Wayward Son

Alex Jones does the same thing psychics do. Say as many things as possible. Recognize that your viewers want to believe, so they forget that almost all the claims are complete misses, and re-interpret a few vague statements to mean something more than they do.

I love how Alex Jones managed to infiltrate the bohemian grove. Jon Ronson - who was writing a book on nutcases like Jones, met up with Jones and two of his sidekicks, plus a person who had previously managed to "infilitrate" the grove. Jones and his side kicks had managed to come up with a dangerous and delusional method of possibly getting in seal team 6 style by going miles and miles out of their way and scaling some pretty ridiculous terrain. But, the person who had infiltrated the grove before had a different idea....walk in like everyone else. Anyone could do it - just don't look crazy. Jones dismissed such an idea as a good way to get to get killed, so Jones and one sidekick entered through a modified, but still completely insane way through ditches and bushes. They managed to tape the events, somehow surviving certain death, and had an opinion of the events that only a mind bogglingly paronoid conspiracy theorist could have. Ronson and the other guy just walked straight in, without encountering a hint of security, watched the events, met up with Jones, who was seeing imaginary dragons everywhere, for a couple minutes. And walked back out. Ronson viewed it as basically a boring, meaningless frat party for businees people who are beyond college in terms of work, but not maturity level. Jones, however, doesn't earn his living by seeing things as they actually are.

Unsurprisingly, you don't understand the burden of proof. It would be pointless for me to provide you with the name of a funding organization as you would either say 1) that it is just one of many organizations, so showing that one has no bias means nothing about the other ones. and/or 2) that I can't prove that the funding organization in question is not biased, just that the bias has not been found yet. The burden of proof lies on you. If you want to claim that such funding organizations are biased, then it is up to you to provide positive evidence for your claim.

As I can't prove a negative, I understand that I can't prove that NSERC has no bias. If someone brings forth evidence that NSERC has bias in their funding, or favours projects that exaggerate problems I will evaluate the evidence brought forward and concede my point if it is justified.

No, as you already know. However, I feel that it is insulting the posters on here when you refuse to even acknowledge when your claims have been proven completely wrong, and instead just hop to your next piece of nonsense. It doesn't surprise me though, I have dealt with the exact same things with 9/11 truthers, creationists, anti-vaccination cranks, paranoid conspiracy theorists, holocaust deniers and other climate change deniers. (And yes you are a denier. You may not like the label, but it fits you perfectly). And yes, I noticed that yet again when you were challenged about the misinformation you spread, you did not provide evidence to support your claim or admit that you were wrong, but instead changed the subject.

You seem to have let the many times I have shown your claims to be wrong to go unnoticed - such as when I showed that your claim that more CO2 just leads to more photosynthesis, despite not understanding the basic biology of limiting factors, and how CO2 is even close to a limiting factor. You just Gish galloped to your next nonsense claim. You fail to understand the most basic points about science, yet despite having an understanding that is surpassed by most 3rd graders, you possess a level of arrogance that can only come with complete and total ignorance. Scientific theories can NEVER be proven. A single experiment can disprove a theory, but no amount of experiments can prove a scientific theory. This is the most basic day one stuff. No scientific experiment has disproven climate change, so far they have just added weight to the theory by failing to disprove it (and I sure hope to hell I don't have to explain here that theories don't turn into laws when they are proven, or other similar nonsense spouted by people who possess negative knowledge about science). This is called falsifiability. And no one here has ever said that any science should never be questioned. What people have said is that if you wish to claim that an established scientific theory is wrong you should 1) actually know what you are talking about (you don't have a clue) and you should apply skepticism to your own claims which go against established scientific theory such as asking yourself why you came to a different result, or why you think that everyone else missed it, or what gaps in your own knowledge may lead to have come a conclusion that is wrong, before you throw out a pile of ridiculous nonsense. As Dara O'Briain says: Just because science doesn't know everything, doesn't mean you can fill in the gaps with whatever fairy-tale most appeals to you. The theory of climate change (and evolution, and gravity) will of course be updated by new evidence as it comes in. However, your opinions will still be completely wrong because they make no sense and contradict known knowledge. The theory of evolution is not 100% correct, but creationists are still 100% wrong. The theory of climate change is not 100%, but the views you have expressed here are 100% wrong.

