swansont

I fear you are completely missing the point. Thie disagreement was not over the linear-fit to the increase over the last several decades. Any function is going to look linear if you look at a short enough data set. The objection is using that linear fit as a basis for projecting a future linear increase, when the longer-term trend is clearly not linear!

Elas, I moved you last post to the thread you linked to; discussion of your work beongs there, not here.

You'll have to better define what you mean by nanotechnology. Nanofabrication has been around for decades, so it's not a new thing. Your computer's processor and memory were built using nanofabrication techniques.

Ah, I see. AIDS is manmade. Gotcha. <sigh>

You looked back three decades. Why stop there? Let's look back 50 years, and break it up into 2 sections. If we look at the graph that you cited, (using the five-year average curve to smooth things out and avoid the potential bias of choosing a particular starting year) it's pretty obvious that there is a slope change. Let's start when solar variations pretty much flattened out. From 1955-1980, the increase is about 0.2 ºC, I'll even spot you 0.05 ºC that might be there from a decrease in solar — let's call it 0.25ºC when we subtract that out. About 0.1 ºC per decade. From 1980-2005, the increase is about 0.4 ºC, or 0.16 ºC per decade, which is in the range that you've quoted. (If we change the cutoff to 1976 the slope difference gets larger.) How, exactly, you can justify a linear extrapolation of temperature, and deem it "good science"?

Name two. I wasn't talking of creating life, I was talking of extending (saving) it, allowing people to live longer. Given that the population was much flatter before the rise of science, if science took more lives than it saved, the population should go down, not up. Unless you can think of another influence on population.

And it also points to the fact that c2 is pretty big.

Asking for the source of the data represented on a graph is not refusing to accept the data. It's asking from where the data came. When Pangloss referenced some data, iNow analyzed it! How can that possibly be characterized as "refusing to accept the data?" What was being challenged was your linear projection based solely on the past behavior with no scientific justification, as we can all recall:

I can't claim any special expertise in GCMs, but AFAIK the feedback terms are named thus because they will appear due to any change in temperature, and it seems to me that cataclysmic events that would help allow you to test that, since it's unlikely to have other events that would mask them. In other models you'd look for similar behavior — any kind of single-variable "impulse" event that would allow you to test the model. Of course, if it's a system where you can control individual parameters, that makes testing a whole lot easier.

Technology makes killing more efficient, but I refer back to the question I posed earlier. If one posits that science killed more than it saved, how would one account for a tremendous increase in population?

That bears repeating. A mole of monotomic hydrogen has a mass of a gram. The sun has a mass of about 2 x 10^30 kg, so if that were all hydrogen, we're talking ~10^57 atoms. Conversion to helium only reduces that by a factor of four.

AFAIK the resolution is only now getting to the point where an earth-mass, earth-orbit planet is detectable. So I'm guessing the answer is "no."

If it's a public school he is an agent of the state.

What is the population today, and what was it 200 years ago?

While there is probably some reactions that split nuclei, they are probably classified as particle ejection reactions rather than fission, and AFAIK they would be relatively infrequent. Fusion is enabled by the conditions (i.e. high temperature and pressure) you get from sufficient compression. Fusion will supply heat, and you'll get a steady-state where the gravitational attraction is countered by the pressure from the fusion.

This is basically argument from incredulity. It does not demonstrate the existence of an ether. Difficult or not, you'd have to theoretically predict and experimentally confirm properties of the ether before you can conclude that it exists.

Establishment or free exercise? I would think it's the latter. But yes, if this is the first objection, you've got to give the teacher the opportunity to modify his behavior.

Well, you provided graphs, which is a presentation of data, but they did not say from where the data came. I can't speak for iNow, but my interpretation of that exchange is this: Without knowing which data were under scrutiny, nothing would prevent someone else coming in and using a different set of data to attempt to make a contradicting point. The thing is, there are many examples of people cherry-picking data in order to support their contention in posts/discussions elsewhere on the net. My take is this was a pre-emptive request to make sure everyone was looking at the same data, methodologies and analysis.

Everyone sits around a circle and think of the household chore they hate the most, and they write down the reason they hate it. Then everone reads their note, but prefacing it with, "I hate sex, because ..."

That's true. But you'd better be sure the summaries of those claims are accurate; the barriers to inadvertently creating strawman or otherwise invalid arguments becomes a whole lot lower when you aren't criticizing the primary work. On the other hand, you also have to be sure not to use fallacies when defending, as well. Like poisoning the well and ad hominem. That would depend on the errors, now wouldn't it? That nine errors were critiqued does not automatically imply that those were the only errors; it stands to reason that they were the largest or most obvious errors, in most need of critique, so it's possible that there were more (magazines have different space restrictions than a book). And of course there could be plenty of correct analysis that can be invalidated by a single wrong premise. Counting the number of errors critiqued is simply the wrong metric; context matters.

Ok, if you're taking the ST path. No problem; I've done that before. Just come up with a buzzword or two whenever you need to violate a law of physics. The problem of keeping the bullet from firing? "Stasis field" or a "neutrino inhibitor" (as in, neutrinos keeping the reactions from happening) , or an "annular confinement beam." Maybe the material involved is "phased matter." Have fun with it.

I was assuming the fission vaporized the water, with the resulting expansion propelling the bullet.

How do you keep the reaction from happening before you shoot?

Blue is a primary color, and more manly. Seriously, though, I think it's more from narrowing the choices to red-green-blue, rather than ROYGBIV.

The most likely reason the IPCC did not used "proven" is because, when scientists are careful in choosing their words (as they would in a paper or report) they know that nothing in science is ever proven. What science isn't based on statistical correlation and smaller scale cause-and-effect observations? That's hardly a valid criticism of this topic. But a "handful?" How many papers in a handful? I don't know what you think contitutes stopping people from saying these things. People have done research into various potential contributions (e.g. cosmic rays and solar variation) but the result is that once these contributions have been quantified, they are found not to be nearly sufficient to explain the results. If you have evidence of people being censored, provide it. But Richard Black looked into it, and found very little. You have removed the context of iNow's statement. It was rude, but it was also "You really need to support your contention or shut up about it." and came after SkepticLance had made the same contention/prediction, several times, with no science backing it up. In context, it was not, as you seem to imply, silencing the critics. There was nothing preemptive about it; it came after repeated calls for evidence. But, iNow, you could have phrased that better.