by wj
Warning: a big part of this post is going to be about sex. So if you don’t want to even think about that, skip the post and just go with the Open Thread part.
One of this week’s big stories, apparently, revolved around Caitlyn Jenner. But a lot of the reason for its prominence really had nothing to do with her, and a lot to do what she represents. Consider, for example:
Steve Deace, a syndicated talk radio host based in Iowa, said in an interview:
“If we’re not going to defend as a party basic principles of male and female, that life is sacred because it comes from God, then you’re going to lose the vast majority of people who’ve joined that party.”
I suspect that may be true: if the party moves on that issue, a lot of the current party base may go away again. But it is not the entirety of the discussion. We also have this:
“Republican reticence and at times intolerance on LGBT issues is a problem for them because they have become a litmus test for young people,” Pfeiffer said. “Even if they’re conservative on other issues, if you break with them on gay or transgender rights, you look like a candidate of the past.”
Let me say right here I am very much a product of the past culture that I grew up in, in the 1950s and early 1960s. I can accept intellectually that someone might, like Jenner, want to change gender. But I simply cannot relate to it on any other kind of level. Likewise, just the thought of gay sex makes my skin crawl — which didn’t keep me from deciding, back in the late 1980s, that allowing gay marriage was the right thing to do. In other words, I think I count as a conservative on many social issues, but I’m prepared to tolerate those whose views are rather different from my own.
All of which leads to another discussion, on where has the GOP come from, where is it going, and what will that mean for its future. We’ve seen a lot of analysis, including from within the Republican Party, of what the party needs to do to in order to have a future. But if there is any intention, on the part of those who are running for the Republican Presidential nomination, to move in that direction, it is amazingly well hidden — especially, and carefully, from the party’s voters. And that includes the parts about the need to reach out to Hispanic and other minority voters.
So what does that all mean? Well, in today’s party, the goalposts have moved so far that the GOP nomination probably could not be won by a politician with a record like . . . Ronald Reagan. And I suspect that it also means that, while the GOP can continue to hold on to majorities in Congress without changing (at least until after the 2020 census redistricting kicks in), winning a Presidential election is going to be increasingly problematic. And the perception that the GOP is the party of old white people (i.e. people who look basically like me) is only going to grow.
The glimmer of hope for the party is the existance of candidates at the local level who are moving in a different direction. For example, the state Assembly seat in my heavily Democratic district was recently won by a Republican who is a serious fiscal conservative, but has to count as a “tolerant conservative” on social issues. Which let her pull in the votes of moderates from both parties. Enough of those percolating up through the ranks, and we may have a future after all.
I don’t think “I can accept intellectually that someone might, like Jenner, want to change gender. But I simply cannot relate to it on any other kind of level” is necessarily a product of culture. It’s just that you’re in your (correct/preferred) gender.
What gets me about all the “God created M/F and that’s the way it MUST be!” is that there are people, a few, that are born hermaphroditic, or XXY, or genetic mosaic, or whatever.
Unless you’re going to take a medieval view that such people are the Spawn of Satan, to be shunned at best, or possibly burned at the stake, then one is rather forced to accept that human sexuality doesn’t always fit simply in a simple M/F dichotomy. And if that is true for major physiological differences, simple dichotomy isn’t so compelling for more subtle effects.
Humans are complex critters. They don’t fit well in simple boxes.
@Snarki — The recent book “Galileo’s Middle Finger” by Alice Dreger discusses this at some length among other topics: there is a startlingly large number of children born intersex. Those who are not given surgery to “correct” them before they can consent are generally no more unhappy than anyone else is with how they are put together. Unless you want to believe in original sin, well, it is indeed true that gender is not really binary. As with almost anything that’s not purely abstract, it’s more complicated than that.
The Dreger book is generally terrific and a very quick read, by the way.
I feel sorry for Bruce. It’s bad enough that the guy has a mental illness, people had to go and enable it, instead of encouraging him to overcome it.
Seems the first hospital to be doing sex reassignment surgery did the normal medical thing, and tracked the outcomes of the surgery. And then, looking at the outcomes, stopped doing them.
“You won’t hear it from those championing transgender equality, but controlled and follow-up studies reveal fundamental problems with this movement. When children who reported transgender feelings were tracked without medical or surgical treatment at both Vanderbilt University and London’s Portman Clinic, 70%-80% of them spontaneously lost those feelings. Some 25% did have persisting feelings; what differentiates those individuals remains to be discerned.
We at Johns Hopkins University—which in the 1960s was the first American medical center to venture into “sex-reassignment surgery”—launched a study in the 1970s comparing the outcomes of transgendered people who had the surgery with the outcomes of those who did not. Most of the surgically treated patients described themselves as “satisfied” by the results, but their subsequent psycho-social adjustments were no better than those who didn’t have the surgery. And so at Hopkins we stopped doing sex-reassignment surgery, since producing a “satisfied” but still troubled patient seemed an inadequate reason for surgically amputating normal organs.
