Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
Over at “SkepticalScience”, which is neither skeptical nor scientific, they’re hyping a new “Artificial Intelligence” (AI) tool developed by John Cook et al. to identify “denialist claims”. The paper laying out this foolishness is in Nature Scientific Reports in an article with the most sciency title of “Computer-assisted classification of contrarian claims about climate change“. The Washington Post reports what they want to do …
“Ultimately, our goal is the Holy Grail of fact-checking, which is being able to detect and debunk misinformation in real time,” said Cook, who partly developed the framework previously at George Mason University. “Ideally, I would have social media platforms using it to detect misinformation in real time.”
Their hope is to use it to censor views that disagree with theirs “in real time” … can you imagine anything more anti-scientific and totalitarian than wanting to disappear scientists who disagree with you before anyone can even read their ideas?
In the Nature paper, Cook and the Cookies describe their work as follows:
Let’s start with a quick, 10-word introduction to climate change. There are 5 key facts that summarize everything you need to know about climate change. And they are:
1. It’s real
2. It’s us
3. It’s bad
4. There’s hope
5. Experts agree
We’ve developed a taxonomy of denialist claims that aim to cast doubt on climate science. Climate misinformation can be broken into five main categories, which we call super-claims. They’re the opposite of the five climate beliefs: it’s not real, it’s not us, it’s not bad, experts are unreliable and there’s no hope.
1. It’s not real
2. It’s not us
3. It’s not bad
4. Experts are unreliable
5. There’s no hope
When I saw this, I broke out laughing. Why? Because in total contradiction to point 4 immediately above, that experts are not unreliable, one of the finest physicists of my lifetime, Richard Feynman, famously said:
“Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”
Feynman is 100% correct. If no one ever questioned the claims of “experts”, science would come to an immediate halt. Einstein questioned Newton. Wegener questioned immobile continents. Science is the slow process of overturning the “scientific consensus” by scientists who question the beliefs of the experts. Feynman was right.
So clearly, the folks putting together this ludicrous “artificial intelligence” tool have no idea how science is supposed to work … and with that as its basis, there’s no hope for this tool.
Look, I’ve been programming computers for fifty-seven years now, longer than John Cook has been alive. And one thing I’ve found to be true, at times to my cost:
Computer programs are nothing but a physical embodiment of the understandings and more importantly the misunderstandings of the programmer.
And as a result, when you start out by programming “artificial intelligence” with a profound misunderstanding of science, as John Cook and his workmates are doing, you’ll end up with artificial stupidity every time.
In any case, here is a full list of their sub-categories of their five main categories of “denialist claims” listed above. Headers are in bold. (And in passing, anyone using the term “denialist” is not a scientist—they’re pseudo-scientists trying to discredit their opponents by a personal attack rather than a scientific falsification of their opponents’ ideas … but I digress.)
1 : Global warming is not happening
1.1 : Ice/permafrost/snow cover isn’t melting
1.1.1 : Antarctica is gaining ice/not warming
1.1.2 : Greenland is gaining ice/not melting
1.1.3 : Arctic sea ice isn’t vanishing
1.1.4 : Glaciers aren’t vanishing
1.2 : We’re heading into an ice age/global cooling
1.3 : Weather is cold/snowing
1.4 : Climate hasn’t warmed/changed over the last (few) decade(s)
1.5 : Oceans are cooling/not warming
1.6 : Sea level rise is exaggerated/not accelerating
1.7 : Extreme weather isn’t increasing/has happened before/isn’t linked to climate change
1.8 : They changed the name from ‘global warming’ to ‘climate change’
2 : Human greenhouse gases are not causing climate change
2.1 : It’s natural cycles/variation
2.1.1 : It’s the sun/cosmic rays/astronomical
2.1.2 : It’s geological (includes volcanoes)
2.1.3 : It’s the ocean/internal variability
2.1.4 : Climate has changed naturally/been warm in the past
2.1.5 : Human CO2 emissions are tiny compared to natural CO2 emission
2.2 : It’s non-greenhouse gas human climate forcings (aerosols, land use)
2.3 : There’s no evidence for greenhouse effect/carbon dioxide driving climate change
2.3.1 : Carbon dioxide is just a trace gas
2.3.2 : Greenhouse effect is saturated/logarithmic
2.3.3 : Carbon dioxide lags/not correlated with climate change
2.3.4 : Water vapor is the most powerful greenhouse gas
2.3.5 : There’s no tropospheric hot spot
2.3.6 : CO2 was higher in the past
2.4 : CO2 is not rising/ocean pH is not falling
2.5 : Human CO2 emissions are miniscule/not raising atmospheric CO2
3 : Climate impacts/global warming is beneficial/not bad
3.1 : Climate sensitivity is low/negative feedbacks reduce warming
3.2 : Species/plants/reefs aren’t showing climate impacts yet/are benefiting from climate change
3.2.1 : Species can adapt to global warming
3.2.2 : Polar bears are not in danger from climate change
3.2.3 : Ocean acidification/coral impacts aren’t serious
3.3 : CO2 is beneficial/not a pollutant
3.3.1 : CO2 is plant food
3.4 : It’s only a few degrees (or less)
3.5 : Climate change does not contribute to human conflict/threaten national security
3.6 : Climate change doesn’t negatively impact health
4 : Climate solutions won’t work
4.1 : Climate policies (mitigation or adaptation) are harmful
4.1.1 : Climate policy will increase costs/harm economy/kill jobs
4.1.2 : Proposed action would weaken national security/national sovereignty/cause conflict
4.1.3 : Proposed action would actually harm the environment and species
4.1.4 : Future generations will be richer and better able to adapt
4.1.5 : Climate policy limits liberty/freedom/capitalism
4.2 : Climate policies are ineffective/flawed
4.2.1 : Clean energy/green jobs/businesses won’t work
4.2.2 : Markets/private sector are economically more efficient than government policies
4.2.3 : Climate policy will make negligible difference to climate change
4.2.4 : A single country/region only contributes a small % of global emissions
4.2.5 : Better to adapt/geoengineer/increase resiliency
4.2.6 : Climate action is pointless because of China/India/other countries’ emissions
4.2.7 : We should invest in technology/reduce poverty/disease first
4.3 : It’s too hard to solve
4.3.1 : Climate policy is politically/legally/economically/technically too difficult
4.3.2 : Media/public support/acceptance is low/decreasing
4.4 : Clean energy technology/biofuels won’t work
4.4.1 : Clean energy/biofuels are too expensive/unreliable/counterproductive/harmful
4.4.2 : Carbon Capture & Sequestration (CCS) is unproven/expensive
4.5 : People need energy (e.g., from fossil fuels/nuclear)
4.5.1 : Fossil fuel reserves are plentiful
4.5.2 : Fossil fuels are cheap/good/safe for society/economy/environment
4.5.3 : Nuclear power is safe/good for society/economy/environment
5 : Climate movement/science is unreliable
5.1 : Climate-related science is uncertain/unsound/unreliable (data, methods & models)
5.1.1 : There’s no scientific consensus on climate/the science isn’t settled
5.1.2 : Proxy data is unreliable (includes hockey stick)
5.1.3 : Temperature record is unreliable
5.1.4 : Models are wrong/unreliable/uncertain
5.2 : Climate movement is alarmist/wrong/political/biased/hypocritical (people or groups)
5.2.1 : Climate movement is religion
5.2.2 : Media (including bloggers) is alarmist/wrong/political/biased
5.2.3 : Politicians/government/UN are alarmist/wrong/political/biased
5.2.4 : Environmentalists are alarmist/wrong/political/biased
5.2.5 : Scientists/academics are alarmist/wrong/political/biased
5.3 : Climate change (science or policy) is a conspiracy (deception)
5.3.1 : Climate policy/renewables is a hoax/scam/conspiracy/secretive
5.3.2 : Climate science is a hoax/scam/conspiracy/secretive/money-motivated (includes climategate)
Let me wander through and comment on a few of these. I’ll start with their very first “denialist claim”, the top of the list:
1.1.1 : Antarctica is gaining ice/not warming
Nature Magazine, a premier scientific journal and a huge defender of the anthropogenic climate change hypothesis, has an article on the subject which says:
The Antarctic continent has not warmed in the last seven decades, despite a monotonic increase in the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases.
Ooops …
So clearly, Nature Magazine is a secret nest of climate “denialists” whose claims should be censored before anyone can be misled by them … and while that example alone should be enough to totally discredit their artificial stupidity, it’s just the first of many.
1.3 : Weather is cold/snowing
So it’s gonna identify articles pointing out that while in most of the media heatwaves are always explained as climate change, cold spells are just plain old weather …
1.6 : Sea level rise is exaggerated/not accelerating
I’ve shown that sea-level rise is both exaggerated by improperly splicing satellite data to tide gauges, and is not accelerating. See “Inside The Acceleration Factory” and “Munging The Sea Level Data“. Those are scientific analyses of the subject, not “denialist claims”. I deny nothing—I investigate and report back, wherein I demonstrate and cite and support what I find.
1.7 : Extreme weather has happened before
Seriously? This is a climate denialist claim? Are they truly trying to say that there’s never been extreme weather before? How about this?
Pointing out that 200-year drought is not “denialism”. It’s science.
2.3.6 : CO2 was higher in the past
This is widely accepted scientific fact … why is it somehow a mark of “climate denialism”?
3.1 : Climate sensitivity is low/negative feedbacks reduce warming
Both of these are the subject of active scientific debate and dispute. One of the huge failures of mainstream climate science is their inability to determine climate sensitivity. Pretending this is settled is unscientific to the core.
And as is obvious from the name, negative feedbacks reduce warming … the scientific question is not “Do negative feedbacks reduce warming.” The question, about which there is little agreement, is “How much?”
3.2 : Species/plants/reefs aren’t showing climate impacts yet/are benefiting from climate change
For most species, including humans and coral reefs, a change of a degree in average temperature over fifty years means nothing. We see more temperature change than that every day, month, and year. Here are the noted “climate denialists”, National Geographic, in a piece entitled These 38 Coral Reefs Are Thriving, Despite Threats.
And in general, plants have benefitted from the additional carbon dioxide, leading to the “global greening” noted by NOAA. But heck, they’re just a government agency, so they must be closeted “climate denialists” too …
3.2.1 : Species can adapt to global warming
Protip: Species are amazingly resilient. If they weren’t, they’d have gone extinct millennia ago. Adaptation is what they do, 24/7/365.
3.2.2 : Polar bears are not in danger from climate change
This is absolutely true, beyond dispute. They are thriving. Why is this still in question?
Well, by chance I got an example of why this is in question. I was listening to an ad from the World Wildlife Federation (WWF) today, and guess who their poster child for fundraising is?
Gosh, you got it first try … polar bears. You too can “adopt” a polar bear for a mere $60.
