Posts by btrower

Re: Crossing The Streams - Managing To The Nonexistent

@Don Jefe:

I often say that "society is predicated on a fabric of lies". Unfortunately, some are necessary to reduce friction and that creates a situation where we come to accept that some lies are OK when they are not. This is used to our disadvantage with things like going to war and other sweeping allocations of resources based on lies.

Unfortunately, although I see that this fabric of lies is problematic, I am honestly not sure how we work around that. Some flexibility of the truth is actually necessary for society to function. I am not at all sure that we can remove the bedrock of falsehoods and still function.

Re: Copyright and Patents both have positive feedback mechanisms

@PyLETS:

Very well said and sensible too.

Re: Husbands will have to ask their wives...

@Bradley Hardleigh-Hadderchance:

Upvote for seriously amusing post with a message.

Re: @bigtimehustler - "moral" duty

@bigtimehustler:

Re: "im more anti all of them!"

Me too. The G7 countries have all drifted into what is essentially a one party system. You can vote all you like but for any practical purpose there is only one choice on the ballot.

Re: Over the weekend ...

@John Lilburne:

Re:http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-57611003-1/meet-sweetie-a-virtual-girl-created-to-target-child-predators/

As someone who is beyond wary about child predators (I have kids and I don't have any illusions), a part of me has trouble having sympathy for the people ensnared by such a sting. As someone who cares about the rule of law, I find it very troubling.

I am not so conversant with this area of law that I can say for sure, but it seems to me that the above is 'entrapment'. An agent evil enough and clever enough could engineer all sorts of illegal behavior in people with a variable schedule of reinforcement that leads them to ever more illegitimate behavior. All kinds of people who would not otherwise engage in borderline activity could be induced to do so by targeting them when they were vulnerable -- intoxicated, etc.

We have laws against most things the community finds unacceptable. We also have mechanisms whereby the state can force its way into people's homes to search them, to spy on them, etc. We do not need some sinister agency spending tax dollars to find ways to essentially make thought-crime punishable.

What really bothers me is the 'ends justify the means' mentality whereby no matter how grotesque our pathway there, as long as we hurt people we don't like, we are fine with it.

Before we support things like this, we need to at least have a discussion about the ethics involved. It does not matter why you are fostering evil. You are still fostering evil. Today, that is being used unfairly against people you don't like. Tomorrow, it can and will be used against you.

Vigilante justice is no justice at all.

Re: Still a problem for non-techies

@Archimedes_Circle:

Re: efficiency, etc.

The most efficient would be cleartext -- no need to process at all. Heck, if you are worried about cost, give the cleartext directly to the attacker and ask them to send it for you.

If it is *feasible* and it increases security then it should be at the very least possible as a part of the design. Current designs limit key sizes to particular values and there is no valid reason for that. It makes me suspicious, but whatever the case, I am not going to do this for my own stuff.

The above is part of the reason that I said that this is still a problem for non-techies. Anybody who cannot build encryption tools themselves is stuck trusting persons unknown and we know for a fact that at least of some of that trust has been violated and is misplaced.

I presume that if you are talking about RSA and Elliptic curve you have some notion about this stuff and if you do then you either know or can easily find out that there are some profound questions about this stuff.

I am unclear -- are you telling me that you would protect important secrets of your own with those tiny keys because you are confident nobody can strip away a few bits of complexity? Maybe you are right in which case my stuff will be overkill. I suspect that at least as far as we are talking about 115 bits, you are mistaken and we will both live long enough for that to be apparent.

If, in what you appear to think is an unlikely enough event to bet your security on it, I turn out to be correct, my stuff still has some chance of remaining secure while your stuff does not.

Re: "Technically, salts do not need to be random, or even unique"

Note: It is a nit, and I expect perhaps a typo, but if you are going to build salts into your system with forward CBC then you should *prepend* the salt, not append it.

I am not sure of what you have in mind, but re-using the same salt to, for instance, secure passwords is a known security weakness that radically lowers the cost of attack. If, in theory, all attack keys are tried at random then I suppose a non-random salt might be equally effective as a random one. From what I know of attacks on such things they are not at all random.

