OT: but frequently seen here - A PNAS paper on why conservatives devalue climate change and what can be done to cure them.

te:

um argument is relevant and valid. The business of explaining the human sus ceptiblity to self-interested nonsense is of interest to science, and it's perfectly valid to point out when it's going on.

es ad hominem arguments all the time and yet he can not point out anyone wh ose mind has been changed.

Or logic, given the argument he just laid out above. Which explains a lot.

Focusing on whether a person is good or bad does not affect the truth or falsity of something they said.

Cheers, James Arthur

It's also often NOT what you would think! E.g., the "customer service counter" at most Post Offices typically exhibits wait times that are annoying; because the Post Office is EFFICIENT in that regard (putting the least amount of resources to that task to ensure they don't LOSE business by making the wait times longer than folks will bear yet not shortening them by adding extra staff/cost)

That's what experiments in general, and NIF in particular, are for: to improve theory and models of stuff that we don't understand.

Now, NIF design is not the political

They built the machine and learned things and got net energy gain. They got it right.

We are fortunate that

NIF was really built to keep a new generation of bomb designers interested. Practical fusion generation, and open scientific research, are secondary.

Nature cooperates: It doesn't take long to demonstrate that climate models are incorrect:

Note that when the models are new, they match recent data pretty well. What they don't match for long is future data. That's because you can always curve-fit old noisy data, but you can't predict future noisy data. Any model that doesn't curve-fit past data (and that doesn't predict warming) will of course not be published, so almost all published models are wrong.

On Jan 1, 2017, John Larkin wrote (in article):

But not at first. Initially, it did not work, not following the very extensive simulation model that predicted success from the start. It took years of focused effort, comparing simulation results with test results, to get to optical break-even. This is the way it usually goes with simulations.

True, and it strengthens the case about the dangers of believing simulations absent test data. These models were developed by the world?s top experts in these models, which benefited from decades of nuclear weapon R&D, backed up by hundreds of nuclear warhead tests.

If these experts could not get it right the first time, who can?

It?s too easy to explain such things away, given the complexity of climate.

The problem is that one must wait long enough that it becomes completely irrefutable that the models are wrong, and not go bankrupt in the meantime. Physics has a long history of just this, even though they at least can do experiments. The experiments that are in the textbooks are precisely those that settled the issue, at long last.

Yes. And climate data is noisy, and unfolds at a glacial pace.

Joe Gwinn

On Monday, January 2, 2017 at 2:16:15 AM UTC+11, snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com wrote :

e:

to be fixed. Burning gasoline in internal combustion engines is not a habit we can sustain. You may not like electric cars, but your kids are going to have to learn to live with them.

stry propaganda to realise why, but they can't fool enough people for all t hat long.

Quixotic idiot. Why should I waste time on personal trivia that might put b ack the climate catastrophe by a couple of milliseconds.

The only kind of pressure that will create the scale of change that we need - no more coal-fired electricity generating stations or internal combustio n engine powered cars - is society-wide collective pressure.

Sadly, this rings your political alarm bells, and you'd prefer to see the p lanet go through a rerun of the Eocene-Paleocene Thermal Maximum than count enance any kind of effective political action.

It's the same kind of political idiocy playing out in scientific decision-m aking that "The Merchants of Doubt" documents.

It's now common knowledge that smoking tobacco damages your health - though a number of people died because they weren't informed as fast and thorough ly as they might have been.

Losing Florida to rising sea levels may be a more dramatic consequence of t he current brand of politically motivated lunacy.

te:

um argument is relevant and valid. The business of explaining the human sus ceptiblity to self-interested nonsense is of interest to science, and it's perfectly valid to point out when it's going on.

They might not work when they aren't relevant. They are relevant here.

anyone whose mind has been changed.

Dan can't list anybody whose mind has been changed the other way by his str ictly logical (if depressingly ill-informed) arguments.

Not a particularly insightful claim about somebody who did science degree i n chemistry.

It does rather ignore that fact that I didn't do any electronics course in college either. In reality, I was always interested in psychology, read a f air bit about it, and ended up married to a fairly able psychologist.

I've probably met more famous psychologists than I've met famous electronic engineers - Bill Percival of Percival's distributed amplifier does seem to be the high point there, while Steve Pinker would be the only psychologist that you might have heard of.

rote:

inum argument is relevant and valid. The business of explaining the human s usceptiblity to self-interested nonsense is of interest to science, and it' s perfectly valid to point out when it's going on.

