By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
In the closing minutes of the final plenary of the U.N.’s Doha climate summit, when no one else had anything further to add, I spent a few seconds telling the delegates something that the bad scientists and the malicious media have done their level best to conceal. There has been no global warming for 16 years.
In the real world, this surely welcome news would have been greeted with cheers of relief and delight. Since the beginning of 1997, despite the wailing and gnashing of dentures among the classe politique, despite the regulations, the taxations, the carbon trades, the windmills, the interminable, earnestly flatulent U.N. conferences, the CO2 concentration that they had declared to be Public Enemy No. 1 has not stabilized. It has grown by one-twelfth.
Yet this startling growth has not produced so much as a twentieth of a Celsius degree of global warming. Any warming below the measurement uncertainty of 0.05 Cº in the global-temperature datasets is statistically indistinguishable from zero.
The much-vaunted “consensus” of the much-touted “ensembles” of the much-heralded “models” has been proven wrong. The much-feted “modelers” had written in 2008 that their much-cited “simulations” ruled out, to 95% confidence, intervals of 15 years or more without global warming. To them, 16 years without warming were as near impossible as makes no difference.
Yet those impossible years happened. However, you would never have known that surely not uninteresting piece of good news from reading the newspapers or watching ABC, BBC, CBC, NBC, et hoc genus omne. The media are not in the business of giving the facts or telling the truth any more.
Precisely because journalists no longer bother to provide the inconvenient truth to their audiences, and because they are no longer willing even to provide the people with the straightforward facts without which democracy itself cannot function, the depressingly ill-informed and scientifically-illiterate delegates in Doha can be forgiven for not having known that global warming stopped a long while back.
That is why they should have been excited and delighted when they heard the news – nearly all of them for the very first time.
But this was the alternative reality that is the corrupt, self-serving U.N. Howls, hoots and hollers of dismay and fury greeted my short, polite announcement. This absurdly inappropriate reaction raises a fascinating question.
How are we to dig a rat-hole wide enough to allow the useful idiots and true-believers to escape as each passing year makes it more and more obvious that their fatuous credo has all the plausibility of the now somewhat discredited notion that the world was to be snuffed out at this year’s winter solstice?
Every student of the arts of diplomacy in the civil-service and staff colleges of the U.K. hears much about the rat-hole problem. How does one let the other side off some hook on which they have imprudently impaled themselves, while minimizing their loss of face?
A cornered rat will fight savagely, even against overwhelming odds, because it has no alternative. Give the rat a way out and it will instinctively take it.
The first step in digging a diplomatic rat-hole is to show that one understands how one’s opponents came to make their mistake. One might make a point of agreeing with their premise – in the present instance, the long-proven fact that adding a greenhouse gas to an atmosphere such as ours can be expected, ceteris paribus, to cause some warming.
Then one tries to find justifications for their standpoint. There are five good reasons why the global warming that they – and we – might have expected has not occurred for 16 years: natural variability in general; the appreciable decline in solar activity since the Grand Maximum that peaked in 1960; the current 30-year cooling phase of the ocean oscillations, which began late in 2001 with the transition from the warming phase that had begun in 1976; the recent double-dip la Niña; and the frequency with which supra-decadal periods without warming have occurred in the instrumental record since 1850.
The next trick is to help them, sympathetically, to focus the blame for their error on as few of their number as possible. Here, the target is obvious. The models are to blame for the mess the true-believers are in.
We must help them to understand why the models got it so very wrong. This will not be easy, because nearly all of our opponents have no science or math at all.
We can start our deconstruction of the models by pointing out that – given the five good reasons why global warming might not occur for 15 years or more at a time – the modelers’ ruling out periods of 15 years or more without warming shows they have given insufficient weight to the influence of natural variability. We can poke gentle fun at their description of CO2 as “ the tuning-knob of the climate”, and help them to put things into perspective by reminding them that Man has so far altered only 1/10,000 of the atmosphere, and may alter 1/3000 of it by 2100.
We cannot altogether avoid the math. But we can put it all in plain English, and we can use logic, which is more accessible to the layman than climatological physics. Here goes.
The fundamental equation of climate sensitivity says temperature change is the product of a forcing and a climate-sensitivity parameter.
The modellers’ definition of forcing is illogical; their assumptions about the value of the climate-sensitivity parameter are not Popper-falsifiable; and their claims of reliability for their long-term predictions are empirically disproven and theoretically insupportable. Let us explain.
The IPCC defines a forcing as the net down-minus-up flux of radiation at the tropopause, holding surface temperature fixed. Yet forcings change that temperature. A proposition and its converse cannot simultaneously be true. That is the fundamental postulate of logic, and the models’ definition of forcing manifestly offends against it.
No surprise, then, that since 1995 the IPCC has had to cut its estimate of the CO2 forcing by 15%. The “consensus” disagrees with itself. Note in passing that the CO2 forcing function is logarithmic: each further molecule causes less warming than those before it. Diminishing returns apply.
We can remind our opponents that direct warming is little more than 1 Cº per doubling of CO2 concentration, well within natural variability. It is not a crisis. We can explain that the modelers have imaginatively introduced amplifying or “positive” temperature feedbacks, which, they hope, will triple the direct warming from CO2.
Yet this dubious hypothesis, not being Popper-falsifiable, is not logic and, therefore, not science. If a hypothesis cannot be checked by any empirical or theoretical method, it is not – stricto sensu – a hypothesis at all. It is of no interest to science.
Not one of the imagined feedbacks is empirically measurable or theoretically determinable to a sufficient precision by any method. As an expert reviewer for the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report, I have described its strongly net-positive feedback interval as guesswork – and that, in logic and therefore in science, is exactly what it is.
There is a powerful theoretical reason for suspecting that the modellers’ guess that feedbacks triple direct warming is erroneous. The climatic closed-loop feedback gain implicit in the IPCC’s climate-sensitivity estimate of 3.3[2.0, 4.5] Cº per CO2 doubling falls on the interval 0.62[0.42, 0.74], though you will find no mention of the crucial concept of loop gain either in the IPCC’s documents or – as far as I can discover – in any of the few papers that discuss the mathematics of temperature feedbacks in the climate object.
Process engineers building electronic circuits, who invented feedback mathematics, tell us any loop gain much above zero is too near the singularity – at a loop gain of 1 – in the feedback-amplification equation. At a gain as high as is implicit in the models’ climate-sensitivity estimates, the geological record would show violent oscillations between extremes of warming and cooling.
Yet for 64 million years the Earth’s surface temperature has fluctuated by only 3%, or 8 Cº, either side of the long-run mean. These fluctuations can give us an ice-planet at one moment and a hothouse Earth the next, but they are altogether too small to be consistent with a feedback loop gain anywhere near as close to the singularity as official estimates imply, for homeostatic conditions prevail.
