Certainty has no place in science, the closest you get is immeasurably
small error margins.
Certainty is only the pervue of belief systems(mostly religions, but
there are others that do not like that label, like atheism).
If you are certain, then you are not doing science.
I do not trust any scientist that says that something is certain, that
is not their job.
A proper scientist should say that something is 'almost certain with a
margin of error less than 0.1%' for a one time event, or some
estimated frequency of occurrence for an ongoing chance('this atomic
clock is accurate to 1 second in 10,000 years')
In a very complex system that is not fully understood and has no
control group, I would find a certainty of over 80% rather suspicious.
Weather forecasters do not put the chance of rain over 80% unless it
is currently raining. Climate change is harder to measure than
rainfall, and the causes are so many and desperate with positive
feed-backs and negative feed-backs that I find difficulty believing in
a margin for error even as little as 20% hard to believe.
On top of that, we are currently in an ice-age(check wikipedia or any
dictionary for geological ice-age, we have year round ice-packs on
both Greenland and Antarctica, thus we are currently in an ice-age.
An inter-glacial period , but still an ice-age.)
(The ice-age started roughly 2.6 million years ago at the beginning of
the quaternary period)
If we can manage to heat the planet up, that would actually be a good thing.
Over much of the planet most plant life goes dormant for a good chunk
of the year because it is just too cold to function. Even if we
brought back a brontosaurus or other large plant eating dinosaur, they
would quickly starve to death because even the rain forests are
relatively barren of plant life compared to what they had to eat back
then.
If you have data to support your suppositions with reasonable margins
of error then I'll listen to you, otherwise keep your religion to
yourself(or 'belief system' if you prefer).
Now, lets get back to talking about the game this mailing list is
dedicated to, any responses to this should be directed to my email and
not the group.
On Fri, Apr 30, 2010 at 11:09 AM, David Scheidt <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 30, 2010 at 1:36 AM, Onno Meyer <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> > Yes i am Crazy, just love dealing with egotistical scientists who have a
>> > bone to pick, or an ego to scratch.
>>
>> Climate Science is a lot like Tobacco Science:
>>
>> 1) They describe complex systems with thousands of causes and
>> thousands of effects.
>>
>> 2) The exact cause-and-effect mechanisms are not always known,
>> and there are random factors, too. ("Uncle Ed smoked a pack
>> every day, and he lived to the ripe old age of 99." -- many
>> others didn't.)
>>
>>
> That's what the climate change deniers want you to think. It's not true.
> We know damn well that carbon dioxide blocks long wave infrared radiation.
> We know that the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is rising. We know
> that the increase in CO2 comes from burning fossil fuels. We know that the
> earth is absorbing more energy than it's radiating away. What's more, we
> know all of these things from multiple independent methods, and the analysis
> has been done by many different independent people.
> There are no serious scientists working in climate that disagree with that.
> (There are some kooks, but you can find kooks in biology that don't believe
> AIDS is caused by HIV. The existence of crazy people is not an argument.
> And, of course, their are monied interests paying people to tell lies.)
> Global warming is real, man caused, and it's going to cause problems.
>
> Just what those problems, and their magnitudes, will be is not yet clear.
> While we have good numbers for the amount of excess heat the earth absorbs,
> we don't have a good understanding of where it's all going. So we don't
> know how fast sea level will rise (faster than than the IPCC reports say,
> though, even their "worst case"). We don't know what happens to ocean
> circulation (which drives much weather). We don't have a full understanding
> of how all the various feedbacks to radiative forcing behave together.
>
> But those are pretty minor problems -- they're very much akin to saying "My
> house is on fire. I don't know if it will burn down in 10 mintues or two
> hours, so I'll wait until the fire gets going to call the fire department".
> We don't know just how bad it's going to be, nor how long it will take to
> get that bad. We can be damn sure it's going to be bad enough.
>
>
>
>> \Any reasonable expert would claim a high likelihood that both
>> cimate change and cancer from smoking are real, not certainty.
>>
>>
> No. It's quite reasonable to make the claim that climate change is certain,
> that it's caused by man burning fossil fuels, and it's happening now.
>
> --
> David Scheidt
> [email protected]
> _______________________________________________
> GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]>
> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
>
--
The man that holds fast to his bitterness will eventually be consumed
by it, but if you let it go, your arms will be free to seize the glory
that is life.
-Terwin
_______________________________________________
GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]>
http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