And why haven’t the WWF folks noticed that the polar bears are doing quite well, thank you very much? Well, as Upton Sinclair said,
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
Sure ‘nuf …
4.1.4 : Future generations will be richer and better able to adapt
Again, this is obviously true … how on earth is this “denialism”?
4.2.2 : Markets/private sector are economically more efficient than government policies
Um … duh. Markets and the private sector have penalties for inefficiencies. Governments have no such constraints, which is why the California “train to nowhere” that was supposed to cost $33 billion and be finished by 2020 is now up to $100 billion, unfinished, and the cost is still rising.
4.2.3 : Climate policy will make negligible difference to climate change
Yes, we’ve all seen how amazingly effective climate policy has been to date.
4.3.1 : Climate policy is politically/legally/economically/technically too difficult
Some is, some isn’t … but “Net-Zero By 2050” is all of those things.
4.5.2 : Fossil fuels are cheap
Again, duh … it’s why we use them.
4.5.3 : Nuclear power is safe/good for society/economy/environment
Nuclear power is all of those things. It is also the only carbon-free baseline power source available. If you think carbon dioxide is a problem and you don’t support nuclear, you’re either a virtue-signaling poser or an idiot.
5.1.1 : There’s no scientific consensus on climate/the science isn’t settled
I turn again to the amazing Richard Feynman, a hundred times the scientist that these artificial stupidity proponents will ever be, who said:
“If you thought that science was certain, well, that is just an error on your part.”
Feynman was a true genius and an honest scientist.
5.1.2 : Proxy data is unreliable (includes hockey stick)
Proxy data is indeed unreliable, which is why different proxies for the same variable often differ by so much. And as for the Hockeystick, that’s a scientific joke. See Steve McIntyre’s extensive falsifications here, and my own comments on it here.
5.1.3 : Temperature record is unreliable
Ummm … since the temperature records from Berkeley Earth and JMA and UAH MSU and HadCRUT and RSS MSU and GISS all disagree with each other … just which one of them are we supposed to believe is “reliable”?
5.1.4 : Models are wrong/unreliable/uncertain
As noted above, the models cannot even agree on an equilibrium climate sensitivity … so it’s clear that either all or almost all of them are wrong. And despite that, they all do quite well at hindcasting the past. How can that even be possible?
5.2.2 : Media (including bloggers) is alarmist/political/biased
5.2.3 : Politicians/government/UN are alarmist/political/biased
5.2.4 : Environmentalists are alarmist/political/biased
5.2.5 : Scientists/academics are alarmist/political/biased
Double duh … it would take a double-dose either natural or artificial stupidity to not have noticed that.
5.3.2 : Climate science is a hoax/scam/conspiracy/secretive/money-motivated (includes climategate)
I try not to ascribe to malice what is adequately explained by ignorance … but regarding Climategate, I was forced to make an exception. You see, I knew what was actually happening because I was the first person to make a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to Phil Jones and the rest of the liars at the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit. I describe their conspiratorial conniving in my post called “Freedom Of Information, My Okole“. And here’s the irrepressible James Delingpole with Climategate 10 Years On – The Bastards Have Got Away With It!
So … those are just a few of the clearly true and totally defensible scientific claims that will demonstrate to the Artificial Stupidity Program that you are an eeeevil climate denialist …
The only good news out of all of this?
Clearly, John Cook and the Cookies are getting desperate … because when you actually think your scientific claims are solid, there’s no reason to conjure up some bogus “AI” program to automatically censor your scientific opponents.
Here in our lovely forest, we’re expecting three days of rain. It’s only December, but we’ve already gotten two inches (5 cm) more rain than all of the last rain year (which around here goes from October to September). Of course, last year was a drought year, which as the graph above demonstrated is quite common in California. And again of course, everyone was blaming the drought on “CLIMATE CHANGE! WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE! EVERYONE PANIC!” … but this year not a word.
How come climate change is so one-sided that it only gets blamed for the bad weather and is never credited for the good weather?
And so, having now firmly established my “climate denialist” credentials, all I can do is wait until the Artificial Stupidity program engages the Climate Thought Police to disappear my heresies … because everyone knows that’s how the very best science works in the 21st century.
My best to all,
w.
As Is My Wont: I ask that when you comment, you quote the exact words you are referring to, so we can all be clear just what and who you are discussing.
Wegener.
Questioning authority is at the root of the Scientific Revolution. In 1543, Copernicus questioned Aristotle and Ptolemy in print. That same year, Vesalius questioned Galen.
Then Kepler questioned Copernicus’ retention of circular orbits, using Tycho’s observations of Mars. Galileo questioned biblical authority.
Lavoisier questioned phlogiston. Etc.
Doubt is to science as faith is to religion.
Kepler went beyond Copernicus, discovered universal gravitation outside geometry, the beginning of modern physics.
Yet, we are told today Newton did this with an apple.
Lavoisier burnt diamonds (state property) proving the existence of oxygen – and was first under the Guillotine as Robespierre said France has no need of scientists.
Today question the Big Bang, show life transfers throughout the galaxy (COVID from comet dust), replicate DNA with a radio signal, and what awaits the hapless scientist? An AI Guillotine.
Kepler did not discover universal gravitation. Newton used Kepler’s laws to develop and demonstrate his hypothesis, the reverse square law, but Kepler’s conception of celestial mechanics couldn’t have been more different from Newtonian physics. Newton invented calculus in order to make universal gravitation work. On life science analogy, it’s as if Darwin also developed Mendelian genetics, and statistics (started by his cousin Francis Galton).
Kepler tried to fit planetary motions into purely geometric, mathematical concepts. He did not have the crucial insight equating falling, observed on Earth, with attraction between Sun and Earth and other heavenly bodies.
As you may know, Kepler’s mom was accused of witchcraft. And Newton was a secret anti-Trinitarian Deist, essentially a Christian Jew. Yet a biblical fundamentalist as to history, if not science.
In the 4th century BC Aristotle wrote that objects tend to move towards a point due to their inner property ‘baros‘ translated into Latin as gravis and later gravitas.
Aristotle’s concept of gravity was that all objects move toward their natural place.
For the elements earth and water, that place is the center of the (geocentric) universe; the natural place of water is a concentric shell around the earth because earth is heavier; it sinks in water.
The natural place of air is similarly a concentric shell surrounding that of water; since bubbles rise in water. Finally, the natural place of fire is higher than that of air, but below the innermost celestial sphere, carrying the Moon.
This is about as far removed from the concept of universal gravitation as is possible to imagine. Galileo defeated this idea (also that the Moon was perfect), but didn’t provide a fully satisfactory alternative, as did Newton.
“Aristotle’s concept of gravity was that all objects move toward” point by the inner force of ‘baros’ i.e. weight.
Newton later defined two constituent parameters as:
F = weight = mg = mass x acceleration
Kepler’s laws are said to be ‘kinematic’ i.e. they deal simply with describing the motions of objects, while Newton’s laws are said to be ‘dynamic’ because they deal with the forces that make objects move as they do.
Until one hits the infamous 3-body problem. Newton is pairwise. Kepler is harmonic. This is much clearer with Einstein’s Riemannian approach.
Kepler showed all the models than, and he tried a few to match, had one fatal flaw – they were geometrical. Universal gravitation, reality, is outside simple Euclidean axiomatic geometry. This breakthrough opened the door to force, as Leibniz said. Kepler actually wrote this in detail. Leibniz clearly said he invented calculus to solve Kepler’s open problem. We use this today.
On Newton see Keynes’ biography – Newton was the last Magi, or alchemist, not a scientist.
“Lavoisier burnt diamonds (state property) proving the existence of oxygen”
Didn’t he prove that diamonds are carbon? Has he been canceled by a very progressive Mr. Robespierre?
Canceled with extreme prejudice.
The little Robespierres and Lysenkos are lurking in the halls of Academia, hoping to eventually lurch forth and kill us all.
They are doing with this experimental gene therapy that is destroying our immune system with this AIDS-generated spike protein.
Religion is a behavioral protocol: morality, its relativistic sibling ethics, and its politically congruent cousin law. Faith is a logical domain of trust in God, gods, mortal gods, and expert systems. Principles/primitives matter.
Every time you hop behind the wheel and emerge from your driveway into traffic, it’s an act of faith. True, you have some control over your fate but you can still be taken out by some addled granny who’s had too much medicinal sherry and barrels through a red light.
If you didn’t have faith, you wouldn’t or couldn’t do anything. Your faith is rewarded enough of the time that you keep going.
More commonly I have had such close calls resulting from some teenager with his view in his lap where he is texting on his smart phone.
Yep! Addled grannies tend to take out people sitting in buildings when they hit the wrong peddle or select D when they should have selected R or visa versa.
This truck driver will tell you that distracted drivers are the most common hazard we encounter on the road and that the use of cell phones while driving is the most common cause of distraction. Situational awareness is the #1 key to the safe operation of any moving machine.
Now I like many if not most Class A CDL drivers are monitored by cameras. Dash cam video alone was deemed inadequate in court in many cases and so now we have a camera aimed at us when we’re operating the vehicle so that our attentiveness can be assessed in the event of an accident or incident.
Potential fine for being caught with a phone or other digital device in hand is $3,000 for the driver and $13,000 for the Company. That is the law nation wide for us.
BTW the installation of those cameras has saved both the company and drivers a lot of money in the 3+ years since they were installed.
The funny thing about that is, the laws designed to stop texting and driving have made it more dangerous. At least before the phone was up near sight line and peripheral vision could still be half decently effective. Now their head is down and they have no sight line on the road at all.
BS – for every idiot still trying to text or browse while driving there’s, what thousands?, who have bought mounts and realized the error of their ways.
“The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.”
Most of our legislators are (in my opinion) not too bright. They seem incapable of anticipating the unintended consequences of their legislation. There is no better area to observe the problem than in the gun control laws advocated by liberals.
Faith based on repeated evidence is vastly different from faith based on wishful thinking (and confirmation bias).
When someone is in a deep hole and the whole world seems to be against them, the one thing that will get them through is faith.
While I’m disgusted with most of the politics of the lgbtq2 movement, I can’t ignore the real distress that many queer young people suffer. In that light, I am in full accord with It gets better.
It takes faith to take clues from the world around you and not just your own miserable personal experience.
“When someone is in a deep hole and the whole world seems to be against them, the one thing that will get them through is faith.”
Really? Not in my experience.
If someone is in a hole, they won’t work hard to get out of it without the faith that their efforts will be rewarded.
I wouldn’t call that faith.
They usually just dig deeper.
Jeff Alberts,
You are still here, so what “experience” was it that got you through if it was not faith?
Richard
It has been in my experience.
I think Hope comes in here somewhere, too.
Faith based upon evidence isn’t faith. The whole point of faith is that it’s unsupported by evidence. What value has faith that is based upon evidence? That’s no longer faith, but reason and objective reality.
If it were normal for humans to return from the dead, what value would Christian faith have?
