"Buerste" wrote in message
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"Ed Huntress" wrote in message
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"Buerste" wrote in message
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"Ed Huntress" wrote in message
...
snip
Well, you know how I feel about the Global Warming(kumbaya) scam. I
still can't understand how anyone with two synapses firing can fall
for it. Oh, I think I just got the answer.

Between Dr. Tom and Dr. Larry, we seem to have all major forms of
denial covered except for the health hazards of smoking, the Earth
traveling around the sun, and the holocaust.

'Good to have you with us, doctors. It's a relief not to have to
believe anything so inconvenient, and to have such outstanding experts
to help us discredit 90% of the world's top climate scientists.

I can't wait to re-read your PhD. dissertations.


And I always gave you credit for firing synapses! AGW is not a voting
issue for and by scientists...

The legitimate climatologists appear to have weighed in and they would
disagree.

The fact that the AGW folks refuse to use the "Scientific Method" and
refuse to debate the issue is what frightens me the most.

I have no idea what you're talking about here but it sounds like a
cock-and-bull story.

And, they push the "We're taking control of the energy, money and
political power!" position first and foremost..

I've yet to hear a climate scientist say any of that. That's you're
interpretation of the politics, not the science.

It's not science anymore. It's not denial, it's skepticism!

It's self-serving politics.


Let's just wait and see if the issue sort's itself out as more facts and
data comes along. My mind can be changed with good evidence.

Well, that's good to hear.

That doesn't exist yet.

Not you, not Larry, not me, nor anyone else I know -- certainly no one
here -- has the faintest clue about whether it does or not.


Smoking is bad.
Earth orbits the Sun.
Jews were murdered.
Global Warming facts are not complete, the issue is not closed for
debate.

(Does that clear it all up?)

My feeling is that the global warming facts will never be complete to a
sufficient degree to satisfy you. Nor will you ever know when and if it
is. I'd have more confidence in your judgments about the validity of
string theory or the existence of naked singularities or dark energy.

With all due respect, Tom, you don't have enough knowledge to be
skeptical about it. Neither do any of the rest of us. For you to engage
in the "debate" implies that you would know enough to debate. You don't,
and it's likely that you never will. Neither will Larry, I, or 99.99% of
the population. We're no more able to engage in the "debate," nor to
understand those who can, than we are to engage in the debate about the
evolution of black holes. The idea that we could is ludicrous.

All we have to go on is the reputation of the people who *can* engage in
the "debate," if there really is a debate. I don't know if there really
is. What passes for "debate" sounds an awful lot like the "debate" over
evolution versus creationism -- it contains some of the same elements,
and even the politics are not dissimilar.

The one thing I can see about it is the history of the conflict. First,
mainstream science began to coalesce around the idea that the Earth is
warming and that greenhouse gases are largely responsible for the current
pattern. Then there was a reaction from the right, because the right is
worried about the economic implications if it's all true. This provoked a
defense from the left. So now it's a left/right issue.

But not really. It's still mainstream science versus the reaction. That
the left has taken up science's banner is just an artifact of the
political basis of reaction. It has nothing to do with the science, which
is still clearly on the side of greenhouse-gas-induced global warming.
The con game that's telling us that there is no general agreement in
favor of it is EXACTLY like the con game that's telling us there is no
general agreement in favor of evolution. It's coming from the same
political angle, in fact, only the con game on global warming is a lot
more sophisticated. It's one hell of a good shell game, and none of us
knows where the pea is.

So that's all you're doing, and all you can do -- argue the politics,
disguised as science. You can't understand the science. Neither can I. It
is many years of study over our heads.

I don't have an opinion on it of my own. If I have to engage the issue,
at the level of voting or whatever, I'll do what I did about landing a
man on the moon, or what I'm doing now about nuclear power -- I'll try to
separate the mainstream science from the quacks and cranks with political
motivations on the fringes, and I'll go with the mainstream science. It's
not easy now, since the issue has been politically polarized, but I'll
throw out the Al Gores and the Michael Crichtons, along with the other
outliers and the freaks on both sides, and take my best shot.

