percentient

Don't skip over style to substance, call people superficial, neglect to empathize with the effort of going through a confusing presentation and lecture people about what value is.

Thanks for sharing. What is the fear though? You didn't say this, but am I correct in assuming that you foresaw embarrassment at the party? It sounds like there's a disconnect between your past friendship with him, and whatever approval you wanted from other kids. And you didn't want to protect him, but yourself from having to articulate the reasons for rejecting him. My guess.

OK let me try: my biceps are now quite diverse after working out for months. My bank account balance has become wonderfully unique though and I should get a real job soon.

Even the most staunch anti-capitalist alarmist-conservationist goes much further than "more CO2 could have benefits". I think you're misreading both my language and arguments and maybe it's not your fault (entirely). I'm glad to engage in the science in some other context.

His language is populism. Your language is snark. I try to speak in logic. For example, you can't argue that O2 is important for life, therefore more O2 is good. Equivalently for CO2. Moore says the Earth hasn't warmed in 18 years, but his own standards fail him -- there is no proof... only some surface datasets, that exclude the ocean, suggest it. Link fixed.

I hate to leave a short negative comment about your presentation style, but you sound twitchy and defensive, and hard to follow because of that.

The only time I had to deal with CAD was when donating to FDR.

So I've been known to be a wise-ass and give an impression that I know more than I do. However, it shouldn't be a secret that this guy is a speaker for money and whatever his scientific girth is, he's speaking in populism. So yeah, I probably know more than he does... that is if he really says what he thinks, because a lot of what he says is just irrelevant half-truths. He didn't even co-found greenpeace as claimed, he was just an early board member (would they fabricate a letter from him? http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/about/history/Patrick-Moore-background-information/). We could debate these notions of "CO2 good or bad" with Moore until the end of time (or at least until it goes under 150 ppm in two billion years). That really doesn't get us far in the ethics of greenhouse gas emissions. Did you know that too much oxygen is toxic for you? I want to like him, we probably agree on environmentalism more often than not.

The point is that he says many things that are wrong. CO2 makes an acid in rain water, dissolves rock, and makes sediments in the ocean. (It turns out plants are kind of involved here, too, I give you that.) The word "starving" is the problem here. (I don't understand your nutrient speculation.) Yes, the models overestimated warming, and this has been a source of a lot of discussion. To conclude that they failed is to miss the point, some variability you just can't predict even if you try. A paper on this topic: http://www.blc.arizona.edu/courses/schaffer/182h/Climate/Reconciling%20Warming%20Trends.pdf Also, oceanic heat content has been rising, so using surface temperature is misleading. One really has to delve deep into this stuff to have an opinion. The other option is to hand-wave about how CO2 is plant food... and that's fine, it's not a toxic pollutant -- but then I could just pull a similar appeal to intuition and say we've already emitted almost as much CO2 as there was in the preindustrial atmosphere, surely that must force radical changes in ecosystems that have adapted over millenia!

He says some odd things in this article. Humans haven't saved the biosphere from imminent starvation and atmospheric CO2 has been much lower before, during glacial periods. With or without plants, CO2 will be taken out of the atmosphere chemically, and that's because over time there will be fewer volcanoes pumping it back up. That takes BILLIONS of years. Is he also worried about the sun exploding? It's going to happen. "At 400 parts per million, all our food crops, forests, and natural ecosystems are still on a starvation diet for carbon dioxide" is also wrong, there are many ecosystems that barely care about increasing CO2 any more, like plankton in oceans, which are usually limited by nutrients. The benefit of more plant food can easily be offset by a slowdown in nutrient circulation. The 18 year old pause is interesting, but isn't the time scale to invalidate predictions. Many climate models don't even try to resolve this kind of variation. Also, it doesn't look like 18 years to me http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ab/Warming_since_1880_yearly.jpg Edit: I intended to link this or something similar http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2013/10/17/1381976927298/IPCC-AR5-WG1-Box-3.1-Fig-1_450.jpg(total energy content) I appreciate the conflict of interest stuff, but the emissions chapter is probably more wrong than right. I'm skeptical of this guy.

20 million tips to represent individual property rights. Round that up to infinity and get a circle, the best of shapes.

By the way there's a broken link to a defense of argumentation ethics by Kinsella, it's this one: http://web.archive.org/web/20130301134859/http://www.anti-state.com/article.php?article_id=312

I can't tell if he's calling me a loud asshole in the first paragraph, but anyway it's difficult to take personally because my plumbing is fine. Looks like a core of his argument is to dispute the premise that argumentation is non-violent. 1. Yes, let's aim for this. 2. The point of lying is to use the value of truth. So you have to presume the mutual value of truth, otherwise you're not lying. 3. This is the same as playing the devil's advocate. Also, when pretending to stab someone in a play, they don't actually die. There is no ethics involved here. 4. If the standard of winning is something else than truth, it's theater again. 5. Indeed, people use rhetoric to control others. It only works because you're appealing to universal standards This doesn't refute everything he says, but he's making things more complicated than they need to be. Imagine someone coming back to you in a debate, saying "well, you can't really know if I'm lying or not, can you?? Gotcha!"