As Church Father Tertullian wisely wrote, “I believe because it is absurd.”
As Luther wrote, “To be a Christian, one must tear the eyes out of his reason.”
Simply not so. What is the “substance” of things not seen? -the “evidence” of things hoped for?
While it would take time to articulate, philosophically, you are on very weak ground. You have created a straw man via prefacing the word “faith” with the descriptive word “blind” and then followed the logic of your own false description, to win a debate you have falsely bordered.
I didn’t say “blind”, but that’s basically what Luther said. And Calvin carried the tenet further.
Even in Catholic doctrine, the Scholastics spoke of the hidden God. Please see Nicholas of Cusa and Thomas Aquinas.
I’m on the firmest of theological bases. You, not so much. As in, not at all.
In short, what part of “faith” don’t you understand?
John Tillman,
You ask,
“In short, what part of “faith” don’t you understand?”
I can only answer for myself.
I don’t understand almost everything about faith but there are people sufficiently interested in my thoughts on the matter that they choose to sit in pews and listen to my sermons.
I add that all honest Preachers would give the same answer.
Richard
In Christian theology, especially Protestant, faith is belief without a rational basis. It has to be that way, or what would be the value of faith? Luther and Calvin rightfully insisted on the doctrine of justification by faith, relying on Romans 1-5..
Scholastic attempts to prove the existence of God were wrong-headed, as even Aquinas came to recognize, at least to some extent. See his hymn, “Adoro te devote, latens Deitas”.
I’m glad your congregation finds value in your sermons.
Who cares what protestants think? For every protestant line of thought there is another contradicting it.
At least some small part of all Christian’s faith is based on the information written in the Bible, which contrary to atheists’ thinking, is a valid historical written account from various authors, describing their point of view on Jesus. Just a valid as anything written by Caesar, Josephus, or Plato. Therefore, even a protestant’s faith is based on something tangible, even if they can’t all agree on what that is.
You have a small field of view if you think there is no evidence for the Christian faith. It’s just some people won’t believe unless Jesus sneaks up behind them and gives them a tickle.
Lourdes, Fatima, various other shires with walls covered with canes and crutches – and yes there is a case of a re-grown leg but I don’t have the ref. handy and I think it was in the distant past so atheists will protest. One of the miracles being submitted in evidence for the canonization of Fulton Sheen, is the raising from the dead of a child born dead soon after birth, hospitals tried all they could, took the time of death and left the parents with their baby to grieve for about an hour. They had a devotion to Sheen, who as an awesome example of faith and reason working in the Catholic faith, and so they prayed for his intercession – the hospital staff returned and the baby woke up. To this day the child is fine, no brain damage from lack of oxygen, etc.
There is no evidence for healing or anyything else from Christian faith, but that’s beside the point.
The whole point of Christian faith is that it must be without evidence of any kind.
Of what value is faith if adherents can point to instances of healing or whatever beneficial result from believing?
Why is this hard to understand? Please see Luther and Calvin on scripture.
Thanks!
“In Christian theology, especially Protestant, faith is belief without a rational basis.”
Who told you that? (Serious question)
I have never seen anything in the Christian Book (Bible) that says or implies any such thing, and never heard any Christian say anythi9ng like that. What I think has happened, is that some who are ignorant of what the Book says about “believing” and “faith” have simply made up a very silly idea, and projected that idea onto what the Book/Christians are actually talking about. (and you bit, so to speak ; )
If you wish, I will explain what is being spoken of, which renders it true that we must believe by faith, but I suspect you’d rather not understand. Because if you did, slapping “religion” every time “science” behaves badly, might not be so satisfying ; )
TAKE YOUR VERDAMMT RELIGIOUS ARGUMENTS ELSEWHERE.
This thread is about John Cook’s pathetic AI program, NOT about Jesus et al.
STOP!
Grrr …
w.
Faith based on evidence isn’t faith, by definition.
What has given ANY of you the idea that this is a thread for the millennia-old never-to-be-settled religious arguments?
Please, STOP! NO RELIGION! There are plenty of sites on the web where such discussions are welcome. My threads are not among them.
ENOUGH!
w.
Yes, sir, at least one of us understands that, and tried to get these other people to get with it, so to speak. Read the thread and you will see.
Say’s who? (Serious question)
If you had said; Faith based on blatant proof is not faith, I’d agree.
STOP WITH THE ARGUMENTS ABOUT FAITH AND RELIGION!!!
It is a sick attempt to derail the thread, which is NOT ABOUT FAITH OR RELIGION.
There are literally hundreds of places on the web to take up this endless millennia-long argument.
THIS IS NOT ONE OF THEM!!
w.
Or, you realize that, statistically, chance is on your side by a very wide margin; you will most likely, by such a very large margin, live a long life if that is the only danger. And, you realize that the benefits of that mode of transportation are enormous; your life will be greatly diminished in many ways if you don’t take the chance.
It’s not faith, it’s expectations based on first hand or secondhand experience.
Christian faith is based on the first-hand accounts in the Bible from 2000 years ago, and then the umpteenth-hand experience since then. It didn’t just pop into existence in 1517, it existed long before that, since the Christian’s faith’s author came to earth, educated his followers and handed on the reins to the first 12 bishops.
I wasn’t commenting on the religious aspect of faith. I was referring to faith in other people or machinery etc.
My Chrisitian faith is based on first-hand experience. (Mine)
My anger at you trying to use Jesus to hijack my thread, which has NOTHING to do with Jesus, is based on first hand experience (mine).
STOP IT!!!
w.
Your post is about censorship, based on preconceptions that preclude alternative points of view from being heard, as I see it. I commented on what someone else said (which happened to pertain to Jesus). If you have a question about why I commented the way I did at any point, you are perfectly free to ask how what I said relates to your post, and/or comments others made on your post.
To me, this particular comment I made was more about dealing with hypotheticals than anything else. A commenter made a statement of fact, which failed to take into account the ramifications of the possibilty that two things could be going on at the same time.
What the comment happened to be about, did not occur to me to render it “off limits”, for making a logical point about that potential. Basically put in logical form; A being true, does not preclude B from also being true.
I made no attempt to “hijack” anything.
Thanks, John. The sad truth is that any mention of Christianity or of any religion on the web is guaranteed to devolve into an endless meaningless argument. I understand that that was not your intention, but if you read back on the thread you can see it already happening in spades.
Call me crazy, but I wrote this post about a certain subject, and I don’t want people to have to dig through miles of way off-topic comments to find actual on-topic comments.
w.
PS~ Fool that I am, I got the impression that this entire site has effectively become an attempt to counteract just such a logical argument.
With A being an observable correlation between the rise in human generated CO2 emissions, and an observable rise in global temperatures during the same general timeframe.
And B being the possibility that these two observables are being improperly treated as indicative of a causal relationship by “experts” with one or more agendas.
In basic logical form, A being true, does not preclude B from also being true, is exactly what I (fool that I am) think this site (and your post) is trying to convey.
Why you would not want a Christian (or anyone else) to attempt to convey to other Christians (or anyone else), how this logical argument is similar to what I tried to use the comment I was presented with for illustrative purposes, I cannot easily understand.
Do you not realize how important it is that you NOT alienate Christians (and other “religious” people) from your basic purpose here? (Assuming something resembling free and fair elections still exist in this country)?
I suggest it may be critical.
Several years ago, the religious discussions around here got really out of hand. To a point where I chose to take a few years away.
I would suggest that is a very good example of “alienating”
I don’t want it because any mention of religion virtually always ends up in religious flame wars. Not interested. Pick another parallel, that one goes nowhere.
See TonyG’s comment below.
w.
“I don’t want it because any mention of religion virtually always ends up in religious flame wars.”
Religious flame wars? As in religious people fighting among themselves? Really? I’ve never seen that happen here, and it wasn’t happening in this case.
Do you consider it some sort of special right non-relgious people have on your comment threads, to say disparaging things about religion/religious people, which religious people have no right to rebut/dispute? That’s all I did, (regarding the very first comment above) when the person then blatantly insulted me . . and you have made it impossible for me to demonstrate that what he said was unfounded (which I was about to do (rather easily) after giving him a chance to provide some evidence for the disparaging claims and the insult he hurled at me.
Why no warning? No request to “wrap it up guys”? You wrote an article about heavy-handed censorship (A real gem I feel by the way), and then did some heavy-handed censoring yourself . . And so leave me (and perhaps other religious people around) in a (brief) state of perpetual self-censorship.
I have often wished I could send Christians to this site, so they could see for themselves the quality of counterarguments to the “climate crisis” they hear about so often, and pass it on, so to speak. But I don’t, because I feel it would be counterproductive in terms of getting them to see so called “climate deniers” as fair-minded people, and I thought I’d try one last time to get some relief in the ‘slap Religion whenever Science misbehaves’ department . . but, no dice. The antitheists simply must have their safe-space, I guess.
I said “I don’t want it because any mention of religion virtually always ends up in religious flame wars.”
John Larson replied:
Nope. Not as in that. “Religious wars” as in what you say following that:
Your comment right there is EXACTLY the kind of religious flame wars I’m talking about. Someone says “disparaging things” about religion or atheism or someone’s particular religion or religious people, and the people disparaged feel they have to reply in no uncertain terms, and the discussion goes downhill from there every time.
I’m sorry I didn’t pick up on the very first mention of religion, but this sub-thread shows why it’s important to do so. For the purposes of my posts, I DON’T GIVE A RAT’S OKOLE ABOUT YOUR OR ANYONE’S RELIGION, and my scientific post is NOT the place for you to defend, attack or discuss religion.
This thread is about Cook and the Cookies censorship plans, not your beliefs about deities and an afterlife and whether they exist or what they look like.
Be clear. Religion is a valid subject for discussion, just NOT HERE!!!!
Thanks,
w.
And no, I’m not “censoring” you. I’m trying to keep the comments on-topic. Period. Read the dang policy page, under “ABOUT” above, where it says:
Notice the very first one on the list? I’ve highlighted it …
w.
Sir, when I first responded at all to anything here, it was to attempt to convey to the very first commenter how similar the term ‘faith’ is (to Christians anyway), to what the term “confidence” seems to me to convey to scientists. In hopes of preventing some future “flame wars”, as you put it.
I have seen this (to me) very strange usage of the term ‘faith’ lead to disputes several/many times, and feel it’s an unnecessary distraction from what’s been posted quite often. Just as you seem to feel.
At that point, there were many comments following the original one, and I did not understand why you would expect me to refrain from attempting to resolve this “incendiary” sort of misconception, if I felt I might be able to. (I am familiar with both “domains” of jargon, and still think a simple dictionary search could help a great deal to prevent misunderstandings of this kind.)
I thought I was possibly going to be able to forestall some of such “distractions”, but if attempts to do so are “prohibited”, and simply seen as engaging in “flame wars”, I suggest you’re basically working against your own interests here.
