Well of course - part of "responsible medicine" is not to use vivisection just because it's cheaper - especially when the results aren't as good as using computer models, lab work and training dummies or actual human cadavers - since they're not training doctors to be vets.

I suspect that person is a new vegan, hence the passion, but surely you're not for unnecessary animal suffering? Let alone if it's going to make your doctor less capable when it's your turn to be treated.

Regardless you can't take a random comment and decide that it's a spokes person for the PCRM. That to me suggests you're looking for reasons to dismiss the good advice, that benefits you and the greater world.

I understand how you've come to your conclusion, but let me clear it up:

The word 'vegan' in medicine is exchangeable with plant-based diet. If you look at the PCRM.org they recommend a whole-foods plant-based diet. They simply call it vegan, as that's what other organisations know it as, such as the British/American Dietetics Association. Clearly not recommending vegan icecream and hotdogs :-)

When it comes to prevention of cruelty to animals, the PCRM do it from a medical training/testing stand point. They're not saying don't eat animals because it's cruel, they're saying don't test drugs on animals when there are computer models and lab work that yield more accurate results (although animals costs less....). They're also against surgeons performing vivisection as part of their training. E.g. when my cousin did her training she had to put a perfectly healthy dog to sleep, chop of some of it's legs and re-attach them, as well as causing massive internal wounds to simulate gunshots.... it's messed up, but it's hard for young doctors to say anything because they've trained for a decade at that point, and they're not going to throw it away (and the next person will come along and do it anyway, since it's such a highly competitive industry). This where the PCRM come in, they lobby medical institutions to stop this kind of stuff.


If you're still thinking that they have some kind of vegan agenda / bias, the PCRM is an organisation of 12,000 doctors. If it was just one or two quacks preaching veganism, I'd be suspicious too, but that's clearly not the case here.

Everything they do is based on data. And they're also not the only medical organisation to do it. The Australian Medical Association is also urging hospitals to give patients plant-based diets because of how much faster they recover (and don't return). The President of the American College of Cardiology is 'vegan', and is know for his phrase "Meat kills, processed meat kills you quicker". The World Cancer Research Fund, recommends beans with every meal, no processed meat, and maximum of 350g of red meat a week. That's basically a plant-based diet.

There are now something like 400 studies being published every single year showing how bad animal products are for us. There's a nice graph here actually showing how much more evidence is coming out all the time: https://youtu.be/C5qRXPDNw1E?t=4190 (nevermind the tacky channel, the speakers at this conference are all legitimate medical professionals)

So yes, your doctors are right, eat your fruit and veg, but also whole grains, beans, nuts and seeds. Bean burrito is a perfect combination of these, followed by a banana and berry smoothie

You also have to consider the amount of financial loss various food and pharmacological industries would suffer if most people ate plant-based. So when you look for opinions about the PCRM people are very quick to make PCRM appear as a bunch of hippies in order to protect their earnings. America spends something like 50 billion dollars a year on statins, and 35 billion on stent surgeries, which would pretty much go away overnight if everyone ate plant-based diets. They're not going to let that money go without a fight, which is why there's a lot of opinions about PCRM around. Needless to say though, they don't have any good evidence to back their reasoning, which makes it quite easy to see which ones are likely opinions funded by certain industries.

Simply not true. Will you get some directors using cookie cutter sound templates? Of course... bad ones. Hell, Bay reuses entire shots in his movies (often in the same damn franchise).

But good filmmakers will hire good sound designers and they will create good sound with what they have available.

Computers are a tool, nothing more. Digital sound is no different to digital imagery... people say they hate it, but they only hate BAD examples of it.

Can foley survive? Short term, maybe; long term, unlikely.

Fundamentally, it'll come down to the same question as any other technique in any commercial artform... cost vs quality. If foley remains the best way to get a sound, you will find people willing to pay for it. As digital sound creation gets better and better, there WILL come a point where no-one can tell the difference.

