"Skepticism that fails to account for evidence is no virtue."-AmMetSoc to Perry

Since it makes no difference anyway, please quit spamming the group. Go away you POS.

Skeptimism is a permanent virtue in science. Especially when there's no evidence.

Modern day climate "scientists" are nothing more than the equivalent of Philipp Lenard in Einstein's day... scumbag profiteers.

(I'm presently reading Walter Isaacson's "Einstein, His Life And Universe" ;-) ...Jim Thompson

History Channel just did a mini-series called "Genius" about Einsteins life, pretty good for TV stuff. He was a lot more interesting than I ever would have thought!

Not that Philip was necessarily a profiteer, but he was a true scumbag.

John

John Larkin perfectly illustrates the ignorant sceptic postion. Because he can't be bothered to look at the evidence for anthopogenic global warming, he feels happy to say that there isn't any.

This does advertise the fact that he is a complacent ignoramus, but he's ignorant enough to believe the nonsense he gets fed by the Murdoch media from denialist web-sites, which does emphasise both his ignorance and his complacency.

nt of being too late anyway.

Then Jim should have noticed that Philipp Lenard was first and foremost an anti-Semite - and disliked Einstein's ideas on that basis. Profiteering did n't come into it - though dissapproving of Jews did cut out a number of com petitors for the top jobs in German academia.

Modern climate scientist aren't known for evaluating their colleagues on th e basis of their ethnic origins, and the residual denialists are a lot less numerous than National Socialists were in Germany.

Jim is gullible enough to swallow the conspiracy theory about anthropogenic global warming, which does happen to be one of the more absurd conspiracy theories available.

If there is a conspiracy going on, it is between the various members of the fossil carbon extraction industry to promote climate science denial, but s ince this process is very well documented, it's a fact rather than any kid of theory.

Jim's opinion has been bought, along with John Larkin's. Neither of them ca n do critical thinking, so they can be bought quite cheaply.

Yep. I found the series very interesting. Apparently my wife tipped off the oldest daughter and she gave me the book for Father's Day. ...Jim Thompson

Lenard "profited" from his position of head of science for the NAZI party. ...Jim Thompson

nt of being too late anyway.

Stay in your vermin filled cesspool and shut-up. Don't try to enter the U.S . Boy, 10, hit by car in Plano after chasing soccer ball into roadway Texas Rangers investigating Plano gas station shooting Woman killed in Plano multi-vehicle wreck involving big rig Joggers, bikers and firefighters save couple at Plano pond Plano police officer shoots, kills gunman at crowded gas station Police fear more victims after Texas man charged with killing 2nd ... Man killed by Plano officer had felony convictions, deported twice Police fear rape-murder suspect left trail of victims before Plano, Fort .. .

Plano firefighters pull 2 from vehicle that plunged into neighborhood ... Third Suicide Of Year Casts Shadow At Plano Senior High Dozens of motorists rescued from high water after rush-hour deluge ...

There are plenty of smart Conservative guys like Rex Tillerson who aren't denialists, they understand the science is legit, but simply don't care.

I'm always skeptical of the notion that these guys were "bought" or don't use critical thinking or don't understand the science. They just don't give a shit. That's all.

The problem is that the "science" and the "evidence" are computer simulations of doubtful accuracy.

The real danger to humanity is not CO2 and not a little warming, it's another mini (or full-bore) ice age.

Or worse, "another mini (or full-bore)" progressive age >:-} ...Jim Thompson

And how much doubt would you assign to a worst-case scenario, numerically? 10% chance? 5% chance? 1% chance? 0.00001% chance?

If I had some oracle that had a track record of making correct predictions (you know, like science) that told me there was a 0.00001% chance my house would burn down tomorrow I probably wouldn't worry about doing anything out of the ordinary. If the oracle told me there was a between 5 and 10% chance, for my part I'd definitely be taking it seriously and considering my options.

All depends on how heavily you want to weight what science tells you vs. paid industry hoes tell you. I'm skeptical of any climate scientist claiming 100% worst-case. I'm also _really_ skeptical of paid hoes claiming it's 0.00001%.

PS: I'm talking real-money industry hookers, not the small-time grant-writing hooking that everyone in every field in academia does from time to time. Pretty sure most climatologists were not exactly making baller money of their portfolio of 100,000 Solyndra junk bonds.

Please provide a list of the people you claim are paid hoes - and who exactly they are paid by.

Some of the skeptics that I have followed were regular university folk who made $0 from any oil or coal industry 'donations'. In several cases peer pressure has pushed them into silence on climate issues.

On the other hand many of the pushers of CO2 as evil are doing quite well financially - An ex-VP, and a tacky science commentator (Bill Nye "(Wikipedia) in 1986, Nye left Boeing to pursue comedy, writing and performing jokes and bits for the local sketch television show Almost Live!, where he would regularly conduct wacky science experiments. ") neither of whom have any formal training in climate science at all.

