by F. Swemson
For all practical purposes, the Democratic Party no longer exists. Its leadership has been taken over by the Progressives. That the Progressives themselves are in fact thinly disguised Marxists / Socialists & Communists is only now beginning to be recognized by any significant portion of the American public. Unfortunately for all of us, the Progressive movement has deep roots in the GOP establishment as well. The Progressive’s political philosophy is based on a foundation of lies, three of which are the cornerstones upon which virtually all of their other lies are built. Those three big lies are as follows:
I. Progressives claim to be the only ones who care about the have-nots, the poor, the weak and the helpless
The first big lie is that the Progressives claim to be the only ones who care about the have-nots, the poor, the weak and the helpless. In fact they don’t give a damn about the have-nots. Their one and only objective is to gain and exercise as much power as they can over others in order to satisfy their own massive egos and their own personal greed. When the effects of the Progressive’s policies of the past are viewed by any objective study, one will see that it’s their own policies that have actually turned the poor into a permanent welfare dependent underclass of citizens. Their continuing efforts to control, stifle and suppress the free market by taxing and regulating the business community to death, has severely limited any chance that the poor have for upwards mobility in order to achieve their own slice of the American dream.
One of the most pernicious ways in which they have managed to do this, is through the American educational system, which their current leaders, the former radicals of the 60’s have totally hijacked. Many of them originally became teachers simply to avoid the draft. Over the last several decades, they’ve rewritten and twisted the history of capitalism and the free market in America which is what made us the richest country in human history, and a force for good throughout the world. Their revisionist history is such a blatant pack of lies that they’ve even managed to convince the people that the democrats and the left are responsible for the Civil Rights revolution. The average American today believes that concern for civil rights is exclusively a liberal or Democratic Party virtue when in fact the first civil rights legislation and a big part of subsequent legislation was introduced by Republicans, and voted into law by Republicans over the hard fought objections of the Democratic left. Click here for a list of specific examples.
II. Convincing the American people that the rich and their “greedy” corporations have attained their wealth by ripping-off and unfairly exploiting the poor
The Progressive’s second big lie is convincing the American people that the rich and their “greedy” corporations have attained their wealth by ripping-off and unfairly exploiting the poor. Nothing could be further from the truth. On a superficial level it’s an irrational argument, because the rich obviously can’t get rich unless the masses can afford to buy their products and services, so it’s simply not in their best interests to keep the masses poor. As it turns out, that’s the Progressive’s job. As any student of Austrian economics will tell you, everyone benefits in a free market system.
Upon deeper analysis, it can be seen that the primary reason why the left continues to promote this philosophy of class warfare, and to actually believe the lie themselves, is that they simply don’t understand the nature of wealth itself. When Obama talks of “spreading the wealth around” the key word is “the”. They think of wealth as something that exists in a static quantity in the universe, and that all of the ills of society could be fixed if only “it” was distributed more fairly. Of course they see themselves as being the only ones morally and intellectually trustworthy of being put in charge of the distribution. What they don’t understand that wealth is created by hard working and ambitious people who choose to use their intellect and other abilities as the tools needed to take what nature gives us and shape it to suit our needs. They don’t understand this primarily because most of them have never participated in the process.
III. Human activities are destroying our environment and indeed the earth itself
The third big lie is that human activities are destroying our environment and indeed the earth itself. The driving force behind the extreme environmental community is a Marxist / socialist political con game designed to fool the people into giving them power over the world’s industrial community. They’ve done this not out of any real concern over the environment. Their motive is simply to enrich themselves and their political supporters and aid & abet the globalists and their parent organization the UN, which has morphed itself from an organization dedicated to maintaining world peace into an international cabal of sociopaths intent on literally ruling the world.
Environmental campaigns are a convenient front for the Marxists to hide behind because it’s politically dangerous to attack anyone in the environmental movement. Just as anyone who attacks or even questions Obama is painted as a racist, anyone challenging the EPA is accused of being in the pay of those evil and greedy oil companies. They’ve learned that they’re virtually immune from attack as long as they’re hiding there, and that it’s easy to fool people into believing that our environmental problems are all caused by greedy capitalists who defile nature and hog all of her resources for themselves. Their methodology has been simple but effective. They simply lie like hell.
