Posts by Kracklite
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The "it was hotter in the Medieval Warm Period" (MWP) meme is another dishonesty doing the rounds.
Global evidence using tree rings etc rather than local historical records supports the conclusion that on average, temperatures did not drop.
New Scientist's guide has a mention of that too.
Another one of the deniers' favourite lies, which Steve Curtis trotted out a while back was that somehow regional drops in temperature and even the short-term effects of El Ninos refuted the conclusion of an overall climb.
The MWP may have been caused by a fluctuation in the Gulf Stream, indeed it's been argued that if the Arctic cap melts, the influx of cold water will seriously alter the flow of the Gulf Stream, cooling Western Europe. Europe 'should' be much cooler than it is in fact, and it's the Gulf Stream that keeps it warm. This particular outcome though has - I think - been lately considered more unlikely.
In any case, regional climate is extremely variable and we might well get the odd glacier advancing here and there while worldwide averages climb.
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Re the Mann graph, a quick look at __New Scientist's__ Guide for the Perplexed leads to this, which has a link to a 2006 report of the US National Academy of Science (pdf)
The basic conclusion of Mann et al. (1998, 1999) was that the late 20th century warmth in the Northern Hemisphere was unprecedented during at least the last 1000 years. This conclusion has subsequently been supported by an array of evidence that includes both additional large-scale surface temperature reconstructions and pronounced changes in a variety of local proxy indicators, such as melting on ice caps and the retreat of glaciers around the world.
And New Scientist wraps up with:
Most researchers would agree that while the original hockey stick can – and has – been improved in a number of ways, it was not far off the mark. Most later temperature reconstructions fall within the error bars of the original hockey stick. Some show far more variability leading up to the 20th century than the hockey stick, but none suggest that it has been warmer at any time in the past 1000 years than in the last part of the 20th century.
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I find all this credential bashing pointless.
I have the highest respect for accountants. In fact I even had one as a girlfriend. Looks like Lucy Lawless, lots of fun to be with, we're still good friends.
OK, now hand a Black and Decker to your accountant and tell him/her to do your dentistry for you. Next, get your bank manager to give you a medical check-up and prescribe for you. After that, you can hand your financial portfolio to your doctor and ask them for investment advice.
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Continental drift evolved into the more accurate term plate tectonics
Wegener was kicked around because he wasn’t a trained geologistThat is at best a gross oversimplification and it certainly wasn't a neat, smooth evolution. Indeed, Wegener met a lot of purely prejudicial opposition, but he proposed a mechanism that was utterly impossible: continents ploughed through solid seabed rock like ships.
It was the discovery of the Mid-Oceanic Ridge and direct observation of spreading and subduction by real oceanographers and geologists that led to the emergence of the theory of plate tectonics.
If that work hadn't been done, Wegener's work would have - deservedly - been forgotten. That has nothing to do with his credentials and has everything to do with detailled data and a plausible mechanism, none of which Wegener had. His role is important, but overrated and detracts from the real work done in the late 60s.
Romantic stories about outsiders showing the entrenched fuddy-duddies how it's really done are just that - romantic stories. To make a leap of induction and claim that this somehow confers legitimacy on the denialists is foolish.
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The trouble with open minds is that people dump all sorts of trash in them. A sceptic doesn't have a closed mind per se, rather they have a pretty rigorous nonsense filter. Yes, someone open to anything may be right now and again, but it's like the stopped clock being right twice a day - OK, it's right now and then, but it's useless as a timepiece.
That is the point of scepticism. Indeed many of us, including myself, have seen evidence/anecdotes of potentially paranormal phenomena, and who knows, maybe an empirical basis for belief in them may one day emerge and stand up to enquiry, but until that big if occurs, explanations involving specifically ghosts or telepathy or the like over a more prosaic explanation are too amorphous or unsystematic to have any utility. Please note that I am making a utilitarian assessment here - and science is utilitarian.
I've read far too much psychological and neurological literature to think that sense or memory are accurate guides to phenomena. If someone says that they have seen something and it's very unlikely to be true, it's not due to them being an idiot or a liar, it's likely to be due to the fact that a brain and sensorium evolved to optimise survival as oposed to revealing objective reality have generated a certain impression, not conducted a NASA space probe-type survey of a site.
If you say you saw a unicorn, I'd suggest that some sort of veterinary examination would be in order before I would believe you.
I'd also check to see if Weta Workshop was staging a publicity stunt.
Actually, we are tending (in the west) to follow a dichotomous empirically-real/bullshit system, with the implicit assumption that is something is not one it must be the other. I'm currently researching narrative and cognition and constantly having to put in qualifiers about the reality or otherwise of myth is damned tedious - and unnecessary, so neither I nor my supervisors do it.