It now appears that our long-ago decision was a wise one. A 2011 study at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden produced the most illuminating results yet regarding the transgendered, evidence that should give advocates pause. The long-term study—up to 30 years—followed 324 people who had sex-reassignment surgery. The study revealed that beginning about 10 years after having the surgery, the transgendered began to experience increasing mental difficulties. Most shockingly, their suicide mortality rose almost 20-fold above the comparable nontransgender population. This disturbing result has as yet no explanation but probably reflects the growing sense of isolation reported by the aging transgendered after surgery. The high suicide rate certainly challenges the surgery prescription.”
It appears that lopping off organs doesn’t do anything to fix a problem that’s located in your brain.
My wife made the point with which I generally agree that while she has no issue with Jenner having reassignment surgery, for God’s sake she’s 65! How much additional plastic surgery did it take for her to look like that, and why does she need to present as a woman of 40 or thereabouts? What’s wrong with looking like a woman of 65?
He went into surgery to look the way he wanted to look. I suspect even real women of 65 would prefer to look like women of 40. So that’s the least crazy part of it.
And I suspect there’s an awful lot of airbrushing involved in his looking like he’s 40. I mean, seriously, his skin was not that good looking before the surgery.
I honestly don’t give a good crap about this. It doesn’t rise to the level of “issue” for me. It doesn’t even rise to the level of “oh, that’s interesting; I would like to know more”.
Bruce Jenner is only a topic of conversation because he’s a former Olympic athlete who’s decided, rather late in the game, to swap genders. And whose daughter has done something vaguely naughty whose exact nature I can’t recall and don’t really care about.
If these things are important to you in the sense that they inspire you to rail on about them, maybe you’re in need of rather more of a life than what you’ve got. Get out. See the outdoors. Visit a museum. Read about history.
I have seen petitions to have Jenner’s gold medal revoked. I doubt those could be effective, but if they’re upset that he won a gold medal in the men’s decathlon using his sekrit advantages of being a woman on the inside, I say give him another gold medal just like it for even more awesomeness.
Other than that: I don’t know the guy; have no connection with him at all. And I think it’d be cool when people stop paying him so much attention and start paying attention to the things going on of real, actual consequence.
EOR
wj,
I looked quickly at the report you link to, and I don’t see a word about policy other than a remark or two about how important it is.
It’s all about mechanics and messages. If Republicans are convinced that nothing about their positions needs to change then either they are doomed or the country is.
Am I saying that they need to become Democrats? No. But they need to start respecting rationality and evidence. Right now they just don’t.
Consider this:
The Republican Party must be the champion of those who seek to climb the economic ladder of life. Low-income Americans are hardworking people who want to become hard-working middle income Americans. Middle-income Americans want to become upper-middle-income, and so on. We need to help everyone make it in America.
But there is nothing to suggest how they plan to do this. Taken a look at Kansas lately? Does the phrase “47%” ring any bells? Does cutting education budgets to reduce income taxes improve opportunity?
We have to blow the whistle at corporate malfeasance and attack corporate welfare. We should speak out when a company liquidates itself and its executives receive bonuses but rank-and-file
workers are left unemployed. We should speak out when CEOs receive tens of millions of dollars in retirement packages but middle-class workers have not had a meaningful raise in years.
Maybe Mitt Romney can say something about that, or Carly Fiorina.
If Hispanic Americans perceive that a GOP nominee or candidate does not want them in the United States (i.e. self-deportation), they will not pay attention to our next sentence. It does not matter what
we say about education, jobs or the economy; if Hispanics think we do not want them here, they will close their ears to our policies.
Gee, where would they ever get that idea?
Look, wj. I know you consider yourself a Republican, and hope the party can come to its senses. Frankly, I think it’s hopeless.
@Brett’s 6:39
Given that it would be essentially impossible to control for transgender individuals being an isolated and generally despised closeted minority, I can’t say that the study you mention actually proves what you and the article you quote purport that it proves.
Having said that, Snarki’s point at the top of the thread is worth underlining. Biological sex is not as cut-and-dry as we like to pretend it is, and gender is ultimately mostly a social construct. I’m sure if we had less rigid and prominent gender roles, we’d see far fewer people opting for gender reassignment surgery.
What byomtov sez.
With full measure to you, wj, the visible face of the Republican Party has egg splattered all over it – and only it doesn’t know it. It’s a sad, sick, idiotic joke with a death warrant that Newt Gingrich first signed, and that has slowly but surely gathered more signatories – again, only it doesn’t know that.
