mistermack

Well, that's my position too. I've made it pretty clear in my posts that I wouldn't advocate the regular use of torture, or any kind of legalisation, as was the case under George Bush. I'm not trying to excuse torture. I'm just curious if people would never use it, even in the most extreme circumstances.

I acknowledge that man-made climate change is real. That's just an empty phrase, unless you put a quantity on it. As is so much climate propeganda. The oil companies are just there for the money. If an empty phrase gets them brownie points, they will happily comply. In the end, the public needs oil. And the public pays the bills, not the oil companies. So long as the same rules apply to all the oil companies, nothing much will hurt them.

No, I think you're dodging the real question, would you EVER authorise torture? If you are claiming that it would NEVER work, then I think that's plain wrong.

I don't recognise that as a likely situation. You can put up imaginary situations where it wouldn't work, but I am absolutely sure that I can put up imaginary situations where it would. If you are making the claim that torture would NEVER achieve the desired outcome, then I don't think that stands up. I'm asking about the situations where it's pretty obvious that it would work. You have to assume that, to anwer the question, would you EVER use it, under extreme circumstances. I've made it clear that in my case, it would be a pretty extreme situation. But if you would rather let a nuclear bomb go off in London, rather than torture the person who without any doubt was guilty of planting it, then you have to wash your hands of failing to save millions of lives, in order to maintain your principles.

But that's like saying that the paper not torturing the subjects came to the same conclusion. But in that case the 'witches' had nothing to tell. So the torture could not have worked. It seems pretty obvious that if they HAD had a secret, they would have spilled the beans. So if they had been the second pedophile, they would have given the location of the child. I think it's becoming obvious that the crisis has to be very extreme, and clear-cut, for me to go with it. But I can certainly conjure up extreme situations where I would approve torture as a very last resort. Like the classic "location of a nuclear weapon, timed to go off in London".

Are those things common then? I don't know anybody like that. I can't stand pain myself. It hurts too much.

I don't mind negatives at all, I was just referring to it, as an illustration of the kind of bullying that a skeptic would get, if there was one working in climate science today. In reality, most were eliminated more than ten years ago, and nobody in their right mind would go into climate science today, if they were not convinced by the warming argument. Life would be intolerable, and they wouldn't find work. Anybody who found themselves beginning to question it would be wise to keep quiet, keep their head down, and say nothing, or get out. There is more tolerance for atheism among priests, than there is for skepticism among climate scientists.

No. That's the point. Torture may be ineffective on the type of people who usually get tortured, while being highly effective on run of the mill cowardly people like me. So the study doesn't necessarily reflect it's effectiveness on a wide, general sample. In other words, you need a high degree of motivation to resist torture.

That might just reflect the fact that generally, people who get tortured are a fanatical lot. In other words, it's a highly selected sample. And of course, if you are torturing innocent people, then you won't get anything useful out of them.

What interests me, is the situation of the peaks in the graphs. You get a situation where the temperature graph peaks, and begins to drop like a stone. But the CO2 graph continues sharply upwards and doesn't drop for another 900 years (from memory). So you have a 900 year period, where CO2 is still rising sharply, but temperatures are plunging. And it often goes all the way, into a major glaciation. 900 years of sky-high record CO2 levels, with plunging global temperatures. Hard to match up with a world so sensitive to CO2. And worryingly, we are at a similar stage in the cycle now. Albeit with even higher CO2 levels. We could be dodging a bullet, with our CO2 emissions.

The researchers must be very brave people. And only know brave people. I can absolutely guarantee that if I was that pedo, and was threatened with torture, I would tell everything quicker than you could find a pen to write the address down. I suppose it might be different if I was in the French resistance, and the gestapo wanted the names of my comrades. But I'm pretty sure I wouldn't hold out long. That's why I said that you have to assume that you knew without any doubt that they were guilty. So that people can decide on the principle, rather than quibble about the ifs. I know in real life there are always ifs, but using them in this sort of hypothetical is dodging the right/wrong issue. Just as an add-on, if there was a referendum on the torture issue, I would vote against it. What I would do myself, and what I would vote for as a law, are two different things. I wouldn't trust other people to make a decision, but under the right circumstances, I would do it myself.

