Aussie Climate Scientists Receiving Death Threats 638
An anonymous reader writes "With the Australian parliament beginning the debate on setting a carbon price, climate scientists are reporting an increase in threatening phone calls and even death threats. The threats are serious enough that several universities have increased security for their ecology and meteorology researchers. The Australian government is seeking to introduce a carbon tax by July 2012."
Its getting to the point where (Score:5, Funny)
...a guy isn't safe checking his wet dry hygrometer in the morning.
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Lets blow up all the hygrometers so bad weather can never happen again!
It's too late ... the work has been published ... (Score:3)
To the people making threats:
The scientists' work has already been published. They can't revoke those publications no matter how much you threaten them. You may discourage them from publishing more work, but that doesn't take back what has already been said. On the other hand, you may also make them more zealous in defending their cause. This isn't only bad for you, but it's bad for science. Either way it's a lose-lose situation, so use your conscience and don't make threats.
Re:It's too late ... the work has been published . (Score:4, Insightful)
Many activists are more interested in making grand gestures and gaining status within their own organisation, than bringing about actual change. Even terrorist organisations tend to follow this pattern.
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Security... (Score:2)
Any murderer worth his salt will get them while they are at home...
Re:Security... (Score:4, Informative)
Diabolical super-criminals with a grudge against weather scientists are pretty rare. Stupid ones are much more common.
I think these guys are probably safe - basically if someone holding a gun in one hand and a picture of you in the other asks you if you're 'you', point the other direction, say "I think I saw him go that way" and just keep walking.
Scientific debate, huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
In the beginning, there was only climate science.
Then came some skeptics, and all was well. And the discussion was between scientists.
Then came some denialists, and all was not well. The discussion was now between politicians.
Now come the death threats, and all is getting worse. The discussion is now between activists.
What's next? Violence? And a 'discussion' between armies?
I'm so glad to see that a lack of knowledge does not hold the world back from taking violent action.
-- Is there any record of a scientist who threatens a religious leader for not agreeing with the Books of Science?
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I think Dawkins has come close to punching a few of them.
Re:Scientific debate, huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
You'd think Dawkins would get along fine with religious leaders, seeing how they have the most dominant personality trait in common: neither can stand people not caring about what they care about.
Re:Scientific debate, huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
What a bizarre argument. There is obviously a difference. Atheists not believing in something does not lead directly to immoral behaviour and the persecution of others. Christians discriminate against women and homosexuals, and they seek to impose their dogma on others.
The typical response at this point is that atheism is as much dogma and seeks to impose its will on other too, but that is incorrect. Since there is no God to hand down morality and punish you for disagreeing everything is up for debate and only a persuasive argument will work.
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Just like with religious people there are many different types of atheists. Not all, heck not even many are of the type you describe. I know I cringe when I see people on TV claiming to speak in God's name about things and they are full of hatred and anger. These two things have no place in Christianity as Christ commanded us to love those that hate us. It's hard to do sometimes but all that hatred is a poison to the soul. Most atheists I find hate any mention of God and react almost violently to any m
Re:Scientific debate, huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Christ commanded us
There is the problem. Christ can't be wrong because he is he son of God, therefore what he said must be true*. Fortunately in this case the message is a good one, but not all of them are.
* Or rather, what the Bible claims he said, and with any modifications various saints/popes/copyists/translators made along the way. You have no way of knowing for certain.
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Most atheists
...who make themselves known to you as atheists - ie. a self selecting sample of activist atheists.
I think you'll find most atheists just don't care.
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I think you'll find that the existence of extremists who happen to agree with you is not your fault. The GP didn't associate himself with certain groups.
Re:Scientific debate, huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
there are many different types of atheists
Actually, there are just two types: those that disbelieve all religions, and those that disbelieve all except for one religion. For some reason, the latter category don't like being labeled atheists though.
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there are many different types of atheists
Actually, there are just two types: those that disbelieve all religions, and those that disbelieve all except for one religion.
