religulous

That graph contains 16 independent lines of evidence. MciIntyre only refers to Mann's and only corrects it minimally.

McIntyre's original argument also has been discredited:

"The close reproducibility of the MBH98 reconstruction based on both (a) the use of an independent CFR method and (b) the use of the individual proxies used by MBH98 rather than the Multiproxy/PC representation used by MBH98, discredits the arguments put forth by McIntyre and McKitrick (2003) in support of their putative correction to the MBH98 reconstruction.

http://www.realclimate.org/RuthetalJClim2004.pdf

This was way back in 2004!

 

As I have stated earlier, Maher has drawn the question too narrowly and chosen to ridicule fundamentalist Jews and Christians. If his base of knowlege had been any broader, and had he more time, he could, no doubt, have included Buddhist and Hindu naifs.

That said, the humorous film does NOT in any way address the question that this thread has evolved to discuss - does 'God' exist?

The bottom line of this discussion is fairly simple. Here's what atheists like Alric and Daniel (nice Biblical name) assert (if you are an agnostic rather than an atheist, I apologize):

"...We live in a house whose architecture, plumbing, and electical systems we know to be operating in complex, dynamic ways through time and we're studying their operations like crazy, but we're certain there's no evidence anyone built the house in the first place..." ~ InstaPunk from a post at InstaPunk.com.

Instapun***K.com Archives:

While I have grown weary of this thread (I'm an old man, but still have things to do) and will move on, InstaPunk actually enjoys engaging atheists with his superior intellect. While the post is almost a year old, I suspect if any of you committed atheists would like to demonstrate your invincible 'knowlege', a suitable comment in any new thread will find a willing opponent. You'll encounter a lot more there that will, no doubt, make your panties bunch.

More from InstaPunk:

"...every religion in the world could be utter bunk, and it could still be the case that the universe -- i.e., the natural, physical state of the existence we experience -- is the creation of a supernatural intelligence, meaning an intelligence that is literally above and beyond the natural. That's a concept normally referred to by the word 'God.'

...Fools. Atheism isn't the intelligent default position. It's simply the "Get out of Jail Free" card for a bunch of folks who equate a lack of knowledge with certainty. Atheists put their faith in the mathematics of the universe, the ellipses of the orbits, the explosive temperatures of gases, the mutations of organic molecules. But why do the laws of math or biology obtain in the first place? They don't know, and they don't care. They don't know where the universe came from, they don't know how life began, and they can't explain how man erupted from primate mediocrity in less than 50,000 years to produce Leonardo and Michelangelo. All they're certain of is that God had nothing to do with it."

If you find discussing the case for or against a creator stimulating, the responses to the post are interesting as well.

C'YA

 

I am certain god is not a necessary hypothesis. In fact, it is the position of having NO hypothesis.

Your house analogy fails in many ways.

With respect to evolution:

1. No reproduction.
2. No genetics.
3. No change
4. No selection.

With respect to the Universe.

1. The universe is certainly put together in a much more haphazard way than a house. A house is an abnormally ordered point in the universe by many orders of magnitude.

If only you started at the observations and worked your way to the conclusions, rather than the other way around, you would understand why your thinking is so diametrically opposite to reality.

 

I haven't seen the movie yet but I know from interviews that he takes on scientologists and muslims too.

 

Your criticism is unintelligible. Please take up your concerns with the author. These are quotes from another source. Do you understand what a quote is? This is not 'my' analogy. I've pointed you in a direction where you may start another discourse. I'm bored. Perhaps this will spur you to visit InstaPunk:

"...Just tell me why it is exactly you act so f*^king superior to anyone who believes in God. Do that and I'll listen. I promise.

No, I don't. You're all a bunch of pseudo-intellectual fakes. If we debated face to face, I'd crush you with pleasure. Don't ever doubt it."

He's laid down the gauntlet and, I confess, is my intellectual superior. Why not take on someone smarter than I am?

 

The site I directed you toward addresses the corrections Mann et al continue to make in 2008! It also addresses Mann et al's attempts to change data surreptitiously to cover their false steps. Get current!

Here is something interesting that normal humans can understand:

• how reliable are the data used to document the recent warming trend?

• how much of the modern warming is natural, and how much is likely the result of human activities?

• how reliable are the computer models used to forecast future climate conditions? and

• is reducing emissions the best or only response to possible climate change?

Obviously, these are important questions. Yet the IPCC pays little attention to them or hides the large amount of doubt and uncertainty surrounding them.
Are the scientists and economists who ask these questions just a fringe group, outside the scientific mainstream? Not at all. A 2003 survey of 530 climate scientists in 27 countries, conducted by Dennis Bray and Hans von Storch at the GKSS Institute of Coastal Research in Germany, found

• 82 percent said global warming is happening, but only

• 56 percent said it’s mostly the result of human causes, and only

• 35 percent said models can accurately predict future climate conditions.