Lots of places. Almost all of which have no influence over the result. If you want to claim otherwise than feel free to actually contribute some evidence. However, there is a big difference between scientists getting funding to do research that has no strings attached (as we also saw happening with the BEST funding from the Koch brothers), and scientists who are conducting NO research yet are being funded by industry to promote industry views (such as Fred Singer, who has been a mouthpiece for multiple industries such as tobacco and asbestoes, and now of course, climate change without having actually conducted any science himself in decades).

This does not address the original question. You said that there was no neutral body funding the research. Cybercoma stated that NSERC is a major funder. To me that means that you either have to show that NSERC is not neutral, or admit that there is at least one neutral body funding this research.

Someone getting the wrong leg amputated says nothing about reliability of the medical science that determined that a leg needed to be amputated in the first place.

There will always be a small percentage of sceintists who disagree with anything. You can find a small percentage of scientists who are creationists and reject the theory of evolution. That doesn't mean anyone should take what that small percentage of nutcases have to say as likely to be correct. A small number of people who are educated in a certain field are always going to take the opposite view from what the evidence shows. Scientists are humans as well, can be swayed by things other than evidence: such as money and pride. It does not surprise me at all that people like Spencer, Christy and Lindzen when shown to wrong simply switched to another tact to support their initial position. It is human nature. That 5% of the scientists in the survey hold your position should make you reflect on your position, especially as you have no expertise in the area in question. What do you even mean? Science can't prove the theory of gravity, that is not how science works.

According to the very survey in question: - "Eighty-four percent say they personally believe human-induced warming is occurring" - "Only 5% believe that that human activity does not contribute to greenhouse warming"

Yes, I thought that was you, and mentioned it on a previous post. I am not going to go back into the history, and I understand that waldo is making the claim that you disagree with much of the mainstream scientific consensus. Whether that is true, I have no idea. For myself, if someone disagrees not with the science, but instead with policy directions that may or may not mitigate some or all of the effects of climate change, then I do not consider them to be a denier, as I reserve such a term for the denial of science or known facts. I am not saying that is the only way for denier to be defined. That may be true. It is certainly widely debated as to the methods that do or do not work for convincing people to drop unsupported arguments. As I certainly can not claim to have a history of changing many minds any comment I could make about what works and what does not would be purely anecdotal. I think we can all agree about this. The argument would be about what science is uncertain. This is where I acknowledge that I know absolutely nothing. I don't know if most others who are knowledgeable in the same field would agree or disagree with you on part of all that. That would be for the field in question (I assume with neighboring fields that overlap) to hash out.

I think that we are talking about completely different things here. However, it is simply not the case that more available carbon = greater mass of combined life forms because I know of no case where carbon is the limiting nutrient. The growth of plankton is limited not by C or CO2, but by P, N and Fe among other things. As long as C is not the limiting nutrient it doesn't matter if CO2 is 280 ppm, 380 ppm, 1000 ppm or 100,000 ppm it will have no effect on the overall mass of plankton. This is why scientists have tried seeding areas of the ocean with Fe. Whether geo-engineering such changes would work (as on a large scale it would lead to depletion of P and N, and it sets off changes in the food chain) is debatable, but such actions are not a case of nature catching up with excess CO2. So it is not a case that we are releasing carbon at a faster rate than the consumers can catch up with, it is a case that no catch up is going to happen (at least naturally).

I would also add that we are headed to a peak population estimated at anywhere from 9 - 10 billion. Feeding these people requires either much more land under cultivation or much more food produced per hectare. GM will lead to more food production per farmland. Organic farming will lead to less and therefore requires more farmland. I will also comment that GH promotes that idea of more trees to deal with climate change. An idea that would damn hard to accomplish while purposefully using farming methods that are less efficient in order to please a small percentage of people who see imaginary dragons when it comes to GMOs.