No, by definition, those are monotheists. Atheists believe either that there is no god or that god is impossible; neither group disbelieves all but one religion. English? You fail it.
Re:Scientific debate, huh? (Score:5, Informative)
No you fail at comprehension. It was a joke. The reason a Christian doesn't believe in thousands of different gods is pretty much the same as the reason the atheist doesn't believe in them.
The only difference is that the atheist also doesn't believe in the Christian god.
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It's a modification of the quote:
"I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours"
Stephen Roberts
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I truly can't say if you honestly believe in this absurd oversimplification, or if this is supposed to a parody [wikipedia.org].
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I'm not going to argue semantics with you. Answer my point directly.
Go to any forum where atheists and theists debate each other and watch the arguments used. Are they persuasive?
You seem to think that "atheism" is some kind of group or philosophy. It isn't, it is merely non-belief in theism, i.e. God. It does not represent any group, any philosophy, merely a lack of faith in a higher power. So either you are saying that people who don't believe in God are not persuasive about anything, or you hold this mistaken belief.
I am an Atheist because I do not follow any religion or believe in God, but that says almost nothi
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Yeah but I think that's more about trying to knock some sense into them for their own good than doing them harm.
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I've said it before and I'll say it again.
Science will not cure politics.
Politics will corrupt science.
Why are scientists calling for a carbon tax?
It's a serious question. It's all fine to be a scientists and seek truth about how our world works. But far too many scientists are going well beyond this and into policy advocacy.
Some cheer this. As a engineer and lover of science, I resent it. It will corrupt the field of science. Power always does.
I believe global warming is occurring. The scientific fa
Why in Australia? (Score:2)
Hey, didn't British send their common criminals to Australia, religious nuts and crooks to America? With only two latter conditions being hereditary? Australians were supposed to be the sane ones!
Re:Why in Australia? (Score:5, Informative)
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Hey, didn't British send their common criminals to Australia, religious nuts and crooks to America? With only two latter conditions being hereditary? Australians were supposed to be the sane ones!
TFA
University of NSW senior psychology lecturer Jason Mazanov said the emails were indicative of a ''closed room'' mentality where people have lost all sense of what is normal.
They must've been originated from America: with this big space available, the Australian can't stand closed rooms...
US and Australian problems (Score:2)
The problem with Australia, strangely, is very different. It is not at all about criminals; it is because Australia is a society based on working class British culture which used to be highly unionised. Australians see high incomes and profligate use of
Death worth? (Score:2, Funny)
How many carbon credits can i claim if i kill someone?
Gotta be worth something... They won't be producing carbon ever again. Just maybe some methane as they rot.
Cognitive dissonance endgame (Score:5, Informative)
As the facts continue to mount against them, these groups...
Climate change skeptics
Evolution denialists
"Birthers" (USA only)
become increasingly more extreme due to cognitive dissonance. I guess the end is when they can no longer even separate the facts from the messengers and having lost the factual battle seek to strike back in any way they can.
How pathetic.
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Re:Cognitive dissonance endgame (Score:5, Informative)
nobody is denying climate change, they are only challenging the cause of it
Balls.The litany has gone:
It's not happening
It's not our fault
It's all for the better
It's not worth worrying about
I's too late, there's nothing we can do.
(I've seen people make most or all of these contradictory claims in a thread. Sometimes multiple ones in the same message.
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I am fairly sure any level of honest investigation on this subject by anyone with reason and understanding of the difference between faith and science, will find themselves yelling in favour of prevention of this experiment during their or their descendants time on earth.
The arguments against action on climate
Great (Score:5, Insightful)
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On the other hand we keep voting in people with green policies. Must be some psychological factor at work which makes it easier for us to do the right thing collectively but not individually.
Re:Great (Score:4, Insightful)
It just depends on the change. The threats in Australia are currently misguided aggression towards the retarded carbon tax policy that is being proposed by the government.
