mistermack

Ok, since it went over your head, I cite the notorious hockey stick. (that never was) that's been lied about and air brushed ever since. And Al Gore, who got the Nobel prize for lying and bullshitting. Especially his choice "never mind the details" when he tried to con the world that the CO2 graph was leading the temperature graph, instead of the other way around. In any case, it's in the nature of the process of misrepresenting climate, that it's done surreptitiously. The request for citations is a bit like denying that the mafia still exists by demanding details of what they're up to. It's easy to give a false picture, without blatant lying. I've already mentioned how it's done, if one cared to read my post. You're just selective about what you use, and what you don't.

Hockey sticks to you, and your citations.

You're conveniently selective with your evidence. You obviously ignore the mountains of similar but opposite evidence. I see that kind of reasoning as a self-induced stupidity. Not born, but acquired. Sort of deliberate blindness.

There may be a bit of oxygen in the Mars atmosphere, and CO2 as well. But there's plenty lacking in life support. Warmth is the first to come to mind. The AVERAGE temperature on Mars is colder than the average winter temperature at the South Pole. And you won't find large life forms thriving there. In fact Mars is far more hostile than Antarctica in winter, because it doesn't have weather blowing in from milder climes. It also gets about half the sunlight, but far more harmful radiation, like cosmic rays and solar wind, because it doesn't have an equivalent to the Earth's magnetic field. or thick atmosphere. And there are no oceans beneath the sand. There's ice, lots of it, but no liquid oceans. The chances of big animals that don't need oxygen or warmth existing on Mars are near enough zero.

To be honest, what Einstein or Hawking thought is an irrelevant bit of gossipy history to me. If they were both staunch deists or theists, it wouldn't influence my thinking in the slightest. On the other hand, if the smelly old man in the library showed me a bit of genuine evidence for a god, I'd be highly interested. Still waiting.

There are lots of products that would come before shoes, in the list of priorities. A nice hairy scalp, for baldies. New skin for burns victims. Cosmetic enhancements. Bigger boobs and willies. Leather is gradually losing out in shoe manufacture anyway. And people will still eat beef and lamb, so the raw materials for leather would probably just go to waste, if there was a cheaper alternative.

My bias is towards things supported by what I see as good evidence. I'm happy to examine contrary evidence, and change my bias, if I find it convincing. That's nothing unique to me, but it's different to most indoctrinated people. To be honest, I think Einstein just didn't want the label atheist. And maybe it was a wise move, in his day. Maybe still is, if you don't want to get involved. Your wiki link says it all really in on sentence : "He clarified however that, "I am not an atheist",[4]preferring to call himself an agnostic,[5] or a "religious nonbeliever."[

Yeh, I included the Canadian provinces in my memorising, and they have Prince Edward Island as their Rhode Island. You can hardly see them on the map. But amazingly, Prince Edward Island grows about a third of Canada's potatoes !! Massachusetts I find quite easy, there is a Gloucester there and I live in the original Gloucester. Maryland is a pig of a state, it's all over the place. Delaware was difficult to memorise, till I noticed it's just below New Jersey, so I used the old song, " what did Della wear boys?" to aid the memory. Nebraska was hard too, it's a state you never hear anything about.

No it doesn't, and it's not, in my case. It's exactly a word thing. If Einstein agreed with your wording, and agreed that he complied with it, then he would qualify as religious as mentioned in those words. Other people would disagree that those words meant someone was religious. In other words, would disagree that that kind of feeling was a religious feeling. So it's about the word religion. And practically everyone has their own feeling for what it means. Some are more clearly defined than others, that's all.

I'd be like Hawking, but a bit more sedentary.

I think it's just a words thing. I'm amazed and awed by the Universe too. But I don't think I'm religious. Or even anywhere close to it. Einstein's version sounds more like flippant or whimsical superstition. Religion is generally the following of an organised belief, common to others and involving some sort of communal activities.

He was playing with words, that's all. In normal language, nearly nobody is going to call that concept god. "The Universe" would cover it for most people.

Always wise to rely on forum posts when dealing with possible poisons. Only an idiot would look up things in text books. The surest method is to drink it all and observe and record the result. That's the scientific method.

Apart from being one of the most difficult shots in golf, it's also against the rules.

