Neither does it prove the consensus. You can’t assume either way. But you don’t just throw out all those papers as though they don’t matter, as though they aren’t somehow part of a consensus study just because they are silent. To get a true consensus figure we need to survey all those people more closely. But you have a point, by looking at the literature itself, the consensus rate on heliocentricity is pretty low, because none of them explicitly talk about it. Therefore, it’s really useless to do such a study to find consensus on anything – and in this case of AGW, it’s downright misleading.
[quote]So Jotham, you’ve obviously got a lot of time on your hands - why not sign up at SkS and rate the abstracts yourself: skepticalscience.com/tcp.php?t=rate_papers[/quote]
Because I know their methodology. I told you I can’t tell what a paper is by abstract alone. Even so, I know that if I honestly rate an abstract as admitting a warming influence by GHG’s (which we all agree on incidentally), bam, it’s part of the 97% consensus, even if it’s no such thing. Besides, even if I’m an honest rater and doubt an endorsement, they will have two people rating, and where there is a disagreement (if for instance a dishonest rater differs from me), a third rater will come in to settle it, and the third rater always comes down on the side of endorsement (which is another criticism of the paper – shouldn’t the third rater come down half and half endorsement or non-endorsement?). So my honesty will always be vetoed according to the methodology.
I think that it is adorable that you are trying to keep up with the debate on this topic. Keep this up and you get a gold star for effort… but you probably did win most of the “initiative” and “good attitude” awards in your school, didn’t you?
I think that it is adorable that you are trying to keep up with the debate on this topic. Keep this up and you get a gold star for effort… but you probably did win most of the “initiative” and “good attitude” awards in your school, didn’t you?[/quote]
I’ve noticed how the really intellectual arguments involve going, “:roflmao: :roflmao: :roflmao:”
I think that it is adorable that you are trying to keep up with the debate on this topic. Keep this up and you get a gold star for effort… but you probably did win most of the “initiative” and “good attitude” awards in your school, didn’t you?[/quote]
I think that it is adorable that you are so full of yourself. I bet you won the “most interesting special learning case student” and “most narcissistic little shithead” awards in your school, didn’t you?
The reason I don’t lump 9/11 truthers in with people who would actually deny Evolution is simply because 9/11 was a closed investigation, and a horribly conducted one at that. Nobody outside government agencies had any opportunity to engage in any science and peer review so we really have nothing to go by. That’s also the reason why there really isn’t anything to debate. If you believe the government’s official story, great. If you don’t, that’s fine too. Neither position is based on any actual science so it’s a pointless debate.
Evolution has an absolute MOUNTAIN of evidence. The only reason on earth a person could deny it would be pure ignorance of what it is. Evolution deniers are vastly different than 9/11 truthers.[/quote]
Brent, without even looking at the rebuttals to various 911 Truther talking points, I can tell you the over-arching problem with their epistemology, and it is relevant to the thread because it’s the same problem for all forms of denialism. Their epistemic approach is called “anomaly hunting”. Here’s what I said to Jotham about that before (one of numerous posts from me he completely ignored):
[quote=“Vay”]What people like Watts are doing is looking at a puzzle that’s been largely put together. The assembled picture pretty clearly shows a duck. But Watts will point at a piece out of place or a couple pieces missing and say, “See! You can’t say it’s a duck! This bit over here looks a lot like a pig, if you squint. And this section kind of looks like a cow! How can you be so sure it’s a duck?”
What he’s doing there isn’t legitimate skepticism. It’s called “anomaly hunting”, and it basically shows that he’s willing to re-arrange the pieces any way he can and see just about anything imaginable in that assembled image - so long as it’s not a duck. For those of us who habitually debate with, say, 911 Truthers or Anti-vaccinists, this sort of behavior is very familiar. Science, though, isn’t about Truth. It’s about the best explanation, given the assembled observations. And those pretty clearly point to a duck. [/quote]
“The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe” podcast host and “Science-based Medicine” blog writer Steven Novella does a really good article on it here:
What this epistemic approach amounts to in practice is an endless parade of critiques: “How can you explain THIS? Oh…well, what about THIS? Oh. Well then how ‘bout THIS?” and on and on. But as I say in my first post above, what their approach is lacking is a hypothesis that explains more of the existing observations than the conventional theory.
Look at Jotham: he has a sort of fusion “ENSO+sun spots+arctic winds+mantle activity” hypothesis, but even if the individual components held up to some extent (they don’t), none of this addresses the bulk of empirical observations (which is probably why he keeps ignoring my posts pointing to them!) The same is definitely true for 9/11 conspiracy theorists.
