goDel

It is interesting to hear a lawyer defend the Barr-position. Which is fair, I guess. But strangely distinct from what Mueller himself argues. In the end it was always going to be about congress and impeachment. No surprises here. But Barr's position, or rather exoneration, makes it all the more difficult to get there. It's no wonder congress want those financial records and takes a more broad approach, instead of just going with Mueller's report. They're probably arguing they need more than just the report to win over public opinion. Especially now that the AG says: nothing's there. Ignoring whether that is actually the case or not, the fact the AG says this means a lot in and of itself. It simply carries a lot of political weight. As it should.

The characterization of Mueller was also pretty revealing, btw. Interesting read.

haven't heard the dj food remix. but if you haven't checked this album, i guess you should. or must. ;) https://www.fsoldigital.com/product/by-any-other-name/

ok... i assumed it was more about barr's handling of the report at this point. barr's "summary" and mueller letter as a response. thought he was going to clear that up. the report should speak for itself.

feels like it, doesn't it ?

It's a 4 page thread? I started f-ing things up on the second page, if thats what your asking. ?

Not sure what the deal with formal verification is in the context of AI, to be honest. Think about the Turing-test. The starting idea for proving AI was an informal verification. So what's the use of a formal one? A recent article about verifiability could give some insight: https://www.quantamagazine.org/computer-scientists-expand-the-frontier-of-verifiable-knowledge-20190523/ The thing with AI however, is that it goes beyond problems with answers which can be good or bad. Verification becomes subjective, instead of objective. Like earning a drivers license, in a way. Driving a car is different to solving a mathematical problem. Btw, there are plenty of initiatives to unblack-box those deep neural nets, btw. Example: https://www.quantamagazine.org/been-kim-is-building-a-translator-for-artificial-intelligence-20190110/