If you don't believe me look at guitar amplifiers. For decades, guitarists have preferred old vacuum tubes (known as valves) to generate the sound they want in a guitar amp. Digital (commonly referred to as solid state) amps are cheaper and generally pretty crap.

But these days, even people who love valve amps (and I include myself in that) have to admit that it's almost impossible to tell the difference between a genuine valve amp and a good computer model of the same (side note for guitar techy people... I know modelling != solid state).

And that's not just in playback, it's in live performance too. A kemper or an AxeFX FEELS like a valve amp, and you can vary the settings like a valve amp.

I believe that foley will ultimately go the same way. People like Wes Anderson will continue to use it, but for most filmmakers on a budget, they'll go with the sound creation software.

So, I take it that you didn't click the link in my comment. If you had, you'd have seen the graph that shows an increase in the ice caps from May to October. (Psst: That's not wintertime, last I checked.)

Quoting: "“This modeled Antarctic sea ice decrease in the last three decades is at odds with observations, which show a small yet statistically significant increase in sea ice extent,” says the study, led by Colorado State University atmospheric scientist Elizabeth Barnes."

It measured an overall increase in the size of the icecaps over the last three decades. So while there may have been a decrease in the computer models, the ice caps have actually increased in size in reality.

Quoting again: "Sea ice in the Arctic Ocean underwent a sharp recovery this year from the record-low levels of 2012, with 50 percent more ice surviving the summer melt season, scientists said Friday. It is the largest one-year increase in Arctic ice since satellite tracking began in 1978."

I personally don't know if it is increasing or decreasing. But, suffice it to say, the science suggests that this is certainly not "obvious BS" as you seem to think it is...

But regardless, I needn't have to say it again: The folks at Bilderberg (or anywhere else) will do nothing to "stop" "climate change" one way or another. (And neither will you... And neither will the politicians.) For some, this "debate" is just a convenient way to justify the state's control over its citizens. Mr. Samsom was an employee of Greenpeace. Later, the CEO of a "green energy" company. Given his background and corporate connections, it is in his best interests (both politically and financially) to align himself within the "OMG! Climate Changed the weather!" camp. He probably ran for office on that platform, highlighting his "environmentalist" credentials. But he's a politician. Only politicians and videosifters seem to know what's "really going on." If there is any climate consensus at all, it is that most climate scientists have no opinion about it.

In fact, no more than 4% have come out with an opinion about what causes "global warming" or whether it is a "problem or not." And even this 4% has not been calling skepticism "BS" with the certainty that the online "pundits/scientists" like you seem to muster.

But I realize that this isn't really about "climate change." It's not even about Bilderberg. It's about "validation". Nothing more, nothing less. And so, for that, I wish you the best of luck in your attempts to "correct" those politicians (and/or "educating" those who "believe" or "pretend to believe" whatever you disagree with). Such is the condition of living in a "democracy" so you're going to need all the luck you can get!

You can demonstrate the effect of carbon dioxide on climate as easily as dropping a ball from your hand? People know that balls will drop because the see it for themselves, not because a former physicist and his dog say so.

In actual fact, the earth has not warmed in nearly 20 years, and the climate models do not help to explain this. They are useless for explaining or predicting changes on the scale of decades, and it's crazy to expect them to somehow predict changes much further in the future.

Warmism, from the start, has been based on obfuscation, concealment of data, dodgy statistics, and overcomplicated computer models that add very little to insight into the real physical phenomena.

Remember the hockey stick? That went the way of Carl Sagan's nuclear winter, which ought to provide a cautionary tale for Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Your child's future will have many problems, one of them being depletion of the fossil fuel supplies that we have come to rely upon for sustenance. Climate will change, as it always has, and some of that change will be caused by CO2.
Climate science could be helpful; it's a pity that it has been distorted into a completely political exercise, and a shame for science generally, which stands to lose a great deal of public trust.

