Your ignorance about science, the environment, tribal culture, economics, politics, and contempory literature and the background of popular authors is profound and deep. Hit the links and attack his assertions and charges, rather than Crichton as a person.

There's just no talking sense into religious fanatics. I know I am offending your faith by questioning your strongly held enviromentalist myths, but until you address the specific claims and assertions of Crichton's and the other Skeptics of the assertion that human activity is the primary cause of Global Warming your lame attempts to defend your myths will remain lame and sad.

tashi deleks,

M

__________________
"They haven't got Brains, any of them, only grey fluff that's blown into their heads by mistake, and they don't Think." -- Eeyore, The House At Pooh Corner

Sit like a mountain,
Breathe like the wind,
Mind like the Sky.

When all the Gods are crazy, who do you pray to?

Like i said in another thread. Im already familiar with your spam and Crichtons opinions. I have no need to discuss him. You can go on hero worshipping him and spamming the board with his take on the subject, i lost interest in Crichton when i was about 14 years old and his books became boring to me.

Andrew

__________________
“...corporations and those who run them cannot stop exploiting resources and amassing wealth until they have... .I cannot finish this sentence, because the truth is that can never stop; like cancer, they can only continue to expand until they kill the host.”

-- Derrick Jensen

More lameness from the lame. Don't kid yourself my friend, the reason you refuse to discuss him is you cannot argue against his claims and assertions with any merit. Your ignorance has been clear for a while, but now it is obvious that you are willfully ignorant and will never rise above your mythic environmentalist belief system.

What will you and the rest of the Algoreans say when it becomes obvious to all that your theory of Global Warming is as valid as eugenics was? You'll probably cling to it still.

tashi deleks,

M

__________________
"They haven't got Brains, any of them, only grey fluff that's blown into their heads by mistake, and they don't Think." -- Eeyore, The House At Pooh Corner

Sit like a mountain,
Breathe like the wind,
Mind like the Sky.

When all the Gods are crazy, who do you pray to?

That's a great argument for doing nothing about leaving the planet in better hands for our kids.

Again, this is what the fourth or fifth time, I have never argued that we do nothing for the planet. What we need to do is what we can do based on the best empirical information we have -- not based on politized science, not based on speculation, not based on some ideological "idea" of nature or humanity's relationship with nature, and not based on some environmentalist fundamentalist religious dogma.

What you advocate will not help humanity and will not help the planet. The only places you find an environmental consciousness willing to do good for the environment develop, is where an affluent well educated middle class has become the majority of the population. The policies and programs that extreme environmentalists (the elites in control of the environmentalist organizations -- the Algoreans) promote will not help the Third World countries develop that middle class population. The Third World will remain poor and hungry and the First World will follow them downward. With all of your feel good intentions you will help destroy, not save the environment or humanity.

Jason you have nothing but your baseless religious beliefs. And like all good fanatics you will preach salvation as you kill, through the policies you promote, the unbelievers.

May the Gods help us all.

tashi deleks,

M

__________________
"They haven't got Brains, any of them, only grey fluff that's blown into their heads by mistake, and they don't Think." -- Eeyore, The House At Pooh Corner

Sit like a mountain,
Breathe like the wind,
Mind like the Sky.

When all the Gods are crazy, who do you pray to?

I am focusing, Si modo. Although some of these articles you have presented question certain aspects of the IPCC reports, none of them call into question the basic hypothesis that greenhouse gas emissions are causing the planet's overall temperature to warm.

Please understand that this is the consensus, not "the sky is falling."

As far as that idea is concerned, I still see a consensus, including the articles you have cited.

The "question" that is not quite dead yet, is what is the most signigficant factor causing climate change. The consensus the disciples of Gore preach as gospel is that the scientific community is in consensus that APG is the major factor.

This is NOT the case, even though so many of the uninformed buy it and repeat it without checking for themselves. My citations are a few that demonstrate these falshoods.