hey caze, thanks for the response, but lets play nice. no need for the " have you even read it yourself!?". the link showed the discussion of whether or not to start at 0 matters. and explains there's more to it than just "it's irrelevant" and "there's nothing happening below so you can skip it". which was what you were arguing. right? and btw, i wasn't arguing to always start at zero. so please don't put me into that box. the point was: it depends. which implies that the message of the visualisation is key in making decisions like that. imo, that is way more nuanced than "there's nothing happening below, so you are allowed to skip". blindly following that logic you'd be happy with that fox example. which you won't argue, i'm sure. not trying to put words in your mouth, just following the logic of your initial statement. following your argument: if there's a 35% increase, like you say, you'd need a similar impact on temperature, one might argue. looking at temperatures, I've seen numbers of 288K avg from year 1800 to 288.8K now (increase 0.8K in 200 years). certainly no 35% increase. so lets call it 3%. is there also a significant hockeystick visible in global temperatures? it changes, yes. but is the change big enough to rise above the level of uncertainty within the data? lets use the nasa page as a reference for a bit https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/world-of-change/DecadalTemp the link on nasa is interesting because it is open about it's assumptions. one of them being: sounds like a poor reference to me, btw. i can understand the pragmatism behind it. but from a scientific point of view, it's a really weak argument, imo. we can't falsify whether it's a good or bad reference. the 3 decade period itself is debatable. and it's debatable to define that period as "normal". we really don't have a good normal. and therefore, it's unscientific, imo. it's political. and perhaps even very anthropocentric. the point is, i'm not convinced about hockeysticks, tbh. i'll come back to this point later, because the malkovich-science is relevant for the hockeystick discussion. the milankovitch graph: "long-scale, slow moving, fluctuations" is not what milankovich predicts, btw. the 41k cycle (or the 100k cycle) might take long, but that's different to "slow moving". as there are multiple parameters which can inhibit or enhance each other. allowing for sudden changes when they do enhance. than there's also stuff about positive and negative feedback loops with other factors influencing climate. which is also visible in the graph. the warming spikes come relatively sudden. and they tend to be followed by a slower drop off. temperatures tend to drop slowly, and rise pretty steep, i'd argue. which is especially visible in the pleistocene period, btw. The period before has a different scaling such that you can't really tell what's going on there. (which is why i'd prefer an x-axis with a uniform scale. but lets skip the dataviz arguments for a bit) more recent, given the greenland temps (NGRIP, light bleuish/green) there have been a number of "hockeystick" events in the past (holocene, 15k/10k years ago) the blue one also, but less pronounced. the odd thing, to me, is the relative stability in the last 10k years. just from looking at this graph alone, this relative stability is an anomaly on it's own. so the upwards curve (although too short, id argue), ironically, is more a return to the usual change. and the anomaly is the relative stability of the last 10k years. sounds like im trolling here, but there is some logic here. like it or not. so, if change in climate is a given, stability is the anomaly. our current hockeystick might not be as unique as assumed. and this is also problematic with choosing the 1950-1980 period as the normal, btw. add to this that our hockeystick starts exactly at the moment we start recording temperatures (1800ish). so the assumption we're in a unique hockeystick, which is caused by humans/greenhouse gas seems premature to begin with. we can't even tell whether this anomaly is significant with respect to the normal variation as far as i can tell. we lack the data to be able to establish that. there's simply not enough evidence one way or the other. and again, this also goes back to the discussion on what is "normal". i think it's fair to argue, the normal is very much an anthropocentric one. which is understandable. but a political choice. not scientific. looking at the projections (2050, 2100) it's not difficult to conclude they seem highly dependant on those studies based on the change in the last 200 years. and again, it simply boils down to extrapolating the change from the last 200 years into the future. i'm simply not convinced this is right, at this point. are these projections also assuming the 1951-1980 period to be "normal"? you've made some comments about those projections as well. and they seemed sensible, so lets leave it at that. so the argument becomes "but the scientific community says". and my answer is: that's actually problematic because it has become too politicised. unscientific stuff is mixed with the science. read the first paragraph of the nasa page, for instance. it explicitly leaves open the cause for the rise in temperature (could be normal variation, it even says!). is that a scientific statement, or a political one? fact is, i can't tell. which is deeply troubling. what nasa says, should be based on science. now i read that first paragraph, and i'm forced to wonder whether that's the science, or some watered down version which is politically safe. the same holds for the ipcc reports, btw. science mixed with politics. that's just plain awful, imo. science has become harder to trust as a consequence. and climate science in particular, has become as trustworthy as medical science, for instance. which is problematic. coming back to my first post, science should be open to contrarianism. which it is not the case in the context of climate science. from the perspective of a contrarian, the current consensus could also imply a strong bias within the community. driven by politics and the goal to publish and get funding for more research, instead of the science itself. (again, take the medical science community as an example here. the impact of bias is big) to think even that consensus itself is part of science. karl popper would turn in his grave! lastly, despite my criticisms wrt paris agreement, i do think it's politically better to keep it in place. (although i'd prefer a less outcome driven approach) not because of the science. but because of the politics. it would really help though if people stop bullying others with a bit of a sceptic outlook on these issues. scepticism is healthy. in both ways. (read: don't you f-ing agree with me!) don't think i'll be responding as extensive as i have. i only hope it's ok to be sceptic. people can have a healthy sense of scepticism wrt the climate issues without being alt-right/populist/nationalist/whatever is essentially all i'm arguing here. others might just trust on the scientific consensus. that's also fine. this is not some snarky argument to prove my opinion is better than others. i just tend to be a bit more sceptical. rightfully or wrongfully. and that should be ok on itself, i'd argue. or rather, should be welcomed even.

if you want to see some nobel laureates making similar argument, go to youtube and search for "nobel climate". also, here in the netherlands there's quite a bunch of people in science very sceptic about climate science. which results amongst other things in netherlands really toetailing the international community in implementing policies, btw. it's not just politicians, it's also the experts being more sceptic. now, you might argue the experts in the netherlands are a bunch of idiots. fair, i guess. but please take into account that rising sea levels is pretty important for a country half of which is below current sea levels. we tend to take that stuff seriously. believe it or not.