Incidentally, it’s totally off-topic, but here are a couple of my favorite sites to show people regarding 9/11 conspiricism. The first is a must-read for anyone maintaining the notion that there was some sort of controlled demolition:
9/11 is a pointless debate to have. There is no evidence, no peer review, no science to conduct, it was a closed investigation. The only information we have was filtered from day 1 through the US government. So yeah talking about missiles and phantom planes and Bush did it etc is all totally meaningless speculation by some very uncreative people I might add. But just because the vast majority of truthers make asses of themselves doesn’t mean the governments story is correct. That’s a complete non sequitur that works to the advantage of the government. It’s like Occupy Wall Street. 99% of them were complete pinheads making total fools of themselves and the movement. But that doesn’t mean that a few of them there didn’t have legitimate points. It’s unfortunate that 9/11 truthers are their own worst enemy. But anybody who believes the governments official story has got to have the full blinders on. Probably the same type of people who believed the Warren Commission report when it came out :liar:
Anyway, it’s a non issue. There’s no science here, just opinions. We’ll never know…
[quote=“BrentGolf”]9/11 is a pointless debate to have. There is no evidence, no peer review, no science to conduct, it was a closed investigation. The only information we have was filtered from day 1 through the US government. So yeah talking about missiles and phantom planes and Bush did it etc is all totally meaningless speculation by some very uncreative people I might add. But just because the vast majority of truthers make asses of themselves doesn’t mean the governments story is correct. That’s a complete non sequitur that works to the advantage of the government. It’s like Occupy Wall Street. 99% of them were complete pinheads making total fools of themselves and the movement. But that doesn’t mean that a few of them there didn’t have legitimate points. It’s unfortunate that 9/11 truthers are their own worst enemy. But anybody who believes the governments official story has got to have the full blinders on. Probably the same type of people who believed the Warren Commission report when it came out :liar:
Anyway, it’s a non issue. There’s no science here, just opinions. We’ll never know…[/quote]
Well, I guess it depends on your definition of “know”, but what I do think we can at least know with a very strong degree of certainty is a lot of things that did NOT happen on that day - for example, a controlled demolition.
Oh come on. There’s such a thing as inference. For example, in the sample abstracts I gave you above, the one which was an impact study, you said this:
You said this about an impact study where the author was explicitly talking about different carbon emission scenarios. One cannot be implicitly endorsing ENSO or cosmic rays if one is using carbon emission scenarios as one’s basis for considering impacts! Moreover, if ENSO or cosmic rays were the culprit, there would be no reason whatsoever to expect the warming trend to continue indefinitely into the future, as you well should know, since you are currently cheer-leading the climate’s impending shift to global cooling!
[quote=“Fred Smith”]…but science doesn’t work by consensus!
Thanks Vay. About time you got with the program. You do understand, however, don’t you? just who is beating the consensus drum and why? and that (hint hint) would not be Jotham or I.[/quote]
Not that you’re interested in learning anything, but here’s what someone who actually knows what the hell he’s talking about says on consensus in science:
You may want to be careful when you throw that word “we” around. It tends to sound a little bit arrogant, especially when discussing a conclusion that is decidedly not a high degree of certainty as you claim. For every person you find who believes controlled demolition is out of the question, you’ll probably find a person on the other side who is skeptical of an office fire bringing down the building, and round and round we go. You have to remember, being a 9/11 truther doesn’t necessarily mean you believe in missiles and phantom airplanes. It doesn’t mean you believe in all those silly conspiracy movies that people put on YouTube. There is no confidence level of lunacy you need to cross to be considered a truther. A truther could simply be a person who doesn’t believe the governments official story in it’s entirety.
I sure hope you are at least a mild 9/11 truther. As I said, you’d have to really have the blinders on if you believe the whole story the government and NIST pushed on us. There’s gotta be a few things surrounding the incidents of that day that at least throw up a yellow flag for you? That by definition makes you a form of truther as well. I think we’re probably all 9/11 truthers to some degree…
It’s quite unusual that governments tell outright lies; normally it’s more effective to just bend the truth.
OTOH it does happen. The Gulf of Tonkin incident springs to mind (a complete fabrication used as an excuse for a war). So I’d say in this case BrentGolf is right (“A truther could simply be a person who doesn’t believe the governments official story in it’s entirety”). Demolition might have been highly unlikely, but you can’t just discount the possibility entirely. This isn’t science, it’s politics, where truth is stranger than fiction.