Rainbow tables come from somewhere. There may not be a rainbow table for your particular salt, but then again there may be. If it is a particularly valuable target that uses a knowable salt for every value, then a rainbow table specific to that salt could be generated at roughly the same cost as any other rainbow table.

People are always going to be surprised by the unexpected. One way to minimize this is to expect more. Generating a random or strong pseudo random salt for every encryption you do is just good practice. Worst case it is a trivial bit of extra work for nothing. We are at a bit of an impass because you obviously can't see how compromised salts can be an issue and I am unable to see how they could not be.

We agree on the multiple sources. Even if your entire communications infrastructure is heavily compromised as long as you can get one good key you can secure end to end.

Re: Still a problem for non-techies

Re: imperfect OTP is imperfect...

Just because you could drink poison does not mean you will or you should drink it. To the extent that you fall short, and you always will, the OTP will be imperfect to that extent. Everything else suffers from that defect *plus* their other defects. With a target model of a one time pad, you have a clear goal whose endpoint will be as strong as you can make the use of keys and key exchange. Anything else and you inherit an extra weakness.

I do not want to trivialize the problem of generating the OTPs and exchanging them. Were the secret very valuable, I would be inclined to go that way, despite the difficulty. However, I am of the opinion that any system at all should have at least a portion that is protected by such a mechanism. We really cannot know for sure what weaknesses exist in other systems. The problem of the OTP is at least a clean one and your security is proportional to however close you come to that idea.

You know for a fact that other systems are weaker, but you can not be sure how much. In some cases, something that looks very strong can in fact be trivial to break if you know how.

Re: "Beyond a certain size, key exchange becomes more of an overhead than the material itself to be transmitted."

Keysize has been historically contained to something that it is theoretically feasible to break with just a small advantage. That would make anyone with even modest knowledge of this area wonder. The difference between a 16 kilobyte key and a 16 byte key is trivial as far as transmission and exchange, especially if just setting up. Certainly you could go to 8,192 bit keys easily enough and the difference between that and a 1024 bit key should be enormous under attack.

Re: "you don't want to waste bandwidth and time transmitting large new keys. "

Maybe you don't. I am not so sure about myself. I would rather transmit large new keys and have security rather than dispense with security.

Re: "Plus there may be situations where the bandwidth is limited or the material to be transmitted small."

This is one of the arguments that leaves me scratching my head. Why would we design a *limitation* into our system to satisfy the systems with the very least amount of power? Our protocols should have the two ends negotiate security as strong as they can comfortably manage, not as weak as necessary to support any device.

Re: "for a state adversary, key size may simply cause them to change tactics and focus more on pwning where"

Uh, that is a point in its favor, not against it. Yes, if we can guarantee that we can make one part of the wall so high they don't even try, that is a good thing. They are always going to go for the weakest spot in your defenses. That is no argument for creating weak defenses.

[As an aside apropos of the above, one of my design points is to have nested decoy messages that cause the attacker to waste resources investigating blind alleys.]

Re: "they could retrieve a 10Mbit key as easily as a 10kbit one"

I have commented elsewhere at the Reg that for stuff that is *really* important I would deal in key sizes running to many gigabytes or even terabytes. If I am designing against a well funded state attacker, I would require resources both sides so enormous that an attacker has trouble getting the resources to attack. In fact, if you use 'data pigs' with terabyte disks to transport enormous keys in meatspace you can be virtually guaranteed that they cannot be stolen without your knowledge and that they will be extremely challenging to intercept and analyze online.

The biggest challenge in overcoming weaknesses is recognizing them at all. You are pointing to places where poor design points could weaken your system. The response to that should not be to throw up your hands and say it is hopeless. The response should be to close that avenue of attack.

The correct response to 'our algorithm is too intense for our slow machines' is not that we should weaken it. It is that we should beef up our machines.

Re: "Again, OTP is useless for an asymmetric environment. How can use use an OTP if Alice and Bob have never met or do not meet on a regular enough basis to synchronize the pad?"

I repudiate the notion that something with a known security issue should be used in all cases when it is not necessary in all cases. Perhaps we have a situation where we simply must do that, but I would not make a fault that is a necessary evil in one case apply to cases where it is not necessary.

I am attempting to protect against any breach. The protection against a MIM attack will require a third party somehow. If you have a third party that you can trust and you both have keys you share, the third party does not require Asymmetric encryption to issue you both a session key that by virtue of being issued from the party you both trust verifies the other party.

