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Phil’s Dad wrote: I think it is obsene to equate human life to a monetary value but you are missing my point (my responsibility). What I am saying is economic mismanagement costs lives, environmental mismanagement costs lives, halting growth/development costs lives. All these factors need to be considered. No one is more important than any other.

Here is the core of the problem. You cannot consider factors scientifically if they are of equal value.
Maybe someday there will be a discipline for evaluating the costs, but for now no-matter the process it boils down to faith, not science.

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Phil’s Dad wrote:
OK here’s how it works. If Breakable (say – purely for example) wants to do something “precautionary” with a clear conscience, he can buy 100 Precautionary Offsets (P Off’s for short) from me at $10 each and I will commit – in order to restore the natural balance you understand – to immediately do something rash with his $1,000. That way everyone is happy and the world is saved again. (Al would be proud) :smirk: 🙂 🙂 😆 😛 :red: :zip:

This might actually work.
The question is who guarantees in case of default?

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Brian H wrote:
…
Retired senior NASA atmospheric scientist Dr. John S. Theon, the former supervisor of James Hansen, NASA’s vocal man-made global warming fears soothsayer, has now publicly declared himself a skeptic and declared that Hansen “embarrassed NASA” with his alarming climate claims and said Hansen was “was never muzzled.” …

My new hobby, look at the person behind the statement:
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/01/so_who_is_john_s_theon.php

Also the other bunch:

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Phil’s Dad wrote:
I would argue that knowledge is something more than the precautionary principle. I would have to further argue that there is as yet little evidence that the precautionary principle has protected the public.

I would not argue with you on that. Maybe there is some evidence, I did not look for it, but the evidence that I saw here is clearly tainted with bias. Still if you want evidence then you are welcome in the world of science. The best evidence comes (I think) from controlled experiments. I hope it is out of the question to reproduce some scenarios that the precautionary principle should prevent?
So what is left is data gathering from historical events and simulations which are hard to reconcile with reality as the GW issue well describes. Do you think such uncertain data is any better than the random choice or the blind precautionary principle?

Phil’s Dad wrote:
…
On another thread I pointed out that more people are dying each year in Africa right now, directly or indirectly from lack of affordable energy, than the worst case predictions say will be harmed by AGW 100 years from now. Yet there are still those who would restrict growth in energy provision in that continent.
If we apply the precautionary principle to the policy of restricting energy provision where it is so desperately needed – and with the associated and undeniable risk of immediate and continued harm to those peoples – then the burden of proof that no harm will come of it lies firmly with those proposing the restrictions. I am clear in my mind that it is not being applied in that way and is not therefore protecting the public.

Yes energy is an issue in Africa, but GW is an issue as well. So now a country in Africa is building a coal plant somewhere inside. Should they consider “Precautionary principle” – I think it is their business on what principles they rely. On the other hand if a country like USA want to interfere in foreign interest I think they should apply their own principles.
Now lets say a different scenario USA sponsors international AID to an African country – a concentrated solar power plant or PV panels for rural homes, a gas power station, wind-belt generators for lighting or maybe a FF plant someday. Should they apply their own principles? Probably they should.
So I guess the question is : can you use “Precautionary principle” for evil? I think it is possible, but much harder than “Precautionary approach”.

Phil’s Dad wrote:
I have no experience of corruption but a great deal (on the receiving end) of lobbying. On the whole it serves to inform decision makers of the opinions and stake-holding of the various groups affected by the decision. That is a good thing surely, as long as care is taken to ensure all voices are heard. Far better to make an informed decision that to exist in some sort of unapproachable bubble.
It is however a fact that governments are already free, under the precautionary principle as defined above, to behave in the way you suggest. Economic mismanagement can and does lead to every bit as much harm to the public as other factors. It is therefore perfectly legitimate, rather than the extreme view that one factor outweighs all others, to weigh those economic and other factors against each other and come to a compromise which is in the best overall public interest. As you said in another thread – “actually I think any extreme is usually bad.”