[quote=“finley”]It’s quite unusual that governments tell outright lies; normally it’s more effective to just bend the truth.
OTOH it does happen. The Gulf of Tonkin incident springs to mind (a complete fabrication used as an excuse for a war). So I’d say in this case BrentGolf is right (“A truther could simply be a person who doesn’t believe the governments official story in it’s entirety”). Demolition might have been highly unlikely, but you can’t just discount the possibility entirely. This isn’t science, it’s politics, where truth is stranger than fiction.[/quote]
Finley read the “Demolitions” article I linked to. Read the eye witness testimony from fire fighters at the scene. The collapses are an empirical fact and there has been plenty of science done on them. I’m out of practice at this topic and don’t particularly care that much what people believe - except for the flawed epistemology I described above, as I think it is a sort of cognitive virus being spread by the Internet, and the 911 Truth movement has done a lot to facilitate that.
Which is exactly why I believe that the truth probably lies somewhere in-between. By very definition that would make me a 9/11 truther, even though I’m far from the full tin hat wearing truther talking about missiles and phantom airplanes and unloading civilians in a secret government hangers etc etc…
I try not to care what eye witnesses said about the sights and sounds of that horrifying day. I try to think critically and rely on actual science. That means, something that can be tested and experienced by a third party objectively. I rely a lot more on what we know about the maximum potential heat output of an office fire in a confined space and how that measures up to the melting point of the actual materials in the building. I prefer to focus on the chemistry, not eye witness accounts of scared people.
I completely agree. A lot of people in the so called “movement” have done themselves a big disservice by focusing on things that are entirely speculative and quite frankly stupid. But just because there is no shortage of idiots within the movement, that doesn’t mean the government is telling the truth. Personally I think government officials involved are probably in a closed room somewhere high fiving each other every time they see another conspiracy theory video being posted up on YouTube. Those just discredit the truth movement even more…
Krugman had a good editorial about how conservatism has become such a brainless cult lately.
[quote]But that was then. Modern conservatism has become a sort of cult, very much given to conspiracy theorizing when confronted with inconvenient facts. Liberal policies were supposed to cause hyperinflation, so low measured inflation must reflect statistical fraud; the threat of climate change implies the need for public action, so global warming must be a gigantic scientific hoax. Oh, and Mitt Romney would have won if only he had been a real conservative.
It’s all kind of funny, in a way. Unfortunately, however, this runaway cult controls the House, which gives it immense destructive power — the power, for example, to wreak havoc on the economy by refusing to raise the debt ceiling. And it’s disturbing to realize that this power rests in the hands of men who, thanks to the wonk gap, quite literally have no idea what they’re doing.[/quote] nytimes.com/2013/09/09/opini … k-gap.html
Can wecall deniers “dumb as a snowshoe hare” or is that speciesist?
[quote]Hares switch color in the spring and fall in response to light, when the days get longer or shorter. But that means they’re at the mercy of the weather. If the snow comes late, you get a white hare on brown ground.
“And they really think that they’re camouflaged,” Kumar says. “They act like we can’t see them. And it’s pretty embarrassing for the hare.”
Kumar calls this “mismatch,” and it’s becoming more of a concern with climate change.
“If the hares are consistently molting at the same time, year after year, and the snowfall comes later and melts earlier, there’s going to be more and more times when hares are mismatched,” he says.
Scott Mills of North Carolina State University leads the research. He says they’re finding that mismatched hares die at higher rates. That’s a concern for the threatened Canada lynx, which mainly eats these hares.
“It’s a picture that paints a thousand words,” Mills says. “It’s a very clear connection to a single climate change stressor.” [/quote]
The reason you have different ways of looking at a duck or pig is because you have models. They all arrange the pieces together to form a picture, and they are all legitimate pictures and different viewpoints and explanations at this point, at least until some models get disproven, which occurs. If AGW were empirically confirmed, physically proven, which it can be if it really happens, then the competing models have to melt away and the true picture of a duck or pig becomes uncontested, because all the pieces are there and can’t be rearranged anymore. You can’t claim that your own theory isn’t arranging pieces to form a picture of what you like to see. If it ever becomes the case that you’re picture is the true one, then your theory has been proven.
Uh no, Vay. That isn’t a fusion of a global-warming model. ENSO itself can explain global warming. ENSO is driven by solar power, which is in turn affected by sun spots or cosmic rays (which are different aspects of solar activity each studied in their own right).