To the extent that I must have asymmetric encryption I would use three different asymmetric methods to exchange and sign keys. It is bizarre to me that the notion of applying multiple locks to things gets such short shrift. Requiring that they steal three different keys and/or use three different attacks to get your message is *worst case* just as strong as one.

Re: [Criticisms of distributed control]

Distributing trust can admittedly become complex. However, that does not invalidate its utility and it is certainly possible to overcome any problems. Wikipedia is a testament to the fact that even something naked to attack can be reasonably secured for a given purpose.

Re: "what if a malcontent uses the distribution system"

Here is where we diverge completely. One of the purposes of distributing the system is to make it possible for malcontents to communicate securely. Today's heroes were yesterdays malcontents. We need to make it possible for the good guys to move about.

Re: "theoretically, it's ALWAYS possible to subvert a trust system"

It is *possible* that Russell's teapot exists. That does not make it probable let alone something we should rely upon.

Re: Still a problem for non-techies

@jason 7:

I am not trying to be glib here. If you are asking the question, you don't really understand what we are talking about and would not understand the answer.

Re: OMG Zombie keeps rising @ btrower

@42:

You really have not made an argument there.

Re: "Climate denial"

This is not even a thing. It is an unsavory pejorative term invented by frustrated alarmists simply unable to articulate a coherent argument or answer any particular criticism. Beyond that, it is a fallacious mutant combination of ad hominem attack and appeal to the crowd. You might as well through in a side of vericundiam or misercordium. Your a distillation of the argument that is put forth by alarmists and they are absolutely incapable of seeing its flaws. You cannot build spaceships and robots on a philosophy that ignores empiricism and attacks your critics for saying so.

Re: "Creationists"

This one is similar to the 'denial' one. It is particularly rich because it is the argument from Evolution Through Natural Selection that crushes the alarmist theories. It is deeply ironic that the side adopting creationist tactics and dismissing the lessons of Darwin are attempting to tar their critics with the label 'creationist'. People who simply believe in Evolution without understanding it stand on no higher ground than people who believe in Creationism. Like the Evolution/Creation debate, this one is more heat than light from the polar extremes and people at the polar extremes display a mean spirit that extends to deliberately ignoring or characterizing their opponents arguments.

For the record, I am a strict Evolutionist, not because I 'believe' it, but because I *understand* it. That is clearly more than we can say for the extreme alarmists who have no inkling suspicion about why canalization over geologic time makes it exceedingly unlikely that the alarmist theory is correct. Thermageddon could happen. We should never say never, but the probability is small to the point of vanishing, surely much below the danger of a meteor strike or a life-threatening change in the sun.

Re: "anti vaxxers"

As one can imagine, I am pretty much on board with vaccination. By coincidence my family is midway through getting them now. Like evolution, this is not a matter of belief with me it is a matter of understanding how it works and liking the cost/benefit trade-off. Unlike alarmists, I would not dismiss the concerns of people about vaccination out of hand without engaging them and despite my understanding and belief I would still give them a fair hearing. Besides, to the extent that 'anti vaxxers' are wrong they follow the same broken lines of reasoning as alarmists. You belong together.

Re: "all use the same techniques you do"

Well, you are a pot calling a kettle black without even realizing it is not a kettle. Techniques? You mean demanding evidence and reasoned argument consonant with my understanding of the laws governing the universe? Demanding parsimony? Criticizing sloppy reasoning, invalid statistics and politics masquerading as science? Sure. People who understand scientific pursuit realize that scientists are skeptics by definition. Alarmists think of 'skeptic' as a dirty word on a par with holocaust denier. They are entirely mixed up with respect to this.

I admit to a certain stridency with my argumentation but I generally put forth fairly straightforward, logically coherent arguments consistent with evidence and comfortably under the umbrella of science rather than sophist rants. Misusing language and name calling happens on both extreme sides, but if we have to pick a side that owns this, it is surely the alarmist camp. It seems they quite simply cannot disagree without invective.

Re: "The facts are so plain that AGW happens it takes a fool of epic proportions to believe otherwise."

