Global Warming...New Report...and it ain't happy news

They've gone nuclear at the first oil shock, ages before this AGW scam. And now they use it not out of desire to "protect the climate" but to sell nuclear plants and to "establish a first global governance" (copyrights Chirac).
And don't say communists haven't taken strong measure to comply with the AGW rhetorics. They have taken 3 strong measures : tax, tax and tax.
I know it, I'm French

Yes I know. But the nonsense I denounced is still a nonsense.

Point well taken.

I think it is a big handicap of McCain in terms of being able to win in November, as global warming and advocating drilling in ANWR, etc. could be a big advantage if McCain could use it, but unfortunately he can't because he has been in bed with the Democrats on this issue.

There are several issues McCain could use to win by pointing out how wrong the Democrats are, but unfortunately McCain can't use them.

Fuel prices would be a big one, by pointing out that we should have been drilling offshore, ANWR, and other places long ago. After all, who would be dumb enough to expect wheat prices to go down if you quit growing as much wheat? Only a Democrat would, and McCain could have used this as a huge talking point, but unfortunately he can't because he has voted like a Democrat on this issue, as well as others.

So you are originally from behind the "iron curtain"? But didn't they have extremely low taxes there? :wink:

(Actually, even Vincent Auriol's Section française de l'Internationale ouvrière [SFIO] was a strong anti-communist party.)

No no, I was born on the "right" side of the Berlin wall, in a communist country called France
And it's not new Walter, read this from Tocqueville :
"Le goût des fonctions publiques et le désir de vivre de l'impôt n'est point chez nous une maladie particulière à un parti, c'est la grande et permanente infirmité de la nation elle-même"

Joke apart, the education system and the public sector here (which employs 1/4 of all French workers, the highest rate of all developped countries) is in the hands of a vast majority of leftists, some declared communists. So communism here is not just a "vue d'esprit".

With good spin doctors (Tony Blair must have some left), McCain can use anything.

Those ¼ of all workers - that number seems only to be so high ... because it includes (traditonally) government employees, as well as employees of public corporations.

In Germany, 1/5 of all in non-self employed work relationships are civil servants or employees with civil servant-like employment contracts (tariffs similar to those of civil servants without the benefits of those).
Add to this number the others ...

Before anyone shows up to bash you over the head for not posting in English....



Hey, we are fans of Tocqueville around here - most of us even read his book on Democracy in America

Stendhal called it being on the budget.

My eldest son is named after Alexis de Tocqueville.

Please tell us that his name is Alex and not Tocqueville.

the whole lot, but he only uses Alexis... but he loves it and is finally reading Dem in Am!

http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.Blogs&ContentRecord_id=f80a6386-802a-23ad-40c8-3c63dc2d02cb

As of December 20, 2007, over 400 prominent scientists--not a minority of those scientists who have published their views on global warming--from more than two dozen countries voiced significant objections to major aspects of the alleged UN IPCC "consensus" on man-made global warming.


THE DISSENTS OF THE SCIENTIFIC DISSENTERS

How science and politics mix:

Science Without Experiments
There are no black-and-white answers when we face integrated complexity.

By Jim Manzi


The idea that that Republicans and conservatives are waging a "war on science" has become a staple of Democratic rhetoric. Hillary Clinton frequently referenced this in her campaign speeches. Chris Mooney, who wrote a book by this name, has an article on it in a recent issue of The New Republic. Daniel Engber has a three-part series on this topic in Slate. This idea has become widespread among liberals ?- and, unfortunately, many scientists.

Mooney's thesis is that it's all been downhill for the relationship between science and politicians since the "halcyon years" of the 1950s. His explanation for why this happened is sociological and political: Republican politicians and their supporters didn't like the conclusions that some scientists reached, so they tried to stonewall or devalue the science. As I have written about at length, there is something to this. But Mooney, Engber, and others fail to consider an additional possible cause for the changed relationship between science and politics today versus 60 years ago: the kind of science used to inform public debates has changed.

One of the most famous (and probably apocryphal) stories in the history of science is that of Galileo dropping unequally weighted balls from the Tower of Pisa in order to demonstrate experimentally that, contra Aristotle, they would not fall at different rates. To the modern mind, this is definitive. Aristotle was one of the greatest geniuses in recorded history, and he had put forward seemingly airtight reasoning for why they should drop at different speeds. Almost every human intuitively feels, even today, that heavy objects fall faster than light ones. In everyday life, lighter objects will often fall more slowly than heavy ones because of differences in air resistance and other factors. Aristotle's theory, then, combined evidence, intuition, logic, and authority. But when tested in a reasonably well-controlled experiment, the balls dropped at the same speed. Aristotle's theory is false ?- case closed. This idea of the decisive experiment is not the totality of the scientific method, but it is an important part of it.

Now, we can very closely approximate the gravitational forces that govern the rate of descent of a ball applying Newtonian physics to the earth and the ball, while ignoring everything else. But this is only an approximation, since every object in the universe with mass actually exerts some gravitational attraction on both the earth and the ball. In part, this approximation works because gravitational force attenuates with distance by the inverse square law, so the force being exerted on the ball by, for example, the moon is comparatively tiny. These effects are so minute that scientists were able to demonstrate that Galileo's finding was approximately valid ?- in fact, valid to within the measurement tolerance of available instruments ?- through all kinds of replicated experiments across Europe.

But suppose that gravity didn't attenuate in this way, and if you let go of a ball it's rate of descent might vary in all kinds of extraordinarily complex ways, the measurement of which exceeded the capacities of the best devices and computational facilities available in the world, because it mattered a lot exactly where you were versus every object with mass in the universe. There would be no way to isolate a component of the total system that had sufficient simplicity to allow us to conduct replicated experiments. We would be trapped by what we might call integrated complexity. If this were the case, Galileo might have had some perfectly true theory of gravity, but be unable to design an experiment with sufficient precision to "prove" that he was right (or more technically, show that his theory passed repeated falsification tests of the kind that Aristotle's theory failed). He would be forced to do a funny kind of science: a science without experiments. We'd probably still be arguing about who was right.

