(10-19-2017, 03:49 AM)Kinser79 Wrote:(10-18-2017, 05:55 AM)Galen Wrote:(10-14-2017, 09:39 PM)Kinser79 Wrote:(10-14-2017, 07:34 PM)Galen Wrote: Yes, I am still trying to work out if he can handle Newtonian physics let alone conservation of energy.
I have discovered the more the supporters of a cause try to scare me the more likely that what they are pushing is false and not in my best interests.
As to scare tactics and shilling I have also found this to be the case.
Xers generally do because it is part of the toolkit we tend to develop needed to survive. The ability to detect scams as early as possible is a valuable survival skill.
Determining whether something is or is not a scam is a technique that nearly everyone needs. Some are merely better at doing just that than others.
In this case, I for a long while believed that the whole anthroprogenic global warming thing was a reality for a while. Unfortunately the predictions that were made on the basis of that belief did not come true. Now I could do like some others and ignore that reality and continue to hold onto a viewpoint that wasn't working or I could scrap it for something else.
That said, it was far easier to stop believing in AGW than it was the labor theory of value.
For once (the metric system) I largely agree with you. The metric system works better, and once people get used to it they will stick with it. The real trick is in avoiding confusion between weights, areas, and volumes. "Liter" and "meter" rhyme.
AGW seems real enough. Christmas merchandise is already appearing in stores, and we are two months and a week away. We have yet to have a frost in southern Michigan. It's not quite summer-like, but the fall foliage is turning slowly. Alternation between cool rains and sort-of-warm temperatures? I'm usually through mowing the lawn by now, but I will do so later today.
You saw the projection maps. Tropical zones expand at the expense of subtropical zones. Tropical zones, unless on alluvial fans (like Bengal) or on volcanic soils (Indonesia) are terribly unproductive as a rule. Deserts and semi-deserts expand or appear where they have not been. In one projection the Danube valley starts going semi-desert.
The menace not shown was inundation. Fertile lands that support millions of people, if only at the living standards of peasant farmers. Where do those people go? Yes, I know well -- peasant farmers have few real friends, especially among foreigners who have no bonds to them. Certainly not Marxists who recognize them as reactionaries for refusing to become serfs of the State. Certainly not economic elitists like Trump who want them to become bonded in debt so that they must become sharecroppers for people with an economic morality like his. The bourgeois intellectuals hold peasants in contempt for their lack of sophistication. Where do all the people of Bangladesh go? Where do all those millions of peasant farmers of China (and China is still heavily rural) go as waters overtake their lands?
Places that go from Dfc (short summers and cold winters, as in northern Scandinavia, northern Russia, most of Siberia, Alaska, and the northern and middle tiers of Canada) to Dfb (long but not very warm summers, but cold winters)? Nice try, but the soils are too thin under Dfc climates. To get new soils suitable for good agriculture would take decades of weathering. Meanwhile recent peasant farmers are in refugee camps.
...Scam detection is easy enough for those who know that nobody operates a business to lose money. Thus the black fellow who tries to sell me a stolen "Rolex" just 'liberated' in a riot (this was in the 1960s) that has a huge price tag might be a cheap fake. I wouldn't buy it. First of all, I am not buying stolen property. Second, I don't buy pointless luxuries; if I had the money I would have a nice portfolio of stocks and not buy $1000 suits, overpriced automobiles, a McMansion, etc., unless that is necessary for the work that I do. An apartment at a Trump Tower? You saw how I skewered the taste of your 'great and glorious leader'. A swimming pool, perhaps, as that offers the best exercise, and getting and keeping fit is good for staying healthy, wealthy, and wise.
Nobody has perfect knowledge. But I now the way of the scientist. These people are impeccably honest, and very rational. They are not in what they do for the money. Double-blind testing and peer review are good for driving out cranks and cheats. Projections of the future are themselves shaky. But who else would you trust? The models that I have shown are estimates. The model can work the other way and give the reality of the Younger Dryas (a partial reversion of world climatic patterns to the time of widespread glaciation outside the polar regions) and to the apices of glaciation in the Pleistocene.
The pattern is simple: raise levels of carbon dioxide in the air and the greenhouse effect strengthens. The atmosphere becomes more capable of holding water vapor, and more water vapor gets into the atmosphere. Water vapor itself has an even stronger greenhouse effect than does carbon dioxide. Air temperatures rise a little more. On the other side, reduce atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide, and the atmosphere becomes chillier. Places that are now tundra or boreal forest get unending winter. About seventy-five years of such are enough to reshape the world's climate patterns to something more glacial. Ice sheets and snowfields expand, and they start to appear in non-polar locations like Scotland and the Adirondacks. High reflectivity of the ice sheets and ice caps ensure that such sunlight as snowy and icy places gets goes back into space instead of warming and melting the frozen water. The ice sheets quit expanding only when the water vapor practically disappears so that no more snow can fall in glaciated places. Yes, it works both ways.
Scientists are not scammers. Can they be wrong? Sure. In the nineteenth century and early twentieth century there were such activities as phrenology and eugenics that have since proved very wrong, in part because those studies violated the scientific method in efforts to push certain agendas. "Bad head-shape", thus criminal. Bad "race", thus criminal (Jews) or simply subhuman (you know where that leads). Academic science screens out cranks and cheats. One does science because one loves it and has the aptitudes and learning. One does industrial labor solely for the money.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.