There's a neat book by Brian Appleyard, Aliens: Why Are They Here that I'd recommend. Appleyard does not both trying to 'prove' that little grey men are conducting rectal examinations - the point for him is that people belive these things and create cognitive maps and act according to the 'reality' of the experience.
Being in a book-recommending mode, there's R. D. Laing's The Politics of Experience too.
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Don't you have a cat or something?
Funnily enough, I use cats as an example explaining semiotics to students. You see, hairballs are an index wheras the written word "CAT" is a symbol.
At least I haven't brought up Foucault. Quasi-semi-coulda been architect types love him with Bentham's Panopticon and all...
Still, do you want to know what dark matter is? It's socks. You see, space at the Planck scale is "foamy" - minute transient wormholes can form and disappear constantly. What else is foamy? The inside of a washing machine! What's more, it's swirling about in a vortex, just like the accretion disc surrounding a black hole - and of course many scientists have suggested that black holes open up large, stable wormholes... so there you have it: ever since civilisations have arisen in the universe, they've been washing their socks (and very probably some millipede-like beings had LOTS of socks to wash), wormholes have been opening in their washing machines and transporting their socks out into space where, over billions and billions (copyright Carl Sagan) of years, they have accumulated in great dark intergalactic clouds affecting the rotation of galaxies and the expansion of the universe.
Voila!
(No doubt this can be falsified)
Also, I note in a recent New Scientist, one correspondent has noted that socks are subject to quantum entanglement - the moment he puts a sock on his right foot, the other instantly becomes a left sock.
Fascinating things, socks. And Sox is therefore a good name for a cat.
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Didn't Einstein have a couple of theories which weren't proven until decades later?
There's no way that science is infallible. It's premised on error-checking, and you have to recognise the possibility of making errors in order to investigate them and weed them out.
I am not a scientist, nor do I play one on television, but I do work with some... so a bit of pedantry follows:
The word to use is hypothesis, which denotes a description of how something in nature may work and which corresponds with observations. The hypothesis can predict results from further observations or experiments. Crucially, it must be falsifiable - that is, if it is wrong, it must be possible to prove it wrong. If subsequent experiments/observations (obviously astronomy is not an experimental science) reproduce (and reproducibility is also vital), then the hypothesis is then accepted as a theory.
In scientific parlance, "theory" is about as strong a statement as you can get - about, say 99.9999...whatever% likelihood of being correct, or accurate in its predictions. When most people say "theory", they mean what most scientists would call a (very weak, unsystematic) hypothesis (hence the big-sky-fairy worshippers disingenuously claiming that evolution is "only" a theory).
Anyway, that's more or less the version according to Popper, but lately, particularly in mathematics and quantum theory, proff or disproof is increasingly difficult due to the extreme difficulty in comprehending what the presumably accurate computer simulation has come up with and so there's likely to be a drift towards Bayesean probability as a measure of the worth of an hypothesis as a potential theory.
Anyway, certainly science is contingent... but 99.999... versus bullshit is better, by a long count.
And, obviously in light of the above, it's not scientists who stand on the absolute infalibility of science!
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Interesting podcast that may be pertinent to the Iran issue.
It was part of a series of seminars on long term thinking by The Long Now Foundation
Psychologist Philip Tetlock decided to start grading pundits and think tanks on the accuracy of their intelligence and predictions. Try here and scroll down to just above 2006. Blog summary here.
Instead of saying, “I evidently had the wrong theory,” the
experts declare, “It almost went my way,” or “It was the right
mistake to make under the circumstances,” or “I’ll be proved right
later,” or “The evilness of the enemy is still the main event here.”Tetlock’s summary: “Partisans across the opinion spectrum are
vulnerable to occasional bouts of ideologically induced insanity.”
He determined to figure out a way to keep score on expert political
forecasts, even though it is a notoriously subjective domain
(compared to, say, medical advice), and “there are no control groups
in history.”Heh.
In a nutshell, the narrower one's terms of reference, the less likely you are to be right. It was not a case of liberals or conservatives proving to be right, rather those who tended to be contrarian against their own inclinations and to qualify achieved better results overall. Simplistic, ideologically-driven assessments tended to be right only in the sense that a stopped clock is right eventually.
The CIA's caution and the Bush administration's certainty now is discussed, and compared with that of the more rabid cold warriors when the Soviet Union neared its collapse.
The whole series of seminars, and the Foundation's intent, I think many will agree, is fascinating in its own right.
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Damn, wrote a reply and it evaporated, which REALLY pissed me off, cos' it was sooo eloquent.
OK, again, and perhaps briefer (relatively).