Only 27 percent believed “the current state of scientific knowledge is able to provide reasonable predictions of climate variability on time scales of 100 years.â€
That’s a long ways from “consensus.†It’s actually pretty close to what the American public told pollsters for the Pew Trust in 2006:

• 70 percent thought global warming is happening,

• only 41 percent thought it was due to human causes,

• and only 19 percent thought it was a high-priority issue.

 

I gave you the reference to a peer-reviewed journal article. Your link is to a blog. Do you have any peer-reviewed references?

 

When a peer-reviewed journal article is found to contain mistakes, baffling omissions, and apparent after the fact inclusions, that certainly casts a poor light on the 'peers' who reviewd the article.

That a 'mere blogger' can point out these errors doesn't help. In fact, McIntyre discusses more disturbing issues with Mann et al 2008 in TODAY'S post. You can't get more current than that. Check it out.

http://www.climateaudit.org/

From the Heartland Institute:

"James Hansen, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) staffer who has called for global warming skeptics to be tried for “crimes against humanity and nature,” has tersely declined an invitation to defend his extremist global warming views in a College of William and Mary debate.

‘Not Interested’ in Debate
Braum Katz, secretary for the Department of Student Rights at the College of William and Mary, had invited University of Virginia research professor and former Virginia state climatologist Dr. Patrick Michaels to present his case for saying global warming is not an impending crisis. Michaels accepted, expressing an eagerness to give college students an opportunity to learn more about climate science.
When Katz extended a similar invitation to Hansen, expressing a desire for students to hear differing points of view, Hansen responded with a terse, two-word email reply; “not interested.”

Controversial Behavior
In addition to calling for global warming skeptics to be put on trial under the same charges as those leveled against Nazi war criminals, Hansen has created controversy with global warming assessments far more extreme than those of most alarmists.
He also has been roundly criticized for the secretive means by which he alters raw surface temperature readings prior to releasing “cleaned up” temperature reports that assert much greater recent warming than has been reported by other climatologists and state-of-the-art NASA satellite readings.

Avoiding Public Forums
The refusal of global warming alarmists to defend their theory publicly is nothing new, skeptics note. Climate scientists who do not believe humans are causing a global warming crisis frequently report alarmists such as Hansen want nothing to do with any public forum in which both sides of the debate are presented and must be scientifically defended.
Nevertheless, given the educational purpose and university setting, Katz was disappointed to receive Hansen’s terse refusal to present his views.
“I was truly taken aback by Dr. Hansen’s refusal to debate Dr. Michaels,” Katz told the Virginia Informer, a student newspaper at William and Mary. “I gave Dr. Hansen a blank check to come to the College, and still he refused. Dr. Hansen’s suggestion that oil executives who advance global warming skepticism be tried for ‘crimes against humanity’ and subsequent refusal to debate one of the most prominent academic skeptics is suspicious and unfortunate, to say the least.”

Traumatic Debate Disaster
Global warming alarmists have been reluctant to debate and defend their assertions in public since Hansen’s colleague, Gavin Schmidt, participated in a high-profile March 2007 debate at New York City’s prestigious Intelligence Squared debating society.
A pre-debate poll of audience members indicated by a 2 to 1 margin (57 percent to 29 percent, with 14 percent undecided) they believed global warming is a crisis. After three experts from each side of the issue debated the matter, however, the audience indicated by 46 percent to 42 percent they do not believe global warming is a crisis, with 12 percent undecided.
Hansen and Schmidt also declined to participate in the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change last March in New York City. Although Michaels and other leading climate scientists from around the world eagerly accepted the opportunity to discuss the latest scientific evidence regarding global warming, Hansen and Schmidt refused to participate in the event.

Avoiding Critical Questions
“The alarmists claim all the evidence supports their theory, but the only way they can prove that is to actually show up for a debate and win,” said Marlo Lewis, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. “If they are afraid to publicly debate and scientifically defend their assertions, it is a good indication who they fear will win the debate.
“It is troubling that a supposedly eminent scientist, who draws his salary from federal taxpayers, is unwilling to publicly explain his beliefs and his policy recommendations unless he is assured in advance that nobody will ask any critical questions,” Lewis said.
“Doesn’t he at least have the intellectual curiosity to hear and consider another point of view?” added Lewis.
“My own suspicion is that if someone is unwilling to tolerate debate and opposing opinions in public, then that person in private is similarly likely to be suppressing other scientific viewpoints,” Lewis said. “One has to wonder if the staff of the publicly funded Goddard Institute really is free to engage in open-minded science, and whether Hansen is stacking the deck with the staff that he supervises.”