They don't work when they aren't relevant. My claim is that they are releva nt here, and Dan hasn't said a thing to invalidate that claim, which makes his own argument as hominem - at best. Making an unsupported and unjustifie d assertion isn't actually constructing an argument.

anyone whose mind has been changed.

t.

James Arthur uses logic as drunk uses a lamp-post - more for support than i llumination.

I didn't take any undergraduate courses in logic, psychology or electronics . I did take one course in computer programming which did cover formal logi c.

I read a lot of stuff that my undergraduate courses didn't cover, and have kept on doing that since.

James Arthur was taught a particularly silly brand of economics in his unde rgraduate courses, and hasn't noticed the embedded fallacy yet.

The point about the effectiveness of denialist propaganda is not that it is aimed at "good" or "bad" people, but at people who are more or less suscep tible to certain classes of deceptive information.

James Arthur is susceptible to denialist propaganda because it comes packag ed with a bunch of political assumptions that play well with the people he socialises with. If he ever unleashed his capacity for critical thinking, h e'd upset most of his friends.

Dan shows no sign of any talent for critical thinking at all. This would be an ad hominem observation, if Dan weren't - intellectually - sub-human.

In your dreams! Where are you getting the water from?

over

They didn't get it "quite wrong". They ran into a mode of plasma instabilit y that they hadn't seen before because nobody had previously made a plasma that hot or that dense.

Climate change is about a much more accessible system.

for

y are

The indirect access - through things like oxygen isotope ratios in fossil w ater - pre-dates the thermometer by a few million ears. Much of climate sci ence is purely observational, but that doesn't stop it from being rigorous.

os,

Plasma instabilities do tend to be chaotic.

be

he

is

ong,

the proof is

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tive.

correct.

Not true. Anthropogenic global warming - like the Eocene-Paleocne Thermal M aximum - is having immediate effects and a lot of them will have played out entirely within the CO2 equilibration time of about 800 years.

When the effects are good deal bigger than the background noise you don't h ave to wait for the process to play out to see which models are working.

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John Larkin does his usual trick of presenting denialist propaganda - Antho ny Watts is on the Heartlands Foundation payroll - as if it were reliable s cientific data from a peer-reviewed source. To be fair to the ignorant idio t, he may not realise that he has been suckered once again.

The data - tropical mid-troposphere air temperatures - is remarkably hard t o model or to measure accurately. John Christy and Roy Spencer have been re sponsible for interpreting the satellite data for years, and got it subtly wrong for quite a few of those years, though the rest of the scientific com munity eventually persuaded them to do their job properly.

Denialist web-sites have an interesting habit of presenting old, subsequent ly corrected data as if it were correct.

I can't be bothered working out where the sleight of hand is here, but John Larkin's insight are rather shallow, and his conclusions reflect his statu s as a gullible sucker.

vant here, and Dan hasn't said a thing to invalidate that claim, which make s his own argument as hominem - at best. Making an unsupported and unjustif ied assertion isn't actually constructing an argument.

ut anyone whose mind has been changed.

lot.

be an ad hominem observation, if Dan weren't - intellectually - sub-human.

So tell me the people who have changed their beliefs because of your ad h ominen statements. That is the only thing that will convince me that your statements have any effect.

Funny that you call me intellectually sub human when I graduated from a bet ter university than you. And took a psychology course taught by B.F. Skinn er. Your ad hominem statements are so ridiculous that they convince people tha t you are a flake.

Dan

Still smarter than you, richer than you and went to a better university tha n you.

levant here, and Dan hasn't said a thing to invalidate that claim, which ma kes his own argument as hominem - at best. Making an unsupported and unjust ified assertion isn't actually constructing an argument.

d be an ad hominem observation, if Dan weren't - intellectually - sub-human .

hominen statements. That is the only thing that will convince me that you r statements have any effect.

I certain wouldn't expose them to abuse by identifying them here, and since nothing would convince you that my statements had any effect, it would be a wasted investment of other people's privacy.

etter university than you. And took a psychology course taught by B.F. Ski nner.

You may have a graduated from a good university, but you don't seem to have learned much - no more than was required to feed back the answers the lect urers wanted to see in your term papers and your examinations.

Nobody who knew much about psychology would boast about having been taught by B.F.Skinner. Skinner may have been a pioneer, but he took the field into some particularly trackless swamps.

Chomsky may have some interesting political ideas and his theories about a language are useful in the way Linus Pauling's were, but if you'd managed t o get to any of his lectures you might well have learned something useful.

hat you are a flake.

Dream on.

han you.

And still as deluded as ever.