Posts by NomNomNom

Re: Perhaps the government is behind all of this ...

you are only ever seeing the tip of the iceberg: what THEY want you to see. No more. No less. To fill in the rest you need courage and genius. You need to be like john mcafee. Can you handle that?

Re: Perhaps the government is behind all of this ...

"The constant supply of crazy "conspiracy theories", making people grow bored of them, must certainly help governments really carry out some of the things they are accused of"

That's what they want you to think.

In reality governments don't have the capability to do it.

Re: Supply and demand

Should have done a proper subject like media studies mate

Re: Pressure sales

"By expected you mean in the same way that many people in the past have expected many end of the earth scenarios without actually having facts to back it up."

No I mean by the method of science.

"As there is so much unknown and not understood in the science of climate the next 200yrs has little chance of such prediction."

Wrong. Not knowing how much warming a 2% increase in solar output would produce doesn't preclude science from estimating it. You are appealing to total ignorance, similar to how creationists appeal to total ignorance about the past to claim that "we can't know" and therefore their theories about the earth and life are just as good as mainstream ones.

"But the word which completely removes your entire credability is "Uncertainty" which you use to support your position but actually destroys yours. If its unknown then we need facts."

It's not unknown, it's uncertain. The precise amount of warming if the Sun's output increases by 2% is unknown, but it can be estimated and bounded with an uncertainty range. Claiming that the word uncertainty

"We dont have working facts yet so "we all gonna fry" is as legit as "we all gonna freeze"."

This is just flat out wrong. To give another analogy it's like claiming that uncertainty in the age of the Earth (it's not precisely known) means believing it's 6000 years old is just as good a conclusion.

"Your acceptance of uncertainty removes your certainty that we gonna burn."

I didn't express any certainty. I expressed what is likely.

"So you offer no proof"

Science doesn't deal in proofs. That's maths. Science deals in evidence.

"nuclear terrorism which is a factual situation that can be measured and has an actual level of risk"

Now you are being inconsistent. You can't PROVE that nuclear terrorism will happen but you accept the risk, yet you demand warming be PROVEN or else it's completely unknown.

"Nuclear material goes missing. Varying levels of talk on terrorist communications and interrogations. Witnesses and evidence. All contribute to an actual assessment of an actual possibility."

Similarly CO2 is a strong greenhouse gas. CO2 levels are rising fast. All contribute to an actual assessment of an actual possibility (I note you used the word "possibility" here, backing down from PROOF).

It seems you tolerate tying of evidence together to form assessments of threat when it comes to terrorism, but not when it comes to science.

"Cherry pick some numbers. Filter the majority of scientists out so only the few who agree are counted, and only publish their stuff (if its biased enough)."

Same excuse the creationists use. To justify why they can't get their nonsense published.

Re: Pressure sales

"Around 125,000 years ago, the temperature was a couple of degrees higher than currently, right before we plunged into an ice age."

Not so. You are looking at a graph of temperatures from a proxy in central Antarctica. That's not global temperature. Changes at the poles are much greater than at the tropics. Therefore the average global temperaturee difference is much smaller than measured at eg Antarctica.

Re: Propaganda still winning hearts and minds?

1998 was a super El Nino, El Nino of the century. A large but temporary surface warming blip as cold upwelling waters in the tropical pacific were severely suppressed for months on end. We shouldn't expect years without such an effect shortly after 1998 to be as warm, let alone warmer than 1998. It took time until a year reached 1998 without such a outlier.

Because of such year-to-year variation the expected warming trend shouldn't be thought of as a single rising line, but as a rising range. Eg: http://tinyurl.com/bhtpaqt

The "plateau since 1998" is an illusion caused by the fact temperature was in the top part of the range at the start of the period and below it towards the end. But it is still within the range and any diversion at this point is not significant enough. Especially considering the start of the period had a high solar max, a run of El Ninos and the last few years have had a quiet sun, a run of La Ninas and a pdo shift. If anything the lack of cooling in recent years in the face of these events suggests greenhouse gas warming has easily opposed them all.