That's a difficult one. George Bush doesn't think waterboarding is torture. Even though it's designed to cause the most awful physical stress, and induce a conviction that you are dying. ( which is quite often accurate ). I'm sure that there are definitions out there, lots of them. But generally I would include pain, physical damage and fear, along with humiliation and mental stress. Looking at waterboarding, I would have to say that that is definitely torture, and George Bush should be made to try it for an hour or two. But if it was the pedophile/child example as in the OP, I would certainly approve it, or volunteer to carry it out. (not with any pleasure) I think there are certain circumstances where the end would justify the means. But then, I guess some of the Gestapo thought that too.

Certainly not. I was replying to your post as I saw it, there was not even a trace of ad hom present or intended in that. It was the emptiness of the response that I was pointing out. For someone so obviously committed to the climate change cause, who had been following it for decades, it shouldn't have been a difficult question. Fair enough, if you were busy, but there was no obligation to answer.

No, but I asked you what YOU thought, and you just replied with a link to somebody else's thoughts, presumably because you thought that they had a persuasive argument. So I don't think I was misrepresenting you at all.

I think like many other ethical questions, this question is not as simple as it sounds. Firistly, to declare my position, I don't believe anything is objectively right or wrong. The ethics, to me, come from our situation in society, and our evolution as social mammals. But in light of the human condition, is torture ever right? (and religion doesn't really have an answer, George Bush and the Spanish Inquisition come to mind) Imagine an innocent toddler has been abducted by a couple of pedophiles, and you have one in captivity, and he knows where the other is keeping the child, but he won't tell. Forgetting the legal and practical issues, if you had a free hand, (if you were dictator say) would you use torture to get the location of the child? I would. (you have to assume that there was no doubt at all that the pedophile you held was truly guilty) I would ignore the slippery slope argument, and go ahead. But I wouldn't be happy or sure about it. It's a difficult one.

Somebody asked me earlier what evidence I had that skeptics were driven out of climate science, and new ones deterred from joining. My answer is, just read back through this thread. And look at all the negative clicking, and the sheer emotion displayed on a supposedly science thread. How could anyone live with that, working every day in a climate science environment? As far as I was concerned, I was stating the bleeding obvious, but thanks everybody, for your ringing endorsement of what I wrote. Studiot, CO2 lags. If you read up on the Vostok ice cores, you wil find that it's always lagged. It's not in dispute, and it would take a monumental fraud to make the data say otherwise, so that won't happen. That was the inconvenient truth that Al Gore tried to hide, in his money-spinning "Inconvenient Truth" video. He put the CO2 and Temp vostok graphs up, and simply came out with his notorious "never mind the details" to gloss over the fact that the temperature leads, and CO2 follows, not the other way around. (historically for hundreds of thousands of years) Even today, if you look at the modern CO2 graph, and the modern temp graph, over the last 150 years, it was temperature rising first, with no significant rise in CO2 till 1950, as has been mentioned earlier in the thread. Of course, humans are now pumping out CO2 at a prodigious rate, so it's a new ball game. But the basic question of did has CO2 lagged historically, is crystal clear. Yes it has, for hundreds of thousands of years. I wouldn't claim that that fact rebuts the global warming CO2 arguments. Unless you are trying to decieve, as Al Gore was.

So nothing from you then? You don't know, but these people do? No surprise there then. That's all you get. "these people think so, so you should too". Their very first claim " The planet's average surface temperature has risen about 2.12 degrees Fahrenheit (1.18 degrees Celsius) since the late 19th century" contains the first deception. CO2 levels only started to significantly rise in 1950, but climate alarmists ALWAYS quote the rise from the late 19th century. In fact, the only years that are relevant are from 1950 till now, and they know it, but they want to mislead. I'm afraid your link is a fail, when it starts out by blatantly trying to pull the wool over my eyes. In any case, a temperature rise doesn't prove a CO2 cause. As I proved in my post above. I wouldn't dream of muscling in on your territory. You posted the graph. I commented on it. You have to expect that sort of thing.

If you look at your own graph, from 1918 to 1942 it's 0.7 degrees in 22 years - 0.3 degrees per decade. Proof that you don't any significant CO2 rise for a rapid temperature rise.

