conspiracy theory don't match up at all. And having been found out several times in fallacious arguments, what happens to him? Does the AGW denier community turf him out? Of course not, they still quote is rubbish. If the problems were not so serious, McIntyre would be laughable.