Originally Posted by Justin '77

That's how I took it, too. As if Teh Prezident can decree "Higher Fuel Mileage," and Lo, there were Higher Fuel Mileage throughout the land.

Actually, this is rather simple-minded, or at least archaic, thinking. More typical of the late '60s or early '70s when the national fleet mpg averages were in the low teens, and with less than 1/10 the cars of today, the So. Cal coastal basins were choking on dangerous smog alerts nearly every day in August and September.

There is an entire field of scientific literature and legal case study surrounding this issue, known as technology-forcing regulation most fully developed under the Clean Air Act but relevant to nearly all environmental pollution issues of the past 40 years and obviously likely to continue well into the future.

The sophomoric understanding that the Prez pulls a number out of his ass is pretty much confined to the grossly ignorant. Entire scientific and legal careers have been build around arguments of the present and likely future state of technology that a "best available technology" standard is based upon.

One of the latest reconfirmation of the past 40+ years of the technology-forcing regulatory approach was the relatively recent CA Supreme Court decision -

American Coatings Association, Inc. v. South Coast Air Quality Management District, 2012 Cal. LEXIS 155822.

A nice summary here -

http://www.alston.com/environmentala...og/?entry=4616

I've noticed that in my absence, the forum tends to slip back somewhat to magic ponyland - perhaps comfortable to some but not very pragmatic in the real world.

CNN and David Frum of Newsweek are predicting 2013 will be a year of crisis. They are pushing a pattern dismissed by others that US crop failures will lead to price increases which will lead to real hunger in the Third World then Arab Spring (or worse) style unrest.

Earlier in the summer some said the US failures were in corn and soybeans, and this could be covered by good corn and soybean crops elsewhere. Not sure whether the numbers have changed or if different writers have different agendas.

Originally Posted by B Butler

CNN and David Frum of Newsweek are predicting 2013 will be a year of crisis. They are pushing a pattern dismissed by others that US crop failures will lead to price increases which will lead to real hunger in the Third World then Arab Spring (or worse) style unrest.

Earlier in the summer some said the US failures were in corn and soybeans, and this could be covered by good corn and soybean crops elsewhere. Not sure whether the numbers have changed or if different writers have different agendas.

This will be an ongoing and increasing problem as global warming continues. From my crystal ball though, it looks like 2013 will be an OK year overall, especially in the summer; it might be 2014 when the food crisis kicks in. However, I have seen unrest spiking in 2013 too, as well as early 2014. I think 2013 will benefit from the election being over, as well as some international agreements and some progress in the Middle East and other places overseas toward freedom and rule of law. The bosses may decide that they can no longer hope to unseat Obama by hoarding their profits and not hiring, and the "uncertainty" might decrease as congress decides what to do about the "fiscal cliff." Despite the ongoing and ever-increasing droughts, floods, extreme weather, death in the oceans, rising sea levels, etc., I think economic recovery is likely to continue slowly in the USA, and the worst crash is past.

This should be interesting:

http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/...imate-science/

Eighty-seven years ago, people and organizations who believed in freedom of scientific inquiry arranged for a test case of Tennessee’s law against teaching the theory of evolution...

...Now the climate scientist Michael E. Mann may be laying the groundwork for his own version of that trial, threatening to sue National Review for defamation. The offending piece was a blog post by Mark Steyn, which described Dr. Mann as “the man behind the fraudulent climate-change ‘hockey-stick’ graph, the very ringmaster of the tree-ring circus.”

...while the business of getting a trial together tends to be slower than the business of electing a president, the prospect of a courtroom defense of climate science — or of the right of opponents to call it fraudulent — might just nudge the issue into a little more prominence in the national campaign.
Certainly, the idea of a courtroom review of the foundations of climate science — and of its professional standards and ethics — had immediate appeal when Dr. Mann announced his intention on his Facebook page.
But after months of legal wrangling to keep Virginia’s attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli, from digging into his e-mails from his days at the University of Virginia, does Dr. Mann, now with Penn State, really want to open up his files to discovery motions from lawyers representing the National Review? What, then, was the point of beating back all those Freedom of Information Act requests?

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/ja...-popcorn-time/

From obscure beginnings and with little discernible talent, Michael Mann has risen to become arguably the best loved comedy figure in the entire field of climate science, like Fatty Arbuckle, Pee Wee Herman and Coco the Clown rolled into one. He singlehandedly invented Mann-made global warming using his amazing Hockey Stick curve – the one programmed using the ingenious algorithm whereby, whatever information you fed into it – fudged paleoclimatological reconstructions, the latest football scores, tofu futures – it always came out in the same, scary-looking This Is The End Of The World And We've Got To Act Now By Pumping Gazillions More Money Into Climate Research shape...