Indeed. Is that, then, the entirety of your case to support condemning people in the third world to death, perverting the world economy to the tune of trillions of dollars, and (ironically) damaging the biosphere? For the record, it would be charitable to say your argument is a bit thin.

There are Nobel laureates who disagree with you. I mentioned one in particular in an earlier comment. Even were your conclusions true, the above argument does not support them or anything else except yet another example of alarmists unable to articulate a real argument and unable to understand why that is not OK. I mean it is OK as a rhetorical device if that is all you bring to the table, but it is invalid as argument. You lose the formal debate by abdicating your responsibility to bring a cogent argument to the table.

Skeptics are largely unpaid volunteers, saying what they say because they believe it is the right thing to do. They have stood against a withering assault on world politics and the house of science because they have a deep conviction that things like 'cap and trade' are wrong and they feel they must take a stand. They have, without funding, assembled facts and arguments and criticisms of the Global Warming narrative against much backlash. People like the Climategate whistle-blower have endured savage criticism and condemnation from the establishment hierarchy in order to bring what they believe to be the truth to light.

Alarmists tend to be blind believers or people with compromised interests. However, in fairness there are a lot of honest people who believe on the basis of what they have been told. Were the assembly of facts they have been told and the supporting arguments sound I would believe too. We part company because someone like me is skeptical until they see proof and there is no proof of CAGW because it is not real.

For the record, most thoughtful skeptics are not denying the evidence that we are rebounding from the little ice age and that the world has warmed. To some extent, we agree on many of the facts, but we disagree on how to interpret them. Does CO2 cause any warming at all? Probably. Our evidence is not very good for this, but it seems plausible. Do humans affect the climate? We really don't know, but I think most skeptics would be willing to allow that we might have a little effect. Thus far, the skeptical view is the one that has been the most predictive and the best at rationalizing the reliable data (not nearly what they think it is, BTW).

If we take facts supported by evidence and sound argument and put them together to create a picture of Global Warming consistent with the body of science and the real empirically testable world, we find that the world is likely warming a little and that we might have an effect. However, the odds on favorite bet ten years ago was that CO2 would have a negligible impact on climate and that climate would stay within perfectly ordinary limits consistent with the null hypothesis. That was the evidence a decade ago, five decades ago and it is the evidence today.

The 'bedrock' of alarmism is the IPCC summary, a political document. The statements from scientist organizations endorsing the Global Warming narrative are political ones, not scientific. To the extent that I know we have sound data, those political statements are not in line with the members they claim to represent. The notion that '97%' of scientists endorse the Global Warming narrative is nonsense on its face; easily debunked. The fact that so many alarmists present that argument at all shows that they have a profound innumeracy and an uncritical credibility that calls the rest of their beliefs into question.

My background makes me confident that thermageddon has a negligible probability of happening and that current efforts to stop it are politically and financially motivated in their entirety backed by dupes who have trouble with logic and numbers and are too trusting for their own good.

Don't trust me. Don't trust them. Dig into this yourself. I am entirely confidant that someone in possession of the facts and their faculties will agree with me. Something happening? Maybe. Important? Not likely. Actionable on global scale that raises the cost of energy? Absolutely not.

Re: Oh dear - oh dear oh dear oh dear

@NomNomNom:

You and I are miles apart, but you should not infer from my long replies, or their tone that I am attempting to argue against you in particular. I am attempting to argue the point. I am pretty much legendary for my long replies to things, but these ones are because I have been asked to do a policy paper that practically addresses this debate.

Because you believe as you do, have surveyed and accepted the various arguments and appear to be animated by the same sense of activist urgency I associate with CAGW proponents, you stand proxy for the more difficult audience members to appease.

One thing that I hope people on all sides could agree to is to place this under the umbrella of 'environmental stewardship' and to research the way to get the best bang for our buck.

Re: WHO CARES!

Re: /And yet despite that you think CO2 rise being caused by human emissions has "little support" which is "unconvincing"/

I was kind of giving you that, but your notion of good evidence and mine obviously are not quite the same. This was apropos of the notion that, as I say "CO2 concentration is mostly controlled by mankind." We surely do have an effect by clear-cutting forests and burning fossil fuels but whether over any significant time frame what we can be expected to do will actually be the dominant force over CO2 concentrations, well... I am not convinced that we won't be the controlling contributor but I am not convinced we will either. Part of the reason I don't care is because the overall debate does not hinge on this.