The first point I would make is that the SG didn't specifically absolve anybody of any particular wrongdoing
And that's what infuriates a lot of people in the activist community. They're tarred with a brush... and now the accusations cannot be disproven in court. The mud has stuck. It's utterly unfair for a lot of them and leads them to believe that the T-word is just cynically and dishonestly being used as a stick to beat everyone with.
I wouldn't invite a vegan to dinner - out of consideration for for their sensibilities. They wouldn't like my jokes about deep-fried whaleburgers.
There is an irony here in that the activists have something in common with Greg O'Connor: some people think all police are rapists, racists and stormtroopers and some people think that all activists are terrorists.
if you don't believe you can effect meaningful change in society, why be an activist?
The end of slavery in the west, votes for women and independence for India did not come about by working within the system. One can draw a continuum perhaps: lobbyists who work with the system (and are seen as corrupt and corrupting by some), activists who compare themselves with the suffragettes and many other groups that have used civil disobedience to achieve social justice (and they are inevitably disruptive) and at the far end are terrorists who will not engage at all face to face with power.
My concern here is the perceived legitimacy of power. Terrorism arises not in conditions of poverty, but when power is perceived as illegitimate. Bin Laden and Lenin are both from wealthy families. Lenin was even a lawyer, but his brother was wrongly condemned and executed by the Tsarist police. We all know what he decided to do next. Saudi Arabia is by no means a free and open state and notably most of the 911 perpetrators were well-off Saudis, not poor and uneducated. There’s a paper which supports this which I am too lazy to find and link.
The problem is that whatever happened in the Ureweras, the police presented a face that looked authoritarian, arbitrary and violent. Hone Harawira, whether one agrees with him or not, articulated the perception that Howard Broad deliberately bypassed all his Maori advisors and even the local Ruatoki police when it suited him to.
Trust is essential to a civil society, and if that trust is flouted, then the legitimacy of authority is undermined. Force achieves immediate results, but long-term consequences may be that the situation ends up worse than ever. I'm sure that in the eyes of Tame Iti and his supporters (right or wrong, moderate or extreme, sane or barking), the raids justified their polarisation.
I don't think that anything good will come of this.
There is definitely a line between activist and terrorist, but people who want to see the adoption of terrorism love seeing people who don't think of themselves as terrorists being treated as terrorists because then they find it easier join the <Darth Vader breathing effects>dark side</Darth Vader breathing effects>. Raids on gluten-free bread workshops (not even dwarf bread) and a womens’ refuge and pointing a gun at a twelve-year-old girl’s head simultaneously with raids on accused terrorists in Ruatoki using the same warrants and as part of the same operation sends a very strong message from the police about who they think that they’re dealing with (my default disclaimer here is “even if that’s not their intention, that’s the effect”).
Now, the biggest fault of the far left is indeed to assume that the enemy of their enemy is their ally. It's hardly unusual - John Pilger and Tariq Ali seem to love Chavez and Castro because they're not W and W loves the House of Saud.
Sometimes it's Realpolitik and sometimes that works - Nixon and Kissinger achived detente with Russia and China after all, despite their repugnance for communism. Sometimes it's just naive, but smart people make that mistake.
It goes back at least as far as Truman who said of one unsavoury dictator, "He's a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch."
Guns, hunting, NRA, NRA not terrorists... sorry, I'm being lazy (but you can fill in the gaps) and I'm not proposing that as an argument to justify actions, but to describe a point of view that is strongly held.
Now I hate patriarchal macho thugs with advanced cases of testosterone poisoning who play with guns... but to even mild-mannered activists who had workshops on gluten-free bread broken up by cops and their members arrested for possession of avocados (or whatever), jerks playing secret army or cops look very similar.
I'm not assuming foresight and co-ordination, I'm decrying the lack of it
Allow me to rephrase my original observation: a lot of what you've been saying I agree with, but it's based on what people (on both sides) should do, not what the really do, what they see and how we need to deal with the consequences arising.
Now, what I want is to see the Maori Party and the Greens in parliament, with all their more extreme elements and hangers on visible there and able to use the levers of power. On the other hand, activism and civil disobedience have worked in the past - very well - and they have in retrospect seen to be on the side of right.
Simultaneously rounding up activists and accused terrorists is a very dangerous precedent because it will polarise society and undermine the legitimacy of power itself - with potentially the negative consequences I've described above.
If the system doesn't work we need to fix it ASAP
Agreed! I think that MMP helps here better and transparency helps even more. The increasing paranoia and clumsiness of the current government does not.
My main objection to the raids is that they are not only outrageously intimidating - they are also outrageously stupid.
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I don't think older history is appropriate to reflect upon the PCA.
Maybe not, but the PCA is perceived as a band-aid at best and incidents of twenty years or more ago are seen as part of a continuum/symptoms of a basic malaise leading up to the present day. The concept of "police investigating police" is not viewed without considerable cynicism.