Just to remind you what happened, here's what I said about the UEA's Professor Phil Jones (of its infamous Climatic Research Unit). I described him as “disgraced, FOI-breaching, email-deleting, scientific-method abusing”. The UEA reported me to the Press Complaints Commission – thus requiring me to waste vast quantities of time demonstrating to the PCC that my remarks were not without foundation.

And guess what? The PCC found in my favour.

...as the PCC noted in its ruling, I had presented plenty of compelling evidence to demonstrate that the claims I had made were accurate. It was not impressed, for example, with the UEA's defence that it had been cleared of wrongdoing by several enquiries because... these enquiries were little more than whitewashes organised by friends and sympathisers of the Climategate "scientists".

Mann is going to face similar problems in his legal action against NRO... NRO's defence lawyers are going to demand full disclosure of any number of hitherto private documents which Mann would probably have preferred to remain private. Furthermore, they are going to have the fish-in-a-barrel-style target of Mann's Hockey Stick which has been so thoroughly rebutted so many times that there is no way on God's earth Mann will be able to claim, straightfaced, that it retains the merest scintilla of scientific credibility. Ditto the various sham enquiries supposedly clearing the Climategate scientists of wrong-doing: an even half-way decent lawyer is going to make mincemeat of their verdicts.

So why, against all logic and reason, is Mann planning to go ahead with his defamation action?

My bet is that he won't. But in the unlikely event that he does it will be because:

1. As I argue in Watermelons, the climate alarmist industry is so richly funded that it can easily afford to pursue cases like this.

2. ...the "Climate Science" community is a bubble in much the same way that the Westminster and Washington DC villages are bubbles: these people spend so little time living in the real world that they lose the plot completely. In the weird, weird world of Michael Mann and his fellow climate "scientists", Climategate was just a case of ordinary decent scientists doing their job, the IPCC remains the gold standard of international climate science, the Hockey Stick is not a standing joke and man-made global warming remains the greatest threat to the planet ever. The facts speak otherwise...

If you need proof that Denialists are no different than any other conspiracy nuts... *FACEPALM*

Link Between Climate Denial and Conspiracy Beliefs Sparks Conspiracy Theories

A study suggesting climate change deniers also tend to hold general beliefs in conspiracy theories has sparked accusations of a conspiracy on climate change-denial blogs.

The research, which will be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science, surveyed more than 1,000 readers of science blogs regarding their beliefs regarding global warming. The results revealed that people who tend to believe in a wide array of conspiracy theories are more likely to reject the scientific consensus that the Earth is heating up.

University of Western Australia psychologist Stephan Lewandowsky based the findings on responses from an online survey posted on eight science blogs. According to the paper, Lewandowsky approached five climate-skeptic blogs and asked them to post the survey link, but none did.

Now, climate-skeptic bloggers are striking back with a new conspiracy theory: that the researchers deliberately failed to contact "real skeptics" for the study and then lied about it.

"[F]or some reason, Dr. Lewandowsky refuses to divulge which skeptical blogs he contacted," wrote Anthony Watts, who blogs on the popular climate skepticism website Watts Up With That?

Climate change conspiracy

Though about 97 percent of working scientists agree that the evidence shows a warming trend caused by humans, public understanding of climate change falls along political lines. Democrats are more likely to "believe in" global warming than Republicans, according to a 2011 report by the University of New Hampshire's Carsey Institute. In fact, deniers and skeptics who felt more confident in their climate-change knowledge were the strongest disbelievers. [10 Climate Change Myths Busted]

Believing that climate change isn't happening or that it's not human-caused requires a belief that thousands of climate scientists around the world are lying outright, Lewandowsky and his colleagues wrote in their new paper. Conspiracy theory beliefs are known to come in clusters — someone who thinks NASA faked the moon landing is more likely to accept the theory that 9/11 was an inside job, for example. So Lewandowsky and his colleagues created an online survey and asked eight mostly pro-science blogs and five climate-skeptic blogs to post a link to the survey for their readers. The respondents were self-selecting, but highly motivated to care about climate science, the researchers noted.

The responses came only from the eight pro-science blogs, the researchers reported. Of 1,145 usable survey responses, the researchers found that support for free-market, laissez-faire economics was linked to a rejection of climate change. A tendency to believe other conspiracy theories was also linked to denial of climate change. Finally, climate-change deniers were more likely than others to say that other environmental problems have been solved, indicating a dismissive attitude toward "green" causes. [Top 10 Conspiracy Theories]

Climate psych controversy

Unsurprisingly, the results did not please climate-skeptic bloggers, some of whom responded by accusing Lewandowsky of not attempting to contact them at all. In an email to Lucia Liljegren, who blogs at The Blackboard, Lewandowsky declined to name the bloggers he emailed, citing privacy concerns.

In response, Liljegren wrote, "I think who Lewandowsky contacted will reveal whether he really even tried to conduct a balanced survey," urging other bloggers to publically give permission for Lewandowsky to reveal their names. The researcher told DeSmogBlog that he has contacted his university's ethics committee to find out if he is allowed to do so.

