Moldy, that puts you pretty much conservative, but not insane Libertarian. It's a good place to be.

On global warming, the politics have trumped the science. It is a fad, but how much damage will be done to the economy and the environment before it's over? Being more conscientious is good, as you say, but the global warming movement is scary. It's the latest excuse the government is using to gain control over how we spend our money and live our lives, and it will lead to socialism, which failed to take hold in this country by conventional means. That's why so many liberal politicians are on board, I don't think every one of them really believes it (Algore does and is sincere, but he's stupid), but it's a great way to increase their power.

I'm not sure I understand your statement on Iraq. Many people (I'm not implying you) forget that we went into Afghanistan first, and that Iraq was the next threat, being, if not openly tied to, at least supporting the activities of Al-Qaeda. We had to topple Saddam, since we didn't before, for our own interests; we could leave now, but we'd be fucking them over, and that's not right. You are exactly correct that we always seem to have the right president at the right time. Could you imagine Algore's response to 9/11 had he been president? I can't. The parallels between Bush and Lincoln are striking. Neither Hillary nor Obama will withdraw from Iraq. They don't want to preside over a failure, and the Dems are pissed that Iraq didn't fail under Bush. They know we need to be there, but they're more obsessed with power at any cost.

toshiro: I realize those differences between Japan and Al-Qaeda, I wasn't implying they were the same organization. I only implied that they both thought they could hit us with impunity. It is fortunate that they were both wrong.

I only implied that they both thought they could hit us with impunity. It is fortunate that they were both wrong.

Is it? For Japan, which was a nation with military goals it was trying to advance by attacking us, clearly it is: counter-attacking with everything we had carried with it a big upside and almost no downside. I say almost because I do tire of hearing the whining about how evil the U.S. is for nuking two Japanese cities, but that's the price we pay for doing it right.

AQ, however, may well have best served their long term goals by provoking us into the response we have chosen. The upside to hitting them hard around the globe is less clear than it was with Japan, where we actively engaged a mighty military power and secured its surrender, preventing its domination of a region.

The downside has been huge, both in terms of economic and international standing costs, and in terms of not being able to play the "9/11" card with a straight face. We've gone out and gotten ours, so we can't very well say, when we want things to go our way, "look, we showed restraint when a rogue group of your citizens killed 3,000 of our citizens--now you give us what we want, or we may start playing hardball." How much is what we've given up there really worth? I don't know.

But ultimately, there's a difference in goals. Japan's was to defeat us militarily and expand their national empire in a very literal sense--they were hoping that we would not or could not strike back hard. AQ's gameplan is far less clear cut. I'm sure they loved the short term gain of killing Americans, but ultimately their goal wasn't to defeat us on the battle field, and it may not have even been to live to plan another 9/11--I can see them hoping, counting on, our striking back hard in a very tradtional way.

I should qualify this musing with two points. First, as a purely moral matter, it would be ideal if America could hunt down every man, woman, and child who smiled when they heard of 9/11... and leave them to die, gut-shot, in a gutter. But nations, like people, can't always dish out ideal moral justice in the confines of the real world. Second, even reconizing the constraints of reality and the benefits of not overreacting, I agree that we should have used deadly military force--and saying to Hell with the civilian consequences of it--in any country where we found AQ or its supporters hiding. If there are people there who need killing, we violate their soverginty and we kill them, no apologies offered. If they have facilities there we believe need destroying, same deal. What we do not do is invade and occupy an Arab country. I don't give a damn about saving the Iraqi people, or deposing the scum that was ruling them. It's expensive in blood and treasure, and it plays into our enemies' propaganda schemes.

Wouldn't being bitter make me better at trolling?

And yes, I think you're right in saying that had you or I chosen physics as our careers we would be bitter.

You've stated your point very reasonably, but I disagree. You're right about Japan, and we've had no complaints about them since, and I totally agree about whiners complaining about the atomic bomb. It won the war, period.

Al-Qaeda has been testing us for a long time. They were responsible for one, possibly two attacks during the Clinton administration (WTC and USS Cole), and we did nothing meaningful in response. They expected the same to happen after 9/11. Whether they would have kept attacking us or not, and whatever their purpose of attacking may have been, it would have been irresponsible for us to not have seen the trend of increasingly daring attacks, and hit it with all we had. We're just nice enough to see that it wasn't Islam that attacked us, but an extremist militant minority faction of Islam, that happens to have had a lot of influence in that area of the world. It is not a war over oil (where is the oil? and why didn't we seize it before, if that's what this was about?), but we got involved because there were (are) terrorist dictators over there who are a threat to us. Helping the region is just a side effect, and we do it because we're the good guys.

