Korean Job Discussion Forums

[xingyiman]

The dissenter on this thread doesn't want to examine your critiques. It's called faith. And right now any opinion besides the one he has subscribed to means nothing. He talks about empirical reasoning but then accepts at face value what he beleives to be the correct evaluation based on a concensus that politically motivated talking heads have convinced everyone is there. Scientific history is wrought with concensuses being off the beam and it's ok to hold a belief but when you hold to that belief and make poeple to disagree wtih you out to be village idiots is when you reveal your own true motivations.

I am not disagreeing with Justin Hale about the phenomenon of global warming, but based upon the doublespeak of many scientists regarding the effectiveness of mitigating atcions, I think more research needs to be warranted before slapping all delveloping countries with environmental taxes. Honestly, do any democrats or republicans really trust that our benefactors are using our monies in the most effecient manner?

[xingyiman]

double post

[Khenan]

Sorry, I deleted my post apparently as you were quoting it. It was kind of a useless post, plus the swear filters stopped working. Would you please unquote me?

[Justin Hale]

[xingyiman]

[Yaya]

Xingyman, save your breath. The guy won't listen to anyone but himself, he'll insist the sky is green to the bitter end.

There's an excellent booklet available from the National Center for Policy Analysis (ncpa.org) titled "A Global Warming Primer." Some of its highlights are:

"Over long periods of time, there is no close relationship between CO2 levels and temperature."

"Humans contribute approximately 3.4 percent of annual CO2 levels" compared to 96.6 percent by nature.

"There was an explosion of life forms 550 million years ago (Cambrian Period) when CO2 levels were 18 times higher than today. During the Jurassic Period, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, CO2 levels were as much as nine times higher than today."

http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/williams092607.php3[/b]

[Justin Hale]

[Yaya]

The UN panel from which governments get their information is deeply flawed, writes Economics editor Alan Wood

At lunchtime on Monday, John Howard and Victoria's Steve Bracks were on their feet talking about energy, climate change and the environment. While their approaches were notably different, there is one thing on which they both agree: the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is the font of all scientific wisdom on global warming.

In fact it has become quite fashionable of late to assert the global warming debate is over and an overwhelming scientific consensus prevails. This is simply untrue.

As acknowledged in an Australian Bureau of Agriculture and Resource Economics report on climate change scenarios, also released on Monday, there are still considerable scientific uncertainties surrounding the nature and extent of future climate change.

A report released in the US on Friday has torn apart one of the main props used by the IPCC to illustrate the need for urgent action on climate change. The report raises serious questions about the IPCC process and the findings on which world governments rely in forming their climate change policies. First, some background.

In telling the global warming story the IPCC, since 2001, has relied very, very heavily on what has become known as the "hockey stick". It is based on a 1999 paper, the principal author of which was paleoclimatologist Michael Mann.

Before the publication of his paper the generally accepted view of the past 1000 years was that there was a period of elevated temperatures known as the Medieval Warm Period, which was followed by the Little Ice Age, and then a new period of global warming.

Mann's hockey stick eliminated the Medieval Warm Period, flattening the fluctuations in global temperatures over most of the past millennium (the handle of the hockey stick) until we get to the 20th century, where the rate of global warming takes off in a sharp upward surge (the blade of the hockey stick).

This is the basis for the IPCC claim, now widely accepted, that the 20th century was the warmest in the past 1000 years, the 1990s were the warmest decade in the past millennium, and 1998 was the warmest year in the past 1000 years. Scary stuff!

Two Canadians, Steve McIntyre, an engineer, and Ross McKitrick, an economist, challenged Mann's work in 2003. They argued his technique produced hockey sticks from just about any set of data. Mann responded in a notably less than scientific manner by withholding adverse statistical results and important data, and discouraging the publication of criticism of his work.

A Wall Street Journal report of the controversy last year attracted the attention of the US House Committee on Energy and Commerce. It wrote to Mann and his co-authors, as well as to the IPCC, demanding relevant information and then approached independent US statisticians for advice on assessing the data provided.

Leading US statistician Edward Wegman, of George Mason University, who is chairman of the US National Academy of Sciences' committee on applied and theoretical statistics, agreed to assemble a group of statisticians to assess the Mann data. Their report was released last Friday and supported McKitrick and McIntyre's criticisms of the hockey stick, finding Mann's statistical work flawed and unable to support the claims of the hottest century, decade and year of the past millennium.

Yet the IPCC used the hockey stick in its publications, media releases, press conferences - where senior IPCC figures sat with the chart as a backdrop - and, for a time, incorporated it into the IPCC's logo.