Our environmental problems have been exaggerated out of all proportion and in many cases totally fabricated by the eco-fascists and globalists who call the shots. The global warming / climate change hoax is the best current example, but there are many others. The globalists at the UN have authored and adopted a plan called Agenda 21. They describe it as their plan to save the world, when in reality it’s their plan for achieving power over the entire world during the 21st century. It’s based on a grossly distorted and exaggerated theory of “sustainability” which claims that the primary cause of all of our world’s problems is man himself. The main problem is that there’s just too many of us by far according to their view of the world.
Their bogus “sustainability” theory contends that the earth cannot sustain a population of more than roughly 500 million people. With a world population approaching 7 billion people, this means that more than 90% of us have to go. They’re well on their way to achieving that goal, and they aren’t trying too hard to hide it. Absurd you say? Au contraire. Their bogus environmental campaigns are the justification they use to force us to put a substantial percentage of our corn production into our gas tanks in the form of ethanol. Corn is a critical part of the world’s food supply because it’s a primary component of animal feed. The fact that ethanol is a lousy fuel in comparison to gasoline is never mentioned. They claim that they’re doing it in part because the world’s supply of petroleum and other fossil fuels is getting perilously low, but that’s another of their outright lies. America actually has the largest fossil fuel reserves in the world, more than enough to last us at our present rate of consumption for over 200 years. Starvation is a legitimate and accepted tool to be used in their planned depopulation. Diminishing our corn production is an effective way achieve that goal. Remember, to Progressives, the ends always justify the means.
Starvation isn’t their only tactic. They banned DDT in the name of the environment, when it was not in fact a dangerous toxin when used properly. Millions worldwide perished of malaria as a result, especially in the poor in the undeveloped countries, one of their primary targets. They’re doing everything they can to prevent them from developing and using their own fossil fuel reserves in the name of the environment, when their real motivation is to ensure that those reserves remained unused in case they themselves run out and need them in the future.
It’s also disingenuous when they vilify the rich and all big corporations by claiming that they act purely out of “greed” rather than on the pursuit of their rational self interest. The very word “greed” itself is incendiary, and the progressive left knows this and uses it most effectively in order to demonize the rich and big corporations who they treat as America’s enemies. For an excellent commentary on “greed”, watch the following brief video of Milton Friedman being interviewed by Phil Donahue in 1979.
While it’s true that mankind has made some major blunders that have been harmful to the environment in the process of converting from an agrarian to an industrial society, even the biggest environmental errors that we’ve made pose little if any long term threat to the planet. The vast majority of so-called ecological disasters, are local and relatively transient when viewed in a geological time frame. Prior to the advances that have been made in recent decades, our use of fossil fuels was indeed polluting the atmosphere, but our exhaust emissions are much cleaner now as the majority of the truly dangerous components of our emissions have been eliminated by technology such as catalytic converters, etc. The facts are as follows:
Our atmosphere is relatively clean right now
Our atmosphere is relatively clean right now. Ecological extremists and activists (read Progressives, and those in their pay) say this isn’t so, because they’ve managed to convince most people that CO2 is a dangerous pollutant. But CO2 is not a pollutant. The truth is that temperature change drives CO2 concentrations, not vice-versa as the eco-fascists claim. This is NOT my opinion, it’s scientifically proven fact, as testified to by The Petition Project in which over 31,000 American scientists (including over 9,000 with PhD’s) have signed an affidavit saying:
“There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane or other greenhouse gasses is causing, or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produces beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.”
And many of you believed that the threat of global warming was real and that the “science was settled” just because a compulsive liar named Al Gore told you so!
Any influence that human activity has over climate change is so small as to be statistically insignificant. Indeed nobody even knows whether our net effect on our climate is either warming or cooling. While raising the level of greenhouse gasses in our atmosphere does raise temperatures very slightly, the climate alarmists never mention the activities of man that cause global cooling, and they are both real and substantial. The entire greenhouse gas theory has been hugely exaggerated in relation to the real and natural causes of climate change, the constantly changing cycles of solar activity: In other words: It’s the sun stupid!