Maybe watch it again and pay attention? He said nothing of computer simulations....

In an isolated system (our galaxy) where there is angular momentum (the spinning about the galaxies central axis), the angular momentum is conserved (it never stops spinning with respect to how much mass is in it, and how far from the centre that mass is).

The objects floating above and below that central plane are NOT in an angular momentum vector, just simply moving about in a chaotic motion. Given enough time, these objects will collide, cancelling out their non-plane motions.....

None of this was derived from a computer model, but it does show it in practice near the end by using one.

The distinction is important.

@radx No problem on the short comment, I do the exact same thing

I find your question hard to address directly because it is a series of things I find kind of complexly contradictory. IE, market forces causing undesirable things, and the lack of market forces because of centralization causing undesirable things. Not to say you are believing in contradictions, but rather it is a complex set of issues that have to be addressed, In that, I was thinking all day how to address these, and decided on an a round about way, talking about neither, but rather the history and evolution as to why it is viewed the way you see it, and if those things are necessarily bad. This might be a bit long in the tooth, and I apologize up front for that.

Firstly, reactors are the second invention of nuclear. While a reactor type creation were the first demonstration of fission by humans (turns out there are natural fission reactors: Oklo in Gabon, Africa ), the first objective was, of course, weapons. Most of the early tech that was researched was aimed at "how to make a bomb, and fast". As a result, after the war was all said and done, those pieces of technology could most quickly be transitioned to reactor tech, even if more qualified pieces of technology were better suited. As a result, nearly all of Americas 104 (or so) reactors are based on light water pressure vessels, the result of mostly Admiral Rickover's decision to use them in the nuclear navy. This technological lock in made the big players bigger in the nuclear field, as they didn't have to do any heavy lifting on R&D, just sell lucrative fuel contracts.

This had some very toxic effects on the overall development of reactor technology. As a result of this lock-in, the NRC is predisposed to only approving technology the resembles 50 year old reactor technology. Most of the fleet is very old, and all might as well be called Rickover Reactors. Reactors which use solid fuel rods, control rods, water under pressure, ect, are approved; even though there are some other very good candidates for reactor R&D and deployment, it simply is beyond the NRCs desire to make those kinds of changes. These barriers to entry can't be understated, only the very rich could ever afford to attempt to approve a new reactor technology, like mutli-billionaire, and still might not get approved it it smells funny (thorium, what the hell is thorium!)! The result is current reactors use mostly the same innards but have larger requirements. Those requirements also change without notice and they are required to comply with more hast than any industry. So if you built a reactor to code, and the wire mesh standards changed mid construction, you have to comply, so tear down the wall and start over unless you can figure out some way to comply. This has had a multiplication effect on costs and construction times. So many times, complications can arise not because it was "over engineered", but that they have had to go super ad-hawk to make it all work due to changes mid construction. Frankly, it is pretty amazing what they have done with reactor technology to stretch it out this long. Even with the setbacks you mention, these rube goldbergian devices still manage to compete with coal in terms of its cost per Kwh, and blow away things like solar and wind on the carbon free front.

As to reactor size LWRs had to be big in the day because of various reasons, mostly licencing. Currently, there are no real ways to do small reactors because all licencing and regulatory framework assumes it is a 1GW power station. All the huge fees and regulatory framework established by these well engineered at the time, but now ancient marvels. So you need an evacuation plan that is X miles wide ( I think it is 10), even if your reactor is fractionally as large. In other words, there is nothing technically keeping reactors large. I actually would like to see them go more modular, self regulating, and at the point of need. This would simplify transmission greatly and build in a redundancy into the system. It would also potentially open up a huge market to a variety of different small, modular reactors. Currently, though, this is a pipe dream...but a dream well worth having and pushing for.