In the meantime, Simon James, who blogs at Australian Climate Madness, has submitted a Freedom of Information request to the University of Western Australia in an effort to force the release of emails related to the study, and prominent climate-change skeptic Steve McIntyre has urged readers to email the university with academic misconduct complaints.

McIntyre later reported that an email search turned up a request from one of Lewandowsky's collaborators.

"[T]o our knowledge, our results are the first to provide empirical evidence for the correlation between a general construct of conspiracist ideation and the general tendency to reject well-founded science," Lewandowsky and his colleagues concluded. Psychological research has found that conspiracy beliefs are hard to dislodge, they wrote, but efforts to debunk multiple lines of conspiratorial reasoning at once may help.

Sorry, that raises red flags for me. "Conspiracy theory" is one of the most loaded phrases in a long list of loaded political phrases.

So what kind of conspiracies are these? People believing bigfoot aliens abducted Elvis? People believing that a small group of financially powerful and politically connected people run the institutions that rule the world? People who believe cap & trade will do little but institutionalize pollution and reward those powerful people who run those institutions?

Ahh, the paper shows its hand:

Another variable that has been associated with the rejection of science is
conspiratorial thinking, or conspiracist ideation, defined here as the attempt to explain a
signicant political or social event as a secret plot by powerful individuals or organizations

If you believe that powerful individuals and organizations influence important social and political events, you're crazy and you hate science. There was no conspiracy to lie us in to Iraq. There were no financial insiders before & after the crash, guiding public policy toward an outcome that favors the banks. There are no billionaire PACs trying to sway the election.

Got it.



Interesting:

In support of a general disposition towards conspiracist ideation, Douglas and Sutton (2011) showed that endorsement of conspiracy theories was associated with people's willingness to engage in a conspiracy themselves when deemed necessary

• "Vast right-wing conspiracy" was a theory advanced by then First Lady of the United States Hillary Rodham Clinton in 1998 in defense of her husband, President Bill Clinton
• Bush also hired Pentagon analysts promoting the idea of al-Queda as a vast, secretive conspiracy run by Saddam Hussein (Mylroie’s allies in the Bush Administration included Iraq hawks Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and others. “The elaborate conspiracy theories she had propounded—dismissed as bizarre and implausible by the U.S. law enforcement and intelligence communities—would have enormous influence within the administration,”)

So why are U.S. presidents so receptive to the idea of conspiracy theories... unless they're willing to engage in conspiracies themselves?

There are conspiracies (as in "conspiracy to commit murder") and there are the "conspiracies" of the tin-foilers, that later are what the study meant. The latter are essentially unfalsifiable notions based on circular reasoning. If there is circular reasoning involved ("any criticism is proof of the conspiracy"), then it is in the latter category.

Essentially, anyone who claims there is a conspiracy, and then dismisses any reasonable criticism as part of the conspiracy, can be dismissed as a nutcase.

Originally Posted by Odin

There are conspiracies (as in "conspiracy to commit murder") and there are the "conspiracies" of the tin-foilers, that later are what the study meant. The latter are essentially unfalsifiable notions based on circular reasoning.

Nope, that isn't the definition they used in the study.

"[C]onspiratorial thinking, or conspiracist ideation, defined here as the attempt to explain a significant political or social event as a secret plot by powerful individuals or organizations"

To the conclusion: If you believe significant political and social events are caused by secretive plots of powerful people, you're crazy and can be dismissed off-hand. Unless you're one of those powerful people who also believes in conspiracy theories, because then you're probably just familiar with how it all works and willing to engage in your own conspiratorial plots.

Originally Posted by JohnMc82

Nope, that isn't the definition they used in the study.

"[C]onspiratorial thinking, or conspiracist ideation, defined here as the attempt to explain a significant political or social event as a secret plot by powerful individuals or organizations"

To the conclusion: If you believe significant political and social events are caused by secretive plots of powerful people, you're crazy and can be dismissed off-hand. Unless you're one of those powerful people who also believes in conspiracy theories, because then you're probably just familiar with how it all works and willing to engage in your own conspiratorial plots.

DOH, that's what happens when I read an article too fast!

But note there is a difference between saying that some particular event was a conspiracy (ex. the 1933 Business Plot against FDR), and saying that all of history has the hands of some secretive evil group behind it.

But I myself have noticed that most denialists I have run into do the "criticism is evidence of conspiracy" routine

A Summer of Extremes Signifies the New Normal

I usually don't like McKibben because of his technophobic "Deep Ecology" leanings, but he's completely right here.

Just as the baseball season now stretches nearly into November, and the National Football League keeps adding games, so the summer season is in danger of extending on both ends, a kind of megalomaniac power grab fueled by the carbon pouring into the atmosphere.