It won't be because I have an opinion on the science. Opinions are what
one has when he has exhausted the known facts; I can't even read the
facts. Neither can anyone else posting here. Your opinion, and Larry's,
and mine, apply only to whom we believe, not to the science. All you're
reading and learning, and Larry, is polarized arguments that are
indistinguishable from con games. In that regard, you could take all of
our opinions, add them up and calculate their value, and we'd find that
they're worth less than the powder it would take to blow them all to
hell.

d8-)

--
Ed Huntress


A few points that you might rethink. "The left that you portray as
"taking up science's banner." due to the reaction from the right." Maybe
from the left's point of view, but I tend to believe the right is reacting
to the attempted seizure of power and money by putting a strangle hold on
energy.

I haven't seen an explicit history of the whole thing, but I know it was
triggered by a report from the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at
Princeton sometime in the '70s. It was an academic subject until Hansen's
(of the Goddard Institute) famous, and inflammatory, testimony before Al
Gore's Senate committee in the late '80s. The right reacted reflexively and,
as I recall, immediately. After that, it quickly became political.

Maybe it was getting political earlier; maybe the left was pushing for it
even before Hansen, I don't know. But the bottom line is that it was
politicized. We're having a discussion about the politics, not the science.

The science has been debated in the normal course of scientific study since
the Princeton report. There are some top scientists who argue against it.
There are many more who argue in favor of it. I wouldn't claim that the
truth is simply a matter of counting heads, and it's true that the more
recent debate has become so highly politicized that it's hard to sort out
the objective science from the biased science.

In fact, it's more than hard. For you and me, it's impossible. I once tried
reading a couple of articles about it in the professional journals and I
almost went blind. g The English isn't hard to read, but it assumes a
great deal of knowledge about fluid dynamics. You probably know that's a
killer subject, if you went through the full mechanical engineering program.
Taken on a global scale, it's impenetrable to most of us.

What we read -- even Larry, who has spent a great deal of time with it -- is
dumbed-down science for the layman. That is, assuming Larry isn't into
complex systems of fluid dynamics and the accompanying math. Dumbed-down
science can be a very good thing and I read it all the time. But it's
potentially dangerous, because you have to trust the integrity as well as
the skills of the...dumber. g

I've done a fair amount of dumbing-down myself. When people asked me what I
did for a living, I used to say "I vulgarize technology." I know how that
works and how dependent it is on the quality of the...dumber...and on his or
her good intentions. And I don't mean their intentions to select evidence
for "our own good."

Most of it does select evidence; when politics is involved, the selection is
likely to be highly biased. They're doing it for our good, of course. So I
discount all of it regarding global warming.

This leaves us with an obvious dilemma. I remain hopeful that science itself
will sort it out before we stick our feet up our butts, one way or the
other, but it's going to be hard to tell if and when it comes. I trust the
scientific institution more than most, however, so I keep my eye on them for
signals.

But I want to emphasize that there's no way any of us can sort out the
science at this point, IMO, and I doubt if we ever will be able to. What we
have to do is to choose whom we believe. I hope that will, at some point,
stop being a political question.


The left ridicules the belief in God because there is no proof yet
believes in AGW with less proof!

I don't think I'd agree with that. The problem with AGW (I hate the
abbreviation -- it sounds like a feed store) is that the evidence is too
complex for most of us to absorb. But the evidence, no matter what it really
tells us, is tangible and measurable.

My only point is the AGW folks won't tolerate even proven experts to
debate the issue.

I don't have to tell you that sounds EXACTLY like the creation science
argument. My feeling is that's why a lot of people object to it. Although
mainstream science isn't always right, most of us recognize that there are
crank scientists, even brilliant ones with tenure, and that the scientific
community itself is better at calling them out than we are. If they're any
good, they'll get their hearing. And if one complains that he's not being
listened to, like Lester Lave or Richard Lindzen, and if the scientific
community doesn't pick them up and support them, the most likely reason is
that they're out in left field -- or right field, as the case may be. g

Sometimes that doesn't work. I go with the numbers. Usually it works. And
that's all we have.

--
Ed Huntress