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Post by Roger Clifton on Jul 27, 2019 12:12:33 GMT 9.5
Roger Clifton, go back to the link which introduced the CDVI. No, the definition wasn't on the page you refer to. I am loyal to the idea that a contribution to the blog is self-contained. That is, you put forward an idea that you have shaped up, and one to three or so paragraphs to turn the comment into a self-contained article. A couple of tested links give authority to the data or trends that you quote. Conversely, I am much less interested in what some third-party says on the web, especially if I have to search through other pages to get definitions or read between the lines. (Having fumbly hands doesn't help mouse clicking). By recommending reading to us, I feel like I've been given homework to do. Let's see your conclusions instead, then we can talk to each other.
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Post by David B. Benson on Jul 27, 2019 13:50:51 GMT 9.5
Roger Clifton, I am a retired professor so I certainly expect people to do their homework. As for a conclusion, I gave mine already. But here is more: humans will blow right through a mere 2 K further global temperature increase. This results in different precipitation patterns as well as unbearably hot summers. Presumably those two factors make up the CVPI.
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Post by David B. Benson on Jul 27, 2019 14:01:07 GMT 9.5
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Post by David B. Benson on Jul 28, 2019 12:26:56 GMT 9.5
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Post by David B. Benson on Jul 28, 2019 16:34:55 GMT 9.5
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Post by Roger Clifton on Jul 28, 2019 20:20:02 GMT 9.5
humans will blow right through a mere 2 K [eventual] global temperature increase. No doubt about that. While we emit any fossil carbon at all, this asymptotic goal (now 2 K, tomorrow 3 K, etc) will itself rise ever higher. It will take time before the public at large realises that land temperatures rise further than marine temperatures, and the temperate zones will heat up more than the tropics. (The tropics have a release valve, in that saturated air above 26° is unstable to convection up to the tropopause.) We might wait with 'bated breath to see how effectively national governments enact steps that would converge on zero emissions. I am hanging my hopes on the shock resulting from a series of climatic disasters. Otherwise there is a very real risk that world opinion relapses into an FTK philosophy. ( F*** The Kiddies!)
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Post by David B. Benson on Jul 28, 2019 20:29:35 GMT 9.5
Roger Clifton, looks to me that FTK already obtains. Sorry that I can't be more optimistic.
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Post by David B. Benson on Jul 29, 2019 20:02:18 GMT 9.5
Arctic Circle burns as heatwaves plague Europe and the US Claire Knox 2019 Jul 25 ABC, Australia www.google.com/amp/amp.abc.net.au/article/11344646I am posting this for the clarity of the photographs taken from the ISS space station. The second one is remarkable. Notice all the separate fires.
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Post by Roger Clifton on Jul 29, 2019 21:22:19 GMT 9.5
[It] looks to me that FTK already obtains. Increasingly, we hear of youngsters marching in the streets. If the old order chooses to be deaf to the rising protest, they may have to answer to revolutionary movements instead. However the conflict need not get that far, if they allow for example, legislation that declares carbon dioxide to be an accountable pollutant.
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Post by David B. Benson on Jul 29, 2019 23:11:50 GMT 9.5
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Post by engineerpoet on Jul 30, 2019 0:39:54 GMT 9.5
Increasingly, we hear of youngsters marching in the streets. They need to do more than that. They need to weld steel and pour concrete. They need to study science and discard cheap rhetoric and propaganda. Revolutionary movements tend to be led by romantics, not realists. They'll demand something like the Green New Deal despite it being unworkable. The old order replenishes itself by recruitment; the 60's hippies became the 80's Wall Street robber barons. It'll take more than that. It'll take near-complete dismantlement of the legal and regulatory apparatus which was designed to kill off the competition for fossil fuels (and no, wind and PV are not it). Most of the revolutionaries will oppose this, because they have swallowed the propaganda and don't have the technical chops to see through it. A few like Michael Schellenberger are on our side, but not many. Hell, Bill McKibben is still opposing the one proven way of getting to 350! Public education is at the base of this rot, because it now insists on "diversity and inclusion" which means catering to the lowest common denominator. High schools which used to teach calculus now issue diplomas to borderline illiterates. To get ahead requires lots of self-study, which is handicapped by the demand to keep butts in seats in boxes full of idiots. I hate to say this, but the planet-wreckers have us right where they want us: ignorant and fighting each other instead of them.
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Post by Roger Clifton on Jul 30, 2019 11:13:21 GMT 9.5
I hate to say this, but the planet-wreckers have us right where they want us: ignorant and fighting each other instead of them. Well, you're pretty good at disparagement. But do you see any positive pathway ahead? Is there something that you hope to occur?
