canhascodez

I don't value contempt. I don't think that contempt is strongly associated with programming or computer science. I would consider that to be a problem. I can't condone the expression of contempt in the public discourse related to computer science. I do not typically have much free money for donations, but I would on principle refuse to financially support contempt. I would wonder that anyone would consider that a positive trait. I certainly think that this attitude would discourage newcomers to the field, and I think it's worth working to promote a different image and mindset.

"Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM", is what they used to say. IBM has 100 years of brand-name recognition going for them. They have to be doing something right.

Programming is tough. That doesn't necessarily mean that we need to emphasize the negative aspects. However, the more concerning element to me is that there are a fair number of gratuitous insults. I am as prone to making and/or enjoying a witty jab as the next person, but I recognize that this is not a wholly positive trait, and try to resist the impulse. I feel like the distilled genius of this profession has something finer to offer than Perl-bashing, or at least, I hope so.

There's a lot of negativity here. A lot of these quotes seem to offer more heat than light.

You're ignoring the different amounts of information those people had about their environments. Do you happen to have issues with a particular scientific consensus, is that where we're going here?

> I disagree with that.

Duly noted.

Glaciation is most strongly dependent on Milankovich cycles:

  - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles
  - http://www.indiana.edu/~geol105/images/gaia_chapter_4/milankovitch.htm

Plate tectonics and volcanic activity have also influenced climate in the past, e.g. the closing of the Panamanian isthmus, or the formation of the Deccan Traps.

Interestingly, the original paper proposing AGW (in 1896) was actually intended to explain Ice Ages:

  - http://www.rsc.org/images/Arrhenius1896_tcm18-173546.pdf

I'm not sure what point you're making. When people believed in a flat Earth, or geocentrism, or miracles, those things did not contradict empirical knowledge of the world. Since then, we have established empiricism as the most useful tool for examining the real world, and expanded the scope of human knowledge considerably. I'm not sure what about that you might take issue with.

I think that it's a problem when we talk about the outputs of different forms of verification as if those things shared a common identity. They may share a similar property of undeniability, but they are not the same thing, and in point of fact, they are not comparable. The phrase "freedom is better than slavery" is not better or worse than "1 + 1 = 2" or "water boils at 100 C". I think that the idea of a singular thing called "truth" is actually fairly harmful.

No one said otherwise, and the comment you replied to specifies "in a dev environment". The language you are using is unnecessarily combative: this is likely to inhibit the adoption of your ideas.

Solar intensity has increased slightly over the last few billion years, but previous changes in climate have been driven primarily by Milankovich cycles, volcanic emissions, and plate tectonics.

That the post-industrial rise in atmospheric CO2 is of anthropogenic origin is hopefully not a point of dispute, but it is demonstrable if necessary. Thus it remains to show that this must raise the equilibrium temperature. So, as you say, CO2 selectively absorbs outgoing IR. In the lower atmosphere, this actually does not have as much of an effect as you might think. Water vapor blocks quite a bit of the absorption spectrum, and the effect of CO2 is more-or-less saturated already.

The mean free path of an outgoing IR photon in the lower atmosphere is quite short. Absorbed photons are re-emitted in a random direction, but take an overall upward course, the mean free path rising with altitude. At the (radiative) top-of-atmosphere, the mean free path is infinite: the photon is more likely to leave Earth. At the edge of space, there is essentially no water vapor, so the action of CO2 is greater. The effect of increasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is to push the CO2-dense region of the atmosphere further out into space. Photons must take a longer path out of the atmosphere, and this must raise the overall temperature of the Earth proportionally, specifically by 3.7 W/m^2 per doubling of CO2, which is commonly held to be equivalent to 1 degree C of global temperature. This must be the case unless our understanding of thermodynamics is very wrong (and if you have an issue with thermodynamics then you have some pretty serious issues).

So, one degree C ain't so bad, right? Well, it wouldn't be if that were it. However, there are several problematic feedbacks. One is that melting a lot of ice lowers the Earth's albedo, which causes it to absorb more heat. Another issue is that there is a lot of this "water" stuff around, which is very readily absorbed by the atmosphere, in a manner that increases very sharply with temperature. Water vapor is a much better greenhouse gas than CO2 by all accounts.

Climate science is not an extrapolation from the temperature record. There is a solid minimum bound on the temperature effects of doubling atmospheric CO2, and a variety of amplifying positive feedback effects. So far, in the last twelve decades, we have not managed to find anything which would reduce those effects to something manageable. At this point, the effect would need to be both very large, in order to offset the strong H2O feedbacks, and very small, to not have been noticed. The most plausible option would be "something poorly understood about the H2O feedbacks". I believe the most successful of such theories would be Dr. Richard Lindzen's Iris Hypothesis, which has generally failed to find support. At this point, there are no particularly plausible mechanisms which would transfer this extra energy to space, and if those did exist, then they would not necessarily be a non-issue: even if thermodynamics and optics are entirely wrong, the planet is warming, and we will have to deal with that even if it can't be prevented.

If you have any other questions, or would like citations for any of the above, do feel free to ask.