CO2 is not a pollutant, it’s plant food, and without it nothing would be green
CO2 is not a pollutant, it’s plant food, and without it nothing would be green. Can too much of it be harmful? Of course it can, anyone who saw the movie “Apollo 13” knows that it can, but are we anywhere near approaching that point? The answer is no. With a current atmospheric CO2 concentration approaching 400ppm (parts per million) we’re not even close. Crowded nightclubs and submarines routinely have CO2 levels approaching 8,000ppm, a full 20 times the levels in our atmosphere.
CO2 exists in the atmosphere in such small quantities, that the very idea of man made CO2 being a major driving factor in climate change is absurd on its face. Water vapor comprises 95% of all greenhouse gasses (clouds, humidity etc) CO2 represents well under 5% by comparison. CO2 accounts for only half of one percent of our entire atmosphere. The man made portion of that CO2, coming from our use of fossil fuels however, only represents about 4% of total CO2. That means that the amount of man made CO2 in our atmosphere is roughly 16ppm, or one part in 62,500. As I said, it’s simply absurd to think that such an infinitesimal amount of a beneficial trace gas is in any way a threat to our planet.
Warming is good!
If the above facts are not sufficient to convince anyone that the global warming movement is a complete scam, the ultimate irony of this whole disgraceful episode should do the trick, because the fact is that Warming is good!
Think about that for a moment. Throughout human history, man has always thrived during the earth’s warm periods, and suffered and starved during the earth’s cold periods. Why? Simple, because crops don’t grow well when it’s cold. While we’ve warmed up somewhat since the end of the Little Ice Age, the earth is still relatively cool in relation to the actual temperature history of the last ten thousand years. The truth is that there’s absolutely nothing whatsoever unusual about our current climate. In fact contrary to the claims of the climate alarmists, we’re entering what promises to be a somewhat extended cooling period that threatens to be significantly colder than the 35 year cooling period from the 1940’s thru the mid 1970’s, during which, parenthetically, our use of fossil fuels was increasing at the greatest rate in recent history. So much for their ridiculous theory.
The Solution
The solution to all of this would I think be obvious to all rational observers. The key to it lies in kicking the Progressives out of our government, and putting our natural resources to work. I won’t delve into the politics of it here, but our incredible energy reserves are clearly the solution once we rid ourselves of all the Marxists and Globalists in our government.
America should start drilling for both petroleum and natural gas everywhere it can. We can start immediately in ANWR in Alaska, and offshore on the East and West coasts as well as in the Gulf. We need to remove all restrictions from the coal miners as well, and start building refineries and nuclear power plants right away. Doing this will jumpstart our economy in a heartbeat.
Doing this can also solve our problem with the world of Islam. By getting back into the energy business, we can literally bankrupt the Arabs along with Chavez as an added bonus. We can do this simply by telling the holders of our debt that the only way we’ll be able to pay down our debt is if they start buying all of their oil, gas & coal from us, and at attractive prices to boot. We don’t have to take all of their customers away from the OPEC nations in order to bankrupt them. The OPEC states have developed huge infrastructures in order to develop and market their oil resources. By taking away well under half of their customers, the cost of their infrastructures will bankrupt them by itself.
Anti-American sentiment in Europe and elsewhere will not help them, because America represents the single biggest market for almost all of the goods made in most of those countries. By requiring a balance of trade between America and these other nations, they’ll have to buy our oil, gas & coal if they want us to buy their export products. We won’t even have to engage in the traditional weapons of international trade such as tariffs in order to do this us. We can achieve our objective simply by undercutting OPEC’s pricing. We have such huge reserves that we can easily afford to do this for as long as it takes in order to bankrupt them. Once the flow of oil dollars to the terrorist states and organizations dry up, they’ll soon disappear. Their leaders will lose their grip on their people without their oil wealth, and once they collapse their people can either choose to join the community of civilized nations or return to their ancestral roots as the ignorant and bigoted goat herds that they once were.