I may very well be suckered, which if true, would be my own fault, as I have not gone back to see what people actually post. I generally like to give people the benefit of the doubt (which is easier when one has not been here very long). Still, at least in this thread, I do not recall Tim bringing forth the zombie arguments that arise here with striking regularity. By zombie arguments I mean arguments that seem to rise from the dead again year after year despite being even more nonsensical than they were when they were intially lowered into graves that are never deep enough for some people to leave them where they belong: In the grave of ideas that not only were not supported by evidence, but contradicted known evidence and facts. I generally don't interest myself in the policy side, although for those who do I can understand it being just as frustrating to deal with what seems to be the one area where doing absolutely nothing in favor of future technology (with out even putting policies in place to encourage research and development into those future technologies) seems to be in vogue by the same people who often first denied climate change was happening at all, then admitted that while it may be happening, humans are not the cause, and then finally adopted the position that either we cant' do anything, or that there is no sense doing anything right now anyways. I understand the frustration, and those pushing for policy adoption and emissions cuts right now may be correct. The problem for me is that it is not something that falls within my fields of knowledge, and unlike the many people on here who I see make bold statements about why climate change is wrong, despite knowing almost nothing about the topic, I choose to not make claims about things outside my areas of knowledge.

I disagree, and by the way you are one of the few people in this thread "on the other side" who I don't feel deserves the label. At least I think it was you who several pages ago urged people to stop denying known science - like CO2 being a ghg, and the real debate was over what should be done, if anything, about it. I have no real problem with such a position, as I am only concerned with the science, and not policy decisions that may or may not be made based on the science. When it comes to science and skepticism it is really simple. What does the science say, what are the facts, and to what degree of certainity do we know those. The degree of skepticism that should be used depends on the degree of evidence that supports a claim and the extraordinariness of the claim (Claiming that CO2 is a greenhouse gas does not require skepticism, as the claim has been amply demonstrated. Claiming that CO2 is not a greenhouse gas does require skepticism, and lots of it, for the same reasons). If I am in a lab somewhere and I come up with results that contradict scientific knowledge, my results could be correct, but I had better use a damn high degree of skepticim when looking at my own results and my own methods or else when I come forward with my claims I risk being shown to be a complete idiot who either used poor methods or standards, or did not understand the results etc. The wrong way to do it would have been to say to myself, I came up with results that contradict scientific knowledge, so I am going to be extremely skeptical of the established scientific knowledge. What we have here, when it comes to the science (again, I am not really interested in the policy claims one way or another, and just skim over them) is people bringing forth ideas they have dreamt up that go against the scientific consensus. They do not apply any skepticism to their own idea. They don't bring those ideas forward by saying, hey how come this doesn't work? What am I missing here?, but instead say the science is wrong because I spent 2 minutes on the can thinking about the issue and I have discovered something really simple that thousands of well trained scientists completely missed even though they have spent a decade training and do this for a living.

I don't assume that the total amount of CO2 being consumed by photosynthesis will never increase or decrease. I do assume that any increase or decrease is largely irrelevant as it is part of the carbon cycle. Lets say that plants tomorrow start consuming 25% more CO2. What does that mean for climate change? Basically nothing as the carbon remains in the carbon cycle. In simplistic termes those plants consume more in spring and summer and simply release it again in the fall. Yes, some of the plants could consume the carbon on a longer term basis by storing more carbon in the soil, or in the form of trees, but the numbers are not that large, and science has a pretty good understanding of it. Not a perfect understanding, but pretty damn good. There are not a whole lot of mechanisms in which CO2 is removed from the system, and they have been studied pretty extensively. We know for instance that there used to be a lot more CO2 in the atmosphere 180 million years ago, and CO2 was being removed from the atmosphere - carbon that became oil - as it was consumed by single-celled plankton that subsequently died and drifted to the bottom of the lakes and shallow ocean/sea beds where it was covered quickly by sediment. The conditions that favoured this process do not exist today. That does not mean that we can not engineer a similar process to do the same thing today, but the solutions (whether they are practical or not, available now or not) are irrelevant to the reality of the science.