Here's something else we've been forgetting: Before 9/11 there were 16 U.N. resolutions "dealing" with Hussein. Of course, the U.N. was never really serious (too many corrupt members making money off Hussein), and Hussein knew he could ignore the resolutions. They passed a 17th resolution, and as usual, only the U.S. (and many small allies, we did not go unilaterally) stepped up to actually enforcing it. Bush went into Iraq with U.N. approval! Not that we needed it to act in our own interests. We don't need permission to defend ourselves.

WMDs were a factor. The fact that we haven't found very many does not matter. He used them before, even on his own people, and he wanted more, so it's a good thing we captured him before he could rebuild his arsenal. Maybe he shipped them across the border, maybe not, it doesn't matter. We acted on the only information we had (you can't trust U.N. inspectors who only went where Hussein told them they could), and it was the right decision.

The difficulty here, as opposed the the Pacific in WWII, is that it's not a national army we're fighting. These guys dress like civilians, stick around civilians, and kill their own civilians. I don't believe all the Iraqi "civilian" casualties were really civilians (even beyond the faked civilian death pictures). This war is one of the few things Bush has done really well. He's forced the terrorists into sort of a last stand in Iraq, and they're coming to us there rather than here. Even Democrat officials know it was the right decision, they just won't admit it; but that's why you don't hear them insisting we "pull out" anymore. They won't preside over a defeat, they just want defeat while a Republican is president.

One more thing: The goal of Muslims is like that of any religion: to convert everyone. The goal of militant Islam is to do so violently, by killing the "infidels," so that all that are left are Muslims. That is their goal in attacking us, to destroy infidels. They won't stop until someone is victorious. They (and every totalitarian dictator ever) understand what too many Americans don't understand, that peace comes through military victory.

You brought nuclear weapons into this, not me, Lecter.

I think that comparing imperial Japan (you keep referring to it as only 'Japan', which is whole new slew of mistakes on quite a few other levels, none of which you show awareness of, Lecter) to Al-Qaeda is comparing two things (whatever they are) based on a very small set of similarities, leaving all the rest out of the equation. I do not think that is good rhethoric and should be used in a discussion such as this.

Toshiro, this is the last thing I will say on this, in both mine and Lecter's defense. I am not comparing the goals, ideologies, governments, hygiene, or taste in music between Imperial Japan and Al-Qaeda. The statement is that Japan attacked us for its own reasons, and Al-Qaeda attacked us for its own different reasons. The only similarity being discussed is that in both cases a major response from the U.S. was not expected. This discussion is about the U.S. Please don't take it personally.

I'm sorry if it offends you that we keep saying just Japan, because there is a big difference between modern Japan and Imperial Japan. It's just quicker to type, that's all. It's not out of simple ignorance.

Also, it's "nukular."

If you're from the southern United States it is, but luckily your vernacular hasn't made it much farther than... well shit now if I didn't fail 'merican geography in grade five...

If you're from anywhere else in the English speaking world it's "n-u-c-l-e-a-r". But, no worries; we'll all see the error in our ways soon enough eh?

PC pretty much covered it; Tosh, you like to argue minutiae that [1] the other party never disputed, and [2] are not relevant or that fail to join issue. Knock it off, as it makes actually discussing anything with you an exercise in whack-a-mole.

Nevermind, I give up trying to make myself clear. Apparently, I can't.

Where you from Tosh?

Wow. A kool-aid party.

Europe.

Butters said: The goal of Muslims is like that of any religion: to convert everyone. The goal of militant Islam is to do so violently, by killing the "infidels," so that all that are left are Muslims.

I don't think converting everyone is the goal of Christianity or Judaism or Buddhism, or even Islam. Maybe "Scientology." I DO think that major religions get on a power trip once they realize that they have some power.

Islamists such as our buddy Osama Bin Laden (militant Islam / ultra-conservative Islam / Wahhabism) DO seem to be bent on the whole "convert or die" thing, and as such should be treated with the same discourtesy. I hope that the next U.S. President takes this into account.

Here's a speech from Bob Carter, another scientist (a respectable one who can read a chart) from Australia who is a skeptic of anthropogenic global warming. He is a geologist (my field) who studies ancient oceans, and has a lot of very good things to say. Aside from the crappy video quality, it is one of the best speeches of global warming I've seen. Compare it to "An Inconvenient Truth." It's half as long, and has no animated polar bears or shots of crumbling glaciers cut and pasted from "Day After Tomorrow" (true story). Also, the sources cited are higher quality than "my college professor," or "my scientist friend."

"Climate Change: Is CO2 the Cause?"
Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV

at the very end of part one there is a animated polar bear

I stand corrected. You're right, my bad. I guess having watched "An Inconvenient Truth" three times and this one just once, I forgot.

There is a difference, though: Algore's animated polar bear is a substitute for a real drowning polar bear, since you can't find those. Polar bears are not dying out because of melting ice. Bob Carter's animated polar bear is a minor (and feeble, although the barbecued penguin is kind of funny) joke.