Whether APG is "the major factor" is not politically relevant. AGW is of concern, and we need to take action against it, if it is a significant cause -- or even if it might be.

That's for policy and another debate. Mixing science with politics is not a good idea in this case. I'ts been done too much and ad nauseum with this subject and I am loathe to do it more.

If we want to discuss policy once we are able to keep our minds open about the science as it is too immature at this point, I am fine with that. Right now, I settle for baby steps with this subject.

I am glad to see that there is hope to dispel the myth that the extent of APG is a dead question and the myth that there is a consensus that APG is the most significant factor leading to climate change. It's a very open question.

Sorry that I took so long to get back to you on this. But, alas, work, school and personal life have intervened frequently over the past few months. Internet message board had to take a back seat.

The biggest problem I have with Michael Crichton is that he claims that the politicization of science is a big problem because it selectively cherry picks the data to further an underlying aim in a particular field of study. And then to prove this, he goes out and selectively cherry picks studies that back up his thesis.

I agree with him that there are examples present in science where politics get involved. It happens in every field of human endeavor, some more than others. Science, unlike many other fields, actually has a way to try and limit the effect of this: peer-review. And a vast majority of the peer-reviewed literature does not support his claim that anthropogenic global warming/climate change is non-existent.

He recognizes this, but claims its not a problem due to two things: 1) over-reliance upon computer models and 2) consensus does not prove truth. I actually have some sympathy for these two points, but I think he overextends himself mightily to think that these points mean AGW is bunk.

First, let's look at computer models. I won't deny that there are problems with the models, and to be honest, no one should be surprised by this. Proper experimentation would mean that we would have to replicate our experiments. Since we only have one planet Earth, and the costs, feasibility and ethical issues that would arise with tinkering with the Earth's atmosphere make it impossible for us to directly test AGW hypotheses. So, we have to rely on models to help us try to do that. They are by no means perfect and I'm sure there are some errors that will continue to be found in them. But, all that being said, the majority of them haven't been that far off.

Now, if we only relied upon models to research AGW, the theory would be very weak. But, that isn't the case. There are a host of different data sources that support AGW from many different realms of science and they all suggest the same thing: the best explanation for warming/climate changes is due to carbon dioxide increase and most of this carbon dioxide increase is sue to man-made activities.

Yet, Crichton never really attacks these data sets. Almost all of his arguments deal with the models, which is far and away the weakest of the supporting data sets for AGW. And the ones that try to go after the science that I've seen are pretty damn weak (the one that comes to mind is one where he states carbon dioxide only makes up a small percentage of the atmosphere so it just CAN'T make that big of a difference). Sorry, but that doesn't fly. If he wants to be far more convincing, he needs to show why other, much stronger data sets are incorrectly interpreted. I have yet to see any skeptic scientist, let alon Mr. Crichton, do this.

Another of his big themes is that consensus doesn't equal the truth. Again, I have sympathy for this argument, yet I think it is logically flawed in how he uses it. It's true that there have been sea changes in scientific thought when one scientist, much mocked and ridiculed, bucked "the system" and proved to everyone that he was right and changed how people looked at the world. Galileo, Darwin, and Wegener come to mind. Crichton often uses the examples of plate tectonics and global cooling to show how the consensus was wrong. So since this happened, how can consensus be trusted?

I know that consensus is sometimes wrong. But, more often than naught, I do trust it (I still read up on it, though). why would I do such a "stupid" thing? Well, it's because consensus is much, much more often right than it is wrong. Yet, Crichton never gives examples of this, and there are MANY. To put it in words that a friend of mine said once, "just because someone laughed at one of your jokes, it doesn't mean you're funny". Crichton uses his argument to paint all consensus as inherently flawed due to a few cases, when in reality, these cases are exceptions rather than the rule.