There is a lot of money (grants, speaking tours, etc.) in supporting the current religion that CO2 is bad/evil that people don't want to (or can't) stop the gravy train.

John

"Peer pressure" often pushes all types of ordinary people, cranks and crackpots, and fringe academics making $0 from anyone alike into silence on all sorts of topics, like Holocaust revisionism, intelligent design, the origin of man from descendants of ancient astronauts, flat-Earthing, the abiogenetic origins of petroleum, P = NP!, six-dimensional time cubes, and the existence or non-existence of a personal God.

The fact that such pressure happens is not at all evidence of any conspiracy to suppress the epistemological truth of . Of course, that it occurs isn't intrinsically evidence against their truth, either. It's just something that people in societies tend to do.

I think part of the reason there are so few skeptics in academia and so many in industry that to obtain the results they do, that white is black and up is down, essentially involves the claim that they're privy to the One True Model or One True Data and what everyone else who isn't a skeptic is using is wrong. Not just "oh we slipped a decimal point in this one equation" wrong, but upside-down wrong to the point it would pretty much require active malice. It's more-or-less a de-facto accusation that one's colleagues are engaged in a massive cover-up and conspiracy to manipulate the data. It's pretty scandalous, if you think about it - no wonder they're not popular.

Of course industry, politicians, and right-wing think tanks accuse academia of this constantly, but they're immune to the consequences. In the academic world such accusations would be a very serious matter bordering on blood libel, and require some pretty serious evidence to back it up. The skeptics in academia don't seem to have the balls to do this with any consistency, however. They just slink away and moan about how wronged and mis-understood they are.

Yep, a few slimeballs will always find a way to make big bucks off just about anything. So what?

There's a lot of money in grants and speaking tours? Maybe for Bill Nye or Al Gore, but gee whiz if a regular academic were going to sell out their integrity for cash there are a thousand other gravy trains that would be more profitable any day of the week.

If I were going to sell myself out I sure as hell wouldn't do it for academic grant and book tour money - I'd have demanded a _lot_ more.

em can do critical thinking, so they can be bought quite cheaply.

dels-vs-reality.jpg

The evidence for climate change comes in two parts - the historical record of what the climate has been, which consists of things like ice core data ( which goes back nearly a million years) and undisturbed lake and ocean sedi ments (which are rare, but go back further) - and current observations.

None of this is simulated, and while making sense of the data does involve a certain amount of computer modelling to pull everything together, the acc uracy of the proess is clearly adequate to the task.

The proposition that we need to do something about climate change does depe nd on predicting what going to happen in the future, which does involved co mputer modelling, but the particular climate models that John Larkin has dr agged up don't have an explicit provenance. One of them does have John R. C hristy's name on it

He's a well known climate sceptic - apparently because he's a born again Ch ristian who can't believe that his god would be mean enough to give us all that coal and not let us burn it all.

More disinterested observers think that the IPCC's range of models brackete d the last ten years or so of global warming tolerably well.

The kind of idiot who thinks that the little ice age was a global - rather than a north atlantic effect - isn't to be trusted.

In reality, variations in solar output are tiny, and have very little effec t on the average surface temperature of the earth.

The current atmospheric CO2 level is about 410 ppm. During ice ages it's ab out 180 ppm. Quite how John Larkin imagines the atmospheric CO2 level is go ing to get itself down to 180 ppm is left as an exercise for the reader. It 's hard enough to work out how it gets there from the 270 ppm that characte rises a typical interglacial.

John Larkin is grossly ignorant about anthropogenic global warming, and wha t he thinks he knows he seems to get from the Murdoch media and the deniali st websites that they have been instructed to favour.

His grasp of what might constitute "evidence" is non-existent.

-models-vs-reality.jpg

It's a bit too long to list here. If in boubt about any particular name go to

who list all the more prominent denialists, and who pays them

People do tend to get cross with you when you won't pay attention to the ev idence. When 97% of the top 300 climate scientists find the evidence for cl imate change convincing - and the ten hold-outs don't seem to have rational objections to the evidence, the suspicion has to be that anybody who doens 't get it has to be a bit stupid.

is an example of an equally unqualified character on the other side. Of cou rse Watts gets money from the Heartlands Institute.

There's a whole lot more money available from the Heartlands Institute. Gra nt money depends on proposing a research project that is scientifically int eresting, and it isn't that generous. The Heartlands Institute pays rather better for just showing up and giving a talk (if the message is denialist).

Climate scientist get their grants from the same grant-giving organsiations that support all scientific research, and get them on the same basis as ev erybody else in science.

The Heartlands Institute has a narrower focus.