bascule

Because it's since been discredited and attributed to instrumental error. http://www.climatescience.gov/Library/sap/sap1-1/finalreport/sap1-1-final-execsum.pdf

No, you're trying to strawman me. All I'm saying is that the climate system doesn't have the simple cause and effect relationships you seem to think it does. Then you turn around and doubt the validity of GCMs. If the operation of the climate system is as simple as you purport it to be, how could GCMs possibly be inaccurate?

I want a cell phone that hooks into my brain

The language/infrastructure you request is called HTTP. The feature you describe is the virtual hosting mechanism provided by the "Host:" header field. HTTP "basic" authorization provides password functions The "gzip" transfer encoding provides compression Everything you want is provided by HTTP

Umm, WTF? Well, I actually went through with it. I guess the beginning part nailed me on the letter, I ended up with D. But I picked Djibouti for the country, Iguana for the animal, and Apricot for the fruit. I expect if you were to actually ask this question to a large number of people the Denmark / Kangroo / Orange combination would be fairly rare. Perhaps much closer to 2% than the 98% the OP claims.

If you think GCMs are overly simplistic then you should not make any statements about causes or effects within the climate system. If the system is so complex that its understanding evades dozens of independently developed multidisciplinary computer models of the problem created by the brightest minds in the field, then its a problem so complex that a layman has absolutely no hope of making any statements with any degree of correctness. If you think GCMs are overly simplistic, then you have absolutely no hope of possibly understanding the problem. Their interpretation is justified by a computer model which tries to take all of the known factors into account. As far as I can tell, your interpretation is based on "truthiness", or to quote Stephen Colbert's defintion "things that a person claims to know intuitively, instinctively, or 'from the gut' without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or actual facts" Seriously, where's the data? Where's your model? Where's anything? You have absolutely nothing to justify your position. While you claim to be a skeptic, you're making an unscientific counterclaim, without evidence and completely contrary to existing scientific knowledge. As far as I'm concerned this puts you in the same camp as people who believe Noah's Flood carved the Grand Canyon. No, it's not. The evidence says you're wrong. Where's your evidence? Why can't anyone make a GCM that corroborates this viewpoint? There's substantial evidence that corroborates the theory that anthropogenic greenhouse gasses are the foremost radiative forcing. Why? Evidence? Papers? Counterclaims to IPCC AR4? Where's a GCM reconstruction which supports this hypothesis? I'd keep going, but I think I've made my point abundantly clear. You have nothing. You have absolutely no way of even knowing if what you say is anywhere near realistic. You can either: 1) Acknowledge science has a handle on how to attack the problem - or - 2) Admit that you have no possible way of knowing anything about the problem, since you believe decade upon decade of research by tens of thousands of people worldwide applying the best scientific knowledge that we have towards multiple computer models which are giving the same results are oversimplifications of the problem Which is it then?

Fortran, loved by scientists, reviled by the computer science community

Looks like we have ourselves a new John Dean! http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/03/23/us.attorneys.firings/ Well, maybe not. We'll see what happens. (Last Nixon comparison for this thread, I promise!)

Point taken. My bad.

You think of the climate system in terms of simple cause/effect combinations, yet you doubt the validity of GCMs. Temperature increases do not necessitate a decrease in the solubility of CO2. Other factors affect CO2's solubility in addition to temperature. Anyone who knows the Ideal Gas Law and Henry's Law can tell you that. Given a static system, yes, is the case, but the climate system is anything but static. It is perhaps the most complex system that humans have ever studied. GCMs are the result of decades of work by thousands of chemists, physicists, and atmospheric scientists. Why is it you seem to have no trouble trusting your own gut feeling about how the climate system works, but totally reject what people who are literally trying to account for every aspect of the climate system have to say about how it actually operates?

Yes, they are both wrong. I hate people trying to excuse this administration's wrongdoings with comparisons to Clinton, which seem almost inevitable.

It was mainly the press, not the climate science community. The press presented what the science community was saying out-of-context. For example, take the following statement published by the National Science Board in 1974: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling Oh no! Global cooling! But wait, they left out the rest of the paragraph: I'm so sick of the "They were wrong back then and they're wrong now!" mentality. Climate science reporting is bad. But don't blame the scientists... it's not their fault.