The current proposal is a tax on carbon. Oh but don't worry, apparently the actual polluters (people) won't be out of pocket, they are only taxing the producers. The way they will manage the increase in energy costs is ... tax rebates for the people. So you tax the producers, and then return the tax collected to the people to offset the costs which have been passed on to them.
The end result of all of this is that the producers charge more to break even. The consumers (polluters) will either be compensated completely (the poor), or compensated partially (the middle class and the rich). What is left over for "green innovation"? Less than 10% of the tax collected. What a bargain for bureaucracy.
There's one other key player though, customers who can't claim money back through the tax return. That has the net effect of simply disadvantaging Australia, a country that generates a large portion of its wealth through mining and energy exports. In the meantime the two biggest polluters in the world are effectively pissing the Kyoto protocol against the wall.
It may sound selfish but as much as the world needs to stop polluting, all this is going to achieve is to grossly disadvantage the country in a time where energy resources (its greatest export) is one of the most critical agendas in international politics. There has got to be a better way.
Global warming is not the big problem (Score:3, Insightful)
While I think it's great people want to get involved with the environment, stop and think about this like a computer scientist.
If carbon dioxide produces global warming, we will run into problems as the ratio of humans to trees changes. Soon we will have more humans than trees, which means more carbon dioxide than nature can re-absorb.
The only solution is for us to use less land, and have more trees on it, which requires we have fewer humans.
We're like an obese person on a sofa who can't stop spreading out over the whole thing. Soon there will be no sofa left, only fat. What then?
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Turnabout (Score:3, Interesting)
Go find a medical researcher who works with animals and ask him for his death threat collection....
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Chilling effect (Score:4, Informative)
Meanwhile, floods [bbc.co.uk] and fires [chron.com] continue. I have always thought that the first major impact on society will be on food supplies, with a concomitant increase in food prices [telegraph.co.uk]. This will at first bring civil unrest [telegraph.co.uk] in poorer countries, as food takes up an increasingly large proportion of their livelihood. Eventually these high food prices will have a severe economic impact [un.org] on wealthy nations as well.
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But can you with any precision show that even 1 of these was due to the increased CO2 levels in the atmosphere. I mean even a single ONE?
Science is all about probabilities. Bertrand Russell thought that science was inductive, meaning it can only ever give probabilities. So your implicit cry for "proof" of association rings hollow. What is important is the trend. Any single data point in an experiment has error, that is it has only a certain probability of being near the "true" value. However, we can combine multiple measurements, multiple points to see a trend or a pattern. The individual error in single measurements or events becomes
Tree Planting? (Score:5, Interesting)
FTA: "One researcher told of receiving threats of sexual assault and violence against her children after her photograph appeared in a newspaper article promoting a community tree-planting day as a local action to mitigate climate change."
Death threats for planting trees? WTF?
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No.
Next question?
Re:Whichever (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Whichever (Score:5, Informative)
And you're so sure because? Of what. A two letter word? Sorry doesn't wash. "Climate scientists" in australia have been doing the same thing as their colleagues have been in the UK, US, and in Canada. Refusing to disclose data including methodology for years.
Actually they have been disclosing their methodologies for years. As one would expect from papers submitted to various peer reviewed journals. That isn't quite the same as feeling inclined to satisfy arbitrary, time consuming FOIA requests from armchair bloggers who want the data merely to nitpick it. It's funny how the so-called "climategate" email leak didn't unveil some vast librul conspiracy. What it did reveal was a bunch of scientists bitching in private about armchair bloggers wasting their time with specious FOIA requests.
Re:Whichever (Score:4, Interesting)
All the above isn't joke, and you can't just dismiss all these facts because you trust blindly only one side. Recognize that it's a highly politicized field, and that we should be extremely careful reading each results, and we SHOULD ASK and CHECK FOR THE DATA. There's no other field on science where this doesn't happen. Why should we do an exception for climatology?
Please don't reply with insults, I'm sick of it, and FYI, I'm not on any side of this, I just think a CO2 tax isn't a good answer, and that currently, there's NO consensus and we should ask for more research, AND THE DATA that goes with it.