I am not a mind a reader, and saw no reason at that point to think you would be opposed to someone who felt they could possibly “get people on the same page”, so to speak, when it comes to what such a term actually means to a Christian (a particular religious person), when they use it, from trying to do so.
(I thought I was helping you ; )
“Your comment right there is EXACTLY the kind of religious flame wars I’m talking about. Someone says “disparaging things” about religion or atheism or someone’s particular religion or religious people, and the people disparaged feel they have to reply in no uncertain terms, and the discussion goes downhill from there every time.”
That’s what I thought you meant. Thanks for clarifying.
My suggestion is to refrain from treating what you anticipate/expect to happen in the comments to what you post, as though some sort of mandate for what you “allow” to happen. Let people respond in writing as they respond in thought.
You may not see the relevance/connections to what you posted, but the proof is in the pudding so to speak. You sparked responses that you may not have anticipated/wanted, but we are not all you. We might see connections to all sorts of things in what you post, and to my mind that is a good thing . . it shows you presented a thought provoking post, beyond what you had anticipated.
Just apply (in a slightly broader context), what you quoted from Mr. Feynman;
“Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts”
Here, you are the “expert” (essentially), so believe in your ignorance. Which is to say avoid falling into the “mindtrap” of assuming that what you imagined was going to be the range of responses to what you presented, is some sort of mandate you or anyone else is rightly confined to. Practice what you preach, as the old saying goes.
For example; You called what you quoted from an earlier comment in which I was attempting to get you to realize the position I felt your intervention placed me (as an example) in; an example of me engaging in some sort of flame war thing. While to me, it was just an attempt to provoke some consideration of how your intervention impacted me, and might therefor impact others, which is somewhat “overbearing”, to my mind.
You are free to ask about such things, rather than “dictate” to me what I am doing (in your imagination, effectively). I sense/feel that you don’t see me as an equal, in a manner of speaking, as a result of how you responded. I’m trying to treat you as one, but certainly can’t force to reciprocate . . Though again, I thank you for engaging in a dialog, it provokes some hope that this is not all in vain . .
I’ve never seen that happen here, and it wasn’t happening in this case.
How long have you been around, John? Because I HAVE seen it, and the site became unbearable to read for some time as a result.
I’m afraid I can’t find any blatant insult directed at you anywhere in this thread. You may have taken something someone said as a personal insult, which is significantly different, and IMO overly sensitive on your part.
I’m on the other end of this from the “religious” folk quite often. One great example is when I’m told what I believe by people who are not me. (which would mirror the closest thing I can find to the “insult” that you’re seeing) But I don’t take it as a personal insult unless it is clearly directed at me personally.
And I don’t understand why you would hesitate to send your Christian friends here. What *I* see is a bunch of people engaged in a lot of dialog, some of it reasonable, some unreasonable, some heated, some calm. In other words: people being people. If they can’t filter that out for themselves, they have bigger problems.
“How long have you been around, John?”
Many years, though I didn’t comment much for the first ten or so.
“Because I HAVE seen it…”
Show me, please. My impression is, that you mean discussion that involves “Relgion” in some/any way. Which is to say without regard for who is doing the “flaming” (as it’s been framed), which could be “anti-Relgion” people flaming against “Religion” in some sense, and other people trying to respond in some/any way. (Please correct me if I’m wrong).
“…and the site became unbearable to read for some time as a result.”
Why not just scroll past such discussions? I do it all the time. I see what could be described as a “flame wars” and if I’m not interested in that stuff I just scroll ahead, or perhaps open a different article that peeks my interest. The concept of never coming back here again “as a result” is somewhat foreign to me. (Such things seem pretty much ubiquitous on this site . . and planet ; )
Why not ask the Moderators to cut and paste these off-topic comments into another thread?
“addled granny”? “barrels through”?
Only if the granny had much too much coffee and is driving a stroked hemi light body car with a hydraulic accelerator pedal.
And my family nicknamed my Mother, Mario Andretti. If she had a stroked hemi, the state police would’ve seized her license. school bus driver or not.
Hmmm. Where I live the people driving that sort of car do seem to be over 70. The hot cars driven by young folks seem to be rice burners.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Wegener
One of my geological heroes, with J. Harlen Bretz, whom I was privileged to know.
Strangely, my wiki’ link originally followed your comment at the top of the page. Somehow it ended up way down here.
Internet magic!
Q: What’s a Keplerian janitor?
A: One that sweeps over equal areas in equal times.
Copernicus may have “borrowed” his concept from Arab astronomer who lived a century earlier, who again may have “borrowed” it from much older Indian texts that Arabs had access to it.
If Copernicus had any forbearers, they were Greek heliocentrists, such as Aristarchus of Samos. He, unlike Medieval Europeans, wasn’t reliant on Arabic translations of ancient Greek works. Thanks to the exodus of Greek scholars after the Ottomans captured Constantinople, he knew Greek and had access to ancient works in their original language.
“In the 12th century, Nur ad-Din al-Bitruji proposed a complete alternative to the Ptolemaic system (although not heliocentric).[101][102] He declared the Ptolemaic system as an imaginary model, successful at predicting planetary positions, but not real or physical.[101][102] Al-Bitruji’s alternative system spread through most of Europe during the 13th century, with debates and refutations of his ideas continued up to the 16th century.[102]….
Nevertheless, Copernicus cited some of the Islamic astronomers whose theories and observations he used in De Revolutionibus, namely al-Battani, Thabit ibn Qurra, al-Zarqali, Averroes, and al-Bitruji.[109]
etc”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolaus_Copernicus
semi-irrelevant note:
“The sun, Earth, and all of the planets in the solar system orbit around barycenter. It is the center of mass of every object in the solar system combined.”
https://spaceplace.nasa.gov/barycenter/en/
In this age of precision and accuracy, we have to drop ‘heliocentric system’ and adopt ‘barycentric system’ (after Aristotle’s baros)
Technically, for our solar system, the barycenter is still inside the sun.
AFAIK not always.
Thanks, Mark, but not always so. When all of the planets line up, the barycenter can actually be outside the sun … I wrote a program a couple of decades ago to calculate the location, and that was a surprising finding. So I checked the literature and found it was true.
w.
The solar system’s barycenter is sometimes within the Sun and sometimes outside it. There is no one barycenter.
I wonder why a simple statement of fact is downrated.
What is wrong with WUWT readers?
I didn’t downvote you, but I imagine it was to register disagreement.
You seem to conceive of the barycenter relative to the sun. That’s one point of view. In that sense the barycenter is constantly wandering and explains your “no one barycenter”. Valid in that point of reference.
Another point of view is that there is one barycenter revolving around the galactic core and around which all the objects in the solar system revolve (including the sun).
Probably more accurate to say that there is one barycenter that is constantly moving in relation to the sun.
Yes, that’s what I was getting at but hadn’t read your comment yet.
“To calculate the actual motion of the Sun, only the motions of the four giant planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune) need to be considered. The contributions of all other planets, dwarf planets, etc. are negligible.
If the four giant planets were on a straight line on the same side of the Sun, the combined center of mass would lie about 1.17 solar radii or just over 810,000 km above the Sun’s surface.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barycenter
Sun’s radius = 696,340 km
I wonder who the hell is down-voting you and Willis when you have provided the evidence – I thought here we could escape cancel-culture.
Mind-blowing to this astronomy buff – I always thought of the solar system as being the Sun plus ash, as far as the various masses were concerned.
Thank you for the correction – science and reason won today!
“dwarf planets, etc. are negligible.”
ranging from zero to some small amount depending on the distribution around the bary center
It still says “Wegman”.
Wegener deserves to be remembered under his real name.
Thanks, John, fixed.
w.
De nada!
“Doubt is to science as faith is to religion.”
I suggest that’s a myth. Based in part on the (to me) obvious athropomorphizing going on in such conceptualizations. Science cannot doubt anything at all. And religion cannot have faith in anything at all.
Even to generate two distinct “entities” who feel doubt and faith is kinda silly, it seems to me. Faith in Christian jargon means the same thing (happening within an actual human being) as confidence means in science jargon.
To me, nobody special, what you said is basically occultist jargon, frankly. And I think such “collectivist” ways of speaking are more akin to CRT advocates talking about “whiteness” than to rational discussion about what this article presents.
It appears that you don’t understand either science or religion.
You’d have trouble understanding Jesuit physicists, like Lemaitre who corrected Einstein and developed the idea of the Big Bang. Or the idea of the Vatican Observatory being one of the top telescope sites in the world.
Perfect understanding. When Christians do science, they are welcome. When they spread antiscientific lies, as in the case of the Discovery Institute and other mendacious professional liars, not so much. As in, not at all.
You’re right – science vs faith is a false dichotomy. There’s people who believe in stupid things in re: to the natural world and the spiritual world, and those whose beliefs are more in tune to what is true, and sometimes only the passage of time bares it out.
Is there anyplace where one can adopt a manbearpig?
Is a “manbearpig” a product of Artificial Intelligence?
No.
It results from an Al-Gore-ithm.
It might be, depending on how the Artificial Intelligence is fed examples for learning. Almost every example of AI in use today requires some learning examples so a logic sequence relative to the topic is developed. Like: God is Love, Love is Blind, Ray Charles is God. Cookies et al are likely to shovel in a lot of Hokey Schticks for their learning examples.
Ray Charles isn’t God?
I guess I should say, wasn’t, but if he were God, then he’s eternal.
Artificial Intelligence to me is a no go!!! A puter will in all probability never be able to step back & say, “Hang about, something doesn’t feel right here!!!” Human beings are pretty amazing, & many of us if not most, can smell a rat somewhere!!! As I have often said to friends, “I don’t mind being scammed/conned by some skilled scam/con artist, because I was too stupid, but I get very peeved when I know I am being conned & scammed by someone. Perhaps it’s my engineer’s training to notice asap when something doesn’t look or feel right!!!
Alan, I can relate to what you wrote. BUT, I love to participate with a skilled con artist when they are selling a con job and I’m fully aware of the game. Lived in region where ‘time shares’ were heavily promoted and I enjoyed the free weekends to get me on board. When they sit me down for the high pressure closing at the end of the ‘free weekend’ and I would breakdown the weekly cost to the total sales price they were getting for a “unit” and their annual maintenance fees collected per unit it would totally rock their boat! When they make a the last ditch effort and bring on the sales manager and several agents to surround you for maximum pressure and intimidation you know you have won bigly! And when you give them a BIG smile they will escort you from the premises.
“Cookies et al are likely to shovel in a lot of Hokey Schticks for their learning examples.”
Poop is shoveled in, Climate Science comes out.
I think many people on this site are too old to know the South Park reference.
I have always regarded Al Gore as someone who didn’t truly believe the Sun shone out of the sky, but from somewhere about his person!!!
I’ve seen the reference around here often enough I would say many of the regulars get it.