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Post by David B. Benson on Jul 30, 2019 11:46:26 GMT 9.5
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Post by engineerpoet on Jul 30, 2019 12:21:28 GMT 9.5
But do you see any positive pathway ahead? Is there something that you hope to occur? A triumph by CGNP, Environmental Progress and their allies over the 5+ decades of anti-nuclear propaganda. A defeat of the Greens by Ecomodernists. It might require criminalization of spreading of provably false propaganda; it will definitely require removal of the ideologues from tenured academic positions.
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Post by David B. Benson on Jul 30, 2019 17:52:29 GMT 9.5
It might require criminalization of spreading of provably false propaganda; it will definitely require removal of the ideologues from tenured academic positions. This will be long. This first comment is about "provably false propaganda". My references are several different articles in the Stanford University Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The phrase in quotation marks is equivalent to stating "I know that X is false", where X is whatever is considered 'propaganda'. Start with the First Philosopher, Socrates, who stated, according to Aristotle, to the effect that he was the wisest of men because he knew that he knew nothing. To know something is to have a justified true belief about the 'something'. For example I know that the moon is not made of green cheese; I believe that. Furthermore, it is true and, most important, justifiably so as Apollo flights brought back rocks, not green cheese. That wasn't hard; however, ever since the writings of Aristotle were rediscovered and extensively taught at universities --- see the Wikipedia page on University --- the philosophers have foundered on what can possibly be a justification. It appears hopeless and some have proposed alternatives; none is universally accepted. So instead scientists don't know; they look for the preponderance of the evidence. As an example, for cancers caused by low dose radiation, there is the LNT hypothesis. There is also QNT, Quadratic No Threshold. Using ordinary Fisher-Nyman-Pearson statistics QNT defeats LNT for leukemia but doesn't displace LNT for solid cancers. This only happens by giving LNT the favored null hypothesis spot. But Reverend Bayes had the right idea; using the Bayes factor to treat both hypotheses equally one sees that the preponderance of the evidence favors QNT. All I can say is that QNT is more likely to be right. The philosophers appear to consider that too weak to be a justification. So we stumble along without actually knowing much, if anything.
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Post by David B. Benson on Jul 30, 2019 18:24:00 GMT 9.5
It might require criminalization of spreading ... Now go read the story of Galileo Galilei, the first physicist according to some. He wrote criminal book about the heavens and was forced to recant. Recognizing these hazards to the creation of reliable information about ... well, everything, the First Amendment protects all speech. I don't understand just what the later encorporation amendments impose upon the several states, but in general free speech obtains. So we have various cliques promoting all sorts of wrong stuff, even though hazardous to public health; the anti-vaccinators responsible for the measels outbreak here in Washington state, for example. Earlier I argued down some anti-floridators, in part by showing them my mouth full of metal due to the pure Seattle water at the time my adult teeth were forming. Jonathan Turley is a constitutional law professor of some standing. He is a strong advocate of free speech. He has a blog one might care to follow although the comments are, in my opinion, mostly worthless. In any case, free speech is worth defending.
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Post by David B. Benson on Jul 30, 2019 18:45:39 GMT 9.5
... require removal of the ideologues from tenured academic positions. My most recent reference is the Wikipedia page on academic freedom. Also, I used to be a member of AAUP before I retired, but also was instrumental in arranging for the removal of a tenured faculty member. Tenure is not lightly granted and is far from a license for the tenuree to say anything at any time. As most accused of being 'ideologues' are social scientists or perhaps philosophers, I fail to understand how an engineer could tell, beyond expressing views remote from one's own. What evidence, beyond unpopularity? Yet it is precisely this unpopularity that tenure is to protect, in certain limited ways. Once again, the Wikipedia page is helpful. Matters are somewhat different for engineering professor Mark Jacobson and his PNAS paper, which contained a glaring error. This was pointed out by others in a subsequent paper, also in PNAS. The result is that Professor Jacobson's reputation is in tatters; nobody will pay attention any longer and possibly his funding will dry. His tenure, however, is surely not in jeopardy; I don't know about raises.