It's a weird kind of symbiosis. Protesters: look how oppressed we are! Change the environment and we'll get better. Cops: look how much violence there is! We're important and underfunded. http://baltimore.cbslocal.com/2015/04/25/baltimore-mayor-gave-those-who-wished-to-destroy-space-to-do-that/

He accepts statism because *anything* is allowed in the maximization of well-being. Otherwise consequentialism wouldn't be an ethical principle for him, if it was subject to other constraints. What could be a higher governing standard than ethics? Like he states ad nauseam, it matters which ideas people believe in. He believes that humans are an engineering problem, just short of an algorithm to figure out the utility peaks in the landscape of human behavior. Never mind that such algorithm is impossible, just the idea that all ethical reasoning must have a goal of maximal well-being lets him use any macro-statistics about wealth inequality or happiness to justify any tool of influencing behavior, including fudging property rights through institutional coercion. Of course, he allows for the feeling of security, provided by predictable property law, to influence this imaginary optimization scheme too. But nowhere to my knowledge does he prove that *muh firemen, muh paved roads* beats practical libertarianism (and how could he?). In that context, his blog post "How Rich is Too Rich?" (linked by st) makes sense. At least he's defending the objectivity of ethics from the cultural relativist crowd.

Donator status doesn't imply recognition.

...success?

She sounds kinda sarcastic when saying positive things about him

The shock wave is not 10k degrees, the radiation is, and that says nothing of the intensity, let alone how much should be absorbed by clouds (hint: very, very little). You simply have to crunch the numbers to make the case, and I'm willing to check your math. The simplest explanation here is that you don't know what you are talking about, but you are free to prove us wrong on the details. Is it not fun to agree with people about basic history?

Pretz, take care of your credibility dude, you really need it. Like with the comments about clouds. You're like someone looking at a boat being hidden by a massive wave in a storm and being surprised when you see it again. Let me explain it with quotes: Precisely. Pressure heats stuff up. Analogously, low pressure cools stuff and makes clouds appear. Low pressure zones follow the shock wave and make a condensation cloud together with the original clouds. Exactly, except much faster. It's the exact same air with the same exact water and associated particles. But how can the boat reappear in the same place after the wave is gone???

"Here, have some words that are supposed to make me sound sophisticated and skeptical." Yeah, announcing that the research presented doesn't match your high standards for objectivity (read: approval of authorities), doesn't cut it. If lazily disputing everything presented is okay, there's definitely grounds to dispute peer review. How do you know that it indicates reliability? It just means that about two people have approved of the end result. Which might even be a bad thing; papers regularly get rejected because they don't conform to the expectations of the reviewers. And sometimes explicit nonsense gets through. There seems to be no study too fragmented, no hypothesis too trivial, no literature too biased or too egotistical, no design too warped, no methodology too bungled, no presentation of results too inaccurate, too obscure, and too contradictory, no analysis too self-serving, no argument too circular, no conclusions too trifling or too unjustified, and no grammar and syntax too offensive for a paper to end up in print. -- editors at Journal of the American Medical Association Secondly, what is their evidence for breaking the near-universally accepted law of non-violence? Surely the most mainstream, most peer-reviewed publication would be Wikipedia? You won't find a justification there http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanking#Research

Yeah, factors other than discrimination usually explain survival rates better. On MS Estonia in the 90s, where 800+ died, young fit male crew members were most likely to survive, and passengers, women and drunken Swedes were least likely. But Titanic is actually an exception, and they really, really did apply the women and children first rule. The numbers you linked obscure the bias, but first class women were a massive 24 times less likely to die than first class men. The trope "women and children first" is very real, but rarely enforced. Women on ships have a survival advantage only if it's enforced. http://www.ifn.se/eng/publications/wp/2012/913 http://titanic.silk.co/

Any examples for those who don't follow?

This is a more recent publication (2013) than the "news" stories that just reference each other (2010). Prolix, this was low effort. You can do better

Would you mind fetching a link to the study, or even identifying information? Edit: When posting this I didn't see the comment above. I couldn't find any study like that with google scholar. The data sounds important, but the discussion in the pop articles is uniformly shitty. "Common sense", therefore spanking? Kids in violent families grow up having tantrums. Self-defense. People naturally capable of becoming violent. Therefore spanking? Come the fuck on.