about the malkovich thing: you there's still stuff that needs to be explained. i mentioned this earlier as well, btw. it explains a lot. which is something as it spans more than 200 million years. to give a sense of the scale. and again, the importance is that even without the human-impact factor, we still don't fully understand the changes from the past. to a large extent it's malkovich, but not everything. so my critique was wrt to current human-impact theories is that apart from the lack of historical data (since we started f-ing with fossil fuel is simply too short), we don't know the full story about what the world would look like without human involvement with screwing the environment. which is necessary, i'd argue. so the problem with current models explaining human-impact is that it is based on such a small timescale, that it's mostly trying to model noise in a way. climate change works over 10.000s years. i could understand the argument however when you say: that might be, but the current anomalies wrt greenhousegasses is really concerning. what could happen? that's fair. but the imo honest scientific explanation is: we don't know. and at this point we return to the paris agreement. where i'd argue: yeah, lets do something about co2 and what not. but please, don't argue we can have a serious impact on the way the current climate is changing. really, it's more rational to assume the impact is going to be immeasurably small.

about y-axis not starting at 0 It matters in terms of visual interpretation. i'll put the rest into spoilers, because you'll prolly get the gist of where i'm going with this. Similar argument holds for the x-axis for the other chart. it's just not good dataviz practice to do this. because it forces the viewer to correct these changes in their head when interpreting. for example, when you're wondering whether there are anomalies, or interested in the stability of certain trends. whether you agree with me or not, when visualising you're looking for patterns and (relative) changes. if you have an x-axis where stuff like this happens, you change the visual patterns. and patterns you see can become meaningless. it goes against the goal of visualising. if we're looking for a hockeystick in the multimillion year chart with a uniform x-axis, you're not going to find it. and what's interesting in the current chart, is if you look at the periodic spikes in temperature starting from a million years back, you see an increase in maximum temperature during the warm spikes. and if you compress the x-axis such that it's the same to the one last used in pleistocene, we're living in a spike starting 20.000 years ago. Coming back to those hockeysticks, what strikes me is that you can't see the medieval warmer period and the little ice age following. at least not in the sense of the other graph with different studies/temperatures. scaling is important here though! (again) so to make a fair visual comparison, it'd be interesting to plot the greenhouse gasses similarly to the global temp. meaning in terms of absolute anomaly (compared to the average, i guess). currently, the correlation is rather poor, if you ask me. greenhouse gasses has been stable until recently, while on the other hand we had a medieval warm period followed by a little ice age. wouldn't it be fair to see a stronger effect? especially when making an argument for the importance of greenhouse gasses! there might be some wobbles during the little ice age, but the amount of methane seems to grow during the little ice age. nitros oxide as well, i'd argue. you can discuss about co2 as there's more going on. but let me put it this way, we didn't have a medieval warm period and a little ice age because of changes in greenhouse gasses. by visually comparing you'd come to the conclusion greenhouse gasses played a week role in those climate changes. it's more likely stuff happening which caused greenhouse gas levels to change during those event. in all fairness, the hockeystick at the end is an entirely different beast. and to be clear, i do think it's fair to do something about it. (but again, stop calling that climate change policies. it's about the environment, stupid.) @chenGOD: malkovich-cycles are bigger (rise in temp roughly factor 10) than the ones we're seeing since year 0. from a malkovich perspective, there's not much of a hockeystick. yet.

scary how the technology is improving..

don't forget to read this part

yeah. great work guys. critical thinking is big around here. ;)