Also, reactors in the west are pretty safe, if you look at deaths per KWH, even figuring in the worst estimates of Chernobyl, nuclear is one of the best (Chernobyl isn't a western reactor). Even so, safety ratcheting in nuclear safety happens all the time, driving costs and complexity on very old systems up and up with only nominal gains. For instance, there are no computer control systems in a reactor. Each and every gauge is a specific type that is mandated by NRC edict or similar ones abroad (usually very archaic) . This creates a potential for counterfeiter parts and other actions considered foul by many. These edicts do little for safety, most safety comes from proper reactor design, and skillful operation of the plant managers. With plants so expensive, and general costs of power still very competitive, Managers would never want to damage the money output of nuclear reactors. They would very much like to make plant operations a combination of safe, smooth, and affordable. When one of those edges out the other, it tends to find abuses in the real world. If something gets to needlessly costly, managers start looking around for alternatives. Like the DHS, much of nuclear safety is nuclear safety theater...so to a certain extent, some of the abuses don't account for any real significant increase in risk. This isn't always the case, but it has to be evaluated case by case, and for the layperson, this isn't usually something that will be done.

This combination of unwillingness to invest in new reactor technology, higher demands from reactors in general, and a single minded focus on safety, (several NRC chairmen have been decidedly anti-nuclear, that is like having the internet czar hate broadband) have stilted true growth in nuclear technology. For instance, cars are not 100% safe. It is likely you will know someone that will die in a car wreak in the course of your life. This, however, doesn't cause cars to escalate that drastically in safety features or costs to implement features to drop the death rate to 0. Even though in the US, 10s of thousands die each year in cars, you will not see well meaning people call for arresting foam injection or titanium platted unobtanium body frames, mainly because safety isn't the only point of a car. A car, or a plane, or anything really, has a complicated set of benefits and defects that we have to make hard choices on...choices that don't necessarily have a correct answer. There is a benefit curve where excessive costs don't actually improve safety that much more. If everyone in the USA had to spend 10K more on a car for form injection systems that saved 100 lives in the course of a year, is that worth it? I don't have an answer there as a matter of fact, only opinion. And as the same matter of opinion on reactors, most of their cost, complication, and centralization have to do with the special way in which we treat reactors, not the technology itself. If there was a better regulatory framework, you would see (as we kind of are slowly in the industry despite these things) cheaper, easier to fabricate reactors which are safer by default. Designs that start on a fresh sheet of paper, with the latest and greatest in computer modeling (most current reactors were designed before computer simulations on the internals or externals was even a thing) and materials science. I am routing for the molten salt, thorium reactors, but there are a bunch of other generation4 reactors that are just begging to be built.

Right now, getting the NRC to approve a new reactor design takes millions of dollars, ensuring the big boy will stay around for awhile longer yet. And the regularly framework also ensures whatever reactor gets built, it is big, and that it will use solid fuel, and water coolant, and specific dials and gauges...ect. It would be like the FCC saying the exact innards of what a cellphone should be, it would be kind of maddening to cellphone manufacturers..and you most likely wouldn't have an iPhone in the way we have it today. NRC needs to change for any of the problems you mentioned to be resolved. That is a big obstacle, I am not going to lie, it is unlikely to change anytime soon. But I think the promise of carbon free energy with reliable base-load abilities can't be ignored in this green minded future we want to create.

Any rate, thanks for your feedback, hopefully, that wasn't overkill

>> ^charliem:

Whats its application?


Many new reactors are experimenting with new fuel types. This has a higher fissile density because of the structure, so you can pack more fuel into a given space, it also has better thermal transfer and less susceptible to radiation damage that traditional uranium oxide. Hyperion Power Generation plans to use a uranium nitride compound in their Gen4 reactor. Gen4 reactors are a whole new breed of reactor, the infusion of modern computer modeling and materials development. While we still have a shitty regulatory system in the US as to not allow newer safer reactors to come online here, they will be launching in places like China, the UAE, and Korea in the future. America is poised to fall behind in the technology it invented, as it has with many other areas that aren't wall street or the technology sector.

we're quite a few decades off computers having reasonable chance of replacing humans outright re maximum effectiveness. So more a conversation for later.

