How would you react to someone painting their miniatures as nazis or with confederate flags.

Not saying you're wrong, but how does your free-speech stance respond to the Anti-Vax, Climate Change denial, and Flat-Earth/Teach-Creationism phenomena?

Each of these cases is the product of idiot ideologies given 'equal consideration' in public debate even though there is scientific proof that they are demonstrably false.

You might argue that each of these movements have not been defeated in a public debate and that in treating them 'as a debate' you give the movement legitimacy and then harm is done to people (see: modern outbreaks of previously suppressed/eradicated diseases).

 

To be honest, police becoming suspicious about me being some sort of terrorist or something is the least of my worries in this case.

The way it is done in Haqqislam, of course! By publicly wasting an offender while streaming entire thing, with links to actual scientific sources embedded to said stream!


But really, you can try to police these "theories", but there are other problems associated with this approach. It may or may not be an improvement in the end.

Off-topic, but case in point. I think the real issue with climate change topic is not whether it's happening, but suggested reasons why. For example, due to people being on a whichhunt against "climate change denial proponents" other brand of populists get away with ignoring important factors like solar activity changes and associated climatical processes spanning over centuries. But anyone who dares to point that out on a public resource will likely get stomped into the mud for... I dunno, indirectly sympathizing with deniers? It's only free speech principles that keep these (sensible, IMO) remarks afloat for anyone who cares to do some research to get some food for thoughts instead of getting all roused up and emotional.

So... It's a complicated matter and IMO the simplest solution is still the best, however flawed it may be.

 

Interesting!

Not to take the thread off-topic for too long a segue but I'd love to take a moment to explore your opinion on the matter. What do you personally think is causing climate change?

 

Anti-vaxxers I'd like to suffer from all the things they don't vaccinate against. The problem is that it's their children who aren't getting the vaccinations, not the antivaxxers themselves. And I refuse to allow a child to die due to their parent's asshattery.

As for the "Intelligent Design" folks, have you ever heard of the Flying Spaghetti Monster? I'm technically a member, from about 1994 or so. It was originally a way of forcing the 'Intelligent Design' folks in Kansas to admit that the version of ID they were pushing was specifically the JudeoChristian one by presenting another 'theory' of Intelligent Design that had zero in common with the Kansas State School Board's version. Why yes, I was a snarky asshole even in High School.

As for climate change, here's my problem: In the 1970s and up through the mid 1980s, the fear was the start of another Ice Age, not getting warmer. The solution to this threat was to give governments the power to do something about it (instead of coming up with a way to encourage industries to clean up their own mess by making money for doing so). Late 1980s and into the 1990s, now it was suddenly Global Warming, with the same requirements: give government more control over what can be done. Now that the activists are being called on their apparent flip-flop, it's "Climate Change(tm)", but the solution is the same. More government control.

Those parts of Africa with the most successful endangered-species management? Aren't the places where the government said, "You can't hunt X anymore". It's the places that found a way for the local people to make money off the endangered animals without killing them. In the best places, people in one place came up with an idea, and the government said, "hey, try this ... , it's working really well over here... " to people in another area with the same problem.

This doesn't get into the horrible experimental and methodological issues with the starting studies announcing Global Warming. The mathematical model that first showed the 'hockey stick graph'? Still spits out that same graph if you feed it random numbers (to be precise, as long as the location data is not random, it gives you that sharp upward rise in predicted temps). But that hockey stick graph has never been retracted.

In the early 1990s, it was some of the coldest years on record due to some really large volcanic eruptions (Mt. Pinatubo, among others), And yet the early 90s are seen as a normal year in the Climate Change debate. We've seen the pattern before, large volcanic eruptions result in as many as 5 cool years before temperatures normalize again. Saw it in 1982 with Mt St Helens, saw it in 1880 with Krakatoa, etc. But by treating those colder-than-normal years as normal, it showed a much greater increase in temperature for the first decade of the 1990s, which made for much greater shock value and panic factor.

More than half of the climate monitoring stations that were out in the middle of the farms in 1980 are now right in the middle of the cities (so there's already a known 'heat island' effect just from all the concrete around them). Some of the recording thermometers are right in the hot-air exhaust from the neighboring building's air conditioner. But there's no mention of a correction to those specific stations due to now being located in the middle of a hot air vent, or even mention of corrections to the stations now in the middle of cities due to heat island effects.