Ridicule is the best response. Well done, WE.
Let me add my thanks and congratulations.
So John Cook openly endorses absolute trust in the established authority and the disappearing of dissenting voices.
This is not in the tradition of western thought.
It is in the tradition of the Legalist scholars in China.
Wonder if the RCP funded this AI?
PRC?
Surely not the RCMP, but under Trudeau, Castro’s bastard, who knows?
I used to abbreviate Communist Party of China as CPC, but members of the Conservative Party of Canada took umbrage, so now I go with CCP, which also nicely recalls the good riddance to CCCP (SSSR), ie Союз Советских Социалистических Республик.
Lavoisier was quite a while before Marx.
Have you read anything of western though over the past few thousand years?
I haven’t lived several thousand years. Although, it does feel like it sometimes
Suppressing dissenting voices has very much been in the nature of many western institutions. Today’s technology may be more effective (or maybe not) but the effort is nothing new.
It’s not just western institutions. It’s a human trait. You will see this in families, communities, religions and cultures around the world.
There is little regard for right or wrong. It’s all about whether you conform or not.
There is little regard for right or wrong. It’s all about whether you conform or not.
Simple, basic tribalism. We haven’t really evolved past that.
Given how short a time it’s been since that was a survival trait, it’s not surprising.
“So it’s gonna identify articles pointing out that while heatwaves are always explained as climate change, cold spells are just plain old weather …”
While articles with an ad hoc explanation for why global warming caused the extreme will get through.
Weather was a lot more extreme during the Little Ice Age, and even more so during big ice ages.
A colder world is a stormier, dustier, drier world.
I often wonder why this truth is so rarely mentioned these days.
Need you wonder, when orthodoxy requires that warmer be worse?
It’s such a fundamental tenet of meteorology … the differential in temperature gradients determines the energy of the storm.
As Swift said … “you can’t reason a man out of a thing he didn’t reason himself into.”
It would be a powerful visual to depict the dust storms of the Younger Dryas in a computer simulation of Northern Europe or a metaverse of the years following the end of the last age when temperatures declined.
Jim Steele discusses two examples of the arrogant ignorance of scientific experts vehemently disputing the observations and theories of lesser known scientists who contradicted accepted scientific orthodoxy.
The first was the geological argument about the formation of Yosemite Valley between John Muir, a naturalist and popular author, and Josiah Whitney, Harvard Professor and Head of the USGS. After years of careful study, Muir contended the valley was formed by the effects of glaciation; Whitney maintained a catastrophist origin and dismissed Muir’s theory as a flight of fancy by an ignorant shepard. Muir’s theory has withstood the test of time. Whitney got a mountain named after him; Muir the redwood forest park.
The second war of words and reputations Steele discusses in Ladscapes and Cycles An Environmentalist’s Journey to Climate Skepticism Ch 17 Communicating Science was about the existence of “quasi crystals” (about which I know nothing) but which Dan Shechtman observed in the 1980’s with shapes that Linus Pauling’s Models maintained were physically impossible. The Nobel prize winner Pauling said there were no quasi crystals and he called Shechtman a “Quasi Scientist.” Despite much professional opprobrium and criticism from Pauling and fellow scientists in his own research Group, Shechtman was able to eventually publish his findings, opening the flood gates to others making similar improbable quasi crystal observations. Schechtman was awarded the Nobel prize.
Steele’s book is filled with wide ranging observations, detailed explanations, humorous graphics and asides and professional experiences I found very enlightening. He integrates climate history, oceanography, landscape geography and biologic species survival in very readable format for amateurs like me. I would strongly recommend others read it if only for the investigation of the extinction of the Golden Toad and many other amphibians due to the fungus Batrachochytrioum dendrobatidis (Bd for short). The quotes are wonderful.
An excellent book
Very accessible to a layman like moi
Amen.
No claim to computer science- just guessing, but I’d think that good A.I. should get feedback from the real world, no? If so, I suppose it could get smarter. So, software doesn’t have to be “hard wired”- in particular, A.I.. So, perhaps Cook’s program will backfire and denounce much of the consensus “science” as it’ll detect the failures/defects of the consensus.
I suspect it is A.I. by current fashion of those ignorant on the subject, having nothing to do with the properties of serious efforts at A.I.
Yes, what is currently hyped as A.I. does seem to be a rebranding exercise with little resemblance to what I learned in C.S. in the late 1980s.
There is no ‘intelligence’ if you pre-condition it with what you consider to be right or wrong.
They merely developed an adding machine
O I
Exactly. And they brainwashed it.
I trust a computer program to do what it is told to do, not what it has been hyped to do. And although I’ve been doing software testing since ’97, it only took on programming class and not 20+ years to learn this simple truth…
Audi/VW do auto aerodynamics, computational fluid dynamics – but they still build special wind tunnels and check reality. lessons were learned with the TT and Smart – the software worked perfectly, the autos flipped over…..
There is a difference here with climateers.
So does this mean they’ll input CC claims as well? Will it be programmed to weed out the CC BS?
Extremely good point. There is much obvious BS coming from climate crisis carnival barkers. Confronting claims on only the climate realism side establishes, without any doubt, that Cook has a dishonest agenda.
I remember when stomach ulcers were caused by alcohol and stress. Medical doctors told me so.
Until someone came along and said they were caused by bacteria and then demonstrated that by curing stomach ulcers with antibiotics.
So then, one must accept the fact that science is a progress report and nothing else.
The cure for misinformation is more information. Banning information is always the refuge of scoundrels.
“remember when stomach ulcers…”
Yes, and I also remember when a vaccine was going to protect us from Covid. Michigan now has hospitalization rates identical to last year’s pre-vaccine rates. Thank goodness we destroyed the economy with business closures, mask mandates, filled the landfills with cleaning products, and engaged in the mass injection with experimental “vaccines”.
Pfizer document concedes that there is a large increase in types of adverse event reaction to its vaccine
So far for vaccination.
Please, no COVID in this thread. All that does is endlessly lead to sidetracking the discussion away from the subject of the thread.
w.
How about asking the Moderators to post your thread a second time, and carrying over to it only the comments that are germane?
Please, no COVID in this thread. All that does is endlessly lead to sidetracking the discussion away from the subject of the thread.
w.
Cook is not a good advert for George Mason University.
And Nature will have more luck publishing on Cold Fusion than ‘Climate Change Denial’ (seriously).
So now we have the Cook Catechism, which all good Climastrologists must believe?
In this case, as Willis correctly points out, artificial intelligence is a misnomer, what you have is an automated censor or ersatz intelligence. Doing what its lunatic creators especially designed it to do, censor off narrative discussion.
All we can know for certain is that Cook’s “intelligence” is artificial.
Well, these guys are working really hard to make sure that it’s not true!
AI implies delegated discernment in the logical domain of faith (i.e. trust). Caveat emptor.
The expanded (with sub categories) list is pretty good. Somehow the alarmos cooked up a nice synopsis of all (or most) that is wrong with their nutty hypotheses. Well done, clucks.
Maybe I view this list differently. It’s not merely a few of the arguments against CAGW that are valid; they all are. And the list is fairly comprehensive. If there are other categories of argument against, please suggest them so they can be added.
I have no fear of “censorship”. The warmunists have been partially successful at getting some academics fired — and that is tragic, unjust, and maddening — but they haven’t been able to stop the debate. The very existence of this list is proof of their failure.
The spider bots are powerless. So are Cook and his fellow conspirators. Their nefarious scheme will not work. It will only backfire on them. Their hubris is their downfall. They have made themselves into laughing stock or worse.
But their list of arguments against their own folly is pretty good and possibly useful.
“But their list of arguments against their own folly is pretty good and possibly useful.”
Yes, it looked to me like it covered all the bases of climate change skepticism. All, perfectly legitimate arguments, btw.
Let Cook and the Cookies (I liked that, Willis) come to WUWT and show that any of the arguments the skeptics make are not valid.
John Cook IS an artificial intelligence tool.
He was such a success as a cartoonist, no one has ever seen his cartoons.
So he turned to climate activism because it was easier to be successful in that than drawing cartoons.
“John Cook IS a[…] tool.”
There. FIFY.
The basic theory of plate tectonics was first put forward in a cohesive book by a German meteorologist, Alfred Wegener following a suggestion by American Frank Bursley Taylor in 1908. Wegener’s book was published in German in 1912 and translated to English in 1915. WW 1 raged and understandably the book may not have garnered much attention initially. For the next 50 years geologists were building hypothetical land bridges to account for anomalies found by palaeontology and botany. Gradually more and more evidence was found from oceanography, geology, and other sciences until by 1964 “continental drift” was starting to be accepted. By 1968 the term “plate tectonics” was agreed on. In 1980 one in eight geologists still did not believe in plate tectonics. (C.f. Bill Bryson “A Short History of Nearly Everything”).
My point is that even a theory as obvious today, as plate tectonics took decades to be accepted by mainstream experts. The climate controversy may run a long time yet until sense prevails.
I think that credit should be given for J. Tuzo Wilson promoting Wegener’s ideas in the role of ‘Wegener’s Bulldog’ in the 1970s. (With apologies to Huxley.)
What won over geologists to “continental drift” was the discovery of seafloor spreading by US Navy scientists in the 1950s. This provided the mechanism.
Similar to what Darwin provided for advocates of “transmutation”, the idea that new species arose from old, which long predated him, without a good mechanism.
The set of global maps you provided during a discussion of species migration, several weeks ago, clearly demonstrated the concepts and settled many conundrums in numerous disciplines.
Glad you found those maps useful!
And almost the entire billions of us must take the idea on faith. The evidence may be there in the serious literature but that is functionally available to only a tiny number.
No faith required. That the continents and smaller plates move is an observation, not an hypothesis. GPS shows the fact of “continental drift”, without recourse to deep sea exploration.
You know of someone who observes it?
California newspapers regularly carry articles about measured movement along the San Andreas fault. Such articles tend to peak right after earthquakes.
Yes. Smaller tectonic plates have been discovered by GPS.
Plate tectonics is an observation, ie, a fact, not just a theory.
Andy, I think your point is that the average person cannot see it, it requires delicate instruments and long time periods of precise measurements in order to see it.
It relies on experts to tell us it’s happening
Which makes it exactly the same as climate change. 1.1c in 200 years seems like something but the average person cannot even begin to detect that sort of change
Let alone develop concern that the world may be coming to an end.
That requires climate Scientologists
It has always seemed odd to me that continental drift took so long to be accepted. As a child looking at a globe it was entirely obvious that parts of continents fitted into each other and had drifted apart. I just assumed that to be the most likely truth probably by about age 9: no-one taught me anything about it at that age. Of course later, encountering fossils of sea creatures high in the Colombian Andes and looking at the folds and dips of the strata of the mountains completely cemented the ideas.
The Theory of Geosynclines addressed most of the observations you rely on to defend plate tectonics.