But as a direction to head towards, having a scientifically proven computer model that can range between base requirements being consistent with the capability to fluctuate out towards an individual minds interests in stable/reliable ways, whereby having greater value to that specific person is a good one.

CGI is not always cheaper. Film producers learned that the hard way. Peter Jackson could have done every set in LotR or The Hobbit with CGI. Instead they build dozens of miniatures and models and animatronics, because it was faster and cheaper for some scenes than fiddling away for months with computer models and the right amount of virtual lighting.

But that's not how the air is shaped by the wings. That's how some studio artist thinks they might be shaped. Those weren't based on a computer model. Even I could see things that were misleading or left out entirely in the air shapes. I know a little bit about how wings create downforce, and it was not represented here, groovy graphics or no.>> ^mxxcon:

>> ^messenger:
Interesting topic, but absolutely useless vid to me. A flat bit pointing down creates downforce? No kidding. I don't care what the names of the parts are. What do they do? How do they do it?
Here's the same guy explaining the same principle much better with clean old-fashioned animations rather than that fake steam mess: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mj5ZK314Cg0.
but it's still cool to see how the air is shaped by all those wings and ducts..even if it's cgi-smoke

>> ^Peroxide:

@bcglorf,
Again, I read your whole argument, I read the conclusions of the paper you posted, neither of them show that current climate changes are not anthropogenic.
Again, your argument that the current changes are not anthropogenic hinges on the ammount of water in the atmosphere. Scientists have addressed this in multiple studies. Also, it makes no sense that water is the current culprit as it has always been in the atmosphere in varying quantities within a certain range, and could only change if another forcing agent caused more energy to be trapped in the atmosphere, essentially it is a positive feedback, but not the driver.
It's co2 emissions, check back with me in 10 years.
http://www.andywightman.com/docs/metoffice_climatepaper.pdf
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/JCLI3966.1
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/152
0-0442%282004%29017%3C3721%3ACONAAF%3E2.0.CO%3B2
http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-iarticle_query?2000ESASP.463..201T&data_type=PDF_HIGH&whole_paper=YES&type
=PRINTER&filetype=.pdf
http://skepticalscience.com/gillett-estimate-human-and-natur
al-global-warming.html
http://www.skepticalscience.com/huber-and-knutti-quantif
y-man-made-global-warming.html
http://www.skepticalscience.com/lean-and-rind-e
stimate-man-made-and-natural-global-warming.html


Wow.

I'll try and use fewer sentences to summarize myself so maybe you'll bother reading it.

Scientific studies on causes and sources for current warming have relatively low confidence levels, largely because there are so many unknowns left to account for.

You can stop reading right there if you wish, everything else I have said is just demonstrating that fact.

I am not making any declarative statements about why warming is happening. If anything I've posted suggests that please let me know and I'll try to clarify.

Take a closer look at your own links, I have. The papers on causes of climate change are all based upon computer run climate models. Computer models are only as good as our understanding of a system and the data we have about the system to compare our models against(fact).

The scientific papers in your own links that you provided agree with me that there is a lack of quality long term data.

The scientific papers in your own links that you provided agree with me that our understanding of climate forcings and feedbacks is far from complete(even whether H2O is positive or negative).

>> ^criticalthud:

>> ^bcglorf:
>> ^criticalthud:
just out of curiosity, in the midst of global warming doubters promoting the theory that the earth is warming through solar/cosmic/natural means... has there been much consideration into the idea that the earth is currently in a cooling phase -- enormously offset by what we're doing to it?
second,
one large concern i have with global warming is "system adaption" - that being that it generally takes the ecosystem a bit of time to adjust to whatever is happening to it (ie: glaciers don't melt immediately). Meaning that the damage we caused 10 years ago is being felt now. Meaning also that even if we were to cease mucking about right now, we could expect continued and possibly even escalating ecosystem problems in the years to come.
so, is it time to panic? dunno. could be.

