mistermack

6 minutes ago, exchemist said:

And my earlier questions? Let me repeat them for the the third time:

Do you have evidence of people being driven out, or of "new sceptics" being deterred from entering the field? Where does this come from?

I didn't respond directly, because it's a silly question. What sort of evidence do you imagine has been measured for that sort of thing. I did ADDRESS the point a day ago, in this post : 

On 2/6/2022 at 2:26 PM, mistermack said:

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. 

23 minutes ago, Peterkin said:

There are three questions: Would I do it in some imagined situation? A: Maybe.

Would I give my police force blanket permission to do if they thought it's warranted? A: No.

and Is it ethical? A: No.

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. 

5 hours ago, exchemist said:

And as I said earlier, even the oil companies acknowledge man-made climate change is real:

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. 

2 minutes ago, Prometheus said:

ignore the real world and all we have are empty words.

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.

2 minutes ago, Prometheus said:

if inflicted upon our imaginary paedophile he would have told us the location of every single child we asked about - one true positive among a forest of false positives.

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.

2 hours ago, Prometheus said:

The paper using cold immersion as a surrogate for torture was on ordinary people

But that's like saying that the paper not torturing the subjects came to the same conclusion. 

2 hours ago, Prometheus said:

There's also a historical perspective that lends credence to the scientific literature: during the witch trials women would confess to anything that they thought their torturers wanted to hear. Truth was the second victim, after the 'witches'.

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". 

11 minutes ago, iNow said:

Or a congenital insensitivity to pain… or just practice desensitizing to it. Or years of mental and mindfulness training and an ability to keep a quiet mind even in the presence of intense stimuli. Or be in a state of physical and mental shock. Or any of the countless many other things which would help one resist torture that have literally nothing whatsoever to do with motivation.  

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

8 hours ago, joigus said:

I didn't give you any negative points. I, for one, welcome scepticism.

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.

6 hours ago, Peterkin said:

Would you expect a wide, general sample?

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. 

29 minutes ago, Prometheus said:

The researchers didn't test that by undergoing torture themselves (although one paper did use cold emersion to simulate torture)- it's based primarily on observational data from different agencies that have found information obtained under torture is unreliable. There was a theoretical paper in there too. It's a sparse literature, but what evidence we have seems to suggest torture is an ineffective means of obtaining accurate information.

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. 

2 hours ago, Prometheus said:

This assumes torture actually works as a method for getting the truth. It's not an easily researchable topic, but what literature i could find suggests that it is ineffective.

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.

2 hours ago, Prometheus said:

There is also the possibility that some of the people you torture will be innocent.

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. 

1 hour ago, iNow said:

How does one objectively define torture? Understanding what’s being described is prerequisite to subjectively determining whether it’s right or wrong.

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.

8 minutes ago, TheVat said:

trying for some ad hominem tack

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. 

14 minutes ago, TheVat said:

NOWHERE IN MY POST was it suggested that "these people think so, so you should too."

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. 

On 2/5/2022 at 2:20 PM, studiot said:

Does anyone have an update on this question of whether CO₂ leads or lages temperature change ?

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. 

4 hours ago, TheVat said:

Palaeoclimate research.

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.

6 hours ago, swansont said:

But why make this about intellectual dishonesty?

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. 

52 minutes ago, swansont said:

From ~1885-1950 it’s 0.3 degrees in 65 years - 0.046 degrees per decade

From 1980-2020 it’s 0.8 degrees in 40 years - 0.2 degrees per decade

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. 

1 hour ago, exchemist said:

And what do you mean when you say there is no more certainty? I should have thought the evidence of rapid warming and increases in extreme weather events was becoming clearer by the day.

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.

6 hours ago, Bufofrog said:

Your first post is an insult to someone from a decade old post?  This should be mildly interesting....

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.  

1 hour ago, TheVat said:

learn something about the complexities

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

12 minutes ago, zapatos said:

That is really cool. I'd love to get a piece of that wood to make something! 😀

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  

44 minutes ago, zapatos said:

Interesting, as the wood from Sweet Track is soft and degraded, and cannot be easily handled unless first preserved.

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 :}