It took time to accept plate tectonics because the apparent fit between continents on opposite sides of the Atlantic couldn’t be proven not to be a coincidence. The major stumbling block was that there was no known mechanism for moving rigid crustal rocks through the mantle.
As noted, seafloor spreading, discovered by US Navy scientists in the 1950s, provided the mechanism for “continental drift”.
GPS now allows us to observe tectonic plate movements daily.
So, are the plates pushed by the spreading centers, or sucked down the trench by gravity? I have it on good authority that “gravity sucks.”
Thanks, Willis. The title of your post made me laugh.
Regards,
Bob
I must agree, because I keep giggling at that ‘artificial stupidity’ wordplay.
There’s something ominously inevitable about “artificial intelligence”, it has always seemed to me, and that phrase coinage makes light of it ; )
2.3.1 : Carbon dioxide is just a trace gas
400ppm Isn’t a trace gas???
2.3.2 : Greenhouse effect is saturated/logarithmic
True and easily provable
2.3.3 : Carbon dioxide lags/not correlated with climate change
True and easily provable
2.3.4 : Water vapor is the most powerful greenhouse gas
Definitely true, has always been true, and no actual scientist doubts it
2.3.5 : There’s no tropospheric hot spot
True and has been widely acknowledged for decades.
The difficulty with this list, is finding something that is actually wrong
Willis mentions 2.3.6, but the rest of the members of that subsection are equally wrong.
Maybe someone who has a lot more patience than I, can go through the list and find the one or two points that might actually be correct.
Well, if they have their way, future generations will definitely not be richer. We’ll have ruined the global economy by building tributes to their dangerous Climate Cult.
It may be true but I think the ‘provable” part is very far from easy in such a complex system. One tiny aspect’s part can not be definitively show by standalone demonstration.
Impact of CO2 is tough to demonstrate in a complex system.
Saturation can be shown via concentration.
I suspect that Cook isn’t implying that contrarian claims are flatly wrong, but that they aren’t as strong as they seem at first glance. In fact I’m sure that is his plan, because this tactic is employed in SkS’s online collection of rebuttals.
“ Ultimately, our goal is the Holy Grail of fact-checking, “
Narrative enforcement and compliance
Now I am confused. Is that “fact-checking” or “protected-opinion-checking”. And this protected opinion rot seems to be only within USA (in its constitution?).
Classical facts are so real and binary. Maybe we need to have a more complex or analog scale for them. I propose: “The real and imaginary components of a fact tells us about the relative politics that influence its relevance to any argument”.
Which leads to a complex explanation. 🙂
hi Willis, clearly this should be John Cook in you almost last paragraph?
“…Clearly, James Cook and the Cookies are getting desperate … because when you actually think your scientific claims are solid, there’s no reason to conjure up some bogus “AI” program to automatically censor your scientific opponents….”
True, fixed. I had him mixed up with a real adventurer.
w.
There is nothing artificial about John Cook’s stupidity.
… GIGO for short. (Garbage In Garbage Out)
There was a time when that simple wisdom was common knowledge to anyone who had anything to do with computers. Well, maybe not the data entry clerks (Remember those?). Anyway, it’s been quite a while since I heard anyone recite that mantra.
We’re living in a wisdom vacuum. Iain McGilchrist tells us why. link
People are noticing. Nassim Taleb refers to the Intellectual Yet Idiot (IYI).
I hope that the knowledge of the badness that has taken over our education system becomes common knowledge and the population demands a fix.
Yes, I remember GIGO. The prospect that we seem to notice with regard to this standard old saying, i.e., that hardly anyone seems to quote this anymore, is part of what makes Willis’ article title here so funny, I suppose!
As for the article, for Willis E. to ‘run’ with his own antithesis version of Mr. Cook’s idea of five “truths”, that just strikes me as sheer genius, just about!
If someone can nail these 5 antithesis points to the door of some eco-Marxist’s office, with as many of Willis’ sub headings as will fit, that might be pretty much a “white knight” operation, as well.
Mmmmmm….Cookies.
Where is the cookie monster when you need him?
PBS has put the cookie monster out to pasture. Apparently eating too many cookies is bad for you and cookie monster was deemed to be a bad role model.
You were asking recently for an R² comparison of linear with quadratic estimates in the sea level context:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/12/06/why-we-must-quit-worrying-about-uncertainty-in-sea-level-projections/#comment-3409366
It isn’t really surprising that the R² value for the quadratic fit might be a little higher, particularly when looking at all the digits returned instead of just the significant digits that can be justified.
However, one then should be cognizant of the potential of over-fitting the data, giving the appearance of greater precision when one might actually be fitting the noise as well as the data. That is, a different data set from a different source, or a sub-sampled set, the noise contribution will be different and the regression equation might be very different for the ‘better’ quadratic fit. These are all things that should be explored before making an assertion.
Thank you for bringing your response to my attention.
” … particularly when looking at all the digits returned instead of just the significant digits that can be justified. ”
I had no intention of inflating the digits atdp. They were only there to indicate a non-zero value for the quadratic factors.
The R² for linear and quadratic fits are over 0.9 for the sat altimetry, and over 0.8 for Grant Foster’s quick shot (!) over PSMSL data.
I didn’t make any assertion: I just presented numbers.
Admitting that you were wrong would be honest on your part.
I don’t understand your comment. All I said was, “How do the correlation coefficients of the quadratic fits compare to the linear fits?”
Was I wrong to ask the question?
I don’t think that I was wrong to criticize showing 5 significant figures for R² when probably only 2 or 3 are justified.
My decision was taken some time ago ago: distrust ANY publication considered “scientific” that uses automatic screening of papers presented for publication. Even when such contraptions are announced as barely informative to their referees. “Distrust” meaning not publishing, not reviewing if asked, and being EXTRA careful when citing (and preferably avoiding that citation) any papers published thereof since the implementation of such procedures.
A few years ago (now, I can say “many” instead) I lost interest in articles published in many journals of the Group Nature. I am sorry for that loss because before having been acquired by that commercial group most of them were honest periodicals with long history at the service of science.
Rules#1
A model models what the modeler models it to model.
Rule #2
Artificial intelligence is no more intelligent than the least intelligent element of the artificial intelligence program.
Rule #3
Elites lie, censor, and defame in order to create and maintain their power. Computer models, search engines, and artificial intelligence are tools used to maintain elite power.
The three axioms for maintaining some semblance of sanity in this chaotic world.
“Clearly, James Cook and the Cookies are getting desperate … “
James Cook was an 18th Century British Naval officer; a magnificent navigator and cartographer.
John Cook shares the same surname.
Yeah, fixed, thanks.
w.
G’Day Old Cocky,
Just something to add to the Cook story:
“Did you know that Capt. James Cook, who discovered the Sandwich Islands, now the Hawaiian Islands, brought barrels of “sour kroutt” on his many voyages to eliminate scurvy?
https://www.thekrautguy.com/blog/a-short-short-history-of-sauerkraut/
That delves up something from deep sub-levels of the memory archives. I remember he was keen on citrus, particularly lime, as a way of preventing scurvy.
Yes, another thing to add to his achievements.
Willis – thank you for your service to humanity.
Ken, I consider myself the most fortunate man on the planet.
I grew up on a cattle ranch, and among many other adventures since then, I’ve sailed the oceans, played in a bar band with drunk Indians in Alaska (and was drunk myself), slept on the streets of New York, been the Chief Financial Officer of a company with $40 million in sales, did the crime and did the time, been held up at gunpoint on a remote South Pacific coral atoll, fished the mighty Kenai River, mined for gold in the Sierras, ridden the freight trains, blackmailed a Japanese Ambassador, and been the piano man in a Manila whorehouse.
Now I live with my gorgeous ex-fiancee, my daughter and her husband, and our two grandkids (2 years, and 2 months), in a rambling house I built with my own hands in the California redwood forest. Here’s the view of the ocean from my kitchen.
So I wake up every morning to that most magical of sounds … tiny feet running across the living room floor.
What better life could any man want?
So I could give back forever in “service to humanity” and never begin to even the scales.
My best to you, and thanks for your kind words.
w.
A quick survey done by me;
In the last week, the number of comments at WUWT has totalled just over 7700.
Not too shabby.
Meanwhile, over at John Cook’s wing-nut SkS site, since the 15th of November they have managed to attract a total of…..
. …. wait for it….
. …. 75 comments
Thats 75 they’ve accepted. They blatantly reject anything not selling or accepting the kool aide!
True!
Since November 15 at WUWT there have been about 20,000 comments posted with about 1 MILLION views.
You can bet that a fair number of those were lost and arrived looking for some other site.
I remember there used to be a contest every year to see which sites, in various categories, got the most votes and or viewers.
Did they decide to retire the trophy because WUWT kept winning it?
We’ll, it would get boring watching WUWT trounce the alarmist sites every year, wouldn’t it? 😉
Every program with more than 1 line of code has an undiscovered bug.
True, Ed, and unlike other living creatures, code bugs breed via death …
…
… how do I know that?
…
Because whenever I manage to kill one bug, it generally creates two new bugs …
w.
With programming, that would be a win. Typically when I swat one bug, QA finds 20 new ones.
Bjørn Lomborg satisfies some of John Cook’s ‘denier’ conditions. I wonder what he would think of that?
Cook’s “AI” is merely a text search and parse algorithm. Pretty basic stuff.
I was just thinking about that when I read your post. It he really was using artificial intelligence it wouldn’t need Cook at all. It would be doing its own analysis and not the musings of a credulous mental midget. True artificial intelligence would have cancelled the entire alarmunist program years ago.
More than that, more like a spam filter used on an email system. Look at the creds of the lead author. That guy searches for terrorists based upon their writing style. Me thinks the cook hired a terrorist hunter to do this work. Also, if you read the paper, they must have had had a pretty good budget. I wonder who funds that.
“…There’s no hope for this tool.”
Right.
Too funny: SkS have been pushing an alarmist “educator” called Melaine Trecek-King, who appears to go around schools forcing her alarmist twaddle on unsuspecting children. The best bit about the whole thing is that she has a teaching “tool” she claims helps students carry out critical thinking correctly. She calls it “Floater”
I’ve tried to be a kind soul and pointed out to her in the comments section on her blog that “floater” is a slang term for a turd in a toilet bowl. I told her that kids will be laughing at her behind her back. What’s the betting my helpful comment won’t get past her blog moderation?
Don’t get in the way of a fool making an idiot of themselves. You shouldn’t have said anything.
Floater is also the slang used for a dead body (typically a suicide) floating in the SF Bay.
It’s also used by eye doctors to refer to floating spots in a person’s eyes.
BAD SCIENCE
Artificial Intelligence Implies Artificial Stupidity
=======
Implies Actual Stupidy
The proof AI isn’t really intelligent is, it doesn’t “writeln” “The programmer is an moron”.