I can admit when I make a mistake: Despite what I said, there is an actual animated polar bear, several, in fact, in Bob Carter's presentation. Watch it anyway, the animation doesn't interfere with the science.

I admit, I don't know much about climate change, let alone man made climate change. I've never even seen "An Inconvenient Truth," and I don't read popular science anything.

This Bob Carter dude, however, didn't impress me much.

The man starts the talk he claims will debunk man-made global warming by pointing his finger at a graph of ice-core samples spanning sixteen thousand years for crying out loud. Now, I'm not denying that humans have been around for sixteen thousand years, ever since our Lord Jesus kicked them out of heaven in 1793BC, but I don't really think a graph with a time step of a few hundred years is very relevant when you're talking about emissions that didn't start up until the industrial revolution.

The rest of it sort of went uphill for a short while, when he stopped presenting completely irrelevant data and went on to bad data, but sort of crumbled toward the end with his "torpedoes." I don't really see how how he can base his entire talk on the value of the empirical data he picked out to make his case and then point out that the system of collecting that data is pretty much worthless. There's gotta be something in this man's head that tells him he's doing it wrong.

I guess my biggest problem with this man is that he dismisses computer models out of hand, without much reason for doing so, and then points out that the empirical data is inconsistent. What next, I shouldn't avoid hurricanes when the TV tells me to because their movement is predicted by computer models?
(Funny fact, the models that do the hurricane and storm tracking are the same ones that predict climate change as a result of CO2 increase in the atmosphere.)

Note: I'm probably reather biased by my close ties to an actual climate scientist, in the computer simulation field, and his favorite anecdote about weather balloon heat shielding technology slowly improving over the years causing a general cooling trend in the upper atmosphere.
On the other hand, I'm not convinced that there's a damn thing we can do about climate change.

PS: There aren't any penguins in the arctic.

P.S. It was 1794 B.C. Genka, get yer facts STRAIGHT.

genka: The point of the perspective is to show how today compares with the rest of Earth's history. (By the way, 1793BC is only 3801 years ago ;) ) The reason he chose that particular record is because it is one of the graphs used to show anthropogenic global warming. However, choosing the scale makes a big difference in what trend is seen, which was his point. The farther you go back, the more it can be seen that we are well within Earth's natural variation.

I'll admit the "torpedoes" theme was kind of silly, but the points made were all valid. His attack on the popularly accepted theory had two parts. He showed that not only does the data that even the IPCC uses not show that CO2 is the major driver of global warming, but the data that they use is also not as reliable as they say.

As far as weather balloon data, that's an interesting idea. The problem with it is that if the balloon is supposed to measure temperature, I don't think they'd be so stupid as to "heat shield" the thermometer. Also, satellite measurements of the same part of the atmosphere show the same general trend. Until the satellite data showed this trend, most global warming models showed more warming in the atmosphere than on the ground, since it's in the atmosphere that the "enhanced greenhouse effect" takes place.

I've heard it said of models that "all models are wrong, some are useful." Storm tracking models are no exception, and they work fairly well over certain time frames, but still aren't perfect. Take a look at the predictions for hurricanes in the past few years. The year of Hurricane Katrina exceeded predictions by quite a bit, so they increased their predictions for the next couple years, which turned out to be very calm. When a hurricane does happen, they predict its path, but the path is a wide cone to account for a lot of uncertainty. They can't perfectly predict how the hurricane will grow, either. Even after the fact with Katrina, it took a bit to decide if it was category 4 or 5 when it hit land. The model was imperfect, but useful, since it could have helped New Orleans prepare, if Nagin had had any real interest in preparing.

Predicting hurricanes is a mild problem compared to predicting the entire climate of the whole world. We don't know a fraction of the variables involved, and models even have trouble simulating past climates. That's why empirical data is better, but should still be scrutinized. With models, too often you get out of them exactly what you expect. Even in the latest report from the IPCC, models contain quite a bit of uncertainty; most notably, clouds. Water vapor is almost completely left out of the study, and it accounts for (depending on what report you read) anywhere between 60% and 90% of the greenhouse effect. Solar radiation is also largely neglected by the IPCC report. The relationship between cosmic rays and cloud formation is not even mentioned as a possibility. How we can legislate hundreds of billions of dollars in spending based on climate models that don't even account for the sun and clouds, I just don't understand.

It's not that I don't support the idea of models. Models are a good idea, and we should continue to improve them. It's the idea that we know enough to act that stinks of hubris to me.

I think it's safe to say, without a model, that if there's a hurricane, and you're on the coast, you should be prepared. If you live in California, models can only tell how probable an earthquake is, not how strong it will be or when it happens. You should still be prepared. Same with floods on a flood plain. I don't trust models, though, that are funded by political groups (or even ones that aren't), that claim to be able to predict the climate 100 years from now based on incomplete data over a tiny sample period.