EEyore FYI - And the IPCC wants to appear balnced?

hehe.

But also take close note of the wording. More useful would have been, "I'm not paid by anyone to _express_ my opinion here."

Jon

It's only politicians, priests,and climate change scientists who get paid for their opinions.

The rest of us have to work for a living.

Misdirection, if I ever saw it.

Of course, as do I. Still doesn't address the point. Not that it matters.

Jon

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Fathead. Idiot. What I have persuaded myself is that there might be some reasonable doubt about our understanding of climate dynamics. What you have persuaded yourself is that you understand it to the level of prediction, and any disagreement implies stupidity.

No wonder you don't design electronics. No wonder you are so mean and rude. You know everything, can admit of no new possibilities, can tolerate no wild ideas, so have no remaining capacity for wonder or amazement. Your life is over, by choice. How very, very grim.

John

Then I'm afraid I missed your point.

I think you are right.

Jon

Doing research in climatology is a job like any other, with this distinction - if they screw up badly enough, they could be responsible for the extinction of the entire human race and every other animal bigger and slower breeding than a rabbit.

Lots of other people would have to contribute for the situation to get that bad. If the current concensus is correct - as seems very likely - the anti-climate change propagandists are increasing the risk. One hopes that it is a low risk, but we don't know enough to put plausible numbers on the risk.

As far as the money goes, regular climate change scientists get paid like any other academic researcher, mostly at universities, where they have tenure.

The anti-climate change propagandists aren't usually on regular wages. Some of the instituions that employ them have been around for a while

- the American Enterprise Insitute was set up for the tobacco companies to lie to the public about the risks of cigarette smoking, and when the bottom fell out of that market they went over to fabricating right-wing psuedo-economics until anthropogenic global warming created a new market for their deceptve services. Exxon-Mobil recently stopped subsidising anti-global warming propaganda, which must have reduced their turnover - other extractve industries still seem to be spending money on muddying the waters, but the irrational propaganda business isn't all that stable or predictable.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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Or so the author wanted us to believe

Actually, I won't read his work because my wife and I have a subscription to New Scientist, which we do read, including this article

"The wild claims of Svensmark do not mean that the idea of a link between cosmic rays and clouds is nonsense. It is taken seriously by a small number of scientists. A handful of studies using different methods hint at a very tiny effect, though more have found none."

Life too short to read everything, and Svensmark's work doesn't appear to be worthe getting hold of.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

From what?

Please be specific.

Thanks, Rich

Well, so have I. Just what in the world _IS_ your point?

Other than just another AGW rant, if you have one outside your faith.

Thanks, Rich

But you KNOW in the CORE of your BEING that CO2 _DOES_, right?

A simple Yes or No answer will suffice.

Thanks, Rich

Which you make clear by telling us that loads more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would be good for the world.

Not only is this wildly wrong, but the only other time I've seen it suggested was on a particularly shameless denialist web-site, which does suggest that you have been taken for sucker, rather than coming up with you own home-brewed nonsense.

Not quite right. Most of the disagreement here is ill-informed to the point of stupidity, and it saves time to point this out explicitly. And I'm well aware - as I've pointed out to you before - that I don't understand climate science as well as Don Klipstein, and I doubt if even he would claim to understand it to the level of prediction.

A false proposition

Grow up.

Childish exaageration.

Strange idea. I read science fiction for entertainment

Wild ideas aren't a problem. Silly ideas that fall at the first logical hurdle - your speciality - are a total waste of time.

I'll be amazed when someone does something useful with nanotechnology. I do wonder how long it is going to take before it happens.

It seems likely that my life as an employee is over, not by my choice. I'm trying to work out how much I can and should spend on getting electronic components and tools together to amuse myself. You'd probably find it grim, but I do seem to have more resources than my father could find when he finally had to accept retirement.

If you weren't - as usual - broadcasting one of your fatuous misconceptions, but had managed to chance on some element of reality in your analysis, there might be some truth in this particular proposition.

As it is, you've just advertised that your poor little ego has been bruised. What a pity.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

It isn't subject on which the core of my being is particularly vocal. Since the core of my being tells me that God exists and care about me, I don't take its opinions all that seriously.

As for the recent ice ages, the generally accepted explanation is the Milankovitch orbital inclination story, backed up by a variety of positive feedbacks, one of which involves CO2 coming out of solution in the oceans and providing some extra greenhouse warming.

Since I'm a card-carrying Popperian, I'm prepared to see this explanation falsified and replaced by a better one, but it hasn't happened yet, and there doesn't seem to be any sign of a better explanation on the horizon.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Do you REALLY not know about blogger/newsgroup shills? Whether activists, paid activists, secret stakeholders or people hired for outright dirty tricks, they do exist.

I assure the thought was both original and sincere. I *am* in the idea business, you know.

I sort of pioneered the first worthwhile instrumentation of the tomographic atom probe. But I counsel patience.