It is important to understand that this is a debate about the use of statistics. Mann did no original scientific work, using available data and manipulating it in a new way.

However, it destroys the idea of an alarming escalation in global temperatures and, as the Wall Street Journal remarked on Friday, brings the present temperature rise within the range of natural historical variation.

There remains plenty of room for argument about the projections of future temperature rises and their implications, based on what are still primitive climate change models. But there is no escaping the damage done to the IPCC's reputation. It has relied heavily on a badly flawed piece of work, produced by what Wegman discovered was a small, insular group of paleoclimatologists who incestuously peer review, reinforce and defend each others' work.

Significantly, former commonwealth statistician Ian Castles and his colleague David Henderson, former head of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's economics department, have also exposed statistical and analytical flaws in the economic scenarios underlying the IPCC's climate change projections. As with McIntyre and McKitrick's criticism of the hockey stick, the IPCC establishment initially tried to ignore, then discredit, their work.

However, last year a House of Lords committee looking at the economics of climate change praised their work and said that without them the debate on emissions scenarios would not have taken place.

The Lords committee also expressed concerns that the IPCC was an increasingly politicised body that tried to suppress dissent. It warned of a risk it was becoming a knowledge monopoly, "in some respects unwilling to listen to those who do not pursue the consensus line".

In an article last week in Canadian newspaper the National Post, McIntyre and McKitrick say the IPCC's lead author, who selected Mann's hockey stick for prominent display, was none other than Mann himself. They quote eminent US climate science academic Kurt Cuffey as saying the IPCC's use of the hockey stick sent "a very misleading message".

They ask a pertinent question.

If the IPCC process isn't fixed, and there is no evidence the IPCC intends to do anything about it, how do we know it won't send out another very misleading message in its upcoming Fourth Assessment report?

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20876,19835476-31478,00.html

[Justin Hale]

[Justin Hale]

[Yaya]

More pathetic is your attempt (or lack thereof) at debate.

[Justin Hale]

I don't need to debate. I've stated why I'm not going to even touch your fringe science. It requires of me to suspend all this:

1.1 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2007
1.2 Joint science academies� statement 2007
1.3 Joint science academies� statement 2005
1.4 Joint science academies� statement 2001
1.5 Network of African Science Academies
1.6 U.S. National Research Council, 2001
1.7 American Meteorological Society
1.8 Royal Meteorological Society (UK)
1.9 Meteorological Office of the U.K.
1.10 Federal Office of Meteorology and Climatology (Switzerland)
1.11 World Meteorological Organization (WMO)
1.12 American Geophysical Union
1.13 American Institute of Physics
1.14 American Astronomical Society
1.15 American Physical Society
1.16 Federal Climate Change Science Program, 2006
1.17 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
1.18 National Center for Atmospheric Research
1.19 American Association for the Advancement of Science
1.20 Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London
1.21 Geological Society of America
1.22 American Chemical Society
1.23 Engineers Australia (The Institution of Engineers Australia)
1.24 Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society
1.25 The Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society
1.26 Meteorological Service Of Canada
1.27 European Geosciences Union
1.28 International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics
1.29 International Council for Science
2.1 American Association of State Climatologists
2.2 American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)

Yours guys are stuff like Economics editors - yeah, great science source there - in mere lay newspaper articles that are nearly 2 years old. You're randomly googling and not checking sources and dates, all in opposition to the expertise above. What a joker.

[Yaya]

So what do you do? Just list a bunch of organizations? Yeah, you sound like a real genius, or better yet, a hakwon cowboy.

[Justin Hale]

I'm a teacher, as I said. This is my career and the game's up in Korea very shortly. No man of wits, decency, taste and discernment ought to be able to tolerate more than 3 years here, even despite the fact I send home $3,000 per month (and do not, and wouldn't ever, work in a Korean hagwon).

That list was a brief list of the consensus of expertise on this matter. As a lay observer, I'm gonna side with those folks, because in science, the rules of the discourse are that consensus is superior to fringe. Fundamental errors can occur of course, but scientific consensus is subject to review and it thus becomes a question of likelihood and that's exactly what the IPCC have said: highly likely due to be human activity. If that is an erroneous position, change and review will be delivered gradually by consensual science, not wholesale and overnight by fringe science and certainly not by TEFL people. Anyone, scientist or not positing the direct opposite (a paradigm shift) to the consensus I simply haven't the patience to consider at this stage. I always was prepared to consider it previously, but the ideologically-driven, religiously-driven, nationalistically-driven, Far Right nature of the discourse made me go "meh! Forget it"

[bovinerebel]