The atmosphere’s lower bound, the ocean, is a vast heat-sink 1100 times denser than the air. Since 3000 bathythermographs were deployed in 2006 no significant ocean warming has been found.
The upper bound of the atmosphere is outer space, to which any excess heat radiates harmlessly away.
Homeostasis, then, is what we should expect, and it is what we get. Accordingly, the climatic loop gain – far from being as impossibly high as the IPCC’s central estimate of 0.62 – cannot much exceed zero, so the warming at CO2 doubling will scarcely exceed 1 Cº.
It is also worth explaining to our opponents the fundamental reason why models cannot do what the modelers claim for them. The overriding difficulty in attempting to model the climate is that it behaves as a chaotic object. We can never know the values of its millions of defining parameters at any chosen moment to a sufficient precision to permit reliable projection of the bifurcations, or Sandy-like departures from an apparently steady state, that are inherent in all objects that behave chaotically. Therefore, reliable, very-long-term prediction of future climate states is known a priori to be unavailable by any method.
The modelers have tried to overcome this constraint by saying that the models are all we have, so we must make the best of them. But it is self-evidently illogical to use models when reliable, very-long-term weather forecasting is not available by any method.
This fundamental limitation on the reliability of long-term predictions by the models – known as the Lorenz constraint, after the father of computerized or “numerical” weather forecasting, whose 1963 paper Deterministic Non-Periodic Flow founded chaos theory by examining the behavior of a five-variable mini-model of the climate constructed as a heuristic – tells us something more, and very important, about the climate.
Bifurcations (or, in our opponents’ intellectual baby-talk, “tipping-points”) in the evolution of the climate object over time are not a whit more likely to occur in a rapidly-warming climate than in a climate which – like our own – is not warming at all.
Sandy and Bopha, and the hot summer in the U.S., could not have been caused by global warming, for the blindingly obvious reason that for 16 years there has not been any.
However, there are many variables in the climate object other than CO2 concentration and surface temperature. Even the tiniest perturbation in any one of these millions of parameters is enough, in an object that behaves chaotically, to induce a bifurcation.
Nothing in the mathematics of chaos leads one to conclude that “tipping-points” are any more likely to occur in response to a large change in the value of one of the parameters (such as surface temperature) that describe an object than in response to an infinitesimal change.
The clincher, in most diplomatic discussions, is money. Once we have led our opponents to understand that there is simply no reason to place any credence whatsoever in the exaggerations that are now painfully self-evident in the models, we can turn their attention to climate economics.
Pretend, ad argumentum, that the IPCC’s central estimate of 2.8 Cº warming by 2100 is true, and that Stern was right to say that the GDP cost of failing to prevent 3 Cº warming this century will be around 1.5% of GDP. Then, at the minimum 5% market inter-temporal discount rate, the cost of trying to abate this decade’s predicted warming of 0.15 Cº by topical, typical CO2-mitigation measures as cost-ineffective as, say, Australia’s carbon tax would be 48 times greater than the cost of later adaptation. At a zero discount rate, the cost of action will exceed the cost arising from inaction 36 times over.
How so? Australia emits just 1.2% of Man’s CO2, of which Ms. Gillard aims to cut 5% this decade. So Australia’s scheme, even if it worked, would cutting just 0.06% of global emissions by 2020. In turn, that would cut CO2 concentration from a predicted 410 μatm to 409.988 μatm. It is this infinitesimal change in CO2 concentration, characteristic of all measures intended – however piously – to mitigate future warming that is the chief reason why there is no economic case for spending any money at all on mitigation today.
The tiny drop in CO2 concentration would cut predicted temperature by 0.00006 Cº. This pathetic result would be achieved at a cost of $130 billion, which works out at $2 quadrillion/Cº. Abating the 0.15 Cº warming predicted for this decade would thus cost $317 trillion, or $45,000/head worldwide, or 59% of global GDP.
Mitigation measures inexpensive enough to be affordable will be ineffective: measures expensive enough to be effective will be unaffordable. Since the premium exceeds the cost of the risk, don’t insure. That is a precautionary principle worthy of the name.
When the child born in Bethlehem ~2012 years ago grew up, He told His audience the parable of the prodigal son, who had squandered his inheritance but was nevertheless welcomed by his father with a fatted calf when he returned and said he was sorry.
However vicious and cruel the true-believers in the global-warming fantasy have been to those few of us who have dared publicly to question their credo that has now been so thoroughly discredited by events, we should make sure that the rat-hole we dig for their escape from their lavish folly is as commodious as possible.
If all else fails, we can pray for them as He prayed looking down from the Cross on the world He had created.
Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.
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Monckton of Brenchley says: December 25, 2012 at 4:07 pm: “The argumentum ad hominem – the logical fallacy of attacking the man and not his argument – is a shoddy sub-species of the argumentum ad ignorationem elenchi, the fallacy of introducing an extraneous consideration or red herring to the discussion, demonstrating that one is ignorant of the manner of conducting a rational argument, and implying that one is ignorant of its matter as well.”
Monckton of Brenchley says: “The pseudonymous “Icarus62””; “The pseudonymous “lgl””; “The pseudonymous “Ratduke””; “The pseudonymous “Lazy Teenager””; “he and others here who lurk behind pseudonyms”; “Pseudonyms, though, are fair game, indicating an unwillingness – for whatever reason – to back up one’s opinions with one’s own name”
===============================================================
Yeah, about that. Referring to people as “pseudonymous” is that very ad hominem, attacking the man and not his argument. Criticising ad hominem and using it at the same time is even worse.
About “back up one’s opinions with one’s own name”, I do not see, how a name can back up an opinion in a scientific debate. Considering a name important is a logical fallacy called “appeal to authority” (argumentum ad verecundiam). If a person is right, Christopher, it does not matter what his name is. Besides, some people have good reasons to not tell the “climate rats” their real names. It is different, however, if a person supports the main “climate rats” concept about “man made global warming”, this person should not be afraid of them, in the first place because they have no reason to be afraid of him/her.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/12/25/bethlehem-and-the-rat-hole-problem/#comment-1182949
Lord Monckton:
Thanks and you’re welcome.
Likely you have already seen the following before, but, just in case, some other info I’ve found exceptionally helpful is looking at arctic ice as an annual average instead of the overhyped single month post-storm.
As an annual average, seen in http://www.webcitation.org/6AKKakUIo (which was up on the U.K. government site before deletion from its original host), the last couple years had an average arctic ice extent far more similar to the mid-1990s than one would guess from common misleading reports.
Such is particularly striking in combination with how http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/ArcticIce/Images/arctic_temp_trends_rt.gif illustrates that the arctic was not warmer in the mid-1990s than in the late 1930s.
Figures 2 and 3 in http://nwpi.krc.karelia.ru/e/climas/Ice/Ice_no_sat/XX_Arctic.htm fit with the preceding, by showing how arctic ice extent in the 1990s was not very exceptional at all compared to the years near 1940.
