Re: Postcard from Atikokan

It was your analogy. Don't blame me for your poor choices.

You'd find a way to dissemble any analogy I might have tried to make.

No, I did not.. (It is dubious practice to snip what I wrote, and then
tell me what I said.)

These exchanges are too long now. Snipping is essential.

I get drawn in. I can't stand by and watch nonsense being
spouted unchallenged. It's a character flaw, I know. I'm running
out of options here. I can't killfile you: I don't want to, and it
would be pointless. I've considered leaving the group, but
this is a major part of my sad little life. I really need you to
stop mindlessly parroting these media scare stoies, and I
don't know how to do that other than challenging them. When
I do so, you never support your claims, except in the most
generalized and evasive terms. I think you're deliberately
trolling me and I'm getting fed up of it.

I completely understand what you have said here. I'm not trolling you. I'm
trying to get a skilled communicator over to the correct side of this
issue. It's a recruitment exercise.

They are deadly. 'never' and 'always' are two of my
favourite examples of mistakes people make.

They are _always_ mistakes, are they?

Nicely twisted.

_Absolutely_ everything? (Apart from binary, of course.)

Pretty much. Binary is a mental construct whose useful property is to be
either one discrete thing or another and nothing else. I was referring to
things occurring in nature.

Argument from omniscience ! That's new (for you).

From my perspective, you dismiss and deny rather than read and consider.

[Snipped yopur criticism of my snipping]

No, you haven't. You are equivocating.

You are denying. I have cited conferences, media, scientific reports,
national and international studies and you dismiss them all. Nothing is
good enough.

That's highly disingenuous of you: the Millenium Report is
iIrc, four 800 page documents.

That might clue you in as to why I don't literally give you 'the data' you
keep asking for. You could just flip through the MA or read summaries or
reviews, check that there is supporting data to confirm I'm not making
things up.

Appeal to the gallery.

Like you don't.

Books are advocacy. Movies are entertainment. conferences
are begging the question. If a conference is about the question
of anthropogenic climate change, then it isn't established fact.
If a conference assumes anthropogenic climate change, it
won't deal with the question!

The reason there won't be a conference as you suggest is because scientists
are decided that issue and have moved on.

I don't "deny" anything, of course (your strawmen notwithstanding).
I simply maintain a healthy skepticism - something that is intrinsic
to good science.

You go beyond scepticism. You deny the existence of evidence all about you.
If sceintists took your 'nothing's ever good enough' attitude, there'd be
no progress. You know scientists accept there is uncertainty in everything.
They move on when there's a consensus that the data points conclusively in
a certain direction. They don't endlessly challenge it. There would never
be any progress.

<sigh> You're not helping yourself. You really ought not to read
such nonsense, if you are unable to see through it.

I have respect for these studies. They form an overwhelmingly consistent
forecast of our future.

British Meteorological Society formed 1850
The Met Office was established 1854

Why do you say "record keeping began in 1880"?
(I'm guessing the US Met. Soc. was established then.)

You're correct. 1859. 1880. Big deal. It was merely to say there was much
more than 5 years of data.

What? You mean you don't know? Aren't you a little bit curious
on that point?

I cannot be expected to be an expert about everything. I'll respect an
authority's evidence unless I have some reason to think it is not correct.

( I nearly asked you if you weren't a little bi curious !)

I was nearly amused.

Ok. Let's look at Antarctica...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarctica

"During an expedition led by Ernest Shackleton in 1907, parties led by
T. W. Edgeworth David became the first to climb Mount Erebus and to
reach the South Magnetic Pole. On December 14, 1911, a party led by
Norwegian polar explorer Roald Amundsen from the ship Fram became the
first to reach the geographic South Pole, using a route from the Bay of
Whales and up the Axel Heiberg Glacier.

Richard Evelyn Byrd led several voyages to the Antarctic by plane in
the 1930s and 1940s. He is credited with implementing mechanized land
transport and conducting extensive geological and biological research.
However, it was not until October 31, 1956 that anyone set foot on the
South Pole again; on that day a U.S. Navy group led by Rear Admiral
George Dufek successfully landed an aircraft there."

Do you think we have a continuous thermometric record for Antarctica
for the period 1900 - 1956?

Antarctica is the site of intensive scientific studies. One of them is ice-
core studies of climate changes going back 100's of millions of years. You
don't need to have been sitting there with a thermometer to get the
historical environmental data.