By returning to a true “free market” economy, America will return to her former glory, as the most prosperous and free nation on earth. The first step is right in front of us. If we don’t take it, all is lost. We must do whatever is necessary to defeat Obama in 2012. If we’re forced to hold our noses a bit when we vote, that will be a small sacrifice that we should be happy to make if it puts us back on the right track.
I agree with what F. Swemson has written with two major exceptions.
First, is the premise that the central government can be fixed. If that means getting our Founders country back we are dreaming. Hopes pinned to this assumption make a lethal leap. We have been swirling down the rat hole of Socialism for 60 years. Newbies like the Tea Partiers have suddenly awakened and naively think they can fix DC by replacing the scoundrels. Get real. Bullets can be removed from a long festering wound but that does not stop the gangrene. The majority of America is addicted to entitlements, unequal protection, government paychecks, and making a living off the crushing burden of laws and regulations. Powerful businesses and industries are addicted to living off the teat of government indulgences. Will this majority support constitutional government? No. Simply put, they have too much to lose. Folks, do the math. The ‘takers’ outnumber the ‘makers’.
Secondly, is the strategy of “holding our noses when we vote”. To me, that means voting for the lesser of two evils. The problem is that you still elect evil. With the exception of Ron Paul, there’s not a dimes worth of difference between the other presidential candidates. All will be puppets controlled by the powerful globalists. Not one will govern constitutionally. Not one will stop our country’s decay. Even if Ron Paul was elected, the powerful globalists would never allow him to govern. A litany of historical events supports that view.
It is time to face reality. In absence of divine intervention, America is in an irreversible meltdown. Now is the time to prepare for that eventuality. True Americans have the responsibility to do whatever is necessary to bequeath to their children their unalienable rights endowed by their Creator and formerly protected by our Constitution. It is our turn to act now. It is time to face the gangrene of DC. And it starts with reasserting the rights and power of STATES. Remember them? If your Governor is a career Progressive, make a regime change. Fortunately our Governor in Montana is being term-limited out. We have strong constitutional candidates like Bob Fanning and Chuck Baldwin. Support the same in your State.
Am I looking for a physical fight with DC? NO! That battle is already lost. But DC is bankrupt and functionally unsustainable. DC needs no help in destroying itself. When the entitlements dry up, the country will be thrown into chaos. If States are not prepared to fill that vacuum, the UN will be.
Roger Dwyer
1. Hmm, I sweated the draft and I recall no teacher deferment.
2. Be careful about negative logic. If you snarl about progressives, does that mean you don't like progress? If you fulminate against "do-gooders", does that mean you don't like doin' good. I know what you mean. Do your kids?
3. I like warm weather, girls are cute at the beach. But just as when you boil a pot, and there's more activity, warming adds energy and creates killer storms such as the one that flattened Joplin last spring.
Warming is non-linear. Consider something any computer tech worth his salt knows. If you remove a panel from a computer "to cool it down" the computer gets warmer because you've disrupted an "ecosystem" of convection currents that its designer designed.
Convection currents result in dramatic and disastrous because unprecedented local cooling. Nome, Alaska, has suffered from a dramatic cold spell but the permafrost in North Asia, perma in that we thought it part of Earth's permanent geology, is melting owing to the larger warming trend. The trouble is we get hammered by the local stuff.
3. I love CO2 too and no real climate scientist, no "Inconvenient Truther" says it's a "pollutant". A pollutant is some part of the surface atmosphere such as smog which interacts directly with human health. I agree that it only affects your health at densities experienced on Apollo 13 because at those densities it replaces good old oxygen.
The problem is the greenhouse effect which is created by relatively small amounts of CO2 (9-26% of the total greenhouse gases in our atmosphere). Whilst the other gases that re-radiate PART of the sun's energy down back to Earth making the Earth hotter (or locally cooler due to higher overall activity, a demonstrable result of adding heat) have remained constant, CO2 has increased owing to fossil fuels.
4. Ever see those doodad things that rock back and forth in Texas? They are used when simple drilling no longer produces a gusher. They are getting "tough oil". Once we go through the remaining easy oil, and the free market has found most of it, we would have to compete with the Saudis, who have an old fashioned, relatively easy to access resource, using fracking and shale extraction. And coal mining? Getting tough too and requiring mountains to be, uh, moved.
