I tried to submit the following post to FT on a climate change story, GE rejects Republicans’ climate change doubts. My comment was rejected due to “suspected profanity”. For the life of me, I can’t figure out what the problem is.
There is no doubt that climate is changing. The question under doubt is whether the changes are man-made and require trillions in expenditures to address. This last one is not as well established as they are economic and political questions, not scientific ones. The scientific fact is that we are undergoing a pause in warming that is, at best, at the far end of the lower error bar bounds of the current models. Once the error bars are exceeded, you toss that model out and get something better.
If you’re depending on these models to justify trillions in expenditures over the next decades, you take a step back and you are a bit humble. A cold year or two and the problem isn’t even arguable anymore. It means that the science wasn’t right and we’re driving the world economy blind, without working models. We might as well call in a shaman. He would have equal scientific validity as models whose error bars are exceeded by stubborn, plain, empirically observed reality.
We are currently undoing major scientific damage that the climate modelers have inflicted on science by hiding their data and stonewalling independent inquiry. The Berkley BEST effort at least will be open and the skeptics can take their best shot at working out the problems. And there are problems, from Briffa’s magic tree in the Yamal data set (the one tree whose inclusion or exclusion reverses the entire conclusion of a highly influential tree ring data set) to the reversal of sign in the Tiljander sediment data (you don’t get to just reverse signs on measurements when they are inconvenient to your conclusions). Time after time data that has been stonewalled turns out to have problems when it is finally pried out into the light of public scrutiny.
There is nothing wrong with GE betting on efficiency and reducing pollution. That isn’t what this is about. It is about public monies and massive changes in the world economy based on science that is tough to check because the original data is often kept out of the hands of skeptics.
You profaned against Gaia. Don’t you know that the science, and in GE’s case the commerce, is settled?
GE has a blog…and the administrator is generally pretty good about approving critical comments. You might try a shortened version there.
“Suspected” may mean that a poorly programmed bot is making decisions. Whatever the cause of the rejection, you might be better off posting your comment elsewhere.
British bots have a notoriously low threshold for finding things obscene. The city of Scunthorpe found itself being blocked simply because there’s something naughty embedded within its name.
You used the sh-word – shaman.
I am at a loss – I have had similar things happen.
“When bots go wild” could be a topic.
you toss the model out.
Try replacing it by “You bin that model.”
P.S. all my experience with prudish programs is with American stuff.
sorry,i don’t know where is the problem.
Belief in climate change is a religion.
A scientific principle can be disproved. For example: if something is found that moves faster than light, then a great scientific principle has been proved wrong. Scientists rejoice and life goes on.
A religious principal cannot be proved wrong because religion is based on faith. Climate change is based on the Model. The Model is the Bible.
Any one who questions prophesy based on the Bible commits blasphemy. So also any one who questions prophesy based on the Model commits blasphemy. That person has profaned a sacred text.
Fortunately in America we have separation of Church and State. Perhaps some one should sue in Federal Court and have Climate Change assigned its rightful place in our pantheon.
I bet it’s your use of the word toss. Seriously.
I’d guess that even with parts of New York under water the climate change deniers will still insist on labeling Global Warming as some kind of plot.
Hi ho.
Tosser is a wanker. Maybe that’s it. Good suggestion John.
PenGun is a member of the anointed. I’d make a small wager but I’m too old. i won’t be here to collect.
“if something is found that moves faster than light,”
There actually are waves that move faster than light. I don’t think they can transmit information, though.
MK – I just heard/read that they discovered some particle that actually is faster than light
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/second-experiment-confirms-faster-than-light-particles/2011/11/17/gIQAlRlTWN_story.html
Sadly for those of us who really would have liked faster-than-light neutrinos, it apparently turns out that loose wiring fouled the measurements
Here’s the profanity:
Even a robot spam filter recognizes that as pure excrement from male bovines.
Pengun
Please explain AGW with respect to the Cordilleran Ice Sheet melting event that began ~15,000 years ago. That, of course, was only the latest of multiple heating and icing cycles of the Pleistocene.
Also, please look up Milankovich cycles, either in Wiki or any college levels intro astronomical text.
The reading will require removing your blinders…so maybe that’s a no-go for you.