Which is why it's so important to understand things better. Rapidly cutting CO2 emissions before we have the replacement technology in place would be costly, not just financially but world history shows big financial impacts generally spill over into violent impacts. Battery technology is getting very close to making electric cars that are superior in every way to their gas guzzling brethren. I truly do believe that the enormous CO2 contribution made by burning gasoline is rapidly on it's way out for purely economic rather than environmental reasons. Another reason I don't feel the need for panic.
As I stated above, I am NOT being a skeptic in declaring that H2O dominates the greenhouse effect. It is the uncontested scientific fact.
I am NOT being a skeptic in declaring that H2O's role in climate models and forcing/feedbacks is very poorly understood. It is an uncontested scientific fact, some models even disagree on whether to assign it as a positive or negative feedback.
Think about those two for a good long while before thinking everything Al Gore said should trump peer reviewed science.

you seem to mistake me as someone who is arguing with you. i'm really only interested in insights.
I'm certainly not a climatologist. I work with spines. But in answer to your proposition that it would be chaotic if we cut back, I think the strength of the human species is in their ability to adapt, and as far as i'm concerned, the ballooning world population combined with a worldwide contracture in resources makes this inevitable (not to mention the growing climate change issue) - but it's up to us on how painful we want it to be.
Our entire economic system and our culture of consumerism needs to be revised. We are mindless automatons, with little awareness to our impact on the earth as a species. Our daily lives are almost entirely self-centered.
Secondly, as to "the" question of human contribution, I would offer the microcosm of the forest fire, in which carbon is suddenly released into the atmosphere. The overall effect is, clearly, very warming, almost suffocating. On a grander scale, the species is continually burning and releasing carbon into the atmoshphere all over the planet. How that would fail to warm the planet escapes me. but, like i said, it's not my field. peace out.


Sorry if my tone comes off as combative, it's not really my intent so please don't take my vehemence on issues personally. Maybe I'm just getting older but I'm of the mindset that the fastest way to know where I'm right and wrong is to be forward and assertive with how I understand things and allow the opportunity to be corrected where I'm wrong.

My thoughts on the human contribution are tempered by a few things. From the very top, that CO2's contribution is small compared to H2O(I count this an uncontested fact). Annual CO2 emissions are small(5%) compared to natural CO2 emissions(I again count this an uncontested fact). The experts do insist that the human CO2 emissions are building up and still driving the natural CO2 levels significantly higher each year. We don't understand the natural CO2 emission and absorption processes very well, so poorly in fact our margins of error on them are larger than the human contribution. There is evidence that CO2 levels are rising in the last 100 years, and there is a correlation there to human emissions. What we don't have strong evidence for yet is what impact that has on climate. We DO know it is warming effect, but the magnitude of it is still poorly understood. As I've outlined above the understanding of temperature trends over the last 2k years is still a work in progress with large margins of error(even systematic ones that are being worked out). The computer models we have by definition are no more reliable than that data, which places us without a strong correlation or confidence in what magnitude of change the CO2 will have when all other variables are considered.

As a side point, if you look at the IPCC or listen to certain climatologists, you may hear it sounding like they disagree and believe my last statement is disproven. What they have studied is the impact CO2 increases should have overall with the assumption of all other variables being equal. It's a useful figure to have, and the confidence in it is better than my last statement described. That is because I was talking about something different, I stated that CO2's impact, with all other variables being considered NOT equal, is still poorly known and has very low confidence levels. In the real world the impact of one climate variable impacts the role of all the others, and often significantly. The IPCC and a select few climatologists talk about CO2 projections that ignore that interaction as a base assumption and somewhere along the line between them and the public or them and Al Gore, that base assumption gets dropped off. That base assumption is central and vital, and it's why as our climate models improve we will see predictions for CO2 that fall outside the error margins of the IPCC models with that assumption. That doesn't invalidate the IPCC's work, it is an advancement of it and improvement upon it. Remembering the base assumptions is vital for the public to maintain faith in the integrity and reliability of scientific research. People need to know WHY the predictions they were told by the IPCC a few years back have changed so much and yet the IPCC insists they weren't wrong. The truth is simply that they were misunderstood.