Also, this chart comes from the wiki page about the little ice age. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age) It doesn't specify the meaning of those different lines. That thick black line is that the global average temperature measured from 1800? Those other lines seem to get stuck around 0 at the year 2000. Without the black line, the hockeystick is basically gone as those other lines have returned to pre-little ice age levels. Perhaps i'm reading this wrong, but i haven't seen a good explanation other than "different studies". Also from that page: Yeah, tentatively. Or in other words, we're still doing research because we don't know. (here comes that question again on what the scientific community currently broadly agrees, because it's still not clear to me, tbh.) If you want to continue this discussion, that's fine. But I hope you at least understand my scepticism by now. You don't have to agree with me or anything. I mean, I'm more in the I don't know camp. But that's a camp that's different to the "believe in climate policies" camp. With respect to the political side of the debate, I'd prefer to talk about policies about energy and the environment. If government could come to agreements on those issues I'm happy. Policies with respect to climate change however seems rather cartoon like in its understanding of climate change itself. Especially when you consider politics works in 4-year cycles. Every 4 years there's another government. 4 years. That's nothing in milankovitch cycles. Politics and climate change is a silly combination.

First: look at the scales of the x and y axes on all the charts you've posted. the milankovitch cycles chart has different scales on the x-axis. which distorts the image and therefore what you read into it. The hockeystick curves: in the last graph you have two different y's and both of them don't start at zero. Which is important to notice when trying to understand what you're looking at and how big the effect is. It basically makes the spike appear bigger than it is. which is unnecessary btw, as even with the y-axes starting at 0, the spike would still be visible. although less pronounced. And wrt respect to the hockey stick: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockey_stick_controversy Which is basically what the threadstarter was about as well. Apart from scientific controversy, it's a highly politicised issue. Obviously. And as such, I'm merely a sceptic. Which is based on a number of issues already explained. Apart from ignoring evidence on other factors influencing climate change (milankovitch), and starting at year 0, it looks at smaller differences as well. So the focus is on the last 2000 years and differences of .5 degrees instead of the 5-10 F of the milankovitch cycle. You should ask yourself how fast climate has changed on average in the last 250 mln years (how many years did it take to change 5F). And than look at those other charts. Is that hockeystick noise, or evidence of an outlier. My argument would be that we actually don't know. And can't know. Simply because the differences in timescale.

(d) This strategy involved energy and climate policy including the so called 20/20/20 targets, namely reduction of greenhouse gas emissions (by 20%), the increase of RES(renewables) share (to 20% on the basis of consumption)[17] and the increase of energy efficiency, thus, saving up to 20% in the energy consumption Countries furthermore aim to reach "global peaking of greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible". The agreement has been described as an incentive for and driver of fossil fuel divestment.[18][19] The Paris deal is the world's first comprehensive climate agreement.[20] The agreement assumes a level of impact on climate change we can't predict. Again, I'm all for a global energy deal. And a global less-polution/improved sustainability deal. A global climate deal, no. If that makes you think I'm in the box of climate change deniers, or that strawman/stereotype you mentioned, well, that's sad. As that's not a good representation of my thinking. But if you want to stereotype me that way, the joke's on you, I guess. I do think however, this way of thinking is part of why people are more and more going into extreme groups in the political sphere. Just put a label on the other side of the argument, and voila. We've won the argument. Nothing against you, mr very honest. I just hope it's OK that i'm a bit of a sceptic wrt climate policies.

i think we have to be specific about what 99% (or 97%) of the science community actually says. because i believe there is a lot of confusion about that. they agree we caused a rise in co2 levels, i'm sure. greenhouse gas principle as well. and i wasn't claiming the opposite, btw. in my experience, people often say you shouldn't be sceptical because all the scientists agree. without actually knowing what they agree on. and where they don't agree. isn't it obvious that climate is influenced by both those milankovitch cycles and greenhouse gas principles (and perhaps some more processes)? it's not an either/or. and if that's obvious, any model explaining (or predicting) something should contain all those principles, i'd argue. a model purely based on the greenhouse gas principle is limited.