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Post by Roger Clifton on Jul 31, 2019 10:25:37 GMT 9.5
"provably false propaganda" ... [requires] justified true belief Thank you for the analysis. When it comes to prosecuting scaremongering, we only need certainty beyond reasonable doubt, rather than the certainty required by philosophers. For that matter, scaremongering might be measured by how much it injures the readers and their kin. After Three Mile Island, there was a lot of scaremongering, predicting that thousands and possibly millions were about to drop dead. When the statistics came out, the only correlation with the nuclear events was with ailments caused by stress rather than radioactivity. An expert witness would be asked if stress included fear and they would say yes. As far as I know, nobody was prosecuted for the manslaughter implied by their fearmongering. In Japan, fearmongering was endemic in the media, conflating the massive death toll of the tsunami with the more exotic threat from the damaged reactors. Inflammatory questions were being posed like, where will we evacuate Tokyo to? A friend of mine in Hokkaido (1000 km downwind) spoke of how frightened they had been made. Again, as far as I know, none of the media were prosecuted for fearmongering. After Chernobyl, the media here (in Oz) reported firstly the most sensational death toll predictions without pointing out the authority or ignorance of their sources. Initially a billion people had the bone pointed at them by a popular green organisation. Similar organisations made predictions in the hundreds of millions. Later as the press ran out of shrieking idiots to quote, the figure dropped down into the millions. Only late in the piece did I read an estimate of a few thousand, made by a health physics group and quoted in New Scientist. It may even have pointed out that it was based unreliably on the LNT. Only a few thousand delayed dead! Even intelligent friends felt anti-climax, as if cheated of the titillation that we paid newspapers to produce. As it turned out there was no delayed death toll at all -- not due to chronic radioactivity, that is. However the fearmongering had laid waste to the surrounding farming landscape and the city of Chernobyl itself, sending the uprooted occupants into a state of dispossessed unemployment where alcoholism and victimhood punished them far more than the radioactivity ever could have.
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Post by David B. Benson on Jul 31, 2019 11:02:57 GMT 9.5
Roger Clifton, see the last post on the Chernobyl thread here on the BNC Discussion Forum, "The true cost of Chernobyl".
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Post by huon on Jul 31, 2019 14:23:51 GMT 9.5
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Post by David B. Benson on Jul 31, 2019 15:53:04 GMT 9.5
The standard for civil law cases in the USA is "the preponderance of the evidence". This seems similar to the weighting of evidence in science, formalized by the Bayes factor method.
The criminal law standard of "beyond a reasonable doubt" appears analogous to the Fisher-Nyman-Pearson null hypothesis method where in this analogy the null hypothesis is "innocent".
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Post by Roger Clifton on Aug 1, 2019 8:53:02 GMT 9.5
Roger Clifton, see ... post ... Er, why? If you have a point to make, I would be interested to read it.
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Post by Roger Clifton on Aug 1, 2019 9:12:33 GMT 9.5
The standard for civil law cases in the USA is "the preponderance of the evidence". This seems similar to the weighting of evidence in science, formalized by the Bayes factor method. The criminal law standard of "beyond a reasonable doubt" appears analogous to the Fisher-Nyman-Pearson null hypothesis method where in this analogy the null hypothesis is "innocent". It would be interesting to get the input from a lawyer here. I am hazy on the boundary between criminal law and civil law, guessing that criminal law requires legislation defining the crime, whereas in civil law expert witnesses must be produced and interrogated as to the nature and degree of the injury to the public interest. With an eye to eventual convictions, it would be helpful to have legislation so that vigilant people can collect the necessary evidence over the interim.
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Post by David B. Benson on Aug 1, 2019 10:37:08 GMT 9.5
This is supposed to be a thread on "Is Climate Change an Emergency?", not Chernobyl nor US law. For the former there is a thread. For the latter maybe start with Wikipedia?
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Post by Roger Clifton on Aug 1, 2019 15:04:56 GMT 9.5
Well, the prime purpose of the blog is to provide a venue for discussion, and this is a discussion on climate change. Perhaps the current discussion needs a preamble that links it to the title of the thread, thus –
Yes of course climate change is an emergency. It affects all members of the community, and it calls on all members of the community to respond. One that way for the general members of the public to contribute is to collect evidence against climate criminals. The process needs a kick start from lawyers to tell us how to prosecute on existing laws, or how to extend existing laws to adequately criminalise carbon crimes.
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Post by David B. Benson on Aug 1, 2019 16:29:55 GMT 9.5
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Post by David B. Benson on Aug 6, 2019 17:50:56 GMT 9.5
Rather than yet another thread, here is Green Technology alone Won't Save us: We need an Economic Revolution to Stop Climate Crisis Christine Corlet Walker 2019 Aug 05 The Conversation, via www.juancole.com/2019/08/technology-economic-revolution.htmlHowever, a resulting economy is not specified. Nor a means to afford eliminating the excess carbon dioxide.
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Post by David B. Benson on Aug 6, 2019 20:52:56 GMT 9.5
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Post by David B. Benson on Aug 7, 2019 15:46:25 GMT 9.5
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Post by huon on Jan 15, 2020 15:49:31 GMT 9.5
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