Re:Whichever (Score:4, Interesting)
It's very clear from a quick google of Vincent Courtillot that his opinions are not held in high regard by climate scientists. Indeed one of the leaked emails suggests Phil Jones rejected one of his papers as "awful".
Of course Phil Jones doesn't like Courtillot, because he has a complete different opinion as his, and he is giving out numbers, curves, and plausible scientific explanations on what he says, WITH the data together.
Therefore why should a scientist bend over backwards to satisfy his requests?
Maybe because:
- It may give a chance to anyone to prove or disprove what has been researched
- It is what everybody does on all science field
- Because your dislike of someone who doesn't agree with you isn't a scientific argument
- Because it's public financed research
- Because it's the only way to do a satisfying peer review
I do agree that some protocol should be put in place for scientists to release data and in return to be immune from being pestered by FOIA requests but that's a separate topic altogether, and certainly does not imply that absence of arbitrary-data-request-being-satisfied that somehow it implies conspiracy.
Come on! Nobody is pretending we are in a James Bond movie. We are just saying that the head of the IPCC is refusing to have his work peer-reviewed by people he dislike, or who will have enough knowledge to redo all the calculation and maybe disagree. That's important! It's not at all what you just wrote. We aren't just talking about the average scientist here, but THE HEAD OF THE IPCC, Phil Jones. To date, we still don't have his data (unless I'm mistaking), even after the leaks. Shame on these researchers.
The UEA emails don't reveal any "smoking gun" at all, just a bunch of scientists engaged in technical, mundane and occasionally bitchy chitchat with their peers.
It does reveal however that Jones doesn't like his opponents to peer review his work, and is hiding behind copyright.
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Re:Whichever (Score:5, Insightful)
Are these the same guys who've been refusing SOI/FOIA requests because they claim that their work which is publically funded is 'proprietary'? Or are these the same ones from aussieland that made up the shit including forging the emails that they were being harassed.
No and even if they were that wouldn't justify sending them death threats. Also it doesn't seem to have come up on Slashdot yet, but the CSIRO has opened a site at http://www.csiro.au/greenhouse-gases/ [csiro.au] where you can view the raw information about green house gas concentrations that has been collected in Australia.
Then again I can't really feel too much sympathy. People will only take a decade or two(maybe three) of doom and gloom based on fudged numbers, and corrupted policies. Especially when they realize that what you're proposing will effectively bankrupt the entire country and turn it into a 3rd world dirt farming nation.
Step 1. Build a global conspiracy supported by every major research organisation world wide suggesting that emitting large amounts of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere is going to affect the climate and don't forget to suppress the voices of the brave and heroic rouge scientists and oil company researchers who attempt to reveal your conspiracy.
Step 2. Have governments world-wide introduces nation-bankrupting schemes to charge (some) people who bump lots of carbon into the atmosphere for that privilege.
Step 3. ???
Step 4. Profit!
Or something like that right? Looking at other countries, like for example NZ, which has a very very similar scheme to what is being discussed in Australia, the results so far have been positive, or is that just more misinformation?
Hell you don't even need to believe in climate change to see the need to encourage the uptake of more renewable energies. Global coal, oil, gas and uranium stocks are predicted to run out in the next few hundred years. In the meantime as demand continues to rise, prices will go up and countries which don't have alternatives will hurt (a lot in the nation bankrupting sense).
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Global coal, oil, gas and uranium stocks are predicted to run out in the next few hundred years.
Rest of it is half plausible, but running out of uranium in the next few hundred years? using fast breeder reactors? not likely.
It is still finite of course, but it will last a shite sight longer than all the other things you mentioned by almost an order of magnitude.
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The tactics of the eu far left benefited the other side, in case you didn't notice. Ditto for the neonazis. People get pissed when you blow them up, no matter what your political reasons are.