In fact, you could argue that the North American summer actually started two days before the official end of winter this year, when the town of Winner, South Dakota turned in a 94-degree temperature reading. It was part of that wild July-in-March heat wave that stretched across two-thirds of the country, a stretch of weather so bizarre that historian Christopher Burt called it "probably the most extraordinary anomalous heat event" that the nation has ever seen. International Falls, "the icebox of the nation," broke its heat records 10 straight days, and Chicago nine. In Traverse City, Michigan, on March 21, the record high was 87 degrees. But the low was 62 degrees, which was 4 degrees higher than the previous record high. The technical word for that is, insane.

And it wasn't just the U.S. - new March records were set everywhere from Perth to Reykjavik, not to mention (this is the gun on the wall in Act One) Summit Station at the top of the Greenland Ice Cap.

Plants, responding in their plantlike ways, blossomed. And so, though April was warmer than normal, the expected frosts killed an awful lot of fruit before it could ever get started. Traverse City, for instance, sits at the heart of the U.S. cherry crop - but not this year. Still, April was a warmish pause, and May warm as well, with the heat gathering. And then right around the solstice in June, all hell broke loose - or at least something of a similar temperature.

While Tropical Storm Debby, the earliest fourth-named storm ever, was drenching Florida, fires were breaking out in New Mexico and Colorado that would become the largest and most expensive in those states' histories. As the Front Range of the Rockies set all-time temperature records, horrible wild fires obliterated homes in Colorado Springs and Fort Collins. (They also chased the world's premier climate researchers from their offices in Boulder, though that didn't stop them from explaining to reporters that global warming was "setting the table" for these blazes.)

And then the heat started moving east. They've been taking the temperature in Dodge City, Kansas since 1874 (one of the longest continuous readings in the country), and June 27 was the very first time it had reached 111 degrees. And it just kept getting hotter as the high pressure slid east - Tennessee, Georgia, Kentucky, Illinois, the Carolinas, Virginia were all in the triple digits day after day after day. Some "relief" came in the form of a derecho (new occasions teach new words), a "straight line wind" that blew from Indiana to the Atlantic Ocean in a matter of hours, knocking out power for 5 million people, many of whom sweltered for days since the heat simply picked back up where it had left off. Things got so bad in Washington, D.C., where the longest heat wave ever recorded stretched into July, that one TV weatherman simply asked "Do you have a walk-in freezer you can move into for the weekend?"

And almost unnoticed, a young ice researcher named Jason Box published a paper predicting that sometime soon the top of the entire Greenland ice sheet would get warm enough to melt. "We're near a tipping point," he said.

As Americans sweltered through the record temperatures, and as the wildfires sent plumes of smoke across the continent, and as utilities tried to patch up the storm-damaged grid, a new specter started stalking the nation. As usual, the money guys noticed first: the price of corn spiked 12 percent in two days right at the end of June, as fear began to build that the heat was damaging crops across the Midwest. And not just the heat - the same high pressure that was letting temperatures soar also blocked storms from watering the country's midsection. (July, it would turn out, saw the lowest number of tornadoes in history, which was about the only good news.)

Soon the story was relentless drought. Farmers reported that corn plants were going into "defensive mode," rolling their leaves to prevent water loss. Experts on the evening news were explaining corn sex - how it could simply get too hot and dry for the plants to fertilize. (As one agronomist put it, "we're in uncharted water, except there is no water.") Shots of cracked earth and stunted ears of corn were the new commonplace, as the size of the drought matched the worst of the 1980s, and then the 1950s, and then had the meteorologists pulling out their charts to see what the Dust Bowl had looked like. (A lot like this, as it turned out.) July turned out to be the warmest month ever recorded in the United States, any month, any year.

State fairs reported small pigs ( "they don't have their virility in this heat"), and ranchers reported that bulls were, well, uninterested once the heat topped 105. Agribusiness had federal crop insurance to turn to - the big losers were, as usual, people in poor countries around the world. Because it wasn't just the U.S. grain harvest that was failing - drought across Russia was tempting the Kremlin to shut down grain exports for the second time in three years, and the Indian monsoon was fitful at best, with large parts of the subcontinent's grain belt in official drought. Corn and soybeans were fetching 30 percent and then 40 percent more then they had just weeks before. Where it wasn't drought, it was deluge - the U.K. was enduring the wettest weather in its history, and Beijing the worst flooding in its modern history.

And Greenland? In Greenland in July they set a new all-time temperature record on the top of the glacier. Which is pretty much exactly where you'd least want to set a new record, considering that's there's 20 feet of sea level in that block of ice. Just as researcher Jason Box had predicted six weeks before, satellites showed a day when the top of the entire ice sheet turned to liquid.

Meanwhile, the surrounding Arctic Ocean spent all summer melting ahead even of 2007's record pace - at first it was out front just by a nose, but then as August came on, the melt accelerated, until an area the size of South Carolina was vanishing daily. On August 26, with almost a month left in the melt season, the old record low for summer sea ice extent disappeared beneath the waves.