Does our effect on CO2 have an appreciable long-term effect on CO2? Maybe, maybe not. Does CO2 have an appreciable long-term effect on global temperature? I doubt it. Depends upon what you call appreciable, I suppose. I do not expect that it has a whisper of a chance to cause anything approaching a runaway feedback loop. What reasonable data we have does not support that notion.

To the extent that CO2 concentrations going from 400ppm to 600ppm has an effect on the biosphere, I am strongly of the opinion that it will have a net positive effect. If you don't think that CO2 figures prominently as a driver of global temperature, it is hard to get excited about our role in it, especially since the direction we are forcing it (assuming we are) is net positive.

I am entirely unconvinced, but it would not be particularly astonishing if CO2 had a finite measurable effect on global temperature. I just do not think it is important and thus far the globe agrees with me, not you.

Re: "I would say that alone shows your ability to analyze data is insufficient."

Well, so far I do OK. CO2 levels have been much higher before we were ever on the scene.

If you think about it, the CO2 we are supposedly polluting the atmosphere with had to come originally from the atmosphere and if you look back on the CO2 concentrations over much larger scales you find:

1) CO2 Concentrations were, for most of our planet's history significantly higher than today.

2) CO2 and temperature do not correlate over very long time-frames at all.

3) Over shorter time-frames CO2 concentrations are controlled by temperature, not the other way around.

What that tells me is that biological carbon sequestration is the overall driver of CO2 concentration and that it can ultimately reduce more than 5,000ppm down to a few hundred and that while sequestration is catching up, CO2 concentrations are driven by temperature rather than the other way around. CO2 concentration has varied by thousands of ppm throughout earth's history and only a few hundred ppm during man's history. We may some day have that level of control, but we surely do not now.

Climate Scientists cherry pick data that supports their contentions and ignore data that doesn't. It is incumbent upon them to produce the positive case that falsifies the null hypothesis. Otherwise, the null hypothesis naturally stands due to our preference for parsimonious explanations.

Re: "The evidence that the ongoing CO2 rise is human caused is overwhelming."

There's that word 'overwhelming' again. The Global Warming fraternity rubs that word like a magic talisman. Rhetoric may move the crowd but it does not move me and it won't change the weather. Rather than endlessly trotting that out to stifle debate, why not cut to the chase and start producing this allegedly overwhelming evidence. I have looked and looked for years and I haven't seen it. To the extent I know that people have attempted to get this 'overwhelming evidence', it has been difficult to the point of requiring legal intervention.

Overwhelming evidence you do not care to show is operationally equivalent to evidence that does not exist.

It is, I am sure, your sincere belief that the CAGW narrative is genuinely supported by rock solid evidence in quality and volumes that cannot be denied. Your overwhelming conviction does not make it so.

Why would the alarmist camp waste so much time on rhetoric and lame sophistry, require FOIA requests to obtain data and methods to support analysis and replication, take their case to television and newspapers, game peer review, fix official investigations of wrongdoing, misrepresent the literature (97% anyone), etc, etc if they really had a solid case to present?

Re: "First there's the ice core record of the last 10,000"

Did you ever stop to wonder how that 10,000 year timeframe was chosen even though you have to graft together three different data sources to cover the time frame? I did, because I know that even though it looks dramatic on that graph, our CO2 level is at a perfectly unremarkable level. Here is a different time frame that gives a bigger picture:

http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/last_400k_yrs.html

That shows that we are not at a peak, that we could easily be going up sharply without violating the null hypothesis that it is business as usual and that over ranges near where we are now CO2 concentrations are driven by temperature, not the other way around.

The graph you present is evidence, but it is weak, could easily be nothing at all, would eventually be defeated by increased biomass and is very much well within a range accounted for by the null hypothesis.

Re: http://iter.rma.ac.be/en/img/CO2-concenNEW_EN.jpg

Again, evidence, but much weaker than you believe. You and I have entirely different ideas of what constitutes 'overwhelming evidence' and I submit that my apprehension is likely to be more predictive than yours.