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Yo. Conservative checking in. There's no hatred of science. There's a dislike of fudged numbers, BS, doom and gloom, including the usual "If we don't..." and "we'll be drowning in 10 years, no wait 30 years, no wait 80 years!!11!" that people get tired of. That's not forgetting the refusal to disclose publicly funded data, and then spending years tying up the courts over that pubically funded data. And so on either while refusing FOIA/SOI requests either. Nah. I know it's difficult to accept, but dam
Re:Just goes to show the lunacy of the conservativ (Score:5, Interesting)
There's a dislike of fudged numbers, BS, doom and gloom, including the usual "If we don't..." and "we'll be drowning in 10 years, no wait 30 years, no wait 80 years!!11!" that people get tired of
Good thing you don't ride a bike to work like me then because its a never ending stream of "if I don't do something now things could be really bad for me in about five seconds".
For me managing the planet should be like riding a bike. I keep an eye out for developing problems and take action when I think something might kill me. The fact that it hasn't so far doesn't invalidate the assumptions I make.
Re:Just goes to show the lunacy of the conservativ (Score:5, Insightful)
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If we were doing the right thing we would stop burning brown coal tomorrow and live without power for a while. The carbon tax is very nearly the least the Government could do. What should happen is that polluters should pay the full cost of the pollution they create so that cleaner energy generators can compete. The carbon tax is a small step in that direction.
Re:Just goes to show the lunacy of the conservativ (Score:5, Informative)
And how do you intend to make them stop doing it? In case you missed it, that's the entire point of taxes on pollution: they gradually raise the cost of polluting until it's not economically feasible anymore. Simply legislating that coal-fired power plants had to be switched off tomorrow would be a disaster, because there's no transition plan. A tax that increases every year at a predictable rate lets people depending on coal have a predictable point where it will no longer be feasible and plan accordingly.
More importantly, it gives a financial incentive to be the first person to switch. If you say 'no more coal in 10 years' then there's a strong incentive to let everyone else pay the R&D costs of developing and deploying other technologies and then roll out your own version in 9 years, for much less since everyone else has helped push the economies of scale. If you start taxing and keep increasing the tax rate, then someone who switches now saves a lot of tax, while someone who switches in 9 years pays a lot more.
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Howdy, there --
I'm an e-bike enthusiast. To put it briefly -- pedal-assist adds very, very little to the price of a bike; it's a sensor and slightly more smarts in the controller, all of which are very well-understood and widely implemented. The biggest difference between Chinese e-bikes and those seen in premium markets is the components used -- Chinese e-bikes, because they're built to be powered principally by the motor and to be motorcycle replacements rather than recreational equipment (albeit recreati
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Let me ease your doubts. The energy required to propel a bicycle nicely is about 200 watts, 300 if you wish to go extra fast or are climbing hills. Electric motors are pretty efficient, lithium batteries are also pretty efficient in charge/discharge. 5 hours of use (more than you get from one charge, but bear with me) gives you about a kilowatt-hour of energy. Double that, just to be really generous, and call it 2 kilowatts. That's 25 to 30 cents worth of electricity, to travel 60-80 miles. You can a
Re:Just goes to show the lunacy of the conservativ (Score:4, Insightful)
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The goal is minimize production of CO2, not to stop using petrol. If we tax petrol to the point that coal-based electricity is cheaper, we're still producing CO2. By taxing CO2, you get everything at the same time, at the correct ratios. It even becomes possible to invest in technology to extract CO2 from coal fired plants, for example.
One of you already let the cat out of the bag (Score:5, Insightful)
Climate change policy is about redistribution of wealth and globalization, not saving the environment.
"One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore, " -- Ottmar Edenhofer, UN IPCC
It is a tool for those seeking power, nothing more.
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Re:Just goes to show the lunacy of the conservativ (Score:4, Insightful)
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So science should be ignored, as it never deals with proof. Kinda hypocritical as you're reading this on a computer. So it seems you accept science when you want to, and dismiss it as sensationalist bullshit when it suits you. You also seem to have a very perverse idea about climate science and the scientists involved in that field. Which in itself is strange, as your actions ("fuck it - it's wrong") would only be a valid position if you had a solid understanding of of this field.