In a way, the preceding is partially off-topic, including since arctic temperatures are not the same as global temperatures. However, the arctic is the capstone of CAGW claims, and hyping arctic ice decline is one of the top alarmist methods to dispute or distract from how there has been nil net additional global temperature rise in about a decade-and-a-half.
Smoothed HadCRUT3 says that the lack of warming only existed for
about 11 years:
http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcrut3/diagnostics/global/nh+sh/
Apply that smoothing to UAH, and the lack of warming was at-most for
12 years.
Greg House writes, “Criticising ad hominem and using it at the same time is even worse.”
An ad hominem attack—a form of rudeness—is very different from an ad hominem argument—a logical fallacy. Supposedly clever men too often confound the two; they should not be confounded. If I were to suggest, for instance, that far too many alleged journalists covering “climate science” are mendacious, proctoleichous propagandists, that would be contumelious (though, I submit, true) invective—an ad hominem—which does not necessarily invalidate any argument I might be making; if I were to say, however, that one can’t believe a single thing they say because they’re all willfully mischievous activists, that—an argumentum ad hominem—whether true or not, would invalidate the argument.
On pseudonyms, I don’t hide my real name, Informalthough some people, mirabile dictu, believe that my name is a pseudonym.
Readers might be interested in my previous posts where I pointed out that when you have a thermal emitter, the atmosphere, which acts as if it is a near black body in the GHG bands, in radiative thermal equilibrium with the near black body Earth’s surface, there is mutual annihilation of many of the GHG bands, the 15 micron CO2 band in particular.
I was then taken to task, correctly, for not having followed through the mathematics relating to the incoherency of the opposing waves. I have now done so and it’s all quite easy. When you have two coherent emitters in opposite directions of the same wavelength, you get a standing wave. This can transmit no energy. Introduce incoherency and the amplitudes of the nodes can vary about the normal 2 times individual wave amplitude.
However, the node positions do not change. Add in a difference in the amplitudes and there will be a net energy transmission. This is well known to anyone involved in radiative heat transfer calculations where you subtract S-B2 from S-B1 to get the net heat transfer. By going to the wavelength dependent version, the Planck Irradiation Function, you see how this varies by wavelength.
Thus the idea in the Trenberth et. al. Energy budget that ‘back radiation’, the temperature signal in the EM spectrum that travels from the atmosphere, transfers energy to the Earth’s surface so that the temperature signal of the surface then transmits energy back to the atmosphere, is totally wrong. There is no significant CO2-AGW or positive feedback by the water cycle. There will be an incoherent standing wave pushing some energy into the atmosphere, but on average it’s oscillatory about zero for equal temperatures.
It’s time the CO2-AGW myth is put into its coffin. it cannot exist except as a minor effect.
The pseudonymous “Lazy Teenager” continues to display a vexatious ignorance of the elementary mathematics both of feedback amplification and of chaos.
He asserts, on no evidence, that what he loosely describes as “rapid transitions from one leg of a bi-stable state to another, supposed oscillations and chaotic behavior require fairly high gain/climate sensitivity and lashings of positive feedback”.
The Earth does not exhibit a “bi-stable state”. Over the past 750 Ma, always subject to the formidable uncertainties of paleoclimate reconstructions, it exhibits a mode of temperature approximately 12 K above the present, with occasional declines (Scotese, 1999; Zachos+, 2005).
Nor does the mere 3% variation either side of the long-term mean over the past 750 Ma require any positive feedback at all. Forcing alone over sufficient timescales is all that is required. The failure of temperature to fluctuate by more than 3% over geological time is altogether inconsistent with the very high net-positive feedback loop gains on the interval [0.42, 0.74] that are implicit in the models’ central climate-sensitivity estimates on the interval [2.0, 4.5] K per CO2 doubling (and that interval, incidentally, is “the climate sensitivity the models express”, to answer another of Lazy Teenager’s questions)..
One reason is that many of the feedbacks posited by the modelers are non-linear, so that over geological timescales the probability of climate states with a gain >1 approaches unity. The oscillations (not “supposed oscillations: only someone altogether ignorant of feedback amplification would use such a qualifier) that would then occur would be extremely violent, and would occur over various timescales including the very short term, at intervals of days or even hours. Yet no such violent and rapid oscillations either side of the singularity at a loop gain of unity are observed or inferred.
Furthermore, no feedback at all is required to cause bifurcations in the evolution of the climate object. Its chaotic behaviour – deterministic but non-periodic – is sufficient on its own to trigger such Sandy-like bifurcations, on all timescales. It is inherent in the mathematics of chaos (Lorenz, 1963; Giorgi, 2005) that bifurcations, which – to dispel yet another fundamental misconception under which “Lazy Teenager” appears to labor – are not necessarily the same thing as oscillations, are no less likely to occur when the perturbation of the initial value at some t0 of a parameter such as global mean surface temperature is infinitesimal than when it is substantial.
“Lazy Teenager”, instead of actually reading the literature on feedbacks or on chaos, characteristically adopts an aprioristic stance known to theologians as “invincible ignorance”.
Talking of which, Mr., House, having repeatedly made an ass of himself by denying, on no evidence, the elementary physics of radiative transfer in a fluid medium, now makes a further ass of himself by purporting to understand the elements of formal logic, of which he is manifestly ignorant.
He asserts, erroneously, that my pointing out that several commenters here hide behind pseudonyms is an instance of the argumentum ad hominem, that sub-species of ignoratio elenchi that irrelevantly attacks the man and not his argument. My drawing attention to the pseudonyms that are too often used here is neither irrelevant nor an attack. It is a relevant observation.
For one thing, It is easier to understand the often obscurantist arguments presented by some commenters if one has some idea of who they are and can refer to their published literature (if any) for clarification. Many of the commenters here would either be considerably more careful with their science or considerably more polite, or both, if they did not have the freedom to post here even when they hide behind pseudonyms.
For this reason, Mr.House’s further assertion, to the effect that in wanting to know who the pseudonymous commenters are I am guilty of the argumentum ad verecundiam, the fallacy of appeal to authority, is also without foundation. Much of the nonsense peddled by trolls on websites such as this only appears here at all because the trolls can skulk behind pseudonyms.
I suspect that the quality of the discussion would be vastly improved if all pseudonymous contributions were filtered out and deleted. Whether Mr. House shares my opinion on this matter or not, I am free to assert it, and to draw attention to it by the use of the word “pseudonymous”, without offending against any of the canons of formal logic, which Mr. House appears never to have studied – not that that has deterred him from imprudently attempting to pronounce upon it.
Lord Monckton: the 12 K extra temperature in the past was from higher lapse rate warming due to the denser past atmosphere. The CO2-religionists hate this argument.
E.M.Smith says: @ur momisugly December 26, 2012 at 11:51 pm
I can say more, faster, in sign than in “mere words”….
