swansont

Setting up an experiment to measure the photon's rest mass does not necessarily imply that it has one. Measuring zero is usually a very tough experiment, and getting a smaller upper bound is worthy of publication.

Tying QM into the mind — "At the heart physics, is the phenomena of the mind." Surely, that is speculative.

Could've been worse. One could say that in prison, for example.

You have to go to the source — the scientific papers — or someone who can legitimately interpret them, i.e. scientists working in that field. Newspaper articles are bad, in general, since they suffer from the temptation to sensationalize things, and reporters often can't separate the wheat from the chaff. Op-eds are a mixed bag, but generally, the argument there isn't science — too much political argument to score points, rather than present science. (I've discussed the difference in those argument styles before, most recently here) Blogs have to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. You can look at the arguments and evaluate them similar to creationism arguments — the tactics are remarkably similar. Look for the ones relying on peer-reviewed science and looking at the whole breadth and depth of the material, as they are probably making decent points. If it's a rebuttal argument, they will be pointing out the flaws I am about to list: The ones using logical fallacies, appeals to conspiracy, using selected evidence (cherry-picking), and making sweeping statements that are not backed up by any science, and often from some false authority — those are the denialists. ———— Now, as to the cases you've presented, they've been discussed here before. The warming that happened starting around 1915 occurred right after some significant cooling, largely induced by volcanic activity. Some of the warming, perhaps upwards of half, was due to a reduction in the volcanic material in the atmosphere (AFAIK, from both large eruptions and general volcanic activity). Some amount was due to CO2, though at a lower rate than later in the century, and some was solar; these latter two making roughly equal contributions The choice of ~1915 would be an example of cherry-picking, since it's choosing the coolest point on the graph. Temperatures can't help but be higher at a later point. The other is the claim that we've been cooling since 1998. It's not true, but 1998 was a very hot year. Again, selecting that data point skews the analysis because it was a fluctuation, this time on the high side. Since we're interested in trends and not fluctuations, one should look for analyses that use averages (five year, ten year or even longer) to ensure the noise isn't a distraction.

You can only have motion in one direction at a time — velocity is a vector. If the vector has y and/or z components, then one option is to re-define your coordinate system. Some problems don't lend themselves to that, though, so you'd have to use the generalized transform in Atheist's link.

You've claimed this before, here in post 37, but were rebutted in post 46 by ChrisC. This seems to show a decreasing slope of emissions rate in the 1990's. Were the forcing increasing exponentially or linearly? Do you have a cite that shows an exponential increase of the forcings?

I think the main issue is that you are quoting Steven Milloy from junkscience, and he's lying. Hansen's predictions stem from the paper he co-wrote ( http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abstracts/1988/Hansen_etal.html ) and published that year. In it he give three scenarios, to reflect different changes in greenhouse gases. The scenario that has the ~0.34 ºC increase is scenario A, which has an exponentially increasing radiative forcing. Since those conditions were not present in the 90's, it's dishonest to characterize that as Hansen's prediction. Scenario B had a linear increase in the forcings, which is the best match to what actually happened, and this predicted a temperature increase of between 0.10 - 0.15 ºC. http://illconsidered.blogspot.com/2006/04/hansen-has-been-wrong-before.html http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/05/hansens-1988-projections/

At current concentrations, that atmosphere is already close to being opaque at the CO2 absorption bands at 4 and 15 microns. http://www.scienceforums.net/forum/showpost.php?p=397344&postcount=77 So outgoing light gets absorbed and then re-radiated; some goes out to space and some gets directed back toward earth. Instead of radiative cooling to the 3K reservoir of space, you are radiating into a much warmer atmosphere, meaning less energy is transferred away from the earth.

What was the bet? To win, place, show, or be euthanized?

It's not that surprising, IMO. There are always going to be people who are convinced for the wrong reason, in both directions. One danger is if such a person becomes a spokesperson — it's like the video Penn did when he interviewed a bunch of environmental activists, and found that none of them (the ones whose footage was aired, anyway) could make a cogent argument abut the science.