So, in many ways, I think Crichton is a case study in the very thing he argues against. He uses part of the story to inflame public opinion for his side of the story. That's why it is better to have these talks based on the science, rather than the messenger (which was the whole point I was trying to get with my flippant comment).

__________________
He who learns but does not think is lost! He who thinks but does not learn is in great danger. --Confucius

Smooth seas do not make skillful sailors.
--African proverb

Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one's living at it.
--Albert Einstein

What I find most amusing is that Michael Crichton holds up medical trials as the example for what all scientific studies should emulate. "I come from medicine, where the gold standard is the randomized double-blind study, ... For a person with a medical background, accustomed to this degree of rigor in research..." MichaelCrichton.com | Testimony before the United States Senate

The irony of course is that medecine has unique problems and frankly shares most of his complaints about scientific rigor with climate change.

In terms of uniqueness, unlike almost any other field, human experiments need to deal with the placebo effect on their experimental subject. Double-blind's are specifically designed to avoid this effect (among others). If a doctor knew what he was administering, humans are adept at reading body language and could cue in on this, which in turn could influence the answers via the placebo effect. No one has to worry that a fundamental particle or thermometer might read their body language and change the results.

As far as weaknesses, the primary ones would of course be:

1) Small sample size. The number of people involved is miniscule in most studies compared to the number of events in say particle physics. Even if results are nominally significant, limited numbers limit internal self-consistency checks for systematics.

2) Biased reporting (which Crichton complains about for climate change). Forget raw data, there's no requirement for any results or the existence of a study to be released which is a statistical abyss in terms of potential cherry-picking.

I disagree somewhat with your last point. In clinical trials, negative as well as positive results must be reported. When a drug or other therapy doesn't work in a subject, that data cannot be excluded per clinical trial protocol.

In the basic and applied sciences, one problem is that failed methodologies are rarely published. It's a shame, too, as this information is useful to others investigating a specific question and could save much time. Unless one serendipituously comes upon another successful methodology while investigating the failed one, any manuscript they submit will be rejected by reviewers. It is the current culture in the basic and applied sciences.

Not a problem. School and meat-life (not cyber-life) should always come first.

And what cherry did he pick? The research by Michael Mann and the infamous hockey stick graph. A graph that was not based on computer models, but on tree ring studies. Even more so, Mann's hockey stick graph was used by the IPCC as clear evidence for global warming and was the major graph that Al Gore used in his fauxumentary "A Convenient Lie." He may have been selective in his picking, but what he picked was used as the prime evidence for global warming by the IPCC, Al Gore, and nearly every environmental group or advocate to push the myth of global warming. It has been completely and utterly discredited.

Crichton does not make the claim that "anthropogenic global warming/climate change is non-existent." He claims that we do not currently understand enough about the hows and whys of the climate to make a firm conclusion on either side. Crichton does not want us going halved ass into draconian trillion dollar projects that have no real chance of doing anything for the climate and will cause tremendous suffering for human beings, particularly in the Third World. I agree with that completely. Also, peer-review is not the be all and end all of any scientific theory or fact. It is the ability to replicate experiments (getting the same results) and the ability to predict events based on a theory (it is also helpful if science can help explain the why or the process accurately). Peer-review only helps establish what we already know, it rarely helps establish any radically new theory or evidence.

That's not what he claims. Read above.

Actually no, the majority of climate models have been far off. Not one climate model has been able to accurately predict past climate trends. None, zero, nada. If none of the climate models have been able to predict past climate trends why-how should we rely on them for predictions of future climate trends? The "one planet Earth" argument does not cut it. There are many ways to study the climate, the atmosphere, the environment without the need to mess with it in ethically questionable ways. It only requires time -- long periods of time. Threats, like Al Gore's and the hosts of other environmentalists extremists, that we only have ten years tells me they are more interested in an agenda and not the truth of facts. If all we have is ten years the world is doomed and the world would not be able to do anything fast enough to fix what may very well not be broken.

