Reptile & Amphibian Forums

All kidding aside, the global warming debate really is interesting. It can inform us about how science is corrupted to meet the personal, philosophical or political prejudices of individuals as well as groups.

We saw in rodney's example, an utter refusal to discuss the validity of his petition evidence - until I nearly beat it out of him - and then he tried to bury the fact that his petition evidence was worthless under a pile of "new" evidence. Clearly we don't want to continue a debate with someone who is so deeply entrenched in their particular position that they can't be open minded. At that point, the point of view has become a "religion" for the individual, and they can't afford to change.

For those who are actually interested in the debate, here is an interesting article from NASA about how a particular "greenhouse skeptic" (like rodney) actually misused the NASA scientists evidence in order to prove his point - again we see an example of someone willing to abuse the evidence to promote their religion!

The only way to have real success in science ... is to describe the evidence very carefully without regard to the way you feel it should be. If you have a theory, you must try to explain what's good about it and what's bad about it equally. In science you learn a kind of standard integrity and honesty. --Richard Feynman

rodney: All I wanted to do with this debate was to see if you had it in you to focus on the issues in a rational manner - clearly you don't.

I would suggest you read this quote, then read the article - you'll learn something - I hope.

In my view, we are not doing as well as we could in the global warming debate. For one thing, we have failed to use the opportunity to help teach the public about how science research works. On the contrary, we often appear to the public to be advocates of fixed adversarial positions. Of course, we can try to blame this on the media and politicians, with their proclivities to focus on antagonistic extremes. But that doesn't really help.

The fun in science is to explore a topic from all angles and figure out how something works. To do this well, a scientist learns to be open-minded, ignoring prejudices that might be imposed by religious, political or other tendencies (Galileo being a model of excellence). Indeed, science thrives on repeated challenge of any interpretation, and there is even special pleasure in trying to find something wrong with well-accepted theory. Such challenges eventually strengthen our understanding of the subject, but it is a never-ending process as answers raise more questions to be pursued in order to further refine our knowledge.

Link: http://www.giss.nasa.gov/edu/gwdebate/

The Global Warming Debate - a NASA perspective

why did you find data that is 6 years old that has been revised twice since then?

Still can't read, or is it that you just can't remember anything?

Don't you remember my post discussing computer model inaccuracies? Where NASA generated those numbers using a computer model? They then testified to congress on global warming, found an error in their computer model, corrected the problem with the computer model, and came up with significantly lower "warming" numbers. (approx. 1/10 the original estimate). They then changed their position from "99% sure there is global warming" to "there is no evidence to support it." That's what got me interested in global warming in the first place. The fact that global warming predictions are constantly being changed, and usually downward. I was investigating why it kept changing, because I wanted to know why those predictions were so inaccurate. I found it curious. That's when I ran across all the evidence of flawed computer models that NASA and the UN were using.

Then the "urban sprawl effect", or "island effect" was discovered and the revision then showed the Earth has been cooling by using much more accurate satellite data of the entire world's temperatures instead of just 99 points on the surface of the Earth. Apparently, this flaw was found due to the higher temps. in winter and in night time lows, while summer highs stayed about the same.--decreasing extreme weather conditions.

As for We saw in rodney's example, an utter refusal to discuss the validity of his petition evidence - until I nearly beat it out of him - and then he tried to bury the fact that his petition evidence was worthless under a pile of "new" evidence. Clearly we don't want to continue a debate with someone who is so deeply entrenched in their particular position that they can't be open minded. At that point, the point of view has become a "religion" for the individual, and they can't afford to change.

What? I tried to "beat" some statistical analysis into you, but your head was too hard. As hard as I tried, the information just couldn't get in. You are still trying to tell everyone who reads these posts how you don't understand statistical analysis? How does your inability to comprehend something, like statistical analysis methods, translate into someone else being "entrenched in their particular position"?

Clearly we can't discuss statistical data with someone who doesn't understand statistical analysis! --Even if they try to make accusations that they can't back up.

Rodney

Here's an interesting site.

http://www.clearlight.com/~mhieb/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html

I have heard on numerous occasions how water vapor is the major factor on global warming. I had no idea it was so large. I was expecting something like 50% not 95%. A few sites I found had it at 96%.

Taking that into effect, I was going to make some calculations, but the site above already did it for me.

So lets see, .28% multiplied by the (.2-.8) degree (C) change that we think has happened (if we ignore the satellite data) in the last 100 years gives us a possible manmade cause of global warming to be a whopping .000168 to .000224 degree Celsius change over the last 100 years! Wow, that's catastrophic! I guess we better spend hundreds of trillion dollars to try and make sure it doesn't go up another .000001 degrees this coming decade. And we better act fast! I can feel the temperatures rising already--no, wait, that's just my furnace coming on again!-LOL. (Assuming you can ignore all the satellite data that actually shows we have been cooling for the last 20 years, and ignore that the land based temps. that gave those figures are wrong).

But wait, let's ignore the water vapor effect too, so it really looks bad! That gives us an increase of .0106 to .04424 over the last 100 years that could be caused by man. If we eliminate all green house gasses caused by man, we could lower the earth temps. by a whopping .0001 to .0004 degrees every single year! In a hundred years, that's a whole one-one-hundredth of one degree. That's certainly worth destroying all industry in the entire world, all cars, all power plants except solar, hydroelectric, and wind based.-- We wouldn't want to create any water vapor from nuclear plants, geothermal plants, etc.. So what if most people die of starvation/freeze/etc. we are evil anyway. I know that's not realistic, so let's assume we can eliminate 10%, then we can be proud, that through our actions, we lowered the earths average temps. by .001 degrees in just 100 years! That's quite an accomplishment. -LOL

Rodney