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
After riding/training horses since childhood, I find I am very very frustrated when I talk to people over the phone because I can not ‘read’ the body language that goes with the words.
I have never tried ‘bunnish’ but after ‘horse’, ‘dog’ or ‘cat’ is very easy.
In the meantime there is no need to be rude. Think of it as educating a stubborn little boy.
Well said, Julian! Rarely have I seen such a perfect juxtaposition of contrasts!
Here, I’ll freely admit that I got carried away on the anti-religion thing, but that is one of my buttons and it got pressed. Bear in mind that I did restrain myself, on the comeback, from addressing to Loud Monkeyton of Benchmark, or anything equally childish, simply because there isn’t any real point in reacting to nonsense. I have a far thicker skin than that, and if anything, respect Mr. Monckton’s views and efforts on my behalf with the powers that be. I do think — quite seriously — that he would be more effective if he scaled back the pointless sarcasm (as opposed to the kind with some sort of point) and presented his arguments somewhat more objectively, but I also understand his frustration since that sort of argument is nearly as fruitless as the other kind so why not have fun?
Dear Mr. West,
To you I apologize as well. As I said, one of my buttons. Although you are a Christian heretic, the word heretic means (of course) choice and while you are projecting your own internal sense of morality onto the Bible rather than vice versa, at least you have the sense to avoid turning the whole thing into a moral club backed by naked violence (which it all too often has been, at least since Nicaea as you note). That doesn’t make it true in any sense of the word, as a myth, a legend, or actual history — but I have met many good Christians (and indeed am related to and descended from them — my niece is a Methodist minister, and my grandfather was a Methodist tent revivalist in Missouri in the first half of the last century). I have also met good Muslims, good Hindus, many good Buddhists (it is actually moderately difficult to encounter a bad Buddhist to my experience) and many, many good atheists. My conclusion is that how good or bad a person is, while somewhat correlated with their belief system, is really much more a function of that person’s brain and experience than it is anything else, and having raised three sons I’m not sure which of the two is more important but I suspect brain. We have a lot less free will than we think we do.
My only suggestion to you, and to Mr. Monckton, and to others who hold religious beliefs is this. Think carefully about what it is best to believe. Not what you were raised to believe, not what everybody around you believes, but what it is best in a logically defensible sense to believe. Be brutally honest about it (this is where it is all too easy to fail, as we are by nature inclined to lie to ourselves — see Feynman’s Cargo Cult address online to get a feel for what I mean).
And with this I will retire and plague this thread no more…:-)
rgb
What Christopher doesn’t want to accept is that all of the rich behavior expressed by the climate including rapid transitions from one one leg of a bistable state to another, supposed oscillations and chaotic behavior require fairly high gain/climate sensitivity and lashings of positive feedback.
Well, OK, I’ll plague it just one last time.:-)
LT, what you don’t seem to realize is that dynamical bistable behavior (as opposed to the sort of static bistability that occurs in ferromagnetism) requires a balance of positive and negative feedback to occur, and that when one is in (say) the upper branch of a bistable system that branch is defined by the cancellation of the negative feedback and positive feedback.
We could go on about cubics and coupled ODEs (and I would be happy to, having spent a decade or so studying this) at your convenience. That’s what EM and I are discussing. The uphill “way is closed” from the evidence of the historical data. CO_2 might tunnel out a completely new dynamical profile, but there is no a priori reason to expect it.
rgb
Donald L. Klipstein says:
December 27, 2012 at 10:07 pm
Smoothed HadCRUT3 says that the lack of warming only existed for about 11 years:
For HadCRUT3, the slope is 0 (-0.000387163 per year) since May 1997 or 15 years, 7 months (goes to November). See:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1997.33/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1997.33/trend
RGBatDuke says:
”Think carefully about what it is best to believe.”
I think that’s true for any subject or issue; whether it be climate, religion, paleontology, or whatever. I know we talk about science not being about belief but when it comes right down to the individual decisions have to be made regarding particulars like weighting of evidence. These decisions are inherently subjective and open to individual point of view.
I am most definitely a heretic. Climate Heretic. Christian Heretic.
If you are not personally committed to literal interpretation of the Bible, I highly recommend reading RGB’s Theory on God. It has an amusing surprise in the middle that I won’t spoil but will say made me literally LOL. Also, the meat of it is an interesting concept and includes a nice summary of religions. There is a Biblical interpretation school of thought that would align quite easily with his theory. It is an interpretation scheme that I have not personally excluded but rather have been on the fence for several years on the central question involved. (Best not to get into that here.)
@RGB
No need for an apology, it takes two to tango as the saying goes.
The text surrounding your core theory could stand some improvement including a model that does align with Judeo-Christian “Sacred Texts”. I have not just read but studied and examined ALL the gospels and scriptures available (not just the ones in the Bible), the great philosophers’ apologetics and critiques, and various interpretation schemes. I have a decent understanding and have at least read the “Sacred Texts” of many other religions including the Quran (yawn ;)). If I can help just say the word.
Monckton of Brenchley says:
December 25, 2012 at 11:40 am
An example. During the Falklands conflict, British troops were trying to dislodge superior Argentinian forces from a strategically-crucial redoubt at Goose Green. H. Jones, the gung-ho, lead-from-the-front British commander on the spot, made the same mistake Wellington had made at Talavera: he led several unsuccessful uphill charges against enemy forces that had the advantage not only of height but also of ability to see into dead ground between them and the Brits. Jones and many of his men were killed.
His no. 2 found himself unexpectedly in command and decided to pray. (Did I say it was Christmas?) The answer came to him at once and he told his sparky to patch him through to the Argentinian commander.
“Now, look here, old boy,” he said in his most authoritative, cut-glass, public-school-and-Sandhurst drawl, “We both know how this is going to end. So what I’m going to suggest is this. You all lay down your arms like good chaps and come out with your hands up, and I’ll see to it that you get properly fed and watered, your wounded treated, and safe passage back to Argentina on the first boat. How about that?”
“Si, señor!” And, to everyone’s astonishment, 1500 Argentinians found they had surrendered to 200 Brits.
You had better hope that no one from 2 Para reads this nonsense! The most egregious error being your dating it at Christmas, actually the battle took place on the 28th May.
The actual surrender document was as follows:
“MILITARY OPTIONS
We have sent a PW to you under a white flag of truce to convey the following military options:
1. That you unconditionally surrender your force to us by leaving the township, forming up in a military manner, removing your helmets and laying down your weapons. You will give prior notice of this intention by returning the PW under a white flag with him briefed as to the formalities by no later than 0830 hrs local time.
2. You refuse in the first case to surrender and take the inevitable consequences. You will give prior notice of this intention by returning the PW without his flag (although his neutrality will be respected) no later than 0830 hrs local time.