I am not saying all Lobbying is evil, just that Lobbying can be often unsymmetrical and that makes it bad. If you have a well supported group on one hand and uninformed public on the other how can you find some middle ground? Especially when there would be no mandate to protect the public, but just to prove that it can be uneconomical.
Basically what I see here is “Economic mismanagement” issue vs “Safety of population” issue. Yes probably wasting the funds is pretty bad, but how can you evaluate the cost of even one human life? It is around 195,946.00 usd. I expect a discount if calculating in bulk.

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Brian H wrote: Nope.
Here’s what genuine physicists say: (excuse the Germanic English)

“… it can be shown that even within the borders of theoretical physics with or without
radiation things are extremely complex so that one very quickly arrives at a point where
verifiable predictions no longer can be made. Making such predictions nevertheless may be
interpreted as an escape out of the department of sciences, not to say as a scientific fraud.”

From http://arxiv.org/pdf/0707.1161v4

I am sorry to set an impossible standard for you, but could you please post some non-refuted criticism (and preferably from non biased sources):
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Gerhard_Gerlich#Refutations

Gerlich was a member of the European Science and Environment Forum. The agenda of this group was to discredit government safety regulations and reports on such things as genetically-engineered bovine growth hormone, pesticides, public smoking, and global warming.

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The science is not a problem. The science is well established for a pretty long time. It is being challenged all the time by other scientists. The scientist are working hard on the other hand some industries and some ideologies and some press channels (FOX news specifically) don’t like what the scientists find. Such was the case with cigarettes causing cancer, such is the case with co2 causing GW and this is not the last issue (creationists, birthers, aids-deniers, MMR-autism, etc).

More openness is good, but the frameworks are not established. You got your Climategate – did anything concrete come out of that?
Try doing your own work by giving your every decision/mistake a PR, even the best politics are not able to implement that, so it is normal scientist share data only with people who understand it. Mr. Lerner actually does not give all his data to us, but you do believe him, don’t you ? Isn’t it hypocritical?

If you care about the science (which I don’t think) there are a lot of things you can check firsthand:
When are the flowers blooming
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Flowers-blooming-earlier-now-than-any-time-in-last-250-years.html
When are the birds migrating
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/6255181.html
Or even just measure the temperature day by day outside for a long time – if enough people do it, it might even turn out valuable.
This would be work that I would really respect – doing actual scientific measurements, even if in amateur fashion, instead of trying to disprove scientific findings in a conspiracy fashion.

To convince a skeptic you need to present facts. I would wonder what would it take to convince you ?
You cant go over line by line, piece by piece over all the data and calculations and data gathering methods and apparatus if you still would have to rely on somebody’s expertise to actually say that it is right in the end? So it is about loss of control.
So I am going back to my original statement:
“you just are afraid of loosing control to the green illuminates too much”.
It is not “argumentum ad hominem” because it is not “irrelevant to the opponent’s argument”. If I was talking to the blind person and he said that it was dark everywhere, then pointing out that he was blind (no-matter how cruel that was) would not be “AD HOMINEM”, because it is relevant to the argument.

What I am trying to point out exactly that it is NOT about science. Its about protecting your opinion.
And I actually don’t care what kind of opinion you hold or anyone else holds, I would just love to not have to hear the same old debunked lies over and over and over again.

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That’s great! I live in Cyprus, and Greece is the nearest thing we have in Europe.
If there will be any event I will probably attend, but I am not much of an organizer (specially in Greece).

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vansig wrote: Okay, Here’s an economic prediction that should be verifiable.
“Increased demand for oil results in upward pressure on the Canadian dollar.”
Let’s apply the method to hard-to-predict, easy-to-verify problems. Can you name a few?

How do you define pressure in a way you can verify it later and specifically with a marked doing whatever it wants at that moment. Economy is booming, busting or stagnating for other reasons not related to oil. Imagine you make you prediction that economy will boom and next day FF comes along.

vansig wrote:
Let’s apply the method to hard-to-predict, easy-to-verify problems. Can you name a few?

I guess if you could predict a price change in currency pair on Forex with a high accuracy, there was no need to write any books.