Re: "ice cores also show CO2 levels going back hundreds of thousands...... last time CO2 was this hight was 15 million years ago ... CO2 continues to relentlessly increase... To say the CO2 rise being human caused has little support is ridiculous! ... radiodating. ... accounting issue"

I am assuming good faith here because I honestly believe that the purveyors of these arguments armed with their carefully selected samples within stochastic boundaries and following the existing curve truly believe.

Newtonian physics, Einstein's refinements, much of the standard model, the theory of evolution, the periodic table, Maxwell Boltzmann, the fundamental theorem of calculus, plate tectonics, optics, etc, etc is supported by very good evidence and sound arguments perfectly consonant with the rest of the known accepted body of science.

CAGW evidence is not nearly as compelling as evidence we demand of the rest of science. Plate tectonics took many years to be accepted when it made perfect sense, was consistent with what we know, was supported by reasonable evidence and was predictive. The nascent discipline of 'Climate Science', such as it is, has gotten a free ride compared that.

Re: Where is all the human CO2 going if it isn't causing the increase in CO2 level?

This is what I call the 'argument from ignorance' , characterized by the generic notion that because you cannot think of any other explanation, your explanation must somehow be correct.

It is reasonable to assume that CO2 we liberate will go into the atmosphere and thereby increase CO2 concentrations when and where we do. The notion that we control CO2 concentrations does not follow from that. We affect them like every other source or sink of CO2. However, it is a leap to say that because we supply CO2 into a very large and very active CO2 cycle we ultimately control it.

Concentrations we see would not be inconsistent with the null hypothesis. Given what we know, I personally expect that CO2 concentrations will taper off and perhaps retreat. However, the evidence we have is not that strong one way or another and because it ultimately drives nothing, it is not much worth researching or arguing about in my opinion.

Re: Oh dear - oh dear oh dear oh dear

@NomNomNom:

Had I looked at the data, I would also have predicted the world would warm, but I would do that on the basis of the null hypothesis rather than the idea that CO2 was warming the world in any remarkable way. Additionally, I would predict that it would in no way go outside of an environmental channel for which the entire biosphere is evolved. I would also have predicted, again on the null hypothesis, that the shape of the curves would remain unremarkable over time, staying within patterns and ranges that they have seen in the past. I would also predict that weather patterns would stay well within their historical limits.

I would predict that there would be species extinctions and perhaps associated ecosystem collapses, again on the null hypothesis. That is how Biological Evolution works. The 'Selection' part of Natural Selection implies the removal of the least adaptive genes. Sometimes that will just change populations and gene frequencies, sometimes it will truncate species. Sometimes sufficient disruption will take down other species and sometimes it is enough to break the elasticity of an ecosystem. The above is the 'Natural' part of Natural Selection. Sometimes when persistent changes to climate are sufficient to reduce viability at one latitude and increase it at another, the range of species and ecosystems will drift geographically. That is not strange or unexpected, even when it becomes, for a given set of organisms, catastrophic for them.

The null hypothesis is both more predictive and more consonant with the rest of science than the voodoo positive feedback via runaway CO2 'forcing' theory of Catastrophic Global Warming.

Skeptics predicted a benign absence of aberrant accelerating warming, Alarmists predicted catastrophic aberrant accelerating warming. Thus far, Skeptics have been right and Alarmists have been wrong. There is no evidence that this is going to change any time soon.

I don't know enough to say for sure, but my hunch is that something similar to what is described in this paper will give much better predictions of future temperature and it is basically an elucidation and quantification of the null hypothesis that the climate will continue on as it has:

http://www.clim-past.net/9/447/2013/cp-9-447-2013.pdf

Fig. 6 on Page 451 shows a reconstruction of past temperatures followed by a prediction for the next number of years. The ideas make sense, the analysis yields an excellent fit to the data and makes a testable prediction both for the future and for past data if we are able to collect it later. To my eye, the graph of the data and the graph of the fitting curve look the way I expect real curves to look. By way of contrast the famous 'hockey stick' is anomalous looking and at least in its first incarnation proven incorrect (faulty math).

I am entirely skeptical that *warming* within ranges we can expect will be a problem. However, cooling as is indicated in the graph above could be a very severe problem. By the same token that increasing temperatures support greater biomass and are net positive, decreasing temperatures mean less biomass and are almost certainly net negative. Runaway rapid increases in temperature seem both unlikely and benign if they happen. I am not so convinced that movement in the opposite direction would be as slow and I know it would not be benign. Accommodating lower energy costs, greater crop yields and a greater amount of habitable geography is significantly easier than accommodating higher energy costs, decreasing crop yields and shrinking habitable space.

