Cap'n Refsmmat

The sudden changes in water vapor that cannot be accounted for by GHGs are declines in stratospheric water vapor. A decline causes cooling. What Knappenberger looks at is the long-term net increase, which happened despite the sharp, unexplained drop after 2000. The long-term net increase has been accounted for by NASA GISS as caused by methane and other GHGs. http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/shindell_05/ In other words: Known anthropogenic factors caused a net increase in stratospheric water vapor since the 1980s, contributing to warming. Unknown factors caused a sudden drop in stratospheric water vapor after 2000, but this drop did not cancel out the net increase.

I thought that was intended for a future software version, but I can't find where that was promised. Dunno if it'll happen.

Because grades are meant to be an assessment of your ability instead of a currency. Grades cannot be traded for essential services such as health. ("For an appendectomy, we charge four Bs or three As. A thesis will also be accepted.") Grades cannot be traded for goods or other services. Taxing grades defeats the purpose of assessing your knowledge of the course material.

As my New Oxford Annotated Bible notes, "You shall not murder" is a more accurate translation, and specifically excludes killings sanctioned by God -- that is, the wars God commands do not constitute "murder." Your point still stands about ordering the deaths of others, though, even if those deaths are not murder.

Karl Popper's point in The Logic of Scientific Discovery is that induction is not, in fact, a valid means of supporting any conclusion. There is no logical principle of induction that lets us say "this has happened before, so it will happen again," or even "this has happened before, so it's likely that it will happen again." One could rephrase your argument to state that a scientific conclusion has as an implicit premise that the rules of physics are the same everywhere, across all time, and that implicit premise can never be proved true. I think that's how Popper would put it. (Also, I haven't actually read all of his book -- I got the free sample on my Kindle, and for some reason the free sample turned out to be a large fraction of the book. I've read most of that...)

Worth noting that the scientific method explicitly rejects induction, rather than being based on it, which is why we cannot "prove" any theory. It's because of this lack of an inductive principle that we cannot say "I've never seen this, therefore it doesn't exist" or "I've seen this happen several times, so it must always happen." Indeed, because of this, all hypotheses are on an equal footing until one is falsified. (Falsification can be achieved, whereas absolute proof cannot be.) If two hypotheses explain the same phenomenon equally well, we cannot choose between them for any reason: not because one makes more sense to us, because one is simpler, or because one builds off an existing theory that has passed experimental tests. None of these provide a reason that one hypothesis should be true and the other shouldn't be. (Occam's razor is a suggestion, not a rule.) The only way to decide is to falsify on hypothesis through empirical experiment. I highly suggest the book The Logic of Scientific Discovery for a proper treatment of the scientific method, if you're interested in more depth. (So yes, I'm agreeing with you, and just pointing out that the lack of induction is the problem, not the other way round.)

Juat how dies one go about ripping the space-time continuum? Galactic scissors?

Worth noting that I'd have never been allowed on it, either.

Ad hominem refers to saying "you're an idiot, so therefore you're wrong." It should never be used in a good debate. However, if someone says "here's five excellent reasons why you're wrong, and by the way, you're an idiot," that's not an ad hominem because the insult isn't being used as the reasoning. We have a tendency on SFN to point out too many fallacies: instead of doing extensive research and planning, it's easier to point out a fallacy. But it's worth noting that "you used a fallacy, therefore your conclusion is wrong" is also a fallacy.

The trouble with external disks and an exact copy of your disk is if the virus gets copied onto the external disk, you're screwed. Windows Vista and 7 come with Windows Backup, which handles backing up everything important and keeping versions of files, so if they're corrupted by a virus you can restore them to an earlier version. (I think it can do that. I've not had to restore anything with it yet.) Hard drives tend to fail inconveniently, so get an external disk and run Windows Backup if you can.

Does it say that the name of this program is CoolWebSearch? Googling indicates that's associated with the registry key you listed there. If you're running Windows XP and this is indeed CoolWebSearch (according to McAffee), look here for other known symptoms and a download that will nuke it off your computer: http://free.antivirus.com/cwshredder/ (Trend Micro is a well-known antivirus vendor)

Damn. And your Search Settings under My Settings are definitely set to the other option? I think View New Content has had persistent issues that IPS just can't reproduce, so they haven't successfully fixed anything. If you can determine any useful details about when this happens, if there's any common factor, etc., that'd be very helpful to track this bug down.