This from Michael Fumento last year:

McIntyre’s latest debunking was the discovery of an error in GISS records for the years 2000 through 2006. In simplest terms, they hadn’t been adjusted to compensate for the location or time of day where the data was gathered.
But nobody correlated those newer figures with the older ones until McIntyre did, even though later Hansen admitted it was “easy to fix.” McIntyre published the data on his own website ... and got the agency to admit it was wrong and post new figures. It even sent him a thank you note.
Yet the GISS did absolutely nothing to alert scientists or the public to the new figures. This though it has published five global warming press releases so far this year, each one alarming. It took the blogosphere and radio talk show hosts to publicize the new figures even as the mainstream media essentially ignored it. (The Washington Post finally ran an article a week after the controversy began, siding with the GISS and describing McIntyre as nothing more than a “blogger.” All the presidential candidates have blog sites, but somehow the Post refrains from tagging them as bloggers.)
Ultimately the greatest importance of all of this is that it strongly appears to substantiate the intuitive belief that, with scientist-politician Hansen at the helm the GISS, whose data are far more important to modeling global temperatures than it lets on, is not a neutral collector and disseminator of statistics but rather a politicized mouthpiece.

I would say the same of Mann.

 

You might want to check out the Unitarian Universalist church. (uua.org). It's a church without a creed. I like to call it a church without a religion. Some UU congregations have strong Christian undertones, and others are very secular, but what they have in common is that you are never told what to believe. You are told you must think for yourself. Typically you'll find people from all the major religious traditions as well as neo-pagans and atheists. I especially like the pagans, though I am not one myself.

I assumed it was. Looks like some posts above have confirmed it.

Your problem, and it is one that Christians never address except to assert without justification that their book is right and all other books are wrong, is that even if you really think that the universe required a creator, without evidence you have no way of knowing which of the thousands of creation stories humanity has invented is the real one.

The Christian argues: "The world must have a creator, therefore the Bible is the only authority." He dismisses out of hand the Hindu, Muslim, Pagan, Buddhist, explanations, probably because he has been taught to supress his own thinking skills. The genius of Bobby Henderson is that there is absolutely no way to choose between the Christian god and the flying spaghetti monster. The FSM is preposterous on the face of it, but upon careful consideration, the FSM is no more preposterous than the Christian god.

I thank you for the appology. I would like to note, however, that misuse of the word "theory" is more than mere mischief. It goes to the heart of the fundamentalist misrepresentation of what science is and what we can know from science. It dismisses out of hand the real impact of science on the whole question.

Nobody is obligated to prove anything. And no scientist and very few atheists would call for such a proof. But again, you misrepresent the question. The question is not a matter of proofs or disproofs, it is a matter of constructing a mythology that runs counter to all evidence, and whose primary purposes seem to be to enrich a small priestly class and divide nation against nation and person against person.

 

Evolution seems germane to a religious discussion, but I'm not sure how we ended up debating climate change in the same thread.

Personally, I don't have any big issues with faith in the absence of evidence. But when religious doctrine asks us to ignore what we do know, and tells us what to think, that's a problem.

As for InstaPunk's challenge, I really don't think it's a matter of moral or intellectual superiority. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Not having to face death, for example, would be a comforting thought, but the concepts of heaven and eternal life are so incredibly unbelievable that I have no trouble rejecting them.

 

TJ, I admire your honesty, and respect you for the risks you're taking in publicly renouncing your former faith. Even as a confirmed atheist who avoids church religiously, I find the story of Jesus - true or not - heartwarming and instructive. What I don't understand is how a wonderful message of peace and love could be turned into such hatred and intolerance.

 

It's nonsense. College dorm rhetoric.

 

Paul did it. He told people to ignore everything Jesus said, and instead to believe that Jesus was god. Then he and his contemporaries argued over whether Jesus was man, god, or both; whether there was one god, two gods, or a trinity; whether salvation was by works or by faith; and a lot of other stuff Jesus had no interest in, which resulted in divisions and intolerance and hatred. Pretty soon people thought god was sending them disease and famine on account of their neighbors' lack of faith.

It's a coincidence: The most vocal of the extreme Christian fundamentalists are also political conservatives, so they bring their political bias against recognition of GW into the religious quarrel they maintain against science. They disagree with science on both evolution and GW, and even though there is no faith-based reason to deny GW, they link their religious quarrel with science to their political quarrel with science.