As yet another rabbit warren, there is an even smaller set of people within the climate community who actively encourage that misunderstanding. They do it firmly believing that the impact of CO2 with all else ignored is still indicative of CO2 with all else considered. Which is even a reasonable and normal expectation. The trouble is it falsely communicates the level confidence and margin of error of current known facts. I can't abide that kind of thinking, it's what is supposed to differentiate scientists from priests and politicians, they are supposed to refuse to make that kind of compromise when presenting what they do and do not know is demonstrably true.

>> ^ChaosEngine:

>> ^bcglorf:

I'm not entirely a layman. I'm basing my opinion on searches through peer reviewed journals, ones like this. If you go and take a look, you'll find it is a pretty much bullet-proof decimation of the statistical methods used in the infamous hockey stick graph. It's not a run and gun hit job by hacks funded by big oil either. Mann's team that generated the original hockey stick graph already came to the same conclusion(with gentler wording) in their own most recent work.
Read Mann's article for yourself, he's one of the most vehement of those claiming the science is 'settled'. His most recent paper's calculations with different statistical methods though show that the earth was just as warm(or warmer) twice before in just the last 2k years.
The science that is settled is that the planet has been warming for the last long while. The science is settled that the planet has been warming over just the last 100 years that we've had instrumental record. The science is settled that mankind is inputting measurable and even significant levels of CO2 into the atmosphere. The science is settled that CO2 contributes to the greenhouse effect. The science is settled that CO2's overall contribution to the greenhouse effect is less between 5-15%, while water vapor accounts for 60-90%. Science is well agreed that the role of water vapor in long term climate change is very poorly understood.
I challenge anyone to dispute the above assessment of the current state of scientific understanding, as my searching of peer-reviewed journals shows the experts in each relevant field agreeing with the above statements. Putting those together doesn't exactly add up to 'time to panic'. The only smoking gun that every was considered was the hockey stick graph that appeared to show that the last 100 years of warming was abnormal and unusual. The evidence for it is being thrown out though, and the newly recalculated data, even by the original team, suddenly looks a lot less worrying and much more normal.

That's probably the first rebuttal to climate change I've ever read that doesn't spout nonsense and lies. Kudos to you.
Out of interest, you say you're "not entirely a layman". May I ask if that means you have studied climatology or simply that you read the papers?
As for water vapour, it's not really a "forcing agent", it's reactive. It's better explained here.


My background is computer science but that requires a strong math background as well. When doing any manner of computer simulation of a complex and unknown system, the purely theoretical models are rarely sane. The reason being you can't model the bare physics of a complex system, so you have to essentially estimate(fake) the macro effects and properties. You get good computer models by comparing the results to real data and iterating back and forth until your model starts doing a better job of reflecting reality. The big red flag for me with climate models is the really limited real world data available to compare models to. I don't models aren't worthwhile, scientists are building them because they are useful. The trouble is what they are useful for. By definition, the models have to be treated as less reliable than the raw data we calibrate them against and run our sanity checks against. Neither does it matter how many different models we run, all that gets is closer to the same reliability as the real world measures that we have.

That ties into the article I linked, where the climate guys trying to rebuild temperature data to calibrate computer models from where themselves not strong enough in statistics to notice very significant flaws in the methods they were using. Flaws that systematically produced the results they initially deemed significant. Without a strong grounding there, I have to assess we are still left with a long road to go before really saying we understand this.