I'm not sure exactly how you got to this from what harryturtle777 wrote. Seriously.
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Re:Just goes to show the lunacy of the conservativ (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, planes don't fly. At least not in a deterministic fashion: Navier-Stokes is a differential equation. Non-linear, too.
Really, objects don't move, as this involves differential equations.
Clearly, thermodynamics are wrong, because it is as differential equations (or large numbers and probabilities, if you go the quantum route).
You have no clue what you are talking about: you assume that the solution must be steady state. You have no way of knowing that. In fact, you ought to know Sol cycles, so steady-state solutions are certainly wrong.
You have no clue what you are talking about: If I tell you that we are all going to die, with a certainty of .999 in 30 years, give or take 20, the proper reaction is not, in fact, to claim that as the error bounds are large, this must be bullshit.
The proper reaction is to say: oh, we'll prepare for the worst case, then.
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I make point A. You reply no, look, it's A. Thus whoosh. See also sarcasm.
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No. My point was precisely what you are saying. Using sarcasm I implied that if the originator of the thread was right, than aeroplanes would not fly. And certainly we could not build them.
Because his original point was that you cannot solve things which involve differential equations, because then they become non-deterministic.
Which is silly, and wrong. To which you clearly agree.
BTW, yes, I also am a great fan of the relativistic magneto-hydro-dynamic version of the NS equations you use to model supernova
Re:Just goes to show the lunacy of the conservativ (Score:4, Insightful)
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Didn't read TFA, didja? Or are death threats a sign of tolerance of differing viewpoints?
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> Yo. Conservative checking in. There's no hatred of science. There's a dislike of fudged numbers,
The problem with the "dislike of fudged numbers" theory is that no-one has ever been able to show that the numbers have been fudged. Climate change has been a hot topic for more than 25 years, and even after all that time no-one has been able to provide and convincing evidence that there is a conspiracy to present false information as fact. Even the infamous East Anglia e-mails showed no evidence for a plo
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It's especially suspicious after the debacle ab
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Then publish a paper at a respectable journal. What's the problem? Your arguments have been refuted, and it's easy to check it with Google.
And I've actually professionally worked in the field of climate modeling, including working with hydrological data, weather system simulation, etc. You might not realize, but we literally have hundreds of various datasets and nearly ALL of them scream 'AGW!!!'.
It's feasible that, say, meteostations might have flaws causing artificial upward trends, it's feasible that our
Re:Just goes to show the lunacy of the conservativ (Score:5, Insightful)
You're talking about data submitted to the scientists by tree rings, right? Or by drilling cores? Or satellites? I'm sure those lazy satellites are just making stuff up instead of measuring it! Just like those evil weather stations all over the world!
If there was only one line of evidence that climate science was based on, you might have a point. But it's not.
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If you have one line of evidence, it may be flawed the way you suggest. But if you have several independent lines of evidence, and they all show the same trend, that's not something you can account for with inaccurate data collection methods (i.e. what you described).
Just by having lots of independently run weather stations, your made up data would be averaged out unless the majority of operators just happen to make up the same trend in th
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http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2008-05-07/ [dilbert.com]
Size of Pluto (Score:3)
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Re:Just goes to show the lunacy of the conservativ (Score:5, Insightful)
Yea, the research universities use data from tired overworked coasties.
Not.
Anyways, even if you guys made up all of the data statistically some of the data would trend in the other direction also wouldnt it?
Have you thought this through?
No, OK. That explains alot.
Re:Just goes to show the lunacy of the conservativ (Score:5, Insightful)
Your first paragraph can be summed up as "My one data point is so much more trustworthy then thousands of scientists." I refuse to address this point because it cannot even stand up on its own.
Your second paragraph says that scientists should instead focus on making another planet habitable. SO scientists can terraform an entire planet, but we as humans cannot cause any inadvertent change in our own environment? That is the argument du jour. That the changes we are seeing are completely natural. If there is no possibility that we as humans have caused these changes, then what hope to we have to terraform a entire planet.