I'd be more than happy, but it would help if you answered my question, so that I can more effectively address your concerns.

That it is real does not mean it is material. Spacetime is not mass-energy. Politely, what you are describing is science fiction.

Could you perhaps indulge me by describing the action of CO2 in the atmosphere, as you understand it?

A single department of one organization, eight years ago, which you migrated to something else? You seem to be contradicting yourself. Any current use of SCCS would exceed my expectations, but I'm quite confused by your example.

I appreciate having the pull requests linked. I did read through a couple of the discussions on those.

Bunge seems to be described primarily as a philosopher, but I also see that he recently wrote a notable paper suggesting that the detection of gravitational waves implies the realism of spacetime.

They believe that Relativity is wrong, for various counterfactual reasons. I did not have much luck with explanation.

Why teach C and not Lisp?

An oil droplet is a physical analogy for a quantum phenomenon. You cannot prove anything about the subatomic world by such analogies. Your insistence that it's "particles all the way down" also continues to be entirely incorrect. I think that you are more interested in believing that you have a special understanding of the universe than knowing the truth. Either way, I am uninterested in repeating myself further.

Microwave ovens do indeed have hot spots[0]. Conduction doesn't propagate evenly in very many foodstuffs, and you still want to avoid overheating any one spot.

  [0] https://www.evilmadscientist.com/2011/microwave-oven-diagnostics-with-indian-snack-food/

Quantization means that energy is observed to come in discrete packets, not that those packets are particles. That the EM field is omnipresent is not a mathematical artifact, but corresponds to a real-world phenomenon. Macro-scale analogies continue to not be valid for predicting quantum behavior.

> But whole idea of quantization is that we have whole things, i.e. particles.

False.

> Yes, abstract thing can exists everywhere, mathematics have no limits, but real physical thing cannot.

False.

> As you, dual particle-wave behaviour can be implemented at macro scale too, so quantum world is not special in this regard.

Using macro-scale physical analogies to as an argument for quantum behavior is wrong on many, many levels.

Knives are generally useful, but not specifically useful. They are often a good substitute for a more appropriate tool. One can use a knife as a can opener, or to cut down a sapling, or to dig a foreign object out of a wound. It may be that a knife is the most generally useful tool of all time: if one can only have one tool, it should almost certainly be a knife. Part of that generality includes misuse, and people tend to have more specifically-useful tools (such as can openers, saws, and surgical implements), which tend to be both less useful and less misuseful (because that's a perfectly cromulent word, no matter what spellcheck says).

The blog post is not credible. The author does not provide evidence for stating that heating tissue causes harm. The scientific paper describes heating of almost the exact magnitude as normal diurnal body temperature variation.

You're asserting your conclusion, and relying heavily on irrelevant statements, and semantic arguments.

Your definition of "quantum field" is wrong. It's not necessarily correct to think of particles in general as having a "real" existence, or rather, it's at least as correct to consider them as being localized excitations of a field. That field exists everywhere: there is no "in-between" for things to be in, just places where you have a low probability of observing a "particle".

Also, arguing quantum-level behavior by analogy with macro-scale objects is superlatively misguided.

The idea that Nobel prizes are inherently unfair actually has wide credence[0][1][2]: basically everyone agrees that singling out individuals or even single organizations ignores the real degree of collaboration between scientists of all fields and levels. However, they're a tradition, and a good show, they're fantastic as a tool for publicity, the money is usually appreciated by the recipients. However, the real point of the Nobel Prize is that it's a great honor, and the effect of that honor is diminished in proportion to the number of recipients--ditto for the prize money.

  [0] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/10/the-absurdity-of-the-nobel-prizes-in-science/541863/
  [1] https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/its-time-to-rethink-the-nobel-prizes/
  [2] https://www.researchgate.net/post/Do_you_believe_the_Nobel_Prize_is_fair_and_or_even_relevant

You misread, I think. They were referring to cases where the gender of the researcher has inadvertently skewed results:

[0] https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/01/10/5770466...

I'm surprised you're skeptical without knowing anything about peer review or climate modeling, yes: it's quite egotistical.

Crichton was not honest or well-informed. Broadly speaking, the temperature record has little to do with the validity of AGW. Suggesting that "climate scientists don't believe a whole lot in falsification and validation" is untrue, and something of an insult to the profession. Suggesting that the greenhouse effect is misnamed is a non sequitur. Your characterization of the study of H2O forcing is basically counterfactual. Berkeley Earth disagrees with your claim about temperature stations.

You don't seem to have a handle on the actual mechanism of carbon-induced warming. I find it most useful to examine science from a historical perspective: as a series of questions about the universe works. As such, I recommend The Discovery of Global Warming:

  [0] https://history.aip.org/climate/index.htm

This will also tell you about how AGW was completely discredited (by multiple independent lines of evidence) for five decades, and had to fight its way back to academic credibility. That should serve as conclusive evidence that there is not a conspiracy or cabal shutting down alternative research: an 12-decade international conspiracy theory to maintain the credibility of a theory is implausible, but there's no way to reconcile that with the theory being discredited for its initial half-century.