What needs to happen for it to become the party you want it to be is for a coalition of fed-up, pissed-off people such as yourself to stage a coup to drive out the Tea Party and their ilk, force the Scott Walkers and Sam Brownbacks to resign their positions for the utter failures they actually are, pull the Ted Cruzes and Bobby Jindals off the stages by the scruffs of their suits, and in every other way, shape and form, dump the racist, sexist, classist, and other-bigoted garbage that has polluted it, and give a great big huge middle finger to the Koches to tell them to go form their own party. Every lousy element of American society that gives it a bad name has been parasitic on the GOP for far too long, and it’s past time for those such as yourself who still believe it can stand for something affirmative to take it back.
Until that happens, the Republicans will continue to reinforce their own stereotype as a retreaded Southern Democratic party, taken nationwide, which is to say that it will die as surely as the bulk of its base will (soon) do – yet once again, only it doesn’t know that.
By every measure you really sound like a Democrat, and the only thing keeping you from their ranks is your admirable loyalty to the Republican name. Yet it has no loyalty to you, and I fail to see any notion of loyalty in the vocabulary of this characterless charade of candidates it persists in throwing up. That’s apt – it’s less interested in communicating meaningfully to those such as yourself and more in puking its sick guts up in your face, projectile-style to boot.
Good luck in manning the station. Unless you can get more to shore it up with you, you’re hopelessly outnumbered.
Slart summed up my reaction to a T.
That said, I might … might watch a YouTube video of Jenner pole-vaulting into a tub of collagen when she turns 85.
Jon Stewart had a great bit about the media’s reaction to Jenner, in effect welcoming her into the strictly surface glass ceiling, what-is-she-wearing-there attention she will now receive as a woman in this society, rather than as a man, not that Jenner didn’t encourage that.
If it wasn’t for the “oh, my eyes, my eyes!”, certified oddballality of the Kardashian Reality TV exhibitionist grift preceding all of this, I might admit there is courage being displayed here, but my attitude toward ALL Reality TV is along the lines of Greta Garbo’s (maybe Marlene Dietrich’s) reaction to the Beast, appearing at the end Jean Cocteau’s beautiful film “Beauty and the Beast” as a normal man — “Please, please, give me back my Beast!”
We have enough reality of the lame kind already, don’t we?
Aliens receive these transmissions eventually, don’t they? I can’t decide whether they are moving their invasion plans up on the calendar as they view our stupifyingly lame antics, or crossing us off their bucket lists because we probably can’t taste very good.
I was momentarily captivated by Jenner’s remark that she has always been a strict fiscal conservative politically (are there clinics anywhere who offer ideological dickectomies as well?) and the odd stutter-step of the conservative media as they perked up at the news and tried to reconcile all of this reality being thrown their way.
I now predict that at least seven of the 623 Republican candidates for President will soon opt for sex-change operations and hormone therapy to make the short-list of who is allowed on camera during the debates so they can capture the token transgender flat-to-no-tax voter audience.
The prospect of Chris Christie going this route could be an occasion for major eyeball hemorrhaging, but desperate people will do what they do.
Grover Norquist will introduce them at the debates while himself dressed as an armed Vivian Vance, but as always, he will be mistaken for his inner dyspeptic William Frawley.
I also do not give a rat’s rectal sphincter for anyone named Kardashian. It’s not that I wouldn’t piss on them if they were on fire, it’s that not one of them is worth a millisecond of my time, unless they were badly wounded and in need of some help that I was in some position to provide.
Ok, I just spent more than that typing this. So: hypocrite me.
Not telling people who to pay attention to, but we’ve become a nation of spectators. Why does the media report on this crap? Because our spectator nation laps it up.
Which is fine. I’ve got better things to do, for the most part.
Humans are complex critters. They don’t fit well in simple boxes.
Snarki and JakeB’s comments led me here.
I try to keep up with things, but every now and then I am hipped to a corner of the world that I had not really thought about or even been aware of.
So, Jenner et al to the side, that’s all food for thought.
To wj’s broader point, what I think has happened to the Republicans of yore is that they are now Democrats.
Republicans of today – by which I mean the Republican party as a political institution, not individual people who identify as (R) for whatever personal and historical reasons – are essentially a reactionary force. And not necessarily, it seems to me, on the substance of things, but mostly as a matter of being reactionary in principle.
cleek’s law applies here, it seems to me.
I sympathize with you, wj, not least because I don’t know where the (D)’s of yore have gone, either.
Compare and contrast the outrage and disgust the Right is expressing over Jenner versus the outrage and disgust they expressed over torture, indefinite detention, and the Iraq war with all its profligate, incompetent cruelties.
The GOP will survive and prosper in its current form as long as the US is run by rich people who are intellectual and moral morons. The trick isn’t remaking the GOP; the trick is getting rid of the plutocracy. And they’re dug in as tight as ticks on a dog.
I don’t know about that, Casey. Most of my fellow right-wingers seem more bored than anything else over the Jenner thing.