I would say, and you're not gonna like it, that a "growth" killing welfare and socialist state with a steep progressive tax might kill jobs, but if it redistributes wealth to the least well off, then we win, that is most of us win, two ways.
We get unemployment compensation and day care, schools and libraries.
The Earth gets a rest.
The losers? Billy Bob Rich Guy, you know, the loud mouth on the dirt bike with the rapist bully son.
Boo.Hoo.
@2 spinozza1111,
Thank you again for your comments on PolyMontana.com.
I must take issue with certain claims your comment is passing off as facts. It is one thing to have opinions. It is another thing to distort or ignore facts.
Global warming supporters regularly repeat, as if by religious mantra, the unsupported claims that global temperature increase has a statistically valid relationship with "killer storms" or that our global temperatures or weather are "unprecedented". Data clearly show these claims are false. Data further show there is nothing about our weather or climate in the past century that is "unprecedented". It has all happened before and happened much more dramatically than anything we have measured over the past century.
If you want to attempt to debate these issues in scientific detail then I invite you to trundle over to ClimateClash.com and participate in the scientific discussions. For a simpler reference, go to ClimatePhysics.org and review the 2011 Montana Supreme Court case where the court ruled against the Petition by Our Children's Trust, which made claims like you have made in your comment. Read the two references that Climate Physics Institute used to counter the claims in the Petition. These two references contain sufficient information to totally rebut your notions about climate.
However, your analogy with a pot of boiling pot of water is interesting, so long as we realize it is an analogy and not a complete explanation of our far more complex atmosphere. In the context of a boiling pot of water, the earth's atmosphere is always "boiling." Such boiling is seen in the atmosphere's convection and latent heat transport which move heat upward. This upward transport of heat cools the earth's surface. In your analogy, if you turn up the stove temperature, your boiling pot of water will not exceed boiling temperature because the convection and latent heat transport upward always keeps up with the heat from the stove. This is negative feedback and negative feedback operates in our atmosphere.
Similarly, our atmosphere's convective and latent heat transport upward in our atmosphere respond to changes in radiative heating of the earth's surface, even if enhanced by additional carbon dioxide. This negative feedback overwhelms any small radiation changes due to carbon dioxide changes.
Your comment that greenhouse gases other than carbon dioxide remain "constant" could not be further from the truth. Water vapor is by far the most important greenhouse gas and it overwhelms the effect of carbon dioxide, and it changes dramatically. A very small change in water vapor (and clouds) causes greater change in greenhouse heating than doubling or quadrupling carbon dioxide.
Finally, getting a little more scientific, the core global warming issue comes down to knowing the value of climate sensitivity, which is a measure of how much warming results from doubling the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The IPCC-derived values of 2.0C to 6.0C have been demonstrated both by theory and by experiment to be way too high. The IPCC values are based upon false assumptions about feedbacks. The best values we have to date is that climate sensitivity is somewhere between 0.0C and 0.7C. These values are recognized by scientists on all sides of the climate change issue to be insignificant in the context of global warming.
In conclusion, let's not use false data as a basis of our opinions and discussions. The ideas about how our atmosphere works contained in your comment are analogous to ancient ideas in physiology and medicine. They are simply wrong.
Well, let's see. If you turn the heat up, it would seem to me that more and more of the water vapor would turn into steam and condense when that steam rose into air that cools it. So, boiling this "system" destroys it if the temperature is increased or left constant with the water at boiling point. Any other scenario would contradict the laws of conservation of energy and matter.
So if you're using this as a direct analogy, then it means that the Earth's systems to you will survive the addition of fossil fuels whereas they might not.
OK, next point. Water vapor hasn't been changing over geologic time even if it changes with a high standard deviation over shorter times. CO2 has. Not sure if you concede that but if CO2 is the result of burning a fossil fuel and it is not magically destroyed, then by way of conservation of matter it's gotta go somewhere. So where is it? In the bottom of the sea? Nope, it's in the atmosphere.
Industry isn't releasing water vapor.