The trend since the 1950s has been that policy-relevant science has become increasingly resistant to falsification testing, because it tends to address scientific questions of integrated complexity. In the introduction to his book, Mooney provides the following list of government entities as the places where the Republican war on science has been most severe: the Department of the Interior (focusing in the book on the Fish and Wildlife Service), the National Cancer Institute (focusing on the epidemiological debate about the purported abortion-breast cancer linkage), the CDC, FDA, EPA, and NOAA (focusing on global warming).



When seen in this light, there is an obvious pattern: These examples are largely drawn from environmental science, systems science, epidemiology, and other fields dominated by integrated complexity. Note the lack of agencies that conduct research in physics, electrical engineering, and the other fields that dominated the executive-level dialogue between scientists and politicians during the Eisenhower administration. The science that informs public debate increasingly can not use experiments to adjudicate disagreements, and instead must rely on dueling models. We wouldn't purposely expose randomly selected groups of people to lead paint, and couldn't build parallel full-size replicas of earth and pump differing levels of CO2 into them.

Limited opportunity for falsification testing is an important characteristic of the two topics that Mooney emphasizes in his recent article, both of which he details in his book: global warming and the "Star Wars" missile defense system.

Consider global warming. No serious scientist has ever disputed that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, since it has been shown in replicated laboratory experiments to absorb and redirect infrared radiation. The key open scientific question has been the net effect of increasing CO2 concentrations after climate feedbacks. This is a problem of integrated complexity. We can't even approximately isolate a component of the climate system because these feedbacks are predicted to occur over decades and are globally interconnected; for example, polar ice caps melt, which changes ocean circulation patterns in the Atlantic which changes cloud formation in Florida and so on. We have constructed large computer models to represent and predict the integrated global climate system, but how do we know they are right? Not absolutely certain, but certain to the degree that we know that CO2 is a greenhouse gas or that unequally weighted objects will fall at the same rate in a vacuum? We don't, and we can't, because we can't conduct decisive experiments to test them.

Or consider Star Wars ?- which, on the surface, seems to be an example of old-school physics, optics, and rocketry. Mooney's book describes the scientific debate moving over a period of years in the 1980s, from skepticism over our ability to develop effective system components, such as lasers of sufficient power and mobility or sufficiently accurate tracking systems ?- all of which have subsequently been proven feasible by the decisive experiment of actually shooting down test missiles ?- to the "even more fundamental" problem of having reliable system-control software. He cites an Office of Technology Assessment study from 1988 that noted the system "would stand a significant chance of ?'catastrophic failure' due to software glitches the very first ?- and presumably, only ?- time it was used."

This is precisely the point that I remember being made in a campus-wide debate on Star Wars when I was at MIT in the 1980s. The speaker indicated what we all knew to be true: when de-bugging complex software, even after you're done with formal testing, you start to use it in practice against more and more cases, and fixing problems that become apparent until you stop getting errors. But because every line of the huge code base interacts, even when you complete this procedure, you never know if there is some error hidden somewhere in the code that will only be revealed in some unanticipated use case. Of course, this is precisely integrated complexity.

There is a spectrum of predictive certainty in various fields that label themselves "science," ranging from something like lab-bench chemistry at one extreme to something like social science at the other. Scientific fields that address integrated complexity sit in a gray area somewhere in between. We can pound the table all we want, and say with smoldering intensity that "science says X," but our certainty is much lower when X = "the projected change in global temperatures over the next 100 years" than when X = "the rate at which this bowling ball will fall."

Serious scientists in fields dominated by integrated complexity are constantly trying to develop methods for testing hypotheses, but the absence of decisive experiments makes it much easier for groupthink to take hold. A much larger proportion of scientists self-identify as liberal than conservative, so when scientific questions of integrated complexity impinge on important political questions, the opportunities for unconscious bias are pretty obvious. Hasty conservative political pushback (e.g., "global warming is a hoax") naturally creates further alienation between these politicians and scientists. The scientists then find political allies who have political reasons for accepting their conclusions; consequently, many conservatives come to see these scientists as pseudo-objective partisans. This sets up a vicious cycle. Unfortunately, that's where we find ourselves now in far too many areas.

The way forward from this morass is closer engagement with science by conservatives. As a starting point, we should work to elevate the role of experiments whenever possible. Recent laudable efforts to demand randomized field trials when evaluating education and other social science programs ?- much as we demand clinical trials prior to drug approvals ?- are a great example of this. Focus on third-party forecast model validation for the global climate models used to make climate change predictions is an excellent example of another step that should be taken. In addition, wherever experiments are simply not practical, conservatives need to get into the details of the science in order to understand degrees of uncertainty. We like to think of science as providing black-and-white answers, but when we are faced with integrated complexity, it's all shades of gray.

?- Jim Manzi is the CEO of an applied artificial-intelligence software company.

The link for above: Jim Manzi on Conservatives & Science on National Review Online

THE DISSENTS OF THE SCIENTIFIC DISSENTERS

You know, I've wondered and maybe our resident geologists or equivalent experts might know.

We see frequent reports of land that is being lost to the sea due to sea level rise. Is it at all possible that the land is actually sinking as we know land has been known to do from time to time? Or has that theory ever been tested--I know there are accurate means of checking altitude. Does anybody know?

That's not a sentence Fox.

Are you seriously suggesting sea levels are rising because the earth is shrinking? That's theory from desperation.