3. In the event and in accordance with the terms and conditions of the Geneva Convention and Laws of War you will be held responsible for the fate of any civilians in Darwin and Goose Green and we in accordance with these terms do give notice of our intention to bombard Darwin and Goose Green.
C KEEBLE
Commander of British Forces”
This document was presented after the fighting at Goose Green airfield several hours after the ‘redoubt’ which H. Jones had attacked had been captured and the Argentinian forces defending the airfield surrendered the following morning!
Deadman says, December 27, 2012 at 10:38 pm: “Greg House writes, “Criticising ad hominem and using it at the same time is even worse.”
An ad hominem attack—a form of rudeness—is very different from an ad hominem argument—a logical fallacy. Supposedly clever men too often confound the two; they should not be confounded. If I were to suggest, for instance, that far too many alleged journalists covering “climate science” are mendacious, proctoleichous propagandists, that would be contumelious (though, I submit, true) invective—an ad hominem—which does not necessarily invalidate any argument I might be making; if I were to say, however, that one can’t believe a single thing they say because they’re all willfully mischievous activists, that—an argumentum ad hominem—whether true or not, would invalidate the argument.
======================================================
Ad hominem is not strictly an argument at all, it is a tactic designed to score points by diminishing the opponent, in order to make the public pay less attention to what the opponent says, or sometimes to provoke an emotional reaction from the opponent, etc. .
Usually employed by bad guys.
Exception: if the opponent is trying to score points by appealing to his own authority (by claiming himself to be an “expert”, e.g.), it is reasonable to look into that claim and find out, that e.g. an “expert reviewer for the IPCC ” is just how the IPCC call the unpaid voluntary readers of their draft reports. Then it is not ad homeninim in the bad sense.
and . . . .
= = = = = =
rgbatduke,
Regards your admission that you over reacted to Monckton concerning his religious views, I respect you for admitting that. I understand it is frustrating to pursue rational discussion with people of belief based views, e.g., religion. I understand the frustration because I am a person who does not find any rational basis for the belief in supernaturalism and superstition which I consider all religion to be. Patience and cold discourse is needed in rational discussion with people who believe the positions of religion. Having said that, science can be easily and rationally separated from religious belief . . . . even when, as is often the case, both occur in the same person.
Regards your observations about Popper’s falsifiability and [Logical] Positivist’s verifiability, Popper’s falsifiability has suffered the same fate as the Positivist’s verifiability. They both are logically contradicted within their own conception. Therefore both conceptions are of little scientific value.
In the early 1970’s I found an excellent treatment the logical problems in both the verifiability concept(s) of Logical Positivism and also in the falsifiability concept(s) of Popper. The treatment is in the book ‘Reason and Analysis’ by Brand Blanshard (Open Court Publishing Co, 1962/1964).
rgb, hope you have a happy holiday season.
John
Monckton of Brenchley says:
December 25, 2012 at 3:17 pm
Finally, since Ratduke seems to think today is Newton’s birthday, I shall be as picky with him as he has been with me on the matter of birthdays. As a result of the adjustment to the calendar in the 17th century, Newton turns out to have been born on January 4, 1643, not December 25, 1642. The deletion of 11 days from the calendar was not received kindly in all quarters: in Russia, peasants demonstrated under the slogan “Give us back our 11 days!” One imagines their descendants now write IPeCaC’s reports.
More historical errors. The deletion of 11 days was a result of an Act of Parliament in Britain in 1750, the peasants didn’t revolt, the “Give us back our 11 days!” arose from a placard in a Hogarth painting of an election scene! So Newton was born on Dec 25th.
The Russians didn’t adopt the new calendar until 1918, by which time 13 days were deleted.
“Popper’s falsifiability has suffered the same fate as the Positivist’s verifiability. They both are logically contradicted within their own conception.”
do you have an example of this you can post here?
“If all else fails, we can pray for them as He prayed looking down from the Cross on the world He had created.”
His Lordship is another Christian sceptic?
Now there’s and oxymoron.
Making that your final statement, M’ Lawd, in a supposedly scientific article, guts the whole essay.
“If all else fails, we can pray for them as He prayed looking down from the Cross on the world He had created.”
Moronic ending to a “scientific” article.
Monckton of Brenchley says:
December 26, 2012 at 4:58 am
And leading modelers writing for the NOAA, in its State of the Climate report for 2008, made it quite clear that the simulations rule out, to 95% confidence, intervals of 15 years or more without warming, and that an interval of that duration was needed to create a discrepancy between the models’ predictions and observed reality.
Actually they were more specific than that, they ran simulations without ENSO. Their results ruled out intervals of 15 years or more without warming in a temperature record from which the ENSO effects have been removed, i.e. ENSO adjusted data. So far there has been no discrepancy between those predictions and reality.
Could you just explain that in a little more depth, in slightly more agricultural terms?
Farmerbraun, looking out at the rain presently falling, in the middle of the twelfth cool wet summer since 1999, and having endured, in the same location, the predominantly hot, dry and frequently droughty summers between 1975 and 1998, could easily tend to the view that ENSO is climate , when viewed from the perspective of a single human life time. Mere milliseconds of course in the geological sense.
ENSO adjusted data surely can only be measured over > ~60 year time frames?
In the early 1970’s I found an excellent treatment the logical problems in both the verifiability concept(s) of Logical Positivism and also in the falsifiability concept(s) of Popper. The treatment is in the book ‘Reason and Analysis’ by Brand Blanshard (Open Court Publishing Co, 1962/1964).
for some small 
…;-)
Thanks for the reference, I’ll look for it. The history of LP (including Popper, who was part of the same anti-metaphysical group of philosophers) is interesting — there was a fair bit of interaction between Neurath and Frank and Carnap and Bohr (where Frank and Carnap, IIRC, were both trained in physics and philosophy). One could say that quantum mechanics had a strong influence on the development of LP, largely for mistaken reasons (remember, this was mid to late 30’s and QM was only about half “finished” at that point and there were only a handful of people who really understood that half).
Both verification and falsification as a basis for knowledge have some point, because we use both of them in everyday reasoning. However, they are also both part of a broader logic, the algebra of probability theory. George Boole had already shown (in a much neglected work on thought) that Laplace’s algebra of probability, properly developed, had what we would now call symbolic logic or Boolean logic — the logic of true/false analysis — as a limiting case. In practice, we use both falsification and verification as a criterion for knowledge, but in both cases in a probabilistic sense associated with plausible inference much more often than in any sort of Boolean sense.