Since this is sci.electronics.design, why don't you either design something, or take your AGW religion to a more appropriate place. All you use it for is a substrate for tedious, fatheaded insults.

Neither of us can do anything about the climate. Both of us can design electronics. One of us does.

John

Karl is worth the time -- specifically, "Objective Knowledge" and "Conjectures and Refutations." I also liked Jacob Bronowski's "The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination." David Miller's "Critical Rationalism: a Restatement and Defence," (from Open Court Books) in

1994, is compact, up to date, and worth reading.

Jon

I actually know one of them personally, in fact. So I have direct knowledge they exist. It's surprising to me that some folks don't admit to themselves that it goes on.

Jon

R > It's only politicians, priests,and climate change scientists who get R > paid for their opinions. R > The rest of us have to work for a living.

G > Do you REALLY not know about blogger/newsgroup shills? G > Whether activists, paid activists, secret stakeholders G > or people hired for outright dirty tricks, they do exist.

J > I actually know one of them personally, in fact. =A0So I have direct J > knowledge they exist. =A0It's surprising to me that some folks don't J > admit to themselves that it goes on.

Which category? I hope their behavior disgusts you. Too many people condone or tolerate it because it serves THEIR position on an issue.

30 years ago a friend of mine admitted to going to the political caucus opposite their own political views. I remained friends but told him how despicable that was. He and I had opposite political views as well.

He switched political parties later too.

For the political left, global warming has been like a religion for 30 years.

More and more, conservatives are starting to pay more attention to the melting ice and acknowledging that we've got to try to change.

The problem now is that most of the production of material goods is no longer IN the United States anymore anyway and it's going to be extremely difficult to get the Chinese to take precautions that we never did when we were the big producers.

He works for the Israeli gov't. What I know about what he does is pretty obnoxious, I gather partly intended to start flame wars about Palestinians and keep serious discussions from lasting very long.

I have to admit that as a real person he is quite exceptional, though, and I have a great deal of sincere respect for other facets of who he is. It's just that he feels strongly about this particular work, too, and plays a hardball game at it. I'd rather he didn't, of course. But my opinion about it won't change anything.

On this narrow score, he serves a vaguely opposite position to my own. So he's not making things better by these actions, in my opinion. But, and I don't want to give away too much about him, he's gives a great deal elsewhere of his time and money that really counts for good -- and not just for his political allies. So like a lot of people, he's complex enough to be hard to box and categorize.

In the very late 1980s, when I started first reading some of the less gray literature on global warming and started focusing more on the peer-reviewed work product, it didn't look serious enough to worry me as I figured there was plenty of time for the difficult science to develop and people would be able to come to grips with the details without being forced on an impossible schedule. At that time, my own larger worry was ozone depletion, which is far, far easier to understand and there was direct observation of the reaction products predicted by theory. Yet DuPont had increased production by 1000 fold in a mere 15 years by then.

However, we've got agreements on the smaller molecules of concern and although there is no dramatic reduction, as yet, at least it seems to be waffling about on a slope of zero or so -- so nothing to go to sleep and forget about, but progress. China worries me there, because their leaders actually once promised refrigerators for everyone and when industrialized nations warned them about cheaper designs, their response was to ask if anyone would pay up the difference and to point out that everyone else had built up their economies on this cheap and efficient means of refrigeration, asking why they should then have to bear the costs of the mistakes of others. Still don't know where all that stands.

But global warming has moved much faster than early knowledge, interpreted conservatively (meaning: make a constant assumption if you don't know the slope, a linear assumption if you don't know the quadratic power's term, etc.), allowed for. Much, much faster than I would have ignorantly guessed, in fact. And the IPCC continues to hold to the more conservative side of the equations, right now, so nature will in some areas move along the outside track of their expectations.

The more serious problem, made even more serious by issues related to fresh drinking water in particular but also disease flow, insects, crops, etc., is something no more complex than human population and biodiversity. Already, humans and their domesticated animals account for about 99.5% of the total mass of land-based vertebrates. We won't have the force of will to do what else is needed if we wait much longer -- there will be just plain too little resource and too many people climbing on each others' backs to get it for them to afford much energy on solving greenhouse gas emissions.

An old textbook on history I read more than three decades ago while in school showed a 'liberated' gas chamber in WW II Germany, where the bodies were piled up in a pyramid in the middle of the room. The caption explained that there was a vent in the ceiling and that some of those in the room climbed onto the backs of others, trying to get closer to that vent and survive just a little longer. They all died in the end, of course. But some got a few seconds longer to live.

Imagine that pile as earth's species, with humans beings at the apex

-- having climbed on the backs of all other life in a vain attempt at survival. We need to take heed and learn to keep an incredibly complex, but necessary, tapestry of life on earth. It is the very diversity itself which provides the negative feedbacks which save all our lives here when change occurs.

Sometimes, I wonder if we are any smarter than bacteria.

Jon