look at the paris agreement. it's not a strawman to look at a global commitment to reducing co2 levels within the next x years in order to reduce global temperatures. it's fine to do common sense stuff wrt to energy policies. i support those in a heartbeat. but the climate part of the agreement makes no sense to me, however. sorry. the idea humanity can limit the growth of the global average to 2C is just silly. that's not going to happen. regardless of the policy. which, i'd argue, is also way beyond what the science community says.

it's not an either/or thing. if there are equations predicting global temperatures based on greenhouse gasses, i'd argue those models are just as reliable as those in 2007 that predicted the economy would keep on growing and everything was going fine. all brilliant equations by brilliant people. which turned out wrong. thing is, science is about explaining. predicting is mostly pseudo science. that's running the numbers and hoping that extrapolating patterns in the historical data will predict the future. Which is fine and all, but just like in 2007, it matters a lot which data you're using and how much history you take into account. there's no guarantee a model made on 2000 years worth of data will be useful the make any predictions. especially when the underlying causality is still not understood enough. That's not to argue greenhouse gasses aren't important. That's to argue we don't know how important. Because of the complexity.

Look, I don't want to be the idiot pulling his middle finger while continuing to burn fossil fuel. Thing is, if you look at the research/evidence on milankovitch cycles, you'll notice there are still a number of issues. Stuff we can not explain well. Changes in climate which aren't explained properly. The important thing to take away from that, imo, is that these unexplainable changes were taking place long before we discovered oil. Or in other words, there are changes we still can't explain which are outside of human influence. I'd consider that a problem. Because, nowadays, any degree the climate gets hotter (or colder?) will be directly blamed on human activity. Which is nonsense. We're still not in a position to explain these changes properly.

you have to take milankovitch cycles into account, to begin with. second, you're arguing it's predictable in terms of chemistry and unpredictable in terms of climate change. what is it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles

No disagreement on human impact on co2 levels. Just that the milankovitch parameters are way more important with respect to causing changes in climate. The Al Gore story about temperatures following the co2 levels is just bonkers. We would have been fried by now. Correlation is no causation. It's hard to pinpoint the exact influence of humans on climate change. Any outcome will likely be within the margin of error, I'd argue. Just like the impact of any policy will have wrt reducing co2 levels. We're looking at this issue at timescales less than 100 years, which imo, is nonsense. Climate will keep on following milankovitch cycles and a next ice age will come eventually. Climate scientists in the 70s/early 80s of last century were even thinking we were already moving into the next one. As climate seemed to be getting colder at that point in time. Which only shows one of the big issues when it comes to following climate changes on a smaller timescale. There just isn't any model with 200 years of data which is sufficient in explaining what's going on, or predicting where we're heading. The best models in explaining climate change are based on the milankovitch parameters and cover periods 100K/millions of years. As far as I'm concerned, science isn't there yet to explain changes in smaller timescales. At least, I haven't seen convincing evidence. They are trying though. But if the next decade will show a global cooling, which is a possibility, we can't explain why and worse, some might argue the next ice age might be coming (or some other end of the world scenario).

Well, don't expect a big difference in outcomes if you do invest. Sea levels will rise until a next ice age. And given the Milankovitch-cycles/parameters that might take a while. But the thing is, all the hysteria really gets annoying after a while. Just implement some common sense policies. And don't confuse energy policies with climate policies. This false sense of urgency where we can actually keep the sea levels from rising is just silly, imo.

Dug this thread from the grave just to check where people are on the climate issue nowadays. Myself, when I saw Al Gores inconvenient truth back in the days, I was pretty much a believer. But recently, I've become more a sceptic. And apart from the "why" it struck me how people in general don't accept scepticism any more, and you're immediately put in the box of racists/alt-right/populists. Really insane. Similar to the leaked mails from the thread starter. To the point I know it's better to shut up. I'm not against saving the environment though. No problems with putting effort into initiatives to reduce pollution and minimize the use of fossil fuels. It's just the level of -imo- dishonesty about what we could do to curve climate change. And what the science actually says. If people are interested I could go into detail on why I've become a sceptic. But it's probably better to feel the temperature first. More sceptics around here?