As for water vapor being reactive, I would very much disagree. Any climate scientist trying to tell you that is trying to simplify things for you to the point they are no longer being accurate. Ice caps melting, oceans rising, and cloud cover doubling is going to drive climate. It is going to force climate more strongly than anything else. The big unknown is just what parameters water vapor works under, it's simply not well understood yet. Computer models don't even know what sign to assign it as a forcing agent for pitysake. Most likely because it can act as both positive and negative based on environmental factors which are dependent on temperature among other things. When it comes to what kind of forcing H2O does the honest answer is that it's role is so complicated we just simply do not know. What we DO know is that currently, it contributes to 60-90% of the overall greenhouse effect. That tells me it's role in forcing is a much more worthy area of focus and study than CO2 and it's a crying shame so many more dollars are spent on CO2 than H2O when what we really need is to understand the whole system in order know what is really going on.

I accidentally responded to GF on his profile so if anyone is interested in that, thats where that is.

But I just also wanted to say is that no - what you are describing is not faith. Scientific theories are constantly and rigorously tested; if they fail tests, they are discarded or altered accordingly.

Faith doesn't allow the possibility of being wrong; that's why it's faith.

>> ^dirkdeagler7:

>> ^BicycleRepairMan:
Tyson is just plain wrong here, he says:
"40% of scientists are religious, so this notion that if you are a scientist, your'e an atheist, and if you are religious, you're not a scientist, is just empirically wrong"
Well, those of us who do say there is a conflict between science and religion have never framed the problem that way, the mere fact that there are religious scientists out there isnt evidence of a non-conflict anymore than the fact that a nazi could marry a jew. People can hold 2 or more conflicting views at the same time, we all do it all the time.
First of all, lets look at that "40%" number, it really depends on which poll or survey you look at. Those surveys who asks questions like "Do you believe in a personal god" usually end up in the sub-20% area of "religious" scientists, but if you include people who answer yes to questions like "are you a spiritual person" then maybe the number is closer to 40%.
So I really think 40% is really stretching it in favour of Tysons view here, but I'll let it go, lets say its 40% then, fine. Whats the same number in the general public? 41% 43?. No. its like 90%, right? So what happened to the 50% difference here? Did "No conflict" just happen to them? They just so happened to learn about science and nature, and via a sheer bloody coincidence, the number of religious people dropped by over one HALF???!!
No conflict my ass.
Of course there is a conflict. Tysons own inflated number even shows it directly.
But even if his inflated number was 100%, that ALL scientists were religious, there would still be a conflict, because faith and science are fundamentally different ways of approaching information and knowledge. In fact, they are, by definition, the opposite of eachother. Science can almost fully be described as "A complete absense of faith" and vice versa. If you've got even a hint of faith in your science, you've contaminated the results. Period. Similarly, if you take a hint of science, even at the level of a curious 5-year old, and apply it to the claims of faith, they immediatly start to look preposterous.
No conflict my ass.

To say there is no form of "faith" in science is misleading as well. If you're an avid follower of the science world, how could you be blind to the number of areas where we hold things to be accepted/true that are impossible to prove (outside of complicated math or computer models)? The most obvious example would be a many worlds/dimensions view, so any string theory borders on requiring "faith" to accept. Anything beyond the atomic level is a combination of interpreted observation and applied mathematics that we'll never be able to observe/prove first hand, in a sense we have "faith" that we're correct and have yet to find a reason to break that "faith" but if it happens we accept our "truth" to be not true. People had faith in newtonian physics being a true predictor/theory and we found it to not be the case after all.
I'm not attempting to compare the validity or justifiability of the 2 different flavors of faith. But a rose by any other name is still a rose, and there are things we believe and treat as true in science that we only know to be true in the ways we can measure them, and those ways sometimes contradict themselves still! Imagine the wave-particle duality and the contradictions in quantum theorys and Einsteins relativity...both of which we still use today (hell we still use newtonian physics in schools).