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Brian H wrote:
1) Not so. The “humans” issue begs the question (circular reasoning). The question is how the planet deals with wide ranges of CO2 concentration. BTW, that CO2 plot doesn’t show the really interesting sequence info: temperature rise precedes CO2 rise. Oops!
2) The point is that the error bars, especially on the potential upside, are much larger than previously assumed. And it’s still “peak”, not “peek”.
3) Water vapour and the atmospheric hydrological cycle are VASTLY more potent and important than the narrow-band “sympathetic” CO2 IR effects. High cloud blocks heat escape with full-band black-body reflection, and has far more feedback potency than any other mechanism.
4) What would interfere with photosynthesis? It’s been going on since algae and fungus got together in lichens and in the seas in blue-green algae for at least 3 billion years.

1) The issue is how planet deals with co2 concentrations in human lifetime within current parameters (not parameters that were millions years ago, or maybe immediately after BB (anyone believe in BB?)). “temperature rise precedes CO2 rise” was refuted long time ago, please move on, to other non-widely-refuted arguments. Why not just try to claim that all the historical Co2 data was faked instead?
2) So basically all the recent (thousand years) data is bogus and there is a natural process which causes natural co2 peeks (sorry about this), which is:…. . And the data actually looks like this: …. . Well if you don’t know how the data looks like how can you claim the current data does not represent a peek (sorry about this)? Has the “potential upside” been demonstrated by a credible scientist in a non-biased study funded by not current-oil-ex-tobacco-fake-grassroots-organization?
3)I assume vapor? Yes, vapor is more important. What about the other less-important green-house-gasses? Compound interest on 100$ 10% vs 11% for 100 years is 1,378,061.23$ vs 3,406,417.53$ . Somehow it seems to me that when stuff accumulates small differences are important. I am not a physicists, but as far as I can tell when you build a greenhouse, it does not become hot because there is more sun inside, just because the heat accumulates. Care to show a model that disproves this?
4) How much atmospheric co2 is too much for you? If you mean 100% is not too much, then you can do photosynthesis. Hopeful genetic modifications will allow the rest of us to adapt as well.

Unfortunately I fail to see anything in your tactics that would seem you are trying to find out the truth. I guess you just are afraid of loosing control to the green illuminates too much, to look at the forest, instead of the trees. My own mission is to actually learn something new. For now I believe I can trust that data methodology and scientific integrity supports GW theory as much as reasonably possible. As far as I see the people that support GW are doing work without adequate compensation and while they are making some mistakes they admit and correct them. I wish I could follow at least one GW critic with high integrity. The only people I see against GW are denialists (not critics). They are trying to distort the truth as much as possible and are getting well documented compensations from shady business. Some biographies:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Monckton,_3rd_Viscount_Monckton_of_Brenchley#Climate_change
Not on Wikipedia (probably hiding from the web)
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Marc_Morano#Climate_change_skepticism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heartland_Institute#Positions

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vansig wrote:

Interestingly not a single hard-science field, probably those principles are not so reliable eh?

Sorry, that statement is absurd if you can select “hard-science” to mean anything “easy to predict”. Do not dismiss whole fields and attempt to use that dismissal as ‘evidence’ that a methodology may be unreliable. Instead, test the power of the method against its competitors on those hard-to-predict problems.

It is possible that their methodology works on the “hard-to-predict – impossible to verify” problems, but not on the “easy to predict – easy to verify” problems?
If we don’t know it does, so why use it? How do do you verify a problem in a field such as “economics, sociology, and psychology”. Probably the best performance indicators come from economics, but they can be totally changed by by market which you have no control of. I am not aware of a single experiment that can measure prediction performance in a market in an unbiased, reliable, controllable and quantifiable fashion at least for the moment.
What about a well controlled verification – why cant I calculate planet earth motion guided by gravity using Newtonian theory (even without relativity) and see how much of the “Principles of forecasting” it violates? If they claim the principles are valid in predicting GW, that means they should be valid in any other physical calculation as GW models are physical in nature and do not try to predict human behavior for now.
But they are actually avoiding those claims – all the fields they are including are not “easy-to-verify” and I don’t see either “Climatology” nor “Physics” in their list of predictable fields. The only reason they even talk about GW, I would think is because they believe its not settled yet – so free publicity (specially for gullible people). My thinking is that they don’t actually want to mess with well-defined-hard-science, because they would quickly be disproved – same as any quack medicine that tries to claim real health benefits would be quickly axed by FDA. I really don’t have the time, but maybe anyone cares to run “CARL SAGAN’S BALONEY DETECTION KIT”
http://users.tpg.com.au/users/tps-seti/baloney.html on them?