Water vapor changes but in regular and well-known cycles, with one of the major such cycles being the transfer from the tropics to the rest of the earth. This means that its effects are constant as a series over geologic time scales, whereas the addition of an extra CO2 load since 1750 is unprecedented in historical time.
"False assumptions about feedbacks" is a pretty darn serious accusation for professors of science at non-research institutions and engineers to make, and it's reminiscent of Joe McCarthy's attacks, the attacks marshaled by Edward Teller on Oppenheimer, and your attacks on Obama. You're saying there's conspiracy and fraud and RICO material.
In actuality, because the climate system is a complex network, we make no one assumption about it but instead deal in sets of scenarios and some of them (1) are pretty darn serious and (2) scientific possibilities. For example, the CO2 release if conceded to cause warming predicted by the model and confirmed by a trend which has slowed in the last ten years (as geologic-time trends slow) causes permafrost melting and release of a more powerful greenhouse gas, then you have a runaway effect. In the worst case Earth is no longer habitable.
We are finding many exoplanets. Very few of them are habitable. To destroy Earth's usability would be worse than the Holocaust.
But do not misread me. I learned my set theory and my quantum theory. A science of a set of scenarios isn't saying it will happen, I'll leave that to cute girls at rallies. It is saying that it is possible to probable. And when human life is at stake, modern people who don't smoke and use seat belts would prefer us to be chalant about this as opposed to non chalant. If we kill "jobs" by preventing mining and industrial activities that we think contribute to global warming, in the worst case, we've created unemployment…and saved more than one mountain from being strip mined, more than one community destroyed by an influx of oilman thugs, and more than one swimmin' hole from being ruined (this is what your industry does, pard).
We know that small changes in cloud cover can cool the planet. Indeed, in one scenario the warming reverses due to an increase in aerial water vapor caused by more storms.
But that's just one scenario.
You're systematically misreading data points that are, when you look at the data, considered by their originators strong possibilities and using their possible falsehood to refute them. You're no more able than climate scientists to produce one set of numbers. The climate scientists are merely saying that the downside is sufficiently probable as to warrant action, which isn't a scientific claim but a moral recommendation. Because you're focused on the reciprocal probability, where if the "bad" scenario is, say, 25% probably, you want the "OK" scenario with its 75% probability to rule because this will "create jobs".
But even if your scenario is more probable, a sufficiently bad downside always warrants expensive prevention which can be shown to "kill jobs". Gee, we don't need the safety lecture from the cute stewardess (if I may use my dirty old man license to use antiquated language). And it costs the airline money and kills jobs. Although the cute stew has something to do, we have to wait on the tarmac when if we just kicked the tires and lit the fires, we could fly more bodies, creating jobs.
I really don't think industry is serious about "creating jobs". It engages certain categories of workers in mining and industry and minimizes their number any way it can. So "creating jobs" is a red herring.
There is engineering, and there is science. I pointed out in my book "Build Your Own .Net Language and Compiler" that if some programmer at the FBI had been empowered to write a miniature compiler on top of the FBI's antique and mainframe based system in 2000, agents may have been able to use the old system for Boolean queries; but to the official investigation, agent Colleen Rowley said that she was not able to form a query such as "attends flight school and is on a terrorist watch list".
Any such programming was a non-starter at the FBI which instead, after Sep 11, set up an enormous "software engineering" project which failed. This is because engineering isn't even applied science, it's applied science plus self-interest, including the second-order self-interest of agents of capital.
Your arguments remind me of arguments between "mere programmers" and men who considered themselves "real engineers" at Motorola during the development of the cellphone. Basically, for any business decision, there was a go/no go point. For example, whether the programmers should "eat their own dog food" and use the same Zilog chipset to run software tools in order to be able to assess the usability of those tools…or use software tools written by a separate consulting firm running on an IBM mainframe.
The "hardware guys" were in favor of the mainframe because they knew the ties between Motorola's executives and those of IBM and did not wish to displease IBM. The software guys were opposed because as more scientists, if applied scientists, if low-level scientists, if considered as computer programmers lower life forms, they wanted to control their work environment.