The current dogma of the Climate Science community is severely compromised. If we think that future climate will change, have a significant impact on us and be predictable, then we should get on with it. However, I think approaches like in the paper above are more likely to yield fruit than the current marginal efforts to continue supporting a theory that makes no sense, conflicts with the rest of science and has no predictive power.

Re: Oh dear - oh dear oh dear oh dear

@relpy:

What you describe sounds like what Climate Scientists do, but it does not sound like what scientists do.

Where is the prediction and falsification both of which are two crucial aspects of science? Where is the talk about sound experimental design and valid methods of data acquisition? What about replication?

Re: OMG Zombie keeps rising

@James Micallef:

Re: "substantial investment in nuclear power"

Doing the right things for the wrong reasons can lead to trouble down the road. You can end up with wacky conclusions about other stuff and end up nullifying the good you do.

For the record, I am pro-nuclear, so people like you and I could work for the same thing. Energy is the one hard limiting factor that affects us all. For now at least, abundant cheap energy would allow us to do as we wish. The alleged CO2 driven global warming debate could be shelved as irrelevant if we had enough cheap energy because we could sequester and de-sequester carbon at will. No need to argue about CO2. We would be able to run the real experiment -- sort of what has been happening for the last 20 years or so.

It has been a few years since I looked at it, but at one point Thorium reactors looked like almost a sure thing. I would be on board with a program to fund research into this and to fast-track it if it looks promising.

I am, despite its many issues, a big fan of fusion energy and I expect that we will probably crack that particular nut in the next 10/20/30 years. The joke about fusion is that it is always 20 years away, but we know for a fact that fusion energy is there and we know we can release it. It has proven a difficult problem, but we are just looking for a way to get over-unity energy release without a nuclear explosion. It is difficult, but has to be doable and we will get there.

Before I started a Thorium program, I would take a hard look at Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works. Last I heard, fusion energy was already in the pipeline: "Lockheed is promising an operational unit by 2017 with assembly line production to follow":

http://www.dvice.com/2013-2-22/lockheeds-skunk-works-promises-fusion-power-four-years

If they are still somewhere on track with that, fusion energy would likely be in the pipe before we could deploy Thorium reactors. If it is real, I would attempt to make a deal with Lockheed to hasten development.

Also, Fusion Energy because flying cars.

Re: "oil company propaganda" @42

@Squander Two:

Re: "I agree with Richard Feynman"

Second that. Seriously, what would Feynman do? Send me my WWFD T-Shirt !

Re: Let's assume they are right.

@Pat 4:

Re:"warming was actually caused BY CFCs"

I am a bit fuzzy headed right now, but that is an interesting speculation. Sometimes it seems like all the data was faked. Massaged, cherry picked data sets keep cropping up like bad pennies. They yield graphs that make people used to seeing graphs of real data sets go "what the...???" Raw data is hard to come by and some goes MIA entirely. However, there are raw data sets out there that graph like any other raw data and I am optimistic that enough reasonable raw data on temperature, ozone cover, CFCs and CO2 exists somewhere. It would not take much of an analysis to see how CFCs fit in. Seems to me that just proper graphs should be enough to tell.

Note: Not kidding about the fuzzy headed thing. I could be way off base...

Re: Good

Seriously? Sir Isaac Newton vs Michael Mann? I feel sheepish putting them both in the same sentence. You are comparing Apples to Orangutans.

I saw the code released in the Climategate stuff. It is not even up to beginner standards, let alone Newton's.

Climateers are masters at ignoring, spinning and suppressing data. A small error? Are you kidding me? It is the complete theory down the well. Newton would look at it and say the second derivative is zero. You claimed it was not. The entire justification for alarm and all this funding was the contention that thermageddon was nigh and worse than we thought. IIRC the hockey stick showed a much different situation and as far as I know some variant of it is still AGW canon.

The CAGW narrative is simply not supported either by empirical data or logical argument from known facts. You are not really disagreeing with me. You are disagreeing with the Universe and you will not win that game.