The 1990s climate predictions are modeled on unchanging solar energy input, and I can't get someone to tell me if their newer predictions include variable solar output (or what that output level is compared to previous years). NASA will happily tell you that no star has a constant energy output. We're actually at a solar minimum right now according to NASA, and solar minimums can last for decades. As best we can tell, the last Ice Age started after about an 80-yr long solar minimum.

If you turned something like this in to the Food and Drug Administration (or your nation's equivalent) to get a drug approved, you'd get laughed out of the building for failure to maintain proper experimental controls so hard there'd be a carter in the street. And it'd probably get you name added to the 'automatic disqualification list', too, so that any project you brought in after that would simply get rejected without any review!

Oh, yeah, and for the folks who say China is leading the world in their response to Climate Change: China was also leading the world in their response to the overpopulation problem with their One Child policy in the 1970s. Their population is nearly twice the size they wanted it to be by this time, and all at the price of a quarter billion abandoned female infants.

 

It's not that I have particularly informed and valuable opinion on the subject, I'm pointing out trends that I've noticed at one point. Discussion of the topic was prone to becoming political due to focus on "humanity factor" in global climate changes and different countries reacting differently to the issue, sometimes causing some animosity since measures taken (or not) affect economical competitiveness on one hand, and annoy people because we all still share the same planet on the other.

Said focus, in my opinion, was not too healthy. Sure, being humans, we can only do what depends on humanity when it comes to such processes, which is not being that proverbial back-breaking straw when it matters. Still, ignoring other factors gets in the way of truly understanding the problem, and IMO having a valuable opinion kinda requires that.

While I'm a dilettante at very best when it comes to this particular matter, it was rather disheartening to see some people buying too much into a particular, skewed presentation of climate change problem featuring old industrial practices as being The Devil despite astronomers reporting significant trend of increasing solar activity and offering examples of similar climate changes happening before industry was even a thing (most common example being "Minor Ice Age" of early 2nd millennium) at the time that drama was peaking but being promptly ignored by general public. Mind you, I am not saying that was the final definite answer, but people willing to dismiss that as pro-industrial shilling (I mean, even if you want to look from this PoV, at least you must understand that economical interest isn't limited to one side of the debate) and refuse to consider that other factors may exist was baffling.

I'm not even saying anything on what @Section9 points out about fallacies associated with the story. Not everyone may have specialized knowledge readily available or time to get a crash-course for the sake of Internet debate, but what about at least considering arguments presented?

This is where we get slightly closer to original topic of the thread since it concerns social phenomena. Thing is, people are still people. They are very susceptible to falling into "us versus them" mentality. We can talk about how education and rational approach is antithesis to herd psychology and them being a weapon against it until you realize that nothing stops people from borrowing sense of superiority (one of the key components of said mentality) from anything including confidence in how their point of view on something is rational, scientific and open to discussion, then going all out barbaric on anyone who disagrees.

It's hilarious and tragic at the same time.

 

I mean... like... I guess you can get offended by things like "ISIS flags" but the thing is, their flag is actually quite insignificant. It litterally just means: "There is no god but God. Muhammad is the messenger of God."
It's all over Islamic writings, mosques, even flags on countries.

I don't know man, I don't see any harm in any of these things. I don't have the imagination required to think how one would prove his aryan master race by unironically painting his pewter for his Fürhrer and somehow inflict harm by doing it. Like, what would he even say if he won the mission?

- 'That showed you. You filthy Jew!'
- 'But I'm from Iranian herritage...'
- 'That's not Aryan!'
- '.. well, it literally is..'
- 'NEIN!'

 

And the Stars-and-Bars is the Battle Flag of the Army of Northern Virginia. It wasn't even used by the whole Confederacy as the National Flag.

But what it's been taken to mean...

Same problem with the Swastika. It's earlier meaning has been perverted, suborned by certain assholes.

Poor bastard! At least they let him keep it once they were done violating the poor Titan...

The agent who wanted to see the inside of my backpack was all sorts of twitchy and made me open it. I thought they'd twigged on the wiring (I'd forgotten to pull it out of the pack, I'd put it all in a ziploc bag with the intent of having that separate), but when I pulled the electronics out he wasn't happy. He wanted to know what the sake set was made from! He was also rather impressed that I'd managed to stuff everything inside the backpack and get the zippers to close.