I could go on and on with accounts of this wildest of summers: "refugee camps" for livestock in arid India; the warmest rainstorm ever recorded in Mecca in early summer (109 degrees), a mark that lasted about six weeks until it was broken in the California desert in August (115 degrees); traffic on the Mississippi grinding to a halt as the water level fell and fell and fell; a record area of the continental U.S. burned by wildfires before the summer was even over. Ad infinitum.

But best to end with the words of our leading climatologist, James Hansen, who in August published a peer-reviewed paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. As he had at every stage of the global warming saga, Hansen laid out what was happening with devastating clarity. There's always been extreme heat, he showed - but the one-degree increase in global temperature we've seen so far has been enough to shift the bell curve sharply to the left. In the old summer, the one most of us grew up in, 0.1 to 0.2 percent of the surface area of the planet was dealing with "extreme heat anomalies" at any given moment. Now it was approaching 10 percent. The math, he said, was clear: It "allows us to infer that the area covered by extreme hot anomalies will continue to increase in coming decades and that even more extreme outliers will occur."

In other words, this is no freak summer. This is how the earth works now.

Welcome to the Brave New World...

Originally Posted by Odin

A Summer of Extremes Signifies the New Normal

I usually don't like McKibben because of his technophobic "Deep Ecology" leanings, but he's completely right here....

The above piece does reflect a new push from the climate science community. They've double checked and debunked the Climategate era criticisms, and come up with fairly clear new statistical analyses that should convince the convincible. We've also had three summers in a row with major heat waves causing crop failures somewhere. Global Warming is harder to shrug off when the main stream media often has pictures of fields of dead corn on their front pages. The reduced arctic ice extent is also becoming obvious to the layman's eye.

I'm not going to try just now to convince the values locked, but don't be surprised by a new propaganda push by the alarmists.

I think that climate change will certainly be a part of (or perhaps the prime) crisis of the current 4T. I think long-term government debt is the other, probably even more serious crisis - actually, the two crises could easily converge - at a time when the U.S. and other national governments around the world should be spending more money on climate change mitigation efforts, their debt levels will be already so far out of control that they may very well be powerless to stop the effects or even try to adapt to the new changes. My hunch is that this a problem that will take decades to resolve, so this is in direct conflict with the idea that a Crisis can be resolved in a 15 to 20 year Turning, but if S&H's theory follows through, then by the year 2030 there should be some sort of major breakthrough that will allow us to adapt to new changes, mitigate future damage, and still somehow maintain a healthy level of debt without teetering on the verge of bankruptcy and economic collapse, a la Germany after World War I.

Of course, S&H make no guarantees that a Crisis or 4T will end well, so by 2030 we could very well have gone off into the abyss, having been thrust into a situation from which we can never recover.

Originally Posted by JohnMc82

Nope, that isn't the definition they used in the study.

"[C]onspiratorial thinking, or conspiracist ideation, defined here as the attempt to explain a significant political or social event as a secret plot by powerful individuals or organizations"

To the conclusion: If you believe significant political and social events are caused by secretive plots of powerful people, you're crazy and can be dismissed off-hand. Unless you're one of those powerful people who also believes in conspiracy theories, because then you're probably just familiar with how it all works and willing to engage in your own conspiratorial plots.

Speaking of conspiracy theories, here's an article on them I ran into.

Conspiracist Crackpots do not have a measured view of human nature and human ability. They are unable to realize that human beings are not capable of keeping the secrets and pulling the massive cons required of conspiracy narratives.

Conspiracist Crackpots do not understand Ockham’s Razor, one of the key principles of logical thought. Even if you explain it to them they’ll just say, “Aha! You contradict yourself. It says right there that the simplest explanation is only usually the correct one.” You pointing out Ockham’s Razor to them is probably the first time they have ever heard of the concept.

Conspiracist Crackpots tend to be obsessed with Nazism to one degree or another. The Crackpots see the horrors of Nazism as somehow evidence that grand conspiracies happen. “If a government murdering its people happened in Germany in the ’30s it can happen anywhere right now!”

Conspiracist Crackpots are oblivious to the fact that their conspiracy of choice tends to relate directly to their political views. Not only that but their embrace of the conspiracy actually flows out of their political ideology. Every single Birther is opposed to Barack Obama on policy grounds. Truthers who think 9/11 was an “inside job” done by the government are almost always politically opposed to the government. Leftist Truthers hate America and Right-wing Truthers hate the federal government. Holocaust deniers hate Jews. Afrocentric leftists who think the government engineered AIDS and crack also think America is fundamentally racist. You can do this with virtually every conspiracy.

Crackpot conspiracists are unqualified amateurs who rarely have any expertise to analyze the events they’re talking about. Yet they have the audacity to come to conclusions that run counter to the majority of trained experts.