This site has a nice learner's tool. Click on the "Ice Core Timeline" link
at the bottom and play with the links there to see what can be learned from
these studies.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/warnings/stories/

In order for it,... this;-
" Sea ice is at the lowest levels in recorded history."
...to be true, you would have to have measurements of
sea ice for the whole of recorded history.

You might think I'm being funny when I mention the ancient
Babylonians - but I'm not. The term "recorded history" has
only one meaning.

Pop quiz. Which character in a Lewis Carroll novel said
'When _I_ use a word, it means just what I choose it to
mean--neither more nor less.'

Please see the NOAA "Climate of 2005 - Annual Report" and address any of
your concerns for their methodolgy directly to them.

www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/2005/ann/global.html

It's unsupported _here_. Our discussion is _here_. If you want
to use evidence, quote it here, or provide a link.
It is not my burden to discover if you are telling the truth,
it is your burden to demonstrate that you are.

I'm not going to put climate change data on here. It's already everywhere
and it's ridiculously vast. UKLC'ers are already complaining these
exchanges are too long to be followed. Referencing sources is standard
scientific practise.

It took me 5 mins to discover the lie in this claim.

Q. Why is the Gobi a desert?
A. Lack of rainfall.
Q. Why is there so little rain?
A. It's in the middle of a continent, surrounded by mountains.
Q. How do you farm (esp. rice) in a land with no rain?
A. You dig a well.
Q. What happens when "tens of millions" of people draw water
from the well?
A. It dries up.
Q. Is this anything to do with anthropogenic climate change?
A. Is it f*ck!

I thought you were insisting on keeping this scientific. I'll believe the
measurable evidence.

I'm not even going to bother with this one. Either pad it out
or keep it.

I live in Canada. Inuit communities devastated by climate change is nightly
news here. That particular quote I used came from Doug Struck, "Inuit See
Signs in Arctic Thaw", Washington Post, 22 March 2006.

Hey! No facts to back up your assertion - as usual.
(Actually I was factually wrong. Anthropogenic CO2 emmissions
constitute around _3%_ of global emmissions, not 6% .)

I stand by what the scientific community has concluded. Climate change is
man-made. Greenhouse gas levels (such as CO2) are not part of a natural
cycle.

_You_ aren't advocating anything. _You_ are merely
(mindlessly, endlessly) "reporting the facts", remember?

And, remember, adding my own bit of editorial such as I personally don't
think we're going to beat this one due to weak national and international
leadership and the influence of religions on human behaviour.

"Advocacy" is "speaking in favour of something".
It is - by definition - biased, and "economical with the truth".
That is antithetical to science.

[snip mutual rhetoric re: Author of "The End of the World is Nigh"]
You see here's where my 'Everything is a spectrum' comes into play. There
can be a few informed journalists. They are not all one way or another.

Yes, indeed there can be. I found one here...

http://www.badscience.net/?cat=25

[snip mutual rhetoric]

Great is truth and what? probity?

Truth is great and will prevail.

Sleepy - le sange est dans labre

You seem to think that taking a stand means advocacy and that it is
inherently a bad thing. Are people lobbying for greater resources to fight
the AIDS epidemic evil? (Note the XVI International AIDS Conference is
currently on here in nearby Toronto hence my topical analogy.) I work in an
energy related field and I can't possibly deny the over-whelming evidence
of climate change as it is affecting so much of the energy sector - either
because it is clear that current energy generation is causing it or that
future energy generation schemes are being designed to reduce it. It's an
invasive thing. It's the elephant in the energy board rooms. It's the
'inconvenient truth' as Al Gore called it. I'm not trying to sell it to
anyone. It just exists. I thought you'd like to know a little inside
information - namely that it's real and that it's worse than people
generally know. You seem to think that's some sort of evil advocacy. It's
my gift to you all. It's the same as if I gave you a hot tip on a stock. I
would hope you would go out and make some money from it. In this case it's
only a matter of information being valuable. Forewarned is forearmed. I let
my friends on UKLC in on something important that I have a bit of an iside
track on. That's all I'm doing when I'm not debating you, for which I
explained my motivation earlier.

Seems like some of the others are tired of all this. Maybe we should just
let it go. It is the week for ceasefires apparently.

Johnny-has-plenty-of-other-things-to-do
.

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