Arctic winds are not an explanation for global warming – they are an explanation for melting ice in the Arctic, which AGW’s still like to say is global warming. The mantle under Greenland isn’t an explanation for global warming; it is an explanation for Greenland ice melting because of geothermal heat under that thin mantle, which melting AGW’s still attribute to global warming.
When I bring up points that refute AGW theory, that doesn’t mean they become part of ENSO theory, or pardon me, model.
The reason you have different ways of looking at a duck or pig is because you have models. They all arrange the pieces together to form a picture, and they are all legitimate pictures and different viewpoints and explanations at this point, at least until some models get disproven, which occurs. If AGW were empirically confirmed, physically proven, which it can be if it really happens, then the competing models have to melt away and the true picture of a duck or pig becomes uncontested, because all the pieces are there and can’t be rearranged anymore.[/quote]
Dude your confirmation bias is really showing here:
* The ionosphere is expected to cool and contract in response to greenhouse warming. This has been observed by satellites: Global Change in the Upper Atmosphere
THIS IS EMPIRICAL CONFIRMATION OF AGW.
And this isn’t all of it by a long shot.
It isn’t “arranging pieces to form a picture of what I like to see.” It’s multiple lines of evidence from independent sources converging towards the same explanation. THAT is the puzzle picture I’m talking about, and THAT is why I keep showing you the above list. I’m not just “throwing shit at a wall to see what sticks” or however you put it.
I hate typing on the IPad so I’ll get to the rest later.
THIS IS EMPIRICAL CONFIRMATION OF AGW.
And this isn’t all of it by a long shot.[/quote]
Yes, you have a model, which explains data (what you call empirical confirmation of AGW) in a way that you interpret. Other models explain or interpret the same data in different ways that haven’t been disproven, which induces them to also say “empirical confirmation of our model.”
Well, it is more likely other models will look at different sets of data for empirical confirmation, which your model completely ignores or only partially admits, such as ENSO, while at the same time explaining the data set in a different way that you assert is empirical confirmation of your own model (if only you interpret it your way) – and they are all legitimate at this point because little has been proved or disproved.
It isn’t “arranging pieces to form a picture of what I like to see.” It’s multiple lines of evidence from independent sources converging towards the same explanation. THAT is the puzzle picture I’m talking about, and THAT is why I keep showing you the above list. I’m not just “throwing shit at a wall to see what sticks” or however you put it.[/quote]
Well…same thing. Other models have multiple lines of evidence converging towards the same explanation. That’s what makes something a model – it has a comprehensive view of a phenomena, and it keeps getting more complex as more scientists get involved in studying different factors of it. At this point you are not the only model with a comprehensive view of a duck or some gibberish.
And one of the lines of your empirical evidence is recently not converging at all, which is global temperature with GHGs – and that one is probably most important. And that is the evidence that is converging very well – nay even better – with other models and could be the empirical evidence that eventually disproves your model in the end.
This is the reason AGWs keep changing the goalposts and have now allowed for 50% natural explanations, such as your Cook’s study of the 0.3% consensus, when previously such a range would be considered skeptical and heretical. AGW model must become pliable and elastic, because they don’t wan’t their model to break completely in pieces in the face of new evidence. We’re all becoming skeptics now.
I can say with absolute confidence, building on my impressive 0 years of experience in relevant fields, that the contents of the NIST report are indeed unbelievable according to this moron with a megaphone whose blog I follow
I’m kidding, of course. The fact is that there will always be yellow flags in the midst of any major media event. I’ve done so much reading into wingnut 9/11 conspiracy crap that I’m totally exhausted by the topic by now… and in the end I never found anything that seemed remotely credible. Not on the engineering side of things anyway.
Well remember NIST themselves have said their initial explanation in the report was wrong so it’s no longer required for you to try to prove it wrong
Well strictly from an engineering perspective it’s at least intriguing to see a building completely and uniformly collapse on itself due to fire. So either way we are looking at something that needs serious investigation.
If the building was constructed to code, obviously it’s impossible for it to collapse due to fire. Maximum potential heat output in an oxygen rich environment vs the melting point of the foundation structure of the building etc… Foundation wins, or so it should if the building is constructed correctly.
If it did collapse due to fire, then it seems the engineers and contractors of the building have some serious explaining to do. Was the foundation of the building actually filled with newspaper and coke bottles like they sometimes are in Taiwan? Maybe. How come nobody was brought to justice for constructing such a tremendously faulty building? Somebody must have made a small fortune replacing high quality materials with low quality ones that can’t withstand an office fire.
Wacky conspiracy theories aside, It raises some questions that’s for sure.