Should have thought isn't science. It's just buying into the constant drip drip. If you look at the graphs of CO2 levels against global temperatures, you will see that there was rapid warming from 1885 ish to 1950. With only very tiny increases in CO2 levels. Which PROVES that you can have rapid warming for other reasons. So you can't just point to warming as some sort of proof that CO2 is the cause. And the link to extreme weather is just someone's hypothesis. There IS no proven link. It's just repeated so many times that people think it must be right. Show me where this link is proved. Anybody ? I could mine the internet for extreme weather in the past, there was plenty of it. Dust bowl? Summer of 1976? Floods of 1947? Big UK freeze of 1963? All of it, if it happened today, would be quoted as evidence for global warming. And anyone questioning it would be called a denier. People bang on about fires in California, quoting global warming as the cause with total confidence. When these fires are occurring not far from (one of) the hottest places on Earth, Death Valley. Wikipedia says : On the afternoon of July 10, 1913, the United States Weather Bureau recorded a high temperature of 134 °F (56.7 °C) at Furnace Creek in Death Valley,[5] which stands as the highest ambient air temperature ever recorded on the surface of the Earth.[6] This reading, however, and several others taken in that period, a century ago, are in dispute by some modern experts.[7] You can see why they would like to dispute it, it doesn't fit the theory. If facts don't fit the theory, change the facts.

Agreed. Although someone new to the site might not be so aware of the dates. I'm not going to read old posts, but just offer what I think. The blue blood myth probably arose because the nobility prized a lilly-white skin as a sign of status. That would have been rare in the old days, as working people were more outdoorsey back then. So the sight of blue veins showing through a pale skin gave rise to the royal blue-blood story. That's my guess anyway.

Just to update this thread : I looked at the free offerings for a backup software, and ended up using Macrium Reflect, which is available as a free download. As usual, you get more with the paid version, but the free version is I think as good as it gets. There are no nasty surprises, it does what it says on the tin. I particularly like it because it will clone a disk, I bought a pc with Windows 10 installed on a 2TB hard disk, and wanted to clone that to an SSD, which makes it all so much faster. It did that, no problem, and the SSD booted up and ran just like the original 2TB hard disk. You can also create an image, to save and use later. And you can do an incremental backup, but I haven't tried that yet. The reports on Macrium were very good, and using it, I have to agree, and recommend it.

OK. What is the biggest and best piece of evidence you can quote me, for CO2 causing a warming disaster this century?

You can buy it. This isn't Irish, it's from the Ukraine, so you might have to do a deal with Putin : https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/153666279646?hash=item23c73958de:g:0pwAAOSwIvddkqrv

Yes, they had to treat the wood from the Mary Rose for a year or more with preservative, to stabilise it, although that was salt water. I suppose it depends how stable and how boggy the conditions are. Bog oaks in Ireland vary from 3,000 to 8,000 years old. We had quite a bit of it on our farm. We had a relatively small area of bog where my uncle used to cut turf. I asked him why he didn't burn it and he said that you couldn't cut it without destroying a chain of a chain saw, so it was just left lying around. Wikepedia says : Water flow and depth play a special role in the creation of bog-wood. Currents bind the minerals and iron in the water with tannins in the wood, naturally staining the wood in the process. This centuries-long process, often termed "maturation," turns the wood from golden-brown to completely black, while increasing its hardness to such a level that it can only be carved with the use of specialty cutting tools.[1] You can make stuff out of it though :

I was never good enough to busk really, but I found that you just needed to play one snatch of music fairly well. Most passers by only ever heard about thirty seconds of music, they didn't know that that was all you had. I was like a stuck record. Money wise, it was the place and time that was as important as the quality. My absolute favourite place was on Charing Cross railway bridge. Tacked on to the side was a pedestrian walkway, that was very narrow, but had a few places where it widened out. Most of the time it was pretty average, but when the Royal Festival Hall finished a big concert, you could make a real killing as the people streamed across to catch their trains. I remember, a Deep Purple concert broke my record for takings. They must have been good, because the people were in a great mood that night. This is what it looks like now, much more de-luxe :