"science" gets things wrong, on a regular basis. Ask any victim of thalidomide. Climate science is especially prone, because of the huge human input. Each model can be jiggled and massaged before it's announced to the world. You never see the ones that don't produce the politically correct result. Climate measurements can be massaged too, just by ignoring this or stressing that. If you're not getting the answer you want, move your equipment. If it's telling the required story, leave it be. Just little tweaks can completely change the picture. I used to trust the figures for climate. I don't any longer. Because you can't trust the people involved to be honest and unbiased. As I said, they are now all activists.

Again, you are confusing blogs with science. And blogs like skeptical science are just about the worst examples. If working climate scientists are writing on rabid climate warrior blog sites, that just illustrates what I said about climate science being composed of biased activists, not dispassionate scientists. And you talk about 100 years of science but that's rubbish. If we had had 100 years of accurate climate forecasts, you might have a point. But we've had 100 years of NEVER forecasting the climate. And when they finally started, they kept getting it wrong. Fair enough, climate is hugely difficult to forecast. But don't pretend that you can do it, when you clearly can't. If climate modelling was so good, there would only be ONE official climate forecast. Not the million billion that we are swamped with. How can they NOT get it right, at some point, when there is a new climate forecast every week? So they can always point to someone who got it right and claim a triumph. Give the world an OFFICIAL climate forecast, and stick to it, and you might get taken seriously. Till the figures come in.

Nope, life's too short. If you start with a blogger called guest blogger on a site called blog, I'm stopping right there.

Jaysus. You're hopping from blog to blog. From skeptical (ha ha) science (he he) to a blog, by "Guest Blogger" on a site called blogs.ie......etc etc. Blogs are worth about the same as posts on this site. By all means put your faith in them, if that's what you like, but don't expect me to take them seriously.

All I can say is that it absolutely screams bias to me. And has for years. If you want to read one side of the argument, exaggerated to the eyeballs, then you can't go wrong.

There's no balance. A bit like discussing the existence of Jesus with Catholic priests.

Quoting skeptical science is exactly what I'm talking about. It's a climate warrior's blog, but people treat it as some kind of reference source. It's a totally worthless site, a bit like what creationist sites are to religion.

That's not an apt analogy at all. The amount of water in the environment is constant. Heat energy on the other hand floods in and out all the time. While the UK is heating up during the day, New Zealand is radiating heat out into space. At the moment, close to winter, the UK temperature is bouncing up and down about six or seven degrees from day to night. In the summer, it's more. And yet people on forums talk about the atmosphere like it's a closed container. It's not. Huge amounts of heat flood in and out daily at most locations. Energy in depends on the Sun and the various orbits and wobbles. Energy out depends on things like clouds, atmosphere composition, atmospheric circulation, albedo of the surface, storms, pollution, and events like El Niño and La Niña . Up to 1997 the models were saying rapid increases in temps. None of the models forecast a standstill of about 18 years. If you can't forecast that, then you simply aren't ready. By all means keep trying, but it's clear that there's plenty that they can't forecast yet. I'm not against climate science, I'm against activism IN science. There should be no place in science for bias and activism. People should make a choice, be a cold sceptical scientist, or be a climate warrior. It's not science, when people pretend to be both.

Is this the origin of shooting craps? I often wondered about that name.

Yeh, well put. Evolution is now so well understood and verified that it's almost on a par with physics or chemistry. There's more to be learned, but no prospect at all of it ever being ditched. Can you believe in evolution and god? Of course you can. You can believe in evolution and two gods. Or ten gods. There are probably people out there who believe in evolution, and creation by god. So of course people can believe in evolution and god. I can't. I'd struggle to believe in god, even if evolution hadn't been worked out. I'd still want to see proper evidence. I suppose the existence of APPARENT design in nature might be hard to get past. But there were plenty of atheists before Darwin. Gradual evolution had been proposed, but not the mechanism. Maybe I would have been one, maybe not. Darwin and Wallace made things easy. I

Reminds me of the value of Pi. It's the concept of "tends towards". You can't nail it down, but it is still an obvious fact. As the number of verifications grows, the certainty grows. As your number of decimal points grows towards infinity, so you approach an absolute value for Pi.