Crackpot conspiracists do not understand that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. A youtube video proves nothing. What kind of mind actually gets changed as a result of some video on the internet?

Crackpot conspiracists do not dialogue. There’s no reason for it. They have the Truth and are there to preach, they’re not “questioning” or “chasing truths.” They’ve already found the answers. They are in no way “open minded.” Hence they won’t really answer your questions. They’ll just change the subject.

Crackpot conspiracists usually believe in more than one conspiracy. It’s no coincidence that perennial third-party candidate Ed Noonan, who showed up on one of the threads, is both a proud Birther and Truther.

Crackpot conspiracists are not able to see ambiguity or complexity. In my dialogue with the Truther he said multiple times that I had the fallacy of believing that there weren’t any conspiracies. I never said that. Conspiracies do in fact happen. 9/11 was indeed a conspiracy. Al Qaeda conspired in secret to attack America and they did it. Rational people understand the difference, though, between rationally acknowledging small, individual conspiracies and irrationally seeing grand conspiracies that are unsupported by adequate evidence.

Originally Posted by Odin

Speaking of conspiracy theories, here's an article on them I ran into.

Conspiracist Crackpots do not have a measured view of human nature and human ability. They are unable to realize that human beings are not capable of keeping the secrets and pulling the massive cons required of conspiracy narratives.

Conspiracist Crackpots do not understand Ockham’s Razor, one of the key principles of logical thought. Even if you explain it to them they’ll just say, “Aha! You contradict yourself. It says right there that the simplest explanation is only usually the correct one.” You pointing out Ockham’s Razor to them is probably the first time they have ever heard of the concept.

Conspiracist Crackpots tend to be obsessed with Nazism to one degree or another. The Crackpots see the horrors of Nazism as somehow evidence that grand conspiracies happen. “If a government murdering its people happened in Germany in the ’30s it can happen anywhere right now!”

Conspiracist Crackpots are oblivious to the fact that their conspiracy of choice tends to relate directly to their political views. Not only that but their embrace of the conspiracy actually flows out of their political ideology. Every single Birther is opposed to Barack Obama on policy grounds. Truthers who think 9/11 was an “inside job” done by the government are almost always politically opposed to the government. Leftist Truthers hate America and Right-wing Truthers hate the federal government. Holocaust deniers hate Jews. Afrocentric leftists who think the government engineered AIDS and crack also think America is fundamentally racist. You can do this with virtually every conspiracy.

Crackpot conspiracists are unqualified amateurs who rarely have any expertise to analyze the events they’re talking about. Yet they have the audacity to come to conclusions that run counter to the majority of trained experts.

Crackpot conspiracists do not understand that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. A youtube video proves nothing. What kind of mind actually gets changed as a result of some video on the internet?

Crackpot conspiracists do not dialogue. There’s no reason for it. They have the Truth and are there to preach, they’re not “questioning” or “chasing truths.” They’ve already found the answers. They are in no way “open minded.” Hence they won’t really answer your questions. They’ll just change the subject.

Crackpot conspiracists usually believe in more than one conspiracy. It’s no coincidence that perennial third-party candidate Ed Noonan, who showed up on one of the threads, is both a proud Birther and Truther.

Crackpot conspiracists are not able to see ambiguity or complexity. In my dialogue with the Truther he said multiple times that I had the fallacy of believing that there weren’t any conspiracies. I never said that. Conspiracies do in fact happen. 9/11 was indeed a conspiracy. Al Qaeda conspired in secret to attack America and they did it. Rational people understand the difference, though, between rationally acknowledging small, individual conspiracies and irrationally seeing grand conspiracies that are unsupported by adequate evidence.

Got it. Conspiracies exist, and they are most effective when they involve small groups of insiders (al-Qaeda) or are able to suppress all opposition and potential disclosure (as in Nazi Germany, Stalin's Soviet Union, and Iraq under Saddam Hussein) -- but oddly totalitarian states promote their own conspiracies (Jews, encirclement politicians, finance capital, and Zionism) as a diversion from legitimate causes for dissent. Conspiracies involving elites (crime syndicates form among the disaffected) are rare, and the bigger they are the more likely they are to collapse. Just look at the collapse of the Watergate scandal, operated by some of the most cunning figures of politics of the time. Just look at the demise of Enron Corporation. The exceptions in which conspiracies get so large that they can get away with evil on the scale of Stalin or Hitler is the totalitarian State that can censor and murder at will. Sure, there might be some local police force that is in collusion with drug traffickers... but that is as a rule a small-scale conspiracy. I would be concerned if some rural sheriff is getting large amounts of campaign funds from out-of-state backers with surnames uncharacteristic of that county. But the entire management of the State Troopers? Not when there are Pulitzer Prizes to win in journalistic backwaters.