Lots of people claim to be truth seekers: Anti-vaxers, 9/11 truthers, Alex Jones and his followers, along with followers of Ayn Rand, religious folk and so one. The problem is how does one evaluate truth, and one thing that all these people have in common with climate change deniers, holocaust deniers and the like, is that they are extremely crappy at evaluating the truth, or the evidence, for their claims. I don't claim to be a truth seeker as I think that it is a completely ridiculous concept. I evaluate claims by first looking for fallacious or fraudulent arguments. Then I look at the evidence. If I am not an expert on a subject, and the subject falls within the domain of science, then I look to see if there is what could be considered a scientific consensus. If there is a high degree of agreement among legitimate experts and I feel that they are mistaken then I look at my position with a high degree of skepticism. I don't claim to ever have "the truth", but I can claim that a position of mine is a strong inference based on the best available evidence, and that it does not violate known laws or contradict observed facts. Not many "truth seekers" can make the same claim, including you on the subject in question. What is wrong with the so-called skeptics in this thread is that they are not using skepticism at all.

No there is not. You can pretend that there is, but that does not change reality. The "debate" exists solely among those on the far fringe of scientific commnunity. You have formed an opinion which is directly opposed to scientific knowledge despite not even understanding the very basics. In most other fields people doing something so completely arrogant would be rightly criticized for what they are. But when it comes to things like climate change, deniers feels that everyone's opinion no matter ridiculous has to considered equally. It doesn't. Human exhaled CO2 does not contribute to climate change. There is this thing called the carbon cycle. Plants take carbon out of atmosphere, convert it into sugars, humans or other animals eat those plants and convert those sugars back into CO2. There is no new CO2 entering the system. It is not like humans just created carbon atoms and released them into the atmosphere. That is wholely 100% different than taking huge amounts of carbon that has been excluded from the carbon cycle for 180 million years and dumping it into the system.

The main study (at least as far as I know) was by Farr, Forssell and Patterson (2010, Applied Developmental Science 14(3), 164-178). Their findings based on comparing 106 families (27 lesbian, 29 gay, and 50 heterosexual) who had adopted young children, were that there were no significant differences. Proper controls were used in selection and data collection to avoid bias. From the paper: "Our findings revealed, for the first time, that young children adopted early in life by lesbian and gay parents were as well-adjusted as those adopted by heterosexual parents. Our results suggest that lesbian and gay adults can and do make capable adoptive parents. We found no significant differences among families headed by lesbian, gay, or heterosexual parents in terms of child adjustment, parenting behaviors, or couples’ adjustment. In addition, reports of children’s outside caregivers were consistent with those of parents. It is important to note in particular that gay fathers and their children appeared to be faring as well as were lesbian and heterosexual parents and their children."

I want to thank you for doing something that very few people do on the internet. Not only realizing that you had been mistaken about something, but having the ethic to admit it to people. Most people just dig in and defend their incorrect position more and more strongly.

I understand that this has already been asked and ignored, but I would sure like to know what experts deny the CO2 is a GHG? Even Richard Lindzen and Fred Singer concede that point. So does Roy Spencer, John Christy, Patrick Michaels, Willie Soon, Henrik Svensmark, Anthony Watts and Robert Carter. I am not sure who I missed, but I can't think of any scientist who denies that CO2 is a GHG. I mean how could they?

I have the book, but have not read it yet. There are several other books that cover the topic of discussing GMOs and organics from a science perspective instead of ideology: The March of Unreason by Taverne, Whole Earth Discipline by Stewart Brand, and Just Food by McWilliams.

You can't be serious. I will not respond to someone whose reading comprehension is that damn poor. If you are not going to respond to what I actually write, then there is no sense responding to you.

Thanks. I am happy that some people gain something from my posts.