Much of this goes all the way back to Laplace and Hume. You can drop a rock a thousand times and watch it fall down every time with an acceleration of g. While this experience does not verify a theory such as “rocks, dropped, fall down with acceleration g” because one cannot logically prove the hypothesis from the observation, only note an extended correlation, there are actually sound reasons to think that it is rather more likely that the rock, dropped the 1001st time, will fall down with acceleration g. Similarly, an observation on the 1001st time that the rock falls up, or floats, or falls with an acceleration g/2 doesn’t suffice to completely disprove the hypothesis that a rock, dropped, falls down with an acceleration g — it just makes it less likely that this will happen since you’ve observed a single rare exception in 1001 trials. Note that you haven’t “proven the hypothesis false” because it was never accepted as true in the first place — to say that it is true means that every rock ever dropped in the entire history of the Universe will fall down with acceleration g, and we can never verify this, any more than we can with certainty state that no falsification of e.g. mass-energy conservation has occurred ever in the history of the Universe, only that we haven’t observed one.
Well, observed one that lasted more than
Oops.
It wasn’t until 1946 that the correct axiomatic basis for the theory of knowledge as probable reason, the formal derivation of a theory of logical inference, was constructed by physicist Richard Cox:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cox%27s_theorem
and expounded upon in considerable detail by E. T. Jaynes in the Mobil Lectures initially (in the 50’s) and much later in:
http://omega.albany.edu:8008/JaynesBook.html
Probability Theory, the Logic of Science, where the free/online book is the 1994 snapshot — I got my own snapshot, which received very widespread distribution in the physics community at least, back in the 80s after my graduate stat mech teacher, Richard Palmer, used Jaynes and Shannon’s Theorem as the axiomatic basis for statistical mechanics in physics.
Shannon’s theorem is a justly famous result on information redundancy and compressibility and introduces the concept of information entropy (which is trivially related to real entropy, hence the connection between Shannon’s theorem and stat mech). However, Cox’s result is more general and permits the trivial derivation of Shannon’s theorem as a special case (and stat mech as another special case, and Bayesian probability theory as a special normalization of the general case). Since it also precedes Shannon’s publication by two years, I usually advance it instead of Shannon’s theorem per se as the sound basis for a theory of practical empirical epistemology. Even this doesn’t do the result justice — its roots trace back through A Treatise on Probability by John Maynard Keynes (hence, IIRC, the notion of maximum entropy/ignorance) and back further still.
Its application is simple enough. Indeed, it in some sense is the direct practical application of Descartes program of systematic doubt, but with the doubt quantified and tied to both direct observations (which yield marginal probabilities, if you like) and a network of observation based and algebraic derived joint and conditional probabilities. Jaynes has numerous examples of how we use this reasoning in both our everyday lives and how it forms the proper basis for things like hypothesis testing and scientific reasoning in general.
Oh, one last reference (since I’ve written all of the above out — it is all explained and covered in a lot more detail in my book-in-writing, Axioms — David MacKay has written a mind-blowing book here:
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/itprnn/book.html
You can read it for free online or buy a hard copy — I did the latter as it is dense to read on screen and he deserves a reward for the hard work that went into it, but suit yourself. MacKay’s book is titled Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms (he’s a computational physicist, Cox was a physicists, Jaynes was a rather famous physicist, Shannon was a computer scientist who worked for Bell Labs back in the day when working for Bell Labs was more prestigious than a tenured professorship anywhere but — perhaps — three or four schools. I say perhaps, since one can walk down through an impressive list of Nobel Prizes (including Shannon’s) that came out of Bell Labs.
These guys were the real philosophers of the latter half of the 20th century, where Russell and Whitehead (and perhaps Godel, indirectly) were the real philosophers of the first half, and sadly the world still doesn’t appreciate (IMO) the monumental contribution they made to the theory of logic and knowledge.
It is in precisely this sense that I (gently, I hope) suggested that people honestly appraise their system of beliefs and try to choose the best one. Choosing the best one requires some actual work, and notions such as “best” imply an optimization process, an ordinal relationship, the notion that this is more/better equal/equivalent less/worse than that. These in turn require assumptions to be made — one cannot even define and understand the ordinal natural numbers without such notions and assumptions (look up the Peano axioms or power sets) — and one has to be careful to make one’s assumptions consistently in a way that is “Godel aware”, aware of the traps, temptations, and benefits of self-referential statements.
Here is a way one might analyze the dazzling array of religions. Suppose there are N of them, that they are mutually exclusive, and we’ll include in the list “none of the above are correct” (where N may not be known, but we can easily come up with a lower bound on N). Initially we might assume that we know nothing of the truth of any of these propositions. The principle of maximum ignorance/entropy would then suggest that the best we can do as an initial estimate of the probability that any of them are true is 1/N. This alone makes it unlikely that any particular religion in the list is true (assuming a large N) while at the same time one of them (including the possibility of the null hypothesis none of the above) is definitely true.
Note well — all names go into the hat! To quote Heinlein, it could turn out that Mumbo Jumbo, God of the Congo is the one true deity and all others are false! A priori we cannot prove one way or another, the best we can do is assess this possibility along with all of the others. So no fair restricting things only to “world religions”, or large denominations or branches or sects of major world religions. Personally I’d throw Cthulhu and the FSM in as well — if nothing else they can act as placeholders for the near-infinity of short lived cults and lost religions (you have to wait until later below to reject a religion based on the evidence that its God(s) were too slothful to maintain any worshippers).
Note well that if one applies empirical reason to this array of possibilities properly, it is not necessary that this initial estimate be optimal! A sound process will systematically converge on the best answer as evidence is accumulated. A poor initial estimate at worst makes this take longer. A useful metaphor might be a system of experiments to determine the probable weighting of a two-sided coin. You can start with a prior assumption of 50-50, 70-30, 100-0, or anything else you like, and then modify it in a Bayesian way as you accumulate observational data, and no matter where you start you’ll end up with a good (in fact the best given the priors) estimate of the coin’s weighting given the data and the priors. You can actually do this and watch the probabilities converge in R, BTW — you don’t even have to code it as it is a teaching example in a book on Bayesian Statistics in R.
One now has to decide what constitutes positive and negative “evidence” for the truth of any of the given religions. We might begin with consistency, since an inconsistent religion is a priori false, not empirically false (at least if you accept the rules of first order logic, which I would recommend or else I will prove that God is a Penguin:
http://www.coopertoons.com/merryhistory/biblestories/paulcolossalapostle/godisapenguin.html
— I can claim the original proof, BTW, note well at the bottom, although it is a joke demonstration of the importance of the Law of Contradiction and the problems with Godellian loops more than anything serious:-).
Of course, none of the religions with the possible exception of Buddhism (which isn’t really a religion, so perhaps we should exclude it) is particularly consistent if one takes them anything like literally, so one is thrust from the beginning into a Hermeneutic Haze that fuzzes out the contradictions. IMO one must charge the religion in some way for this fuzzing — lower its plausibility in some way proportional to how many contradictions one has to Exegesify “without contradiction” by means of broad or poetic interpretation of words that obviously mean something else entirely.
At the same time, one can strip out irrelevant information. Much of the Bible is a history, and the truth or falsehood of the history has nothing to do with the truth or falsehood of the (postulated) religious principles in question. One might as well reduce those principles to simple statements, e.g. the Nicaean creed, the Eightfold Way and Four Noble Truths, whatever.