 

So I don't take particular issue with your reasons for skepticism here, but my professional background is environmental consulting in NJ, and I have been convinced for awhile that government control is the only thing keeping any industrial site from killing all of their neighbors.

 

That may be more of a problem with New Jersey than anything else.

I mean, the reason the New York got all the lawyers but New Jersey got all the toxic waste dumps is because Jersey got first pick.

Out where I live, that's much less of a problem. Usually because unhappy neighboring ranchers are armed.

 

I went to a con recently and there was a proper fat cunt dressed as an SS Officer, called him a cunt as well. he waddled away in shame.

 

You're doing the Lord's work Flipswitch

 

In my experience the 'champions' of any given race are usually the worst examples of it

 

I mean, they are snazzy uniforms. They're made by some famous designer or another, so I mean, I get people dressing as them who are into the history. I personally wouldn't, but I try to be nice to people.

Some idiot starts talking about gassing the jews, I just confront them with, as usual, 'oh, so you want to kill me. Real nice, real nice mate.' That usually shuts them up real fast.

 

@Section9 You've got quite the bevy of information that seems to support the talking points of the American right. What's next, that study about hamsters or whatever to tell us that homosexuality is unnatural?

Do you have evidence of isolated climate monitoring stations not seeing evidence of temperature increases compared to urbanized ones? Or is that just... an implication that allows you to draw the conclusions you want?

 

I'm going to pretend you didn't write that, because quite frankly my first response was to report the post.

That's not what I said.

I'm saying that there is no mention of a correction for heat island effects in the climate monitoring stations that were out in the fields but are now in the middle of the city. There are a couple different reasons that could happen, one of which is relatively innocent but not really excusable.

The innocent-but-not-really-excusable reason is that the person doing the data analysis didn't know that a correction was necessary for those stations, because they didn't go out and check any stations for changes since it was established. That would have been acceptable about 10-15 years ago, when this issue was first brought up. In fact, when it was brought up, someone should have said, "oh crap! Didn't even think to check that, and it'd be an easy grant proposal to write. Plus we'd get to travel all over the world to do it, and get to keep traveling every year to stay on top of the local changes!" But I still haven't seen any climate researcher that's actually done the ground-checking of climate monitoring stations in the years since people started bringing this up. I also haven't seen anyone who has come up with a heat island correction factor (which would probably be worth a PhD all by itself).

The not-so-innocent reasons?

• Well, the lack of mentioning a correction is very poor form in a study presentation, grounds for reducing someone's points but not for withdrawing their PhD. Might be grounds for not awarding the PhD in the first place, depending on how strict the Dissertation review is.
  
• A lack of doing a correction gives a greater increase in temperatures than actually happened, which would be bad science. And if that lack of doing a correction was deliberate (to make a claim that the actual numbers didn't support), that would be grounds for stripping someone's degree.

Also, now that it's been 10-15 years since this has been identified, it's that much more work to go back and see what the changes have been.

 

By the way STILL @Section9 is STILL accused of being a "Rabid Homo-Hater" or something other idiocy, while He is ONLY presenting in later posts the informed, educated opinion of a "100% Straight" that DOES not accuse ANYTHING that is NOT based in grounded clinical, psychological FACTS of the Medical Studies. . .

I refer AS A PERSONAL OPINION on these Facts that I provided in the "Is the name "Kempeitai" insensitive" Thread in this same "Off-Topic English" about the Posts N°330 and N°355 that I wrote. . .

And yes, @Hecaton I know that You hate my use of CAPITAL LETTERS, but is the manner that I write, and I DO NOT THINK that I will change it. . . . . .!!!

 

Hecaton is not the only one that gets seizures from your random capitalization.

But I guess that's what the ignore function is for.