If AI existed at all, there would be no need for a programmer interfering. We’d just start it up and the system would just get on with it. It certainly wouldn’t need an intellectual dead end like Cook to misdirect its logic.
What ever the way is, the so called AI has to know, what to do when starting.
Arguing for nuclear power – the only way to decarbonise power production – is meant to be a “denialist claim”???
4.5.3 : Nuclear power is safe/good for society/economy/environment
This revealing anti-logic shows that the very last thing that the likes of oberleutnantfuhrer Cook and his colleagues want is any actual solution to global warming and CO2 assuming they even need a solution.
But showing themselves to be antinuclear makes it 200% clear that they don’t really even see CO2 as a problem – if they did then they would embrace nuclear power. Many environmentalists do embrace it of course, like Shellenberger, with more intelligence than everyone at SS skeptical science combined. The problem with the likes of Shellenberger is that they are honest – they think CO2 climate effects are a real problem needing a real solution. Unlike oberleutnantfuhrer Cook they don’t realise the climate thing is pure pantomime and just a vehicle for the political agenda. Their attitude to nuclear makes that clear enough.
Beautiful – thanks Willis.
Cook rides the “Gish Gallop” on climate skepticism!
🏇
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop
Great article WE. I’ve saved it and printed it and bookmarked it.
“Clearly, John Cook and the Cookies are getting desperate” Oh, I wish you were right but I am not so sure. My gut is saying that they are getting emboldened and they think their “artificial Intelligence” will put the final nail in the sceptics coffin. Remember, they got their idiotic 97% diatribe past almost every politician, bureaucrat and journalist without really trying – it was swallowed hook, line and sinker. I see it as entirely possible that the same will happen again with this AI crap. These guys appeal to the non-scientific public (which means most people) for the very reason that they use glossed up pretender language that sounds like science and is easily understood.
And we should do the same (keep it understandable to Joe public), and keep the science and stats for when they are really needed. We show our hand too early on the really important points and then the activist spin doctors, and fact checkers, gazump us. I told a playing partner at golf about glaciers melting and trees appearing, polar bears, sea level rise, temperature rise from 1850 to 1940 vs rise from 1940 to present, cyclonic energy, weather disasters, worst floods and droughts ( it was a slow round!) and he was astounded at these few basic facts. The public wants simple, understandable facts.
AI is “bullshit baffles brains”. Not understanding the subject most assume AI has some sort of god-like mystical power to solve problems humans cannot.
When you are browsing the internet and an ad pops up for the exact thing you were thinking of buying it might be chance, but it might not be. There are vast AI networks already in place feeding you ads based on your behavior.
What happened is your browsing behavior matched someone that previously bought product X. The AI engine recognized that and fed you an ad for Product X, before you asked for it.
Is this intelligence? It is no different than a waiter watching your glass and offering another round before your glass is empty.
In Cook’s case it looks like they are trying to play whack a mole on the internet. Using something like the ad server in reverse to predict what pages need to be removed.
This is likely to lead to adaptation. Perhaps the word “not” for example will increase in significance.
I was talking on my iPhone to another person one time recently, and happened to mention the “Ring Doorbell” in the conversation. I was shopping on Amazon using the iPhone, when I got the call, and when the call ended, I continued shopping and when I paged down one screen from where I was when the call came in, and there on the next page was an advertisement for a Ring Doorbell. I wasn’t shopping for doorbells at the time, I was looking for something completely different but this Ring Doorbell ad was inserted right in the middle of all the other, unrelated items on the page.
I don’t think this was a coincidence. 🙂
well said Willis / Peter M Native Sun
Thanks, Peter. Is that the fishing boat “Native Sun” that I used to fish on when Darrell was the skipper?
w.
W. ==> ” Antarctica is gaining ice ” See Zwally et al. (2021) — maybe gaining, maybe losing, but ind=significantly.
I think the following is more accurate
1. It’s real
2. It’s us2. We have had a part to play
3. It’s bad3. It is likely to have pros and cons. So far, on balance, its been good
4. There’s hope4. We should concentrate on mitigation rather than prevention for any bad effects
5. Experts agree5. Experts are learning all the time.
I’m not sure I agree with
5. Experts are learning all the time.
It appears many of the “experts” refuse to learn.
I was being nice.
Didn’t you mean “we should concentrate on adaptation”?
I know how computers work. Learned all about it starting back in 1966. One of my teachers was Rowland Emmett who Invented the Forget-Me-Not computer.
https://flic.kr/p/gsuQ12 <– see it here. Click on the right margin to see more pages. And you can click on the images to see a magnified view.
Haha, tell me you’re not desperate and out of arguments—after you automate rebuttals—without telling me you’re not desperate and out of arguments.
The best argument I have is NOAA data showing sea level rise at a relatively static rate.
The intelligence is artificial, but I’m afraid the stupidity is all too genuine.
My thoughts exactly..
Cookie has no business being a scientist – his original (cartoonist) vocation tells us as much.
Why: He patently has no idea what computers are, what they do or how they do it APART from what everybody ‘knows’ = Computers are always right
The computer for him is thus a a very potent Authority. That someone/anyone needs such an authority should set alarm bells ringing.
But also, cartoonists are actors/actresses (of a fashion), people who like to be seen, to be adored and constantly have praise heaped upon them.
So, what Cookie is doing here is building an Authority in his own likeness – he is programming a computer – a device to magnify his desire for power, to reinforce his idea that he is ‘always right about everything‘ but also be something people will fawn over
He is building A God in his own likeness – hoping that legions of fawning acolytes will descend and basically, stroke his ego?
Should that guy be in a hospital or a university?
But no-one seems to really notice, he is but one out of hundreds and thousands inside climate science alone – he is not especially unusual.
It is not a healthy picture is it.
Given that 1-in-40 children are now diagnosed as definite Autistic and that autism is not an On-Off disorder – where do you even start to count the subclinical cases and the undiagnosed?
Where does Confirmation Bias or Cherry Picking fit in. What about plain old Magical Thinking, belligerence and stubbornness?
Are they natural or artificial personality traits – are they nature, nurture or self-inflicted?
How do you even know if you yourself is or is not suffering a cognitive or mental impairment?
(If you are even ‘just’ pre-diabetic, take care throwing stones lest you be in a glass house – simply ‘a bit’ on the overweight side will suffice esp if you have been for some time)
It seems to me, the Climate Experts are Pygmalion and the various computer creations are their Galatea. However, intelligence can never come from a computer program, artificial or otherwise.
I’ve talked with a few people about artificial intelligence. What I find most interesting is how people think it will be smarter than almost everyone from the outset. I think it will be more like a 2-year-old that hasn’t mastered potty training yet.
If we pay 60 bucks to the WWF to sponsor a white bear, can we feed vegan greenies to them?
Won’t be as fat as seals.
Nice work.
Perhaps WUWT readers can construct an artificial intelligence program to highlight alarmist claims:
* Climate emergency
* Climate crisis
* Climate models
* Tipping point
* It’s worse than we thought
* Might
* Could
* IPCC
*RCP 8.5
*proven
*settled science
*97%
*Cook
(this is sarcasm on my part, quotes are from the Nature paper)
After reading the paper on Nature: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-01714-4
Oh Jeez Willis, why do you get so pissed off. This tool doesn’t attack your scientific claims against junk science, it only targets WUWT or you as a blogger.
See, they’re only targeting your writing style. Thus, anyone who thinks like Willis, Dave, Chris, or any other WUWT poster must be a bad person. Bad ideas will be tracked through the fingerprints of their writing style.
Furthermore, it took a small army of undergrad students to track your style
Alas, they couldn’t do the job, so they were fired. A team of 30 well indoctrinated souls was recruited.
Ordinary self-reliant thoughtful undergrads weren’t able to find fault with your science, so they needed fully brainwashed team players.
(think about the budget to do this).
(giggling to myself), here’s a great opportunity to influence the artificial intelligence. Just insert a bunch of relevant paragraphs from papers of climate activists as keywords within WUWT posts. Suddenly, everything these activists say is flagged as contrarian.
TLDR: Any scientific claims made on WUWT are flagged as contrarian. This is not a problem … it is an opportunity … to have fun.
After reading the Nature paper, and examining the creds of the authors, it becomes clear the authors hold in their minds that contributors on WUWT are terrorists, and must be tracked as such. Thus I surmise, the cook recruits the lead author (not saying his name, lest it be flagged). But its important that He Who Must Not Be Named hereafter: “HIM” is person who hunts terrorists by use of software that tracks writing style.
So the cook decides that WUWT is a terrorist org, and hires HIM to flag the words of WUWT writers in any social media posts.
Let me have a go at Cook’s number 4 – “There is hope” With his artificial intelligence he mindlessly switches the list to its negatives and for ‘4’ he comes up with “There is no hope” as a ‘contrarian’ thing. In what possible way would a contrarian, who says (and shows) there is no problem with climate, find this hopeless?
There is a big ‘tell’ in this! Yes, Hope is a big presence with the consensus. With real scientists, hope is not tool they make use of. After having projected 300% too hot compared to observations (and if it doesn’t hurry up and start warming the error is only getting larger), and suffered psychologically almost 2 decades of zero warming ended by an el Niño, now gone and cooling returned, Hope seems to be all that’s left.
Having cost a couple of trillion on useless political mission oriented ‘research’, hundreds of sq miles of renewable nightmare energy farms that don’t really work, damaged the fossil fuel industry, destroyed economies, impoverished a world that really needs this money to for betterment of their lives, yeah, you better hope for hell and high water to start making an appearance soon! This will certainly be laid at the feet of the consensus when it doesn’t occur.
Cook and the Cookies describe their work as follows
:”Let’s start with a quick, 10-word introduction to climate change.
There are 5 key facts that summarize everything you need to know about climate change.””
A pathetic and patronizing summary is hardly an auspicious start for them.
The problem with AI is simply this.
With a program there is no ability to correct an error that enters the program.
This is not to say that a smart AI program does not have an ability to run checks on data entering the system and try to remove anomalies.
Just that both at the entry point and during the running of the program assessing the data errors can occur which are not correctable because there is no way of assessing errors in the program or errors that occur because the inputted data is wrong.
There is a third type of error in that rounding up of minute changes can over time lead to horrendous outcomes.
Human supervision can identify and overcome this issues or cause the problem to worsen when greed and self interest dictate.
I would still rather play a human opponent than an AI at chess because a computer cannot change the right way to do things programmed in.
Once you beat it at an opening once you can wrack up the same game over and over again.
If it is programmed to play a different move the weakness in that move can be identified in time with the same result.
.
“he comes up with “There is no hope” as a ‘contrarian’ thing. In what possible way would a contrarian, who says (and shows) there is no problem with climate, find this hopeless?”
The only hopeless people are the alarmists trying to promote this climate change scam.
Skeptics are full of hope for the future because we don’t see a problem with CO2. And it’s not like we haven’t been looking.
