What do you think conservatives would regard as the most harmful careers?
It is not unreasonable to believe that someone who is used to being exceptionally cruel to animals, when it is not terribly expensive to avoid that cruelty, will on average be more willing than usual to be cruel towards other humans. "Avoid hurting beings that can experience pain" is arguably a more compelling Schelling point to organize 21st century civilization around than "avoid hurting other humans, but do whatever the hell you want to other species". I disagree with Wiblin about this being a "no-brainer", but I mostly agree with his final judgment of the desirability of phasing out this type of factory farming.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10062999.
It's completely wrong to say that anyone would go hungry because we stopped farming meat. The market would easily adjust and provide other foods at a lower cost.
James Inhofe has written a book about how climate science is supposedly a hoax. http://www.amazon.com/The-Greatest-Hoax-Conspiracy-Threatens...
Chris Christie said that a national teachers union deserves a “punch in the face” http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/chris-christie...
The universities are heavily in the business of indoctrination. That's why millennials are so much more pro gay marriage and anti free speech than their elders. The "killing religion" part is overblown.
>James Inhofe has written a book about how climate science is supposedly a hoax.
Much of it is. There is evidence to suggest the earth is warming, but anyone who tells you he can predict the global surface temperature in 20 years is selling you something. I don't know where people got the idea wild statements based entirely on demonstrably wrong models are Teh Science.
>Chris Christie said that a national teachers union deserves a “punch in the face”.
It does. Note there's a huge difference between teachers and the AFT. In most places you don't don't get to decide whether or not part of your paycheck goes to the union, so it's a bit disingenuous to characterize that as an attack on teachers. I don't know how we reached the point where to work as a teacher I would have to pay money to a third party that's going to support political candidates and educational policy I oppose.
I'd also point out regardless of what they say or don't say governors of both parties across the country are looking ofr ways to curtail the power of public employee unions.
> but anyone who tells you he can predict the global surface temperature in 20 years is selling you something
They are predicting the averages, not exact numbers. It's like when someone is predicting average dice roll, it can be done even though the exact next dice roll cannot be predicted. This is one of the most misunderstood aspects of climate science.
Not these people, though. There's too much hubris, money, and professional standing at stake for anyone to admit he doesn't know any more than a five year old extrapolating historical data with a crayon.
Predicting rate of change is a tricky problem, because it's nonlinear transition phenomenon. We can easily predict the resulting steady state, though. So for instance, in some areas, scientists grossly underestimated the rate of change - for example Arctic sea ice. But that doesn't mean they don't understand what's going on - the resulting steady state (what amount of warming are we going to get, called climate sensitivity) is actually quite well understood both from history and models.
I'm well equipped by training to understand the science. No, the problem is you don't like it when people tell you your emperor has no clothes. Look, when your model doesn't agree with reality that doesn't mean it's mostly right. It means you don't understand the system. You say you can predict the steady state, but you have no way to validate that assertion. It's all based on speculative modeling.
We have plenty of evidence what the steady state (based on historical data and our understanding of physics) will be; I suspect you are not familiar with it (you still didn't tell me what exactly is the thing that you find in a disagreement).
I suspect you and I have far different thresholds regarding what consists of "evidence", and I'd like to point out there's a difference between the words "difficult" and "impossible". In any event the "difficulty" of validating predictions hasn't stopped people who ought to know better from spouting off like it all came from a burning bush. So far this is what we've seen:
* "We have a model showing the earth is warming catastropically, and CO2 is the culprit. Look, in ten years average global surface temperatures will be $today_guess warmer.
* (ten years later) "Well, sure, what we've measured isn't anything like what we predicted. Of course, we have a new model that agrees 100% with the historical record."
* (ten years later) "Huh. Well, look, it's really hard to figure out what the temperature is gonna be in ten years, so let me tell you what the temperature is going to be in a hundred years, long after it matters to anyone alive today.
There must be tens of thousands of people who've gone broke trading on stock market models that match previous data.
You still didn't answer the question, what exactly model you refer to?
Even if you look at work of Plass in 1950s, you will find very close estimates to climate sensitivity that we have today. And that's just from simple equilibrium models that include water vapor (his model is in fact wrong in several ways that pretty much cancel out).
In fact, no one has been able to show a working model of Earth that doesn't show a warming due to CO2. (Critics are trying to poke some holes but to have an alternate theory is a whole different ballgame.) The models are tested on historical data; they are not just statistical extrapolation of the current trend.
If you're young, I think eventually you're going to find that whether the rate of warming is 0.1 degree per decade or 0.2 degree per decade doesn't matter too much. Either way, it's too fast so it will cause mass extinction (and problems for agriculture), and either way, the new steady state temperature is driven by the amount of CO2 we emit.
Good question. Which of the many non-working models would you like to discuss. Why don't we start at the IPCC?
>In fact, no one has been able to show a working model of Earth that doesn't show a warming due to CO2.
Which isn't surprising at all, given no one has been able to show a working model of Earth.
>If you're young, I think eventually you're going to find that whether the rate of warming is 0.1 degree per decade or 0.2 degree per decade doesn't matter too much. Either way, it's too fast so it will cause mass extinction (and problems for agriculture), and either way, the new steady state temperature is driven by the amount of CO2 we emit.
There's no way you can know that. CO2 may be completely dominated by other factors.
In any event, I'm not young, so none of this matters to me on a personal level.
Here are some analyses: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/05/hansen... http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2013/02/2012-u... http://www.skepticalscience.com/lindzen-illusion-2-lindzen-v...
Current climate models are pretty accurate in their predictions.
> Which isn't surprising at all, given no one has been able to show a working model of Earth.
I am not sure, at this point, if you are just trolling. Every model has a certain limits, but it doesn't mean it is "not working". If you actually knew history (I always recommend https://www.aip.org/history/climate/index.htm) it is a remarkable achievement that we can model climate at all.
> There's no way you can know that. CO2 may be completely dominated by other factors.
Sorry, this is just trolling. Of course, in the same sense, we cannot predict the path of the Earth around the Sun because what if an unknown dominating factor comes to its path?
When creating a model, we simply try to account for every important factor we know of. And given that the predictions are quite accurate (look at Lindzen comparison!), we probably know of all the important ones.
To be fair, teachers' unions do tend to cause a desire for percussive maintenance. In my own (admittedly anecdotal) observation, said unions tend to be run by - and thus prioritize - tenured teachers over all other factors (including actual approval from students, parents, other faculty, etc., and also including test results, passing rates, etc.). This results in skilled, fresh talent to be the first for consideration when schools need to cut back on teacher employment, rather than the arguably better alternative of encouraging some of the more tenured teachers to retire. This isn't to mention that said unions tend to impose dues regardless of whether or not one is a member, and that said unions frequently take political stances that the dues-payers may or may not agree with.
This isn't to say that the concept of a teachers' union in and of itself is a bad idea - far from it. Rather, in their contemporary form, they seem to be getting more in the way of education (by favoring tenured and perhaps out-of-touch educators over younger, fresher educators with more modern foundations; also, by favoring said tenured and more expensive teachers over younger, less expensive teachers, thus contributing to higher class sizes and thus a degradation of educational quality for students) than they are helping education.
Granted, I'm not really involved in the inner workings of teachers' unions, and my experience is limited to both what I saw as a student and what I continue to see among friends who got into teaching, so maybe these tendencies aren't universal.