Agreed

So just a quick ethical question here... which is worse: covering up why you fired the attorneys who were conducting criminal investigations into your activities, or lying about a blowjob under oath?

I think you just about nailed it

SkepticLance, how much reading on the carbon cycle have you actually done? To say something so simplistic as "CO2 increases due to changes in solubility in sea water" is naive. This depends on a multitude of other factors. Water can act as a carbon source or sink at the same global mean surface temperature depending on a multitude of other factors in the climate system. The carbon cycle is a complex, densely interconnected non-linear system full of feeback loops. It is in turn a subsystem within the global climate, which forms a larger, even more complex and more densely interconnected non-linear system full of feedback loops between smaller systems. You cannot simply say that carbon concentrations increase with the global mean surface temperature. That depends on a multitude of other factors. I think it's rather ironic that those who doubt the accuracy of GCMs seek naive and oversimplistic explanations for how the climate system operates. The climate system is something which can only be understood in the gestalt, because due to non-linearities and feedback loops it is much more than the sum of its parts.

The August 6th PDB is definitely screwey. It was prepared by the CIA. The CIA originally claimed it was generated internally, then revised their story to say that it was prepared at Bush's request. However, it was delivered to Condi as Bush was on vacation at the time. The second page, which consists of a single paragraph (in the version that was released) notes that there has been recent surveillance of buildings in New York and terrorist activities consistent with preparation for hijackings. The White House has this page where they attempt to debunk speculation into what that last paragraph meant: http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/04/20040410-5.html

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0307/3227.html Hmm, seems awfully similar to 18 minutes of erased tape... Tony Snow was confronted on the matter today

Did I mention I work for a Podcasting company? http://clickcaster.com

Which government officials are those, and why do you think your as-yet-unnamed sources speak for the government as a whole? You might also note the airliner-as-missile idea formed the central theme of Tom Clancy's novel Debt of Honor, in which an airliner was used to destroy the Capitol Building during a joint session of Congress, killing the overwhelming majority of congressmen and the president (and lead to the inevitable promotion of Jack Ryan from Vice President to President) Don't forget that Family Guy predicted that Osama bin Laden would sneak through airport security by singing show tunes. I see absolutely nothing which I would consider to be evidence in your post. Using logic, I would say that as the claimant you have the burden of proof. Unattributed anecdotes, coincidences, and fictional plot lines are not proof of anything.

The question is when it became predictable. Look at the above stock chart and tell me when the stockholders came to the realization that the market was collapsing. Looks to me like it wasn't until early 2007.

My belief is the subprime lenders attempted to rip off any customers they could dupe into purchasing a home with an ARM. What they didn't realize was collectively they would destroy the entire housing market. Like the homebuyers, the subprime lenders wanted to hear the word "yes". And they did. New Century's stock skyrocketed between 2001 to 2005, to the point they declared themselves "a new shade of blue chip." Their actions, along with the actions of multiple other subprime lenders, destroyed their source of revenue. Like the subprime borrowers, they lacked the foresight to realize the impact their actions would have on the market. Their stock is indicative of the situation as a whole:

Perhaps you missed the part where houses are selling cheaper than cars. "The lumber in the house is worth more than that!" cry the salesmen! I don't know about you, but I bought my home for an order of magnitude more than my car. When the former is cheaper than the latter, something is very, very wrong. I don't think the housing market is irrevocably obliterated. I'm using "obliterated" to indicate a period of record foreclosures combined with record bankruptcies in mortgage brokers, the biggest drop in the housing market in 30 years. Oh, and in some markets, houses selling cheaper than cars. I profited off this situation. I bought a home for under half the offering price of units in the same complex 6 months before my purchase. So why am I complaining? Because the situation is indicative of why Laissez-Faire capitalism doesn't work. Two people, engaging into a deal which they both believe will bring them value, end up losing tremendous value, and the collective action of millions of people engaging in such an activity is enough to negatively impact the economy as a whole. This is a clear case where deregulation has failed. There's several other places where it's failed, but this is one which has the potential for widespread impact upon the economy as a whole. I'm treating it for what it is: deregulation failing

Do I believe the universe has properties which are shared by fractals? Yes Do I believe the universe *is* a fractal? No A "fractal" is an object whose Hausdorff-Besicovitch dimension exceeds its topological dimension.

An Emperor Tamarin: Why? I like the moustache