It's called climate sensitivity, and it does have a predicted value of around 3 ºC for a doubling of CO2.

There is a car. If someone gets in the car, puts it in "drive" and steps on the gas, it goes forward. If they put it in "reverse" and step on the gas, it goes backward. If they do nothing, it sits still. Since I can't predict what the driver will do, using this logic, I can conclude that I know nothing about how a car works. Somehow, I am not convinced that the logic is valid.

http://www.pik-potsdam.de/~stefan/Publications/Nature/rahmstorf_etal_science_2007.pdf http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/05/hansens-1988-projections/

As I recall, your one example of political pressure was from GW Bush on behalf of the oil industry, a source that would like nothing better than a result of "it's all natural and there's nothing we can do about it." So, how about some concrete examples? Are the results from peer-reviewed journals being corrupted when collated by the IPCC? Any science to present?

Not a biologist, but — if your body doesn't metabolize it, it doesn't have any dietary calories.

Not after seeing some of the anti-relativity and anti-QM cranks or discussions with creationists. Being earnestly and sincerely accused of censorship is old hat. Why don't we look at some of those queries? You've accused the IPCC of being political and of scare-mongering, but have provided no specifics when prompted. You've repeatedly implied that the science — not just the reporting of it — has been politicized and can't be trusted, without supporting it. You made a claim about the temperature of the last decade which was incorrect. When called on this, you attempted to dismiss the data by claiming they were unreliable even though the magnitude of the error was too small to make any substantial difference. You used a strawman argument to downgrade global warming from theory to hypothesis, and made a blanket statement that it cannot make verifiable predictions. I don't see any scientific questions being raised.

"Our results suggest that global surface temperature may not increase over the next decade" (quoted from the Nature abstract) has now become a decline?

Aardvark postedeight times (25,29,32,35,37,39,46,49), and bascule responded four times (27,33,43,48) before using "denialist" in the fifth (50).

An application of Poe's law. It is impossible to make a parody of denialism that someone won't mistake for the real thing. Repeating your argument doesn't make it right. You need to establish that using one standard deviation isn't common practice if you want to call it "proper science." Good luck with that. Just because your field does it one way does not allow you to validly extrapolate that to all science. It's been my observation that fields that do population sampling (e.g. medical testing) tend to use confidence intervals rather than standard error. But other fields use standard error. You would have to establish that it isn't common practice in climate science to begin to conclude that the decision was political. (more on error bars: http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/2007/03/most_researchers_dont_understa.php )

Yes. And 128 cubic feet of water weighs just under 4 tons.

Well, there's actually more to it than even that. You hear the report (often from a small-sample trial), and it even may have been peer-reviewed and published, but the only reason it got published (or even possibly submitted for publication) is that the result was unexpected, which is going to happen in some fraction of experiments. The publications get biased by ignoring expected results.

I thought I made it clear in both post #3 and in post #8 that I was addressing a statement of yours, and not the paper's. Just so everybody understands this. Your claim has little or nothing to do with what the paper asserts is a problem: accuracy vs precision. If it's one standard deviation and you'd rather it be two, double the length of the error bars. It's really only an issue if your standard is e.g. 95% confidence interval, and you report numbers using 68%, and misrepresent your findings. But using 68% does not make it "poor science"

How is it a "front-loaded" attack when it took several exchanges before the "d-word" was used? From what I can see, it was a conclusion, not an accusation. The evidence that this is consistent with false skepticism was already present.

More cost, yes. Right now they are "boutique" items; more-or-less hand-crafted in the sense that while many of the parts are commercially available, the combination of them is not, and lots of work has to go into getting everything to work. Much like the case with atomic fountains, you have to make specialized circuitry and components. And there is a lot of specialized care and feeding. In a couple of years I should be in a position to estimate how much an optical clock costs, but I think the laser that gets you started is a couple hundred thousand dollars.

Why are you asking me?