 

(Disclaimer, I'm not a climate scientist, although I used to work with hundreds of them, so I would consider myself more knowledgable than a member of the public, but much less so than a specialist)

(emphasis mine)

OK, do you have any examples of these stations? Because to be taken remotely seriously as a climate researcher, you need to use WMO (World Meterological Organisation) standard data, (i.e. data taken from WMO member states). To be on that list, you need to adhere to WMO standards, one of which says (Book 8, section 1.3.5.1, https://library.wmo.int/opac/doc_num.php?explnum_id=4147)

That last one (the metadata one) is important. Stations move, particularly in the olden days. The associated metadata tells you it moved, and that just because it's still called, for example, Holden South (made up name), doesn't mean it's actually anywhere near Holden South. What you're looking for is the actual Lat/Lon of the station, or the id of the station (neither of which can move). Does this make some of our older observations inaccurate? Probably, but most are ok, so the noise of that data should disappear.

Even beyond the requirement to check on stations every 2 years, most modern instruments need recalibrating fairly often to be as accurate as possible. You can reasonably assume a developed country is checking it's sites every couple of months. The metadata covers this as well. While I am still bound by certain legal secret restrictions, I saw a few examples of station data that was marked as short term unreliable due to outside interactions (my favourite being a scarecrow that had unseated itself and blown across two fields straight into the obs station during a storm)

(As an aside, some of our oldest observations are from naval vessels in the middle of the Atlantic, where we've since put automated monitoring stations, and they definitely don't have any thermal island effects from buildings)

If you do have examples of such stations that have slipped through the net, I'm sure the WMO, or NOAA, or the Met Office, or Meteogroup, or whoever, would very much like to know about them, and fix them.

Of course, some monitoring stations are located in urban areas, deliberately. For example, London, St James' Park (51.5047222222°N, 0.1311111111°W, https://oscar.wmo.int/surface//index.html#/search/station/stationReportDetails/1864) is very much in the centre of London (https://www.google.com/maps/place/5...5!3m4!1s0x0:0x0!8m2!3d51.5047222!4d-0.1311111). These are marked as such, so that they can be factored out if required, although if it is known a site is urban, and has always been urban, they can still be used for research purposes (since the urban area will be having an effect on the climate just as it is having an effect on the station)

I can assure you more than one person is looking at this data (I'll use this point later)

Even without WMO guidelines, automated stations need to be checked every few months for instrument accuracy, and manual stations are staffed at least once per day. Good short term forecasts require good observations, and a drift of even 1/10th of a degree would start to have an effect.

No, it wouldn't have been acceptable. If it was, every piece of scientific literature of that age would need to be either systematically checked or, more likely, removed as a scientific source.

In all my years working at the Met Office, I never once heard of this being a thing, yet we performed post processing on data for a huge amount of other things (such as cleaning radar rainfall data to take into account migrating bird flocks)

I think you are vastly underestimating both a) the amount of effort that goes into a grant proposal and b) how many people are actually involved in the entire process. Scientists don't go out to check the accuracy of these things, engineers and technicians do, and I can assure you the Met Office had around a hundred of those as well, just to cover the UK.

Probably because no such problem exists. You're asking for proof of fixing a problem that itself has no proof. If we were being tardy or lax about this, then yes, we would need to cover these things, but we aren't being tardy or lax. These people literally are trying to save the world under the microscope of people who, for whatever reason, don't think we're having an effect on the Earth's climate, or that the effect is being overplayed. Everything they do is peer reviewed, checked, double checked etc. Are there quacks there? Yes, but that's true for every field, and the citation system, for all it's problems, helps to keep them down.

A Thesis with that big of a hole in it would never even reach the Viva stage, let alone not being awarded a PhD

Yes, it would. That's why we have peer review. At the very least, that person would be unable to publish in any influential journals/conferences

I must admit, I am very curious as to who identified this problem, when, where, what literature it was published in, how many citations it has garnered, and where this person has gone now, because, as noted, I've never seen this even been considered as a problem. Maybe it was before my time? I don't know, but I do know an organisation with around 2,000 staff (including near 500 scientists all boasting at least Masters degrees in the field) that is considered a world leading climate science and weather forecasting centre, one of two centres trusted with literally every international flight (and the generally preferred one by pilots), one with a 96% accuracy at predicting the future 24 hours in advance, never considered it a problem.

 

OK, I feel a bit better about the monitoring stations. I'm in the US, so I don't have any UK stations to compare to.

@qechua : Do you mind if I quote your post onto another forum to chase down some specifics?

I'm actually going to come out a bit. I'm not 100% straight, I've found one person I love enough to go gay for. This doesn't change my concerns about abusive relationships or increased risk of STDs.

 

No problem at all