I recognize the attraction of unchallenged power, especially power that does not rely upon the caprice of a fickle electorate, economic performance, and checks and balances. I recognize the temptation of filthy lucre to support personal excess that derives from the denial of the basic decencies and even necessities of the common man. I recognize the power of unexamined hatred. Human vices of our time are essentially the same as those of the time of Nebuchadnezzar and Ramses. Yes, one could set a soap opera or sitcom in antiquity. As a rule it is the vices that do the harm, especially when those vices manipulate mass delusion.

Making an honest living through ordinary toil or even surviving on petty crime is far easier than establishing grand evil schemes or keeping them intact. As one debunker said of the "Jewish conspiracy of world domination" -- the wisest people easily recognize its ludicrous absurdity due to its gross injustice and logical contradictions, but the biggest fools recognize it as the purest essence of reality and the answer to all of the inadequacies of their personal lives.

Originally Posted by odin

conspiracist crackpots do not understand ockham’s razor, one of the key principles of logical thought.

Crackpot conspiracists are not able to see ambiguity or complexity.

Beyond being a hilarious internal contradiction, this strawman definition has nothing to do with the definitions in the "study" you linked earlier. Which I'm still cracking up about, because they define conspiratorial thinking as the assumption powerful people control important events - then they conclude their paper with suggestions for how powerful politicians can control important debates.

Besides, Ockham's Razor isn't a "Key principle of logical thought." It is a logical fallacy that would reject General Relativity for the simpler but less accurate Newtonian Physics. Same goes for atomic level chemistry: why mess with quantum mechanics when the plum-pudding model of the atom is so simple?

But yeah, not relevant. You can't just stretch the definition used in the study until it fits under the umbrella of some bloggers' straw-man parade.

Originally Posted by Normal

I think that climate change will certainly be a part of (or perhaps the prime) crisis of the current 4T. I think long-term government debt is the other, probably even more serious crisis - actually, the two crises could easily converge - at a time when the U.S. and other national governments around the world should be spending more money on climate change mitigation efforts, their debt levels will be already so far out of control that they may very well be powerless to stop the effects or even try to adapt to the new changes.

There is no reason to believe that debt will be an issue if climate really starts to be a major problem. We'll spend what needs to be spent, and the results will be measured in climatic terms, not financial ones. Debt issues alwasy resolve themselves in one way or another, and the fact that we're using fiat curency these days makes the issue even easier than it used to be. If the debt is less than crushing, a little mild inflation will lift the burden in a decade or two. If it's worse, the inflation will have to be high enough to resolve it in a few years. We may even have to change currencies. Oh well. Under no coniditon will it be allowed to impoverish the entire world.

Originally Posted by Normal ...

My hunch is that this a problem that will take decades to resolve, so this is in direct conflict with the idea that a Crisis can be resolved in a 15 to 20 year Turning, but if S&H's theory follows through, then by the year 2030 there should be some sort of major breakthrough that will allow us to adapt to new changes, mitigate future damage, and still somehow maintain a healthy level of debt without teetering on the verge of bankruptcy and economic collapse, a la Germany after World War I.

We are not now nor will we ever be the Weimar Republic. The hyper inflation there was due to war reparations that were impossible to meet. With reparations priced in French Francs, and the old German Marks dropping in value by the day, inflation just raised the debt bar as the currency tanked. No country will ever be liable for that kind of debt again.

Originally Posted by Normal ...

Of course, S&H make no guarantees that a Crisis or 4T will end well, so by 2030 we could very well have gone off into the abyss, having been thrust into a situation from which we can never recover.

This is possible. We're still discussing the GOP plan for converting the US into a banana republlic. We could decide on that as our chosen course. It's also possible that we might fail in our climate response. Nothing is assured that is outside human control ... or susceptible to human frailty.

Originally Posted by Normal

I think that climate change will certainly be a part of (or perhaps the prime) crisis of the current 4T. I think long-term government debt is the other, probably even more serious crisis - actually, the two crises could easily converge - at a time when the U.S. and other national governments around the world should be spending more money on climate change mitigation efforts, their debt levels will be already so far out of control that they may very well be powerless to stop the effects or even try to adapt to the new changes. My hunch is that this a problem that will take decades to resolve, so this is in direct conflict with the idea that a Crisis can be resolved in a 15 to 20 year Turning, but if S&H's theory follows through, then by the year 2030 there should be some sort of major breakthrough that will allow us to adapt to new changes, mitigate future damage, and still somehow maintain a healthy level of debt without teetering on the verge of bankruptcy and economic collapse, a la Germany after World War I.

Of course, S&H make no guarantees that a Crisis or 4T will end well, so by 2030 we could very well have gone off into the abyss, having been thrust into a situation from which we can never recover.

Since you're a junior member here, I'll go easy on you about this govt debt "crisis" you expect.