What he probably means is that contrarians believe renewable energy is hopeless. (Say, was that topic on his list?)
What this lot are talking about is not AI. It is pattern matching from a database.
They’re just using a buzzword to try and add credibility to their efforts.
You can’t have actual artificial intelligence without first having sufficient actual intelligence to understand what intelligence itself is.
Of course, if they were actually developing a useful AI that would look dispassionately at the data, it would soon tell them that they’re barking up the wrong tree.
Well the deadline to the essay contest – 11th December – came and went with no mention at all.
Is it still being run or has it been quietly dropped??
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/11/11/submissions-open-the-first-wuwt-climate-change-essay-contest/
Cook et al have done a pretty good job of cataloging the skeptical arguments in general terms. This can be very useful for skeptics. I find this amusing. It is something I have wanted to do for a long time but never had the funding.
For example it will be very helpful to say which arguments are being advanced by a research result, or in a long video. One could even build a search engine that finds content by argument. I love it!
That they call our arguments misinformation does not change the value to us of their catalog.their
Yes!
Willis? There is nothing artificial about the stupidity of the left, it is 100% pure and unadulterated.
Willis,
You should ask for a free copy of the program, then edit the 50 or so statements they use, to things like:
1] Arctic Ice will be gone by…
2] Major cities to be inundated by…
Etc… and then set the program to work. It would probably be a boon to all of us here at WUWT. (lol)
From the article: “Clearly, John Cook and the Cookies are getting desperate … because when you actually think your scientific claims are solid, there’s no reason to conjure up some bogus “AI” program to automatically censor your scientific opponents.”
That says it all.
Very good article, Willis. Lots of reading material here.
I would go with “CO2 is plant food” as showing the whole project is utter garbage
That Reviewer 2 rant does not abide by the wise advice of Teddy Roosevelt, Willis:
<blockquote>
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better
</blockquote>
Or better get a life. <a href=”https://andthentheresphysics.wordpress.com/2021/12/11/classification-of-contrarian-claims-about-climate-change/#comment-203312″>Your endless criticism, carping, and whimpering is boring as hell</a>.
Point of confusion: Cook’s paper asserts that alarmists contend “There’s hope” and skeptics contend “There’s no hope.” If the subject is climate-caused doomsday, this is exactly backwards. Why are alarmists so full of alarm? Why are children across the globe fearful and depressed?
For skeptics, hope doesn’t enter the picture. Nature, the weather, and climate will do what they will do, and humanity will largely adapt.
“Clearly, John Cook and the Cookies are getting desperate … because when you actually think your scientific claims are solid, there’s no reason to conjure up some bogus “AI” program to automatically censor your scientific opponents.”
Says it all really – thanks for putting all the current info all in one place.
It is scary seeing how science/medicine has being politicized to take away our rights and our money, while patting us on the head and saying it’s for our own good. Shades of the fascist/socialist/communist totalitarianism build-up of about a hundred years ago.
It was well said many years ago in a BBC broadcast.
Those who believe in the absolute correctness of their science and scientific theories are the dangerous ones. Those who believe in the tick-toc mathematical magic of their science are the same people who condemn the unbelievers, and especially those who see the strange chaos that resides in all those variations within the error-bars.
<blockquote>
“It’s said that science will dehumanize people and turn them into numbers. That’s false, tragically false. Look for yourself. This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance, it was done by dogma, it was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods.
Science is a very human form of knowledge. We are always at the brink of the known; we always feel forward for what is to be hoped. Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error and is personal. Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible. In the end, the words were said by Oliver Cromwell: “I beseech you in the bowels of Christ: Think it possible you may be mistaken.”
I owe it as a scientist to my friend Leo Szilard, I owe it as a human being to the many members of my family who died here [at Auschwitz], to stand here as a survivor and a witness. We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power. We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act. We have to touch people.”
― Jacob Bronowski (Ascent Of Man, episode 11 – Knowledge Or Certainty) </blockquote>
Very powerful – and very pertinent
Re:
2.5 : Human CO2 emissions are miniscule/not raising atmospheric CO2
Are you referring to the CO2 exhaled by humans? Otherwise I thought it was accepted that human activity was causing the observed increase in CO2.
I just want to be sure to give Willis credit for one of the mostest hilariousest examples of (unintentional) irony I think I’ve ever seen!!
So Willis quotes Feynman, as an expert on experts, to prove that experts aren’t reliable?
PERFECT!!!!
Once again, Joshua shows up to do all that he knows how to do—criticize, carp, and whine about anything that I might say.
And once again, Joshua totally misses the point. Feynman was well aware of this.
Get another hobby, Joshua, or at least get a grip. All you’re doing here is making people point and laugh.
w.
Willis – only a person of your grand(iose) stature could teach that epic level of cluelessness and lack of introspection.
You actually appealed to the authority of an expert to argue that experts are unreliable.
Seriously, that’s perfect, bro. Just perfect.
Joshua, if I want to know about the unseen faults of doctors … I’ll ask a doctor.
If I want to know about sketchy stuff the police are doing … I’ll ask a policeman.
If I want to know the truth about the weak points of lawyers … I’ll ask a lawyer.
If I want to know what firemen are doing wrong at fire scenes when no one is looking … I’ll ask a fireman.
And if I want to know about the reliability of experts …
My advice?
Quit while you’re behind. You’re embarrassing yourself.
w.
Thanks Willis –
Exactly. So when you want to know something about an area where you lack expertise, you ask an expert. Exactly like you said.
And back up your view of experts, you referenced an expert! And not just an expert but “one of the finest” experts of your lifetime.
That was my point. Thanks again for showing how you agree with me despite your protestation otherwise.
Willis is exactly right, you are beclowning yourself. There was no “appeal to authority” in Willis’ quote. He wasn’t using it to prove anything.
And you sit here claiming HE is the clueless one?
Right. There was no appeal to authority in Willis’ appeal to Feynman’s authority when he appealed to Feynman’s authority. Nor was there any appeal to authority in his appeal to the authority of lawyers, doctors, policemen, or firemen.
Thanks for that explanation with such logical clarity.
> He wasn’t using it to prove anything
Willis never needs to prove anything. He’s a **doer**.
And thanks to him, I now discovered anchors:
https://climateball.net/but-science/#ignorance
***
The pickle is easy to solve. If you distrust expert E1, you ask E2. Then E3, E4, and so on and so forth. If most experts agree on something, you get some kind of reliability. So in an indirect way Willis is rediscovering why science is intersubjective.
That does not mean that you get infallible knowledge. That does not exist in empirical sciences. That just means that’s the best we got so far. You can always bet against that. That’s what contrarians do.
For every Warren Buffett millions of contrarian investors lose money. It’s really hard to beat the market.
So Willis’ trick is to confuse reliability and fallibility.
Next time, keep the chin up.
There are experts to real questions. Like how to make good small modular nuclear reactors, how to classify stag beetles or how to obtain artefact-free X-ray tomographic images at submicron resolution (or at least voxel size).
But there are no experts on ill-posed questions. Like – is current climate change unprecedented or alarming? Or is sea level rise accelerating? Or what happened before the Big Bang or in parallel universes?
Naming oneself an expert in such a field is a strong sign that you are a charlatan.
Of course there’s not an “expert” on whether or not the risks posed by ACO2 emissions are “alarming.”. That’s a subjective assessment.
By the same token, there are no experts on whether risks posed by ACO2 emissions are a “nothingburger” or whether we’re all doomed by the AGW hoax, blah, blah.
Been trying to follow your logic, but I find none.
WE did not appeal to authority, to an expert.
His quote is basically framing the statement, trust no one including the person who did the quote.
> His quote is basically framing the statement, trust no one including the person who did the quote.
He appealed to Feynman’s expertise as an authority (one of the finest physicists in Willis’ lifetime).
Willis then went on to amusingly justify the general practice of relying on experts.
Let us not forget that the person we’re talking to here trusted his own expertise enough to confidently declare that there was a “hard limit” on population fatality from COVID – and that no country would exceed a 0.085% pop fatality rate.
And a renown “skeptic” expert (Nic Lewis) weighed in to largely agree with Willis’ expertise, after NIc put up a series of posts where he predicted that “herd immunity” would be reached at as low as 20% population infection rate, and that London, Barcelona, India, NYC, and Sweden, among other localities, had reacted a “herd immunity threshold” as early as Spring of 2020.
Interesting how so many “skeptics” found Nic’s and Willis’ expertise to be reliable, despite that it was unarguably not remotely reliable, isn’t it?
Of course it’s legit to question the reliability of “experts” as a class. The problem is when people apply the associated logic selectively to, basically, confirm ideological biases.
Joshua
Nice to see you posting at WUWT, don’t hold your nose too tightly 😁
The use of AI for this purpose makes no sense. AI is driven by a model and to make it work you need to train it with examples, such as correct science and bad science statements. The AI model then finds more examples of bad science automatically to help the censors do their job. The model clearly does not think in the manner of a human brain but simply follows the rules it has been given. The whole idea that it will correctly pick out examples of bad science is totally bogus. It can’t reason through logic it isn’t trained on, so any new science would likely be labled as bad science.
This is about the most stupid application of AI I have seen. It is similar to what William Briggs says about statistical models and how they can be designed to prove anything the author wants them to.
The father of environmental justice, on whether we’re all doomed – VOX
I should be getting paid to consume the comprehensive media from TV to the internet that is how much it is leveraged. Not sure how I missed this post. Excellent summary of how fact checking works as censorship/narrative control propaganda. Even broader algorithms are at work in terms to the detection of narrative themes in social media, searches, blog entries a and such paired the interventions response to those emerging themes is endemic of the intervention response to trends played out in music, images commercials, TV show’s moves, weather broadcast, news stories. The twisting and slanting of the news stories in the 1980s has turned into an endemic blitzkrieg of propaganda because the data shows that it works. it used to be that the actual current events drove the the news. Now something else entirely is driving the stories. In the past ten years there has been so many amazing current events that never hit the threshold of a new story. I
Can’t they be both?
P.S.: I couldn’t wade through all the comments, so if this is a repeat…
It is – but it’s well worth repeating
Here’s an image to help Herr Cook to train his deep learning algorithm
I think it’s great that SkS / Cook has created this outline of Points In Dispute (PIDs). Now let’s get the Oxford Union to host a series of deep debates on each point.
And/or let’s challenge SkS to fill in the blanks in its outline so that our side can come to grips with them and, by thus engaging, defeat or blunt them. (SkS already has posted its position on most of these points, which we could copy and paste in, so all our side needs to do is collaboratively put together responses—mostly from material we’ve already written.)
The resulting online document could attract a lot of attention because of its comprehensive nature, and its cheeky debunking-the-debunkers appeal. Cook has provided us with a perfect opportunity to counterpunch and land a haymaker in front of a global audience. Seize the day, y’all!