Then one has to compare the statements and claims that are essential to the religion in question to the real world, and apply brutal rules. If one tests one of those statements and they don’t pan out, you have to reduce your degree of provisional belief in the religion(s) that have that statement in common, and increase your degree of belief in all of the others that do not (to maintain normalization). Conversely, direct, reproducible positive evidence has to increase the degree of belief for all religions to which it pertains, decrease it in the rest.
This can force one to difficult decisions. For example, is it a postulate of your faith that “prayer works” in some measurable way? Risky business. Yet without something one can test, the “none of the above” (which goes up some with all null results that fail to provide direct evidence of divine action) will creep up steadily, or at the very least all of the religions will remain around 1/N, approximately zero, which is basically a de facto win for none of the above as well.
It also forces one to accept certain rules. At some point — and you’ll have to decide what that point is — twisting the words of scriptural verses (in any of the scriptures involved) around so that they appear to be “true” and consistent with things like scientific or historical observations just to avoid some particular scriptural religion from becoming downgraded to very, very implausible is permitting cognitive dissonance to dictate a distortion of the analysis, not reason:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance
Note well the classic original study:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Prophecy_Fails
The failure of prophecy should (one would think) count as negative evidence for any religion that makes prophetic claims. Strongly negative evidence. So when Isaiah (in 7) prophecies that Ahaz will not lose to Syria, and 2 Chronicles 28 says that “the LORD his God delivered him (Ahaz) into the hand of the king of Syria; and they smote him, and carried away a great multitude of them captives, and brought them to Damascus. And he was also delivered into the hand of the king of Israel, who smote him with a great slaughter.” this has to count as a big problem for Isaiah, and all versions of all religions that rely on Isaiah being an actual prophet whose prophecies could be relied on.
But this is up to you. If you want to interpret the entire chapter of Isaiah 7 as a secret code foretelling the birth of Jesus where Ahaz is nothing more than a catspaw, window dressing, somebody the Lord had already decided to waste later , if you want to claim that the Lord told Isaiah to lie to Ahaz (which introduces consistency problems IMO), if you want to claim that the text lies to us (ditto) — these are all your decisions. However, don’t expect to convince others once your reasoning, driven by a wish to avoid dissonance, becomes too convoluted and requires too many special exceptions to make any sort of consistent sense.
This is really the last important rule. Special exceptions all have a cost (in plausibility). Not just ones that are associated with internal contradiction, all of them. This is Ockham’s Razor — if you make everything a special exception you can explain anything you like and understand nothing at all as you do so. For example, I can explain everything that has ever happened as being the work of invisible fairies. Who can disprove it? They’re invisible! Why do they make things appear to fall according to a law of gravitation? Because they want to, of course. They sit there with invisible fairy calculators to make sure it all comes our exactly right. You want proof that they exist? Drop any rock. You can’t see them directly, but we can see what they do (according to my hypothesis) and hence infer their existence.
Think this is crazy? Substitute the word “graviton” for “invisible fairy”. How crazy is it now?
But too many fairies spoil any theory! So explaining away Isaiah one way or another perhaps can be done, but not without cost in plausibility, because our common sense tells us that Isaiah’s prophecy in one place is contradicted by an account in another place, and they can’t both be true any usual way and any explanation outside of the text itself costs plausibility points as you’re gonna just make it up to avoid the problem.
Apply any variation of these rules — the same rules one might use to decide the probable truth of any proposition — to not just one religion, but all religions on an equal, unbiased footing, and see where you end up. I’m pretty sure it will be “None of the Above” or “Answer Cloudy, Try Again Later”.
rgb
rgbatduke says:
December 28, 2012 at 7:29 am
…..My only suggestion to you, and to Mr. Monckton, and to others who hold religious beliefs is this. Think carefully about what it is best to believe. Not what you were raised to believe, not what everybody around you believes, but what it is best in a logically defensible sense to believe. Be brutally honest about it (this is where it is all too easy to fail, as we are by nature inclined to lie to ourselves — see Feynman’s Cargo Cult address online to get a feel for what I mean).
And with this I will retire and plague this thread no more…:-)
=========================================================
I appreciate what I think is your intent, to “help”. I was “brutally honest about it” 40+ years ago. I’m 58. I was not raised holding all the beliefs I now have. That brutal honesty led me to the cross and the empty tomb. I tell you that as my attempt to help.
= = = = = = =
gnomish,
It is nice to get a comment from you. Hope your holiday season is pleasant.
I can give you some basis/ examples. But, please be patient . . . . . I only have hard copy of critiques of Popper’s and LP’s concepts and overall logic (both of which, as rgbatduke properly identified, have common philosophical issues surrounding them). I will get a response to you . . . . but again be patient. It might be several days . . . . I wish I had the resource electronically instead of paper.
John
@Stuart B:
Well, I read this far 😉
I like the idea, but can’t see a practical method… yet…
@Gail:
I see LazyT continues to not know what end of the mule goes which way… and even uses non-sequitur to excess. I’m also left wondering why he doesn’t like the Global Fund for Children. Or perhaps he meant the Georgia Forestry Commission or the Great Firewall of China? Or maybe it is the use of Gel Filtration Chromatography that’s got his panties in a bunch? No, more likely it’s the Geelong Football Club…
At any rate, it is the fools who push hard for driving into the wall at full speed. as they do not understand it. that are the worst fools. LazyT doesn’t even realize he wants the death and destruction that will result from cutting fossil fuel use…
Oh, and no wonder my Dad was so good at training animals… He actually taught our English Setter to sneeze on command. Think about that. How do you get the concept of a sneeze (that dogs don’t do all that often anyway) connected to the word “sneeze” AND get them motivated enough to try doing it, and on command? Now THAT’S communication!
BTW, I have a natural “people reader”. Developed before hearing loss. Later I added lip reading… It’s horribly compromised by electronic communications. In a meeting around a table, I can pretty much tell you what everyone is doing / thinking in terms of attitude and direction. On one contract we were forced to use some Micro$oft computerized meeting thing. I was like trying to work in a gunny sack under a waterfall… Staring into a computer screen cut off 90% of my information flow. Peoples faces went slack. The postures froze. The non-verbal communications halted. Hell, IMHO.