You should know that the US govt pays off its ENTIRE debt about every three months. They "roll it over" by paying off existing bonds and issuing new bonds with a bid-to-cover of around 3-to-1 - i.e. for every successful bidder another 2 go home empty handed. This has been the case since the nation was founded and it will be the case into the future. The govt can always pay its debt that is held in the currency that it issues.

The issue isn't govt debt, it is govt spending that includes the govt paying interest on the debt it owes. The only question is demand-pull inflation. Will govt deficit spending, when added to all other spending, cause aggregate demand to exceed the ability of the economy to supply during any given time period and cause prices to rise during that time period? That's it; from a macro-economic perspective that is the only issue of concern for federal govt spending. Real scary, yes? Well, not really.

For it to be a concern, you have to know for that given time period whether the economy is operating at full tilt (e.g. full employment) or not. If it is operating at full tilt, then demand-pull inflation from federal deficit spending is possible; on the other hand if the economy is operating at sub-par, then the federal deficit spending would be welcome.

Do you know what the economy will be doing during the time period you expect a crisis? I don't and anyone who says they do is lying.

What I can tell you is what we can do to increase the chances that the future will have a vibrant economy capable of meeting whatever demand comes along. That would be investment in our infrastructure, a highly-educated and productive workforce, and kick-ass research and development. For example, getting rid of student debt is probable one of the most important things we can do if we want to avoid inflation in the future. With the addition of a healthy natural environment, those are the only three things we can do now to assure a good economic future.

Unfortunately, those three things are what we are currently forgoing because we are foolishly lead astray by nonsensical predictions of a future federal debt crisis. Then there's that whole deal about ignoring global warming. Pretty silly, no?

in a very hot kind of way -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature...&v=OtY8DpA_XNE

Originally Posted by playwrite

in a very hot kind of way -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature...&v=OtY8DpA_XNE

Interesting, but wasn't 1880 an unusually cold period? Maybe you should find a you tube video starting with the medieval warming period.

This Scientific American article on the disintegration of the northern ice cap has a chart that left me absolutely terrified.



That is NOT fucking natural.

Originally Posted by Odin

This Scientific American article on the disintegration of the northern ice cap has a chart that left me absolutely terrified.

Yep. The more ice melts, the faster the ice melts. This is one of the tipping points I've been watching for for years. The next tipping point is the methane...

Originally Posted by JohnMc82

There was no conspiracy to lie us in to Iraq. .

The lying about the war was right out in the open. There is no reason to try to hide lying, as they are no consequenced for lying. Without secrecy there is no conspiracy.

Few people thought the war was really about WMDs in the first place. Seriously, did you? What sort of a reason is that for fighting a war? Polls of the troops involved clearly show that they overwhemingly believed that the Iraq war was payback for 911. Now that's a reason for going to war. The WMD things was the pretext, which for many wars is usually a polite fiction.

This idea that the war was to remove WMDs was demonstrated to be bullshit when, after determination of removal in 2003, nothing happened, the war continued as if the objective had not just been achieved. But since you weren't supposed to take the WMD things seriously, as it was simply the pretext and not the reason, nobody batted an eye when confirmation that the supposed goal of the operation was achieved didn't end the operation.

There were no financial insiders before & after the crash, guiding public policy toward an outcome that favors the banks.

Of course there were financial insiders guiding policy to their benefit, that's what politics is about. These things were out in the open.
A conspiracy is supposed to be secret.

There are no billionaire PACs trying to sway the election.

This is no secret.

Originally Posted by Odin

This Scientific American article on the disintegration of the northern ice cap has a chart that left me absolutely terrified.



That is NOT fucking natural.

I'll say. Who the fuck put the satellites up there back in 700AD to measure sea ice coverage?? Aliens?? Or did the Vikings like just pace it out???

Originally Posted by Justin '77

I'll say. Who the fuck put the satellites up there back in 700AD to measure sea ice coverage?? Aliens?? Or did the Vikings like just pace it out???

It's proxy data, obviously (I hate dumbed-down pop-sci articles that don't tell where the data comes from, GRRRR!!!!) . Of course, given that a while ago you made it clear you reject the validity of all proxy data I didn't expect that it would convince you.

Originally Posted by Odin

It's proxy data, obviously (I hate dumbed-down pop-sci articles that don't tell where the data comes from, GRRRR!!!!) . Of course, given that a while ago you made it clear you reject the validity of all proxy data I didn't expect that it would convince you.

Still putting words in peoples' mouths, I see.

"Proxy" isn't a magic word that makes things invalid -- or valid. It'd be really nice to see exactly what proxies were used to determine sea ice coverage, being as how that's an ocean-surface thing, and the surface of the oceans are rather a bit poor as far as carriers-of-multi-century-information. Who knows, the line they draw might even be vaguely similar to reality!

I know it's not an important question for some people, but could you maybe humor the rest of us, who like to know more than just the name of the person who promised that their numbers are "totally really, really good, seriously".