To use a slashdot favorite heres a car analogy. I can probably fix a lot of little things on my car, but I don't have much of a hope building one from scratch. The Earth is our car, it is so much easier to fix what we got, then it is to build a new one.
That doesn't even touch on the fact that this generation, and I'm willing to guess the next few generations, will never live on another planet/moon in large numbers.
This has nothing to do with being conservative, this has to do with ignoring science in favor of a gut feeling.
It's not about Science (Score:3, Interesting)
The anger and hatred isn't over the science. It's about taxes. People get tired of being taxed to death. Here in the US they had terrorists throwing tea in the harbor over the tea tax back a few years ago. I think they were the neo-cons who started the whole tea party thing.
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The relative taxes we pay compared to the 50's is irrelevant. People only think in terms of "Well, I'm paying this now, and they WANT ME TO PAY MORE!" Anytime taxes go in any direction but down, voters will be pissed. The only way to overcome that is to have a leader capable of selling people on sacrifice (usually during wartime or crisis). And FDR and Dwight Eisenhower were the last leaders we had in the U.S. who could pull something like that off.
Yeah... Just Conservatives (Score:5, Insightful)
The point of view that the people who send death threats to scientists are mostly conservative would be news to scientists involved in animal testing.
So no Tickle Fights? (Score:3)
Always do the opposite of a conservative, especially the "freedom-loving" libertarian types.
Opposite? So I can't cheat on my wife with my young male interns? Or have, as I like to call them, "Tickle Fights"?
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It's not about science, it's about sacrifice. People are perfectly fine with science, as long as it either benefits them or is neutral. But the second some government talks about asking them to pay higher taxes, forgo some luxury, sacrifice jobs, etc. based on some scientific finding (legitimate or not)--well, WATCH OUT!
Re:Just goes to show the lunacy of the conservativ (Score:4, Informative)
And scientists (who want to abide by the law) can't defend themselves using guns...
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what is the purpose of banning guns.
preventing the populace from defending itself from a totalitarian regime. History is replete with kings and warlords making weapons illegal for the populace (hence why many weapons are derived from farming tools). Just be glad you're not in GB where knives are on the chopping block.
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Given that there quite obviously is a link between overall murder-rate and gun murder rate, *that's* the purpose. Lower ownership of guns leads to lower murder rate (whatever the weapon).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence [wikipedia.org]
Fairly obvious when you think about it (go on, use your logic). It's lots easier to pull a trigger than physically melee someone to death.
Re: (Score:2)
Because the fact that murder is illegal means that nobody ever kills anyone /sarcasm. I'd consider owning an illegal handgun less severe a crime.
However, the people who illegally possess such guns in this country (Australia) generally aren't going to use them against scientists so much as dispatching competitors in their illicit businesses ie. gang/mob violence.
Re: (Score:2)
Since people can't rationalize their hatred of science
Yea! Think about the Church of Global Warming
Church of Global Warming? Oh yeah! That's right next to the Church of Gravity and just up the street from the Church of Evolution and the Church of Quantum Mechanics.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
...is good.
Do you intend to turn that into carbon dioxide and water?
--
The other threat was made to a scientist at a university function last year by a person not known to university staff (or the cops).
Re: (Score:2)
...is good.
Do you intend to turn that into carbon dioxide and water?
Probably solid waste with a dose of methane for good measure...
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Old news (Score:5, Informative)
And there were just those two threats, five years ago, eh? No. You need to get your information from other people than Andrew Bolt. Followup to TFA:
http://www.canberratimes.com.au/news/opinion/editorial/general/change-of-attitude-needed-as-debate-overheats/2194216.aspx?storypage=3 [canberratimes.com.au]
Re: (Score:2)
Isn't there a some sort of police force in Australia that can set traps, look at e-mail and phone records and find those criminals?
Sure, but there is always the risk that the dangerous offender is the person for whom action speaks louder than words, while the person who makes the threat is all talk.