 

It does amaze me that smart people can be so dumb. Yes, there must be two different areas of the brain at work there. The religious (irrational) part of the brain must be separated from the calculating/memorizing part.

 

And that's just sheer, unadulterated arrogance. Interesting too how humanists accuse Christians of being "close-minded" -- but this is close-mindedness at its worst. All you have to do is take an objective look at your statement to see what really is dumb. But somehow humanism clouds that part of objectivity -- it's too superior in its own estimation to be level-headed. This is exactly why it is fair that God leaves people to perish in unbelief. At least you can see that it is fair indeed.

 

Like the theories of Darwin and Newton I mentioned earlier, many in the debate about climate change get caught up in the details. They try to apply the standards of gotcha politics to science. Ah ha! Last year you said the mean variation in temperature for the last 1000 years was only +/-0.2 deg and now you say it was +/-0.4 degrees! Therefore the entire theory of global warming must be false and there must be a god! That Netwon's classical mechanics turn out not to be quite right, doesn't mean that balls dropped on earth suddenly fly off into space. It just deepens our understanding of why they do what they do.

The reality is, this is an exceeding complex subject. Good science does not set out to prove a point. It takes observations, and tries to explain them. Over time as our understanding improves, our explanations are refined. Like all scientific endeavors of significant importance, there is a great deal of debate over the details. Its worth noting that McKitrick and McIntyre are not climate scientists per se, but rather an economist and a petroleum geologist. The website linked earlier, climateaudit.org happens to be run by McIntyre. That doesn't mean they are wrong, just helps to keep things in perspective. In fact Mann has agreed that some of their observations are correct, and factored them into his revisions. Thats how science works. It doesn't change the big picture just the details, which McIntyre seems to agree with as well.

There is good reason to be concerned. There is significant observational evidence to suggest that something is going on with our global climate. There is also building historical data to indicate that temperatures are warming, and that CO2 levels are reaching levels unprecedented in modern history. We can demonstrate in a lab, that rising CO2 levels can create warming. We can observe other planets, and see the effects that green house gases have on their planetary climates. We can see evidence in the past that suggest that warming and rising CO2 go hand in hand, one reinforcing the other regardless of which leads or lags. We can also speculate about what would happen if that warming occurs, using computer models to try and predict what might happen. Given that what is happening has never happened before, it should be little surprise that the accuracy of those predictions is uncertain.

I think it is foolish to expect that we can take the carbon sequestered into the ground by natural processes over millions of years, and put it all back into the atmosphere in a few centuries and expect there to be no impact. The only real argument remaining, is how severe the impact will be. It may be a gentle gradual warming trend that will only be a minor nuisance on a global scale. Or, we could be initiating a self reinforcing feedback cycle that will threaten civilization as we know it by catastrophically altering the fundamental mechanisms of the earth's current climate. The only way to find out who is right is to wait around and see what happens. Personally I'd like to see us stack the deck as much in our own favor as possible before we play out that particular hand.

It kind of worries me that I agree with John McCain on something

Rob

 

One or two parting comments (yeah, I know I said I was bored, but I left the PC connected to this site and just returned to find a couple of comments that I couldn't resist.)

The thread took a turn into AGW through a throw-away comment I made to Alric. You can go back and look it up.

In response to assertions that Christians by definition suppress their thinking skills:

Francis Collins (geneticist - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

Francis Collins was, as I mentioned in a much earlier reply, in Maher's film. I think he was taken aback by Bill's shallow understanding of religion - and his lack of respect for an accomplished man's views. In any event, his 'interview' lasted less than a minute.

John Polkinghorne - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

It is the faithfulness of God that allows epistemology to model ontology.
~~ John Polkinghorne

C YA

 

It seems to me the arrogance starts with people declaring themselves "the chosen ones", and damning everyone else to hell. Each religious group seems to have its own set of rules, guaranteeing exclusivity and branding the rest of humanity as infidels or heathens, wholly unworthy. No, god doesn't love everyone unconditionally, just "us". "Perish in unbelief" you say? Now, that's arrogant.

 

No more arrogant than your assumptions that atheists are all Christian hating close minded science zealots. I choose to call myself an atheist because I reject the notion that the universe cares what I believe, or what particular group I belong to. In that sense I think Christianity is as silly as any other mythology. That doesn't mean I don't think they are entitled to their beliefs, so long as they respect my right to my own and don't use their beliefs as justification for persecuting others. I can't say they have been doing a great job of meeting either of those requirements lately, which leaves me not having much respect for Christians in this country. If they are being misrepresented by a crazy vocal minority as you suggest, I would expect to see a much greater outcry from more reasonable Christians about having their reputations dragged through the mud.

Rob