The citizen who looks out her window and sees smoke, or who dreads the spring in Kansas, is more of a scientist than the engineer who's blowing smoke up her butt because he needs a job.
Let me clarify some math here. My review of the climate data shows that the "numbers" presented by the scientists are not "real numbers" represented as x in algebra.
Instead they present "ordered pairs" , where x is the minimum probable value of a climate data point and y is its maximum!
In many cases, it appears that the Global Warming Denial boys are cherry-picking the y values. This is sure to deceive the public because most people don't understand the concept of calculating with inequalities.
I did a C Sharp object class a while back for this math. It isn't hard, just something that ordinary folks don't need in ordinary business and life. We know what our employer will pay us as an x value unless we're working as a commission salesman and in this case ordinary people prefer scenarios that repeat the numbers, such as are supported in Excel.
But scientists, including not only climate scientists, but also quantum physicists, deal with "plus or minus n" all the time.
Therefore, to take the worst case (max or min) number and claim that it's exaggerated for political reasons, is either ignorance or libel.
Engineers prefer to deal with, and in their world, can deal with, hard numbers: the oil rig will have known dimensions. And since businessmen are in general uneducated in mathematics, they demand "hard" numbers, in part for Freudian reasons where a scientist, who refuses to produce anything more than a range, is often bullied for being a "sissy" who's not "thinking like a manager"…as engineers, not scientists, were bullied at the launch approval conference for Challenger, creating a phallic disaster.
Indeed, science often dispenses with what we think to be numbers. It started with the scientist-geometer Euclid who discovered that if the radius of a circle is a "surd" its circumference is an "irrational" number that businessmen cannot use; perhaps Euclid got yelled at for not giving a hard number to a farmer whose field was circular!
It continued in modern physics when Einstein found uses for Gauss's "complex number", a multiple of the sillyassed number "the square root of -1".
It got worse, because Keynes showed that because of uncertainty as described by Von Mises, otherwise his adversary, an economy in depression need not find a new equilibrium (with all of us happy peasants working at Costco), but would continue to be plagued by downsizing of Costco owing to competition from Dollar Stores.
"Welcome to Costco, I love you. Welcome to Costco, I love you. Welcome to Costco, I love you." – Idiocracy
Scientists reason qualitatively, without "hard" numbers in many cases. Einstein was not a great mathematician, instead he reasoned qualitatively using physical intuition and stories (the traveler near the speed of light) known as "models" to him. In the case of climate science, the "worst case" as the y in has been shown to be a strong possibility, which means that all numbers "close enough" to y are aggregate possibilities, which makes it likely that serious consequences will ensue.
@ MONTANAGUY:
For reasons which elude me at the moment, I don't remember ever reading the comments I find here today, so please forgive my tardiness….
I wonder if you still feel the same way about America's chances of survival, now that we're almost 2 years into President Trump's first term. I'm a 71 yr old former US Marine, and for the first time that I can remember since I read Atlas Shrugged for the first time (in 1962) I'm beginning to think that we might actually have a chance…. Assuming that is, that the evil ba$tard$ don't assassinate him first.
I still agree with your long term assessment however. The odds are still in the enemy's favor. Not long ago I sent Dinesh DeSouza a personal thank you note for his film, "Hillary's America". In it I wrote: "Personally, I won't believe we've won until I see the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences hand you a retroactive Oscar for what must clearly be the greatest documentary film ever made."
Cheers;
fs
@ SPINOZA1111
I wish I could get back all of the time I've wasted arguing with folks like you over the AGW hoax over the last 8 years or so…. but then again, just maybe, to some "statistically insignificant" degree, perhaps my comments weren't a complete waste of time after all…
My many articles that have appeared on the subject in a good number of conservative websites over the years, have probably had at least as much of a beneficial effect on the progress of reason over this patently absurd hypothesis, as all of the collectively penned "hot air" on the subject that I've suffered through during those years has actually had on our planet's actual climate change itself.
In the meantime, I'll let Dr. Ed speak for me regarding your many falacious assertions from this point on…… although I will add that arguing with Dr Ed on this subject reminds me of that old admonition against arguing with anyone who buys ink by the barrel…
fs
Hear, hear !