You mean like Mann's hockey stick graph?

False.

I have already showed that is not the case.

In no particular order:
Roy Spencer’s testimony before congress backs up Monckton’s assertions on climate sensitivity « Watts Up With That?
Roy W. Spencer: Global Warming and Nature's Thermostat
CO2 Science
Still Waiting For Greenhouse
When Graphs Attack! « Watts Up With That?
http://www.climatechangeissues.com/f...5mckitrick.pdf
Climate Modeling Must Consider All "Greenhouse" Gases
Jan Veizer
The Milky Way Galaxy's Spiral Arms and Ice-Age Epochs and the Cosmic Ray Connection | ScienceBits
On the Role of Cosmic Ray Flux variations as a Climate Driver: The Debate | ScienceBits
Two Peer-Reviewed Scientific Papers Debunk CO2 Myth
http://www.heartland.org/pdf/21977.pdf
Dr. John R. Christy
http://www.nsstc.uah.edu/atmos/chris...gless_etal.pdf
http://www.marshall.org/pdf/materials/136.pdf
Harvard Gazette: Global warming is not so hot
http://www.fel.duke.edu/~scafetta/pdf/2005GL023849.pdf

Consensus can never be trusted completely. Experimentation repeated and verified by multiple sources can be trusted. Consensus does not move scientific fact forward, it helps establish it.

Amazon.com: Rethinking Risk and the Precautionary Principle: Julian Morris: Books Within this book you will find a list of major scientific developments that were held back because of the subjective prejudices of scientists. That's consensus for you.

Considering the fact that you misunderstood Crichton's claim and his argument (you at least misstated them) I think we can dismiss yours. While not all of the links above lead to articles written by scientists writing about "the science," several of them are. But thank you for taking the time to reply.

tashi deleks,

M

__________________
"They haven't got Brains, any of them, only grey fluff that's blown into their heads by mistake, and they don't Think." -- Eeyore, The House At Pooh Corner

Sit like a mountain,
Breathe like the wind,
Mind like the Sky.

When all the Gods are crazy, who do you pray to?

But the entire study can be suppressed - there have been a host of calls for reforms to address this. Showing a positive correlation in one study out of three is far different than showing a positive correlation in one study. (possibly that has changed in the last year or two. I certainly could have missed it.)

Regardless, the main point is that although there have been gaping flaws in some medical experiments historically, medicine as a whole has moved forward. While it may be imperfect, decisions made with trial information are on average better than decisions made ignoring the trials. There are almost certainly misunderstandings in the current medical understanding of say cancer, but we know more now than 20 years ago and your chances of surviving are also higher by and large.

Crichton, in contrast, is saying we'd be better off ignoring the data completely. This logic would suggest that we ignore the last century of medical progress because their disclosure requirements were rather shoddy and open to misuse.

So as far as I can tell that list boils down to three articles published in scientific journals plus a bunch of popular press articles.


Douglas, 2007 looks at 22 atmospheric models. After choosing to remove some of the models from contention (which reduces the scatter), he finds that they are inconsistent with measurements of tropical air temperatures. He states that this disagrees with other analyses due to their choices in which model lines to exclude. Douglas may or may not have chosen the better subset of data to analyze, but he does not rule out global warming in his conclusions.

Scafetta and West, 2005 state the Sun may have had a larger effect than expected. Allowing an arbitrary amplitude of the response as a function of frequency, they fit for the best-fit correlation. The biggest obstacle is clearly that they only have twenty years of data, eg they are pulling out 2 best-fit parameters from ~3 independent data points which obviously limits their accuracy.
However, their best guess is 10-30% of the temperature rise of the last twenty years is due to the Sun. The author's make no claims on whether the remaining 70-90% is due to carbon dioxide and human activites.

The third article in the Energy Sources Journal I failed to access since I don't subscribe. The abstract states it's the results of a computer climate model of the kind you've disparaged.