Bunnish is harder / more complex than cat or dog. First, they use at least 3 modes. Tooth chatter, a scream, the ‘rupt rupt’ soft vocalizing. Being partly deaf, trying to pick up the subtle and soft vocalizing is very hard. They are deliberately at nearly sub-vocal so predators can’t hear normal ‘gossip’. It’s partly tone based, so the intensity and stress changes meaning (from “I’m enjoying this grazing” to “BIRD Predator!! stop grazing and run!” is a bit louder and ‘more tense’ RruuPT ruuPT!’ with slightly higher pitch I think.) It is specifically “BIRD” as they looked to the sky, not the fence. (I’ve not figured out how they say ‘cat’ yet…). The ‘tooth chatter’ is “I’m really happy and relaxed”. The “scream” is blood curdling and incredibly loud. It means “I think I’m about to die!” and warms everyone to escape, now. (It also startles the ‘predator’. I was sexing a young bunny and turned it on it’s back, so it screamed at me… I almost dropped it.) There’s more, but the basics are to realize the three modes and listen to variation inside them. Oh, and eyelid tension is a modifier. The eyes are very expressive / communicative. Ear position (for non-lops) also adds information.
@LazyT:
HINT: if you use an obscure acronym, define it.
Also, someone can be pointing out the inevitable result of your advocated policies without reading your mind as to why you want it. Then again, it’s not likely anyone can read your mind…
BTW: The Lord is isn’t doing an ad-hom on you, he is relating accurately the observed evidence and speculating about what it might mean…
OH, and it’s “E.M” not “E.E.” ( e.e. was the poet… 😉
So you have not read it, yet want to debate it by asking questions? Odd “style”…
1) There is NO one value for ‘climate sensitivity’. The value varies depending on your state. Hysteresis is like that. Positive at one end, negative at the other, metastable in between. By Definition. (Go to a light switch. Flip it. Flip it back. Must have up pressure at one end, down pressure at the other. Self limits in each direction. At the exact middle, it’s unstable.)
2) There is no ‘positive feedback’ needed. The insolation changes over the Milankovich cycle such that each “end” eventually becomes unstable and a ‘flip’ to the other end happens. During the Glacial stage, things are a bit less stable and short term excursions toward warm can happen, but they decay back to frozen when the stimulus ends.
Reading the paper would improve your questions…
As we are already leaving the “stable in warmth” end of Milanchovich, the only stability is to the cold side. We have insufficient Watts at 65N to get back to warm. So ANY cold excursion can send us to a stable Glacial State. And most importantly, NO amount of warm excursion can warm us more than the peak of the Holocene Optimum that happened under full acceleration out of the last glacial and when Watts/m^2 above 65N were far higher than now.
That’s what makes the IPCC, the AGW Paranoia, and all the rest so incredibly dumb.
They want to push, as hard as they can, in exactly the wrong direction.
We need to be continuing the warmth as much as possible as long as possible since once we start cooling, there is no coming back. And we ARE cooling. The 1500 year, 5000 year, and a probable 23,000 year cycles are all rolling off a top “now”. (Where “now” is somewhere between 30 and 300 years depending on cycle).
@Lord Monckton:
There are valid reasons to use a pseudonym. Ones that likely do not apply to a “Public Person” such as yourself. For example, some folks are employed at institutions that would likely fire them if their beliefs became known. Not being financially independent, that’s an unacceptable risk. ( I know at least 2 folks in that group.)
For others, if “the neighbors found out”, things like party invites drop off. I’ve already got a couple of family members who are ‘put off’…
Finally, there’s just the whole SPAM-bot and identity dredging that goes on. I have an email address specifically for public use that is never used to “real email”, precisely because it is a SPAM magnet. Now most folks don’t go that far. They have some work or telephone related account. Spoil it, and they are ‘toast’. (Especially if a work account). I learned this after I had to throw away my 3rd email address do to SPAM overloads…
So please don’t be too hard on folks with pseudonyms. Heck, if my proper name were not already the functional equivalent of Anonymous Anonymous I’d likely be using a pseudonym. As it is, we met at Chicago at the Heartland event, yet you likely would not remember me from E.M.Smith… but “Chiefio”, my ‘pseudonym’, clearly identifies me… (I think of it more as a ‘unique handle’ than pseudonym, yet it’s really both…)
@Gnomish:
The problem with your assertion is that congenitally deaf folks use language. There are no sounds involved, nor have there ever been. Sound, and verbal structures, are not needed for language, nor for cognition. VISUAL language, is still language, and still has definitions.
Similarly, the “tooth chatter” of a bunny has a specific meaning, a definition. As does a “rupt rupt rupt’ sound sequence, which, if ‘tightened’ slightly higher pitch, and louder has a quite different specific meaning and WILL cause the herd to do a specific action, which is a head tilt scan of the sky for predatory birds. They don’t just do that randomly, BTW.
That you are deaf to the intelligences all around you is a pity. They can communicate with you, but only if you learn to listen, and sometimes to listen visually…
BTW, Coco, the Gorilla who learned American Sign Language invented her own word for refrigerator. She combined “cold” with “box”. Oddly, I used that same term in my ASL class (we were asked to name a ‘fridge) and found that my instructor had ‘created it’ as a kid, but was then told by his parents what the ‘proper’ sign was. (It isn’t ‘cold-box’). So three intelligences all created the same compound word. One a hearing person (me). The other a congenitally deaf person. The third a Gorilla. They all used it to mean the same thing, and to communicate with others. Yet you assert that one is somehow different from the others, and that all of them are not language the way a spoken ‘refrigerator’ would be… besides, they are not found in a ‘dictionary’… (So one also presumes that from your POV there was no language prior to the invention of dictionaries … a rather recent innovation, BTW.)
A curious and limited world you live in.
@RBG:
I’ll be looking up “Langevin Equation” 😉 Thanks!
FWIW: It’s my opinion that the reason this interglacial is ‘flat topped’ is that we had an asteroid or meteor strike (that caused the Younger Dryas) and it ‘clipped the peak’ off the shoot ‘up the wall’. Leaving us in a more energy balanced state ‘at the top’. And now we’re just dropping in sync with insolation changes and ice build-up, not on a ‘rebound’ from too high up the ‘wall’.
Nice metaphor, BTW….
Oh, and while I’ve personally ‘run the gamut’ from dunk-in-the-tank Southern Baptist to hard core atheist (and part way back): I’ve encouraged my children to embrace religion, and I’m married to a hyper-religious sort. So I’m, in fact, encouraging them to ‘find their own way’ but also with a nudge toward something I have trouble fully embracing… So, you see, it’s not so much “how I was raised” as “where thought has led me”… (At this point, I’m more a syncretic quasi-Buddhist with Christian overtones who admires a lot in Sikhism…)
@John West:
And the Nag Hamadi library and the Gnostic Bible and the Nestorian and the Peshita… (Once you get out of the Approved Bible Rut there’s a lot of interesting variations…)
@DirkH:
Well done! I’ll join the All Green Commune after their 4th decade of operation at a western level of comfort…
@Julian Flood:
Who’s “little”? 😉
@Werner Brozek:
Note that Donald said “Smoothed”… common smoothing methods effectively hide the end of the data by the smoothing interval ( like the simple moving average does) so it is a kind of intellectual dodge to use a smoothed series to look at length of zero trend….
@farmerbraun:
Well put sir. Very well put! A lifetime indeed is needed.