Re: Propaganda still winning hearts and minds?

#4, the claim that there has been no warming since 1998 is a common misconception.

It's an illusion caused by a single data point outlier, a spike in 1998:

http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1880/compress:12

To help disspell the illusion, here is the same graph but with the single outlier year 1998 removed:

http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1880/to:1998/compress:12/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1999/compress:12

With the year removed it's clear the data is compatible with a continuation of the rise since ~1980. A claim of warming having stopped cannot possibly stand on a single outlier. 1998 is known to be an outlier because the cause of the temporary spike is known.

Re: Pressure sales

"Over the last 10,000 yrs we have had cooling and warming."

but not as much as expected in the next 200 years, even by moderate estimates of the warming in store.

"hey have to revise down the figures regularly and fix the broken models constantly. Mostly because they dont know enough to model accurately."

Uncertainty works both ways. Eg look at this incorrect prediction:

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/files/2012/09/naam-ice-12.jpg

"You talk of a worst case situation which is far from proven or factually supported."

It doesn't have to be proven. Anymore than nuclear terrorism has to be proven for it to be a threat.

Re: Pressure sales

I pick the relatively stable climate of the last 10,000 years as this is the only tested time period in which human civilization has flourished on Earth. Any other climate state is untested and threatening.

"If we are warming the planet and to what extent and to what temperature and to what result is unknown."

The strong likelihood is we are going to push the climate into a warm period the likes of which it hasn't been in for millions of years. Which won't just be a novel situation for humans but much of other life on Earth. Business as usual with the idea of just risking it is fine, but don't expect to be able to reverse the process down the line if it all goes wrong. Human technology is highly unlikely to be up to that task.

Re: Pressure sales

"If it turns out there is an actual problem, and we have some reliable science to back it up we are likely to have better technology then."

But probably not sufficient technology of the scale required to revert Earth back to it's original state. Once the Earth cooks up enough that the ice sheets become de-stabilized and frozen hydrocarbon deposits start degassing only epic scale sci-fi level technology is going to work.

As human technology currently stands we can barely deal with plugging up a relatively small oil leak in the gulf of mexico.

Re: Yes, but...

warming isn't happening on mars

Re: It wasn't such a wondrous year...

also don't forget about all the zero day bugs. Another reason why I wait months before buying (usually)

Re: Would be interesting...

"maybe people are waking up to the fact that they just don't have the hours to spend on these sprawling AAA epics"

Like large outside open area games like fallout and skyrim? sure. But traditional room-by-room FPS games have only gotten shorter over time and I don't see anyone celebrating that. I tend to see people complaining about being ripped off by eg a £30 FPS that only lasts 12 hours in singleplayer with no multiplayer.

The problem is because of the heightened graphics that are expected these days. Artists have to spend longer on each level or feature to make it look nice. Level generating in the old days eg doom, quake, halflife was less involved and so more levels could be produced for a game meaning the games lasted longer.

It's not just FPS. Even XCOM: Enemy Unknown wasn't as broad in content as the original XCOMs. Same limited maps over and over again. Again because they were going for quality (graphically) over quantity. Replayability is something players want (higher hours/£) but it's oddly something that designers neglect.

That's why all the multiplayer games are so popular, because human generated situations or even content (eg minecraft) produces a hell of a lot more replayability than is found in singleplayer.

The solution for singleplayer is to use procedural generation more, which is pretty much the philosophy of roguelike games, so that each play of the game is different enough so that it can be played many many times without getting boring (ie repetitive)

free to play is pure evil

Re: Whatever. It's SOLSTICE! Celebrate!

"Idiots predicting doom, based on moronic opinions on "long count", really need their heads examining "

oh right and i suppose you know more about predictions than all the Mayins combined