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http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20627606.100-living-in-denial-why-sensible-people-reject-the-truth.html
Examples anyone?

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Brian H wrote: Buried in the fine print of the Warmist IPCC reports is the acknowledgement that the “models” are actually “scenarios”, meant to illustrate what would happen if a particular set of unverified and untestable guesses were true. As physics professors Gerlich and Tscheushner point out, this amounts to video gaming, and has nil scientific value. Chicken Little crying, “The sky might be falling, and if it does it would be horrible, so give me all your money so I can build shelters for you!” That’s the precautionary principle. Nonsense from start to finish.

Would it surprise you to hear that some of those “scenarios” that were modeled in eighties and nineties are playing out quote well? As well as a weekly prediction of weather. So probably those unverified and untestable guesses are true in those particular scenarios and if nothing is changed those scenarios will likely remain true.
But I guess you would not be interested. So I guess I will shut the **** up, and you can placate your “coal is good” all over the forums again.

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Rezwan, I think all our pursuits wont matter in a million years more or less. Still reducing suffering is a noble pursuit and this is what I hope FF will achieve.

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vansig wrote: The text of these principles is available for download/verification at
http://forecastingprinciples.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=7&Itemid=7

i see the content .doc files on the submenus..
Bootstrapping, Selecting, Combining, Evaluating, Expert, Extrapolation, Rule-based, Standards, Role-playing.

The resulting evidence-based principles can be applied in fields such as economics, 

	sociology, and 

	psychology. It applies to problems such as those in finance (How much is this company worth?), 

	marketing (Will a new product be successful?), 

	personnel (How can we identify the best job candidates?), and 

	production (What level of inventories should be kept?).

Interestingly not a single hard-science field, probably those principles are not so reliable eh?

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Brian H wrote:

Somehow i have a bad feeling about going back into Cambrian era:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Phanerozoic_Carbon_Dioxide.png
Probably a lot of factors were different back then, like the sun being younger and smaller

More recent data shows that we are in a peek of co2:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Carbon_Dioxide_400kyr.png

I assume you mean “peak”, not “peek”.

1) The time period you select is a dot at the tail end of the geological scale measured in ’00s of millions of years. Most of that time was spent with numbers in the ‘000s of ppm.
2) The ice core data has been subject to considerable re-evaluation and doubt recently, as it appears that the cold water film in the pressurized air bubbles has been responsible for dissolving and leaching out about 20% of the CO2 in them.
3) The Cold Sun Paradox has been resolved much more elegantly recently with water vapor/high cloud models, with no reference to CO2.
4) The more CO2 the better. Bring it on!
1)The question is not what it is in the lifetime of the planet, but what it is in the lifetime of humans. The second chart is more relative to that, unless you want dinosaurs back.
2)Until this effect has been verified, peer-reviewed, and the data adjusted it is not very important. Yes, the data could be transformed, but there is no way you can transform the second chart so we would be at a non-peek without proposing a natural phenomenon that reproduces our current consumption of fossil fuels. Previous civilizations anyone?
3)I am not a scientist, but it looks strange to me for water vapor to protect water from becoming ice and ignore any other forcing’s. Why would water vapor in this situation not produce so much vapor that all other water would vaporize?
4)If you cant do photosynthesis – probably not.

PS:A nice alternative to Wikipedia http://www.conservapedia.com/Examples_of_Bias_in_Wikipedia

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