My thoughts (as a non-orthodontist) are that if you simply pressed the two teeth apart, you'd have no guarantee that they'd remain in relative alignment. They may end up rotating out of the way rather than simply moving sideways, or they might push the teeth behind them in a way that causes them to rotate and become crooked. Now, I think the idea of full braces may be overkill, though as a non-orthodontist I may be totally wrong. Before I got full braces, I had four brackets on my front upper teeth and a bracket on each rear top molar, which were used to correct an overbite. They didn't have to place brackets on all the other teeth, and they left the bottom teeth alone until that was done. So certainly corrections can be done without an entire set of braces. I think your best option would be to get copies of the X-rays and head to a different orthodontist for a second opinion. Orthodontists often have different approaches and techniques for dealing with problems, and perhaps a second opinion will shed some light on the issue.

In my experience, we just invent more and more sophisticated mathematical constructs to help us deal with concepts we can't understand. Quantum mechanics, for example, makes sense mathematically but not intuitively.

You can ask questions. But when nobody seems to answer, asking the questions again repeatedly doesn't make them more likely to answer.

You appear to have been banned for this sort of thing: We are capable of reading, so asking the same question six times in nine minutes is very annoying. Particularly if others are trying to have a conversation.

http://www.scienceforums.net/index.php?app=core&module=usercp&tab=members&area=signature

Read into that what you will.

I get the same thing as well, despite refreshing.

Whoa, there. The ScienceNews article you quote in post 48 refers to the sudden drop in vapor since 2000, not the overall increase since 1980. The drop in vapor doesn't account for any warming of the planet -- a drop in vapor would decrease warming, not increase it. The quotes you give indicate that the sudden drop cannot be accounted for by GHG feedbacks, but says nothing about whether GHGs could have caused the overall increase in vapor since 1980. Solomon does not dispute in the paper that methane can be a cause of increases in stratospheric vapor: (Of course, it's not the sole cause; ENSO is a factor as well, as indicated by Solomon. But you can't fairly attribute all of vapor changes to ENSO, just as you can't attribute them all to methane.) I thought your goal here was to identify "natural causes for all but 0.2-0.4 degrees of warming." If black carbon is anthropogenic -- and what I have read indicates it is -- then you have merely identified another anthropogenic source of warming. This is not a natural cause for warming.

It's worth noting that "molestation" under Swedish law does not have to be sexual. It's better translated as "harassment." http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2010/08/julian_assange_1.html

If you're at a university, note that many offer bulk licensing deals so students can purchase a Mathematica license at a discount. I actually got mine free from our physics department. Mathematica notebooks work the same way across platforms, as far as I know -- the commands and methods are the same.

My point is that cumulative apparent warming between any two years is a comparison of the warming of each of those years; that is, one must compare the warmth of 1950 to that of 2009. If, for some reason, the warmth of 1950 were depressed for some unaccounted-for non-anthropogenic reason, our comparison is wrong. Anyway, these are accounting details; we still have not covered the other issue: whether stratospheric water vapor is a feedback of any other known anthropogenic forcing. You have previously quoted a number of researchers speculating that changes in stratospheric vapor were caused by global sea-surface temperature patterns, but did not cover the possibility that GHGs and other gases have an impact on these patterns. For example, a 2001 article about stratospheric water vapor has this to say: http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/shindell_05/ These are all anthropogenic sources. It would thus seem to me that at least some of the water vapor changes are anthropogenic, and so some of the climate changes you want to place in the "attributed" bucket are in fact anthropogenic. Incidentally, in post #29 you acknowledged that the measurement error doesn't matter in long-run warming calculations, such as warming from 1800-present. Now we refer to warming from 1950, in which case it's applicable -- but your original claim was to attribute warming from 1800 to the present (see the OP). Shall we avoid changing our references and agree on the whole of modern warming, 1800-present? I believe that's what you intended to discuss originally.

Could you describe this in a little more detail? I'm not entirely sure what you're describing when you say "by gently bending inertia."

Thank you for your eloquent and detailed attempt to explain what mississippichem doesn't understand. We always appreciate it when members take the time to explain their views instead of just dismissing those that they disagree with.