There’s the revoke his medals crowd, but to be honest it seems kind of lonely and neglected.
Even my Dad can’t seem to summon much outrage over it, and outrage flowers on him overnight a bit like psilocybe on cowflops.
It is interesting that the report has high praise for GOP governors. WTF? Brownback, Walker, Jindal, Scott, Page, Perry, Christie? Who are the other geniuses in that group?
byomtov, I’m not actually suggesting that the Republicans need to become Democrats (except in so far as a bunch of folks who were once Republicans are now (for the moment) Democrats . . . or at least independents. But that is not to say that they don’t need to become, once again, a center-right party.
As russell notes, the Republican Party today is, as an institution, a reactionary body. Probably in part because of the Nixon/Atwater strategy of recruiting the Dixiecrats — who then proceeded to take over. (It’s almost like when Bank of America took over Merrill Lynch. And then ended up with ex-Merrill executives running big chunks of the company. It has not been an improvement for them either.)
To russell’s question, the Democrats of yore are still there. It’s just that, having ended up with a lot of moderate Republicans in their party as well, the Ds are a lot less solidly left than they once were. Including, but by no means limited to, a lot of big business enthusiasts who were once solid Republicans. Not to mention a majority of black voters.
If you’ll take the Dixiecrats back, we’ll (OK, some of us) be glad to take some of our ex-Republicans back. 😉 And, from a lot of historical practice, I figure you guys will know how to keep them safely under control.
byomtov, with regard to the GOP governors, did you happen to notice that Brownback (yes, really!) has now proposed a tax increase in Kansas? Apparently his theory that tax cuts would be made up in massively increased economic activity has not proven out in practice. And, having a state to run, reality has rather forced itself upon him — at least a little bit.
I’m not actually suggesting that the Republicans need to become Democrats (except in so far as a bunch of folks who were once Republicans are now (for the moment) Democrats . . . or at least independents. But that is not to say that they don’t need to become, once again, a center-right party.
wj,
I don’t disagree that having a legitimate center-right party would be a good thing. My point is that the Republican Party of today has, IMO, zero chance of becoming such a party. I’m hard-pressed to come up with important areas where it (as an institution, not particular individuals) holds center-right views. Isn’t Obamacare a center-right policy?
Maybe you can identify some such, as a starting point.
Meanwhile, what I see is a party whose primary domestic policy goals seem to be making sure that rich people pay as little tax as possible, preferably zero, that no silly concerns for the common good, like environmental or health and safety rules, for example, interfere with their supporters’ business activities, and that poor people are kept in their place.
The primary foreign policy goals seem to be endless wars and making sure as few people as possible go to Cuba.
Dixiecrats? Your guys won them over. Keep them.
Probably in part because of the Nixon/Atwater strategy of recruiting the Dixiecrats — who then proceeded to take over.
and assisted by the rise of right-wing radio. the right-wing outrage machine flourished once the audience didn’t have to pay for its content and the delivery was in near real time. but, the need to fill hours and hours every day, in real time, lowered the bar for what counts as an outrage so low that it’s now basically underground.
and now, the web has democratized the outrage producing system. and made it bipartisan.
i don’t know how we recover from that.
I absolutely blame the newsworthiness of Marco Rubio’s traffic citations on the Republicans.
Bastards.
Also, Mitt put a dog on his car and had binders full of women.
I’d bet if we went back to Lincoln’s time and read the newspapers, none of this kind of crap would appear.
“Even my Dad can’t seem to summon much outrage over it, and outrage flowers on him overnight a bit like psilocybe on cowflops.”
I’ll be stealing that.
I wouldn’t say the possibility is zero. Not enormous, unfortunately, but not zero.
If we are going to have a center-right party, it has to come from somewhere. The options for that, as far as I can see, are:
1) the Republicans go back to being that party,
2) a new center-right party emerges from somewhere,
3) The Democrats become the center-right party, leaving an opening for a new center-left party.
Of those, the first seems like the most likely. For openers, 2) and 3) require a new party to emerge. So far, the only times we have seen that happen is when there is some huge issue that neither party is willing to address adequately. I don’t really see one of those at the moment.
That said, 3) may actually be the way we go after all. A lot of moderate to conservative Democrats are emerging. And the existing ones are getting more so. (See Bernie Sanders’ comments on the need to be business-friendly. And he’s the far left candidate at the moment!) So the left may leave in disgust and try to start something more to their liking. Again, they’d need a big issue as a proximate cause, not just serious irritation. Maybe russell sees something that could drivce that.
I could see #4, the Democrats splitting in two. That would take a big enough win for the party to be dominant, so that internal politics can come to the fore.
If that happened some Republicans might join the more centrist faction and the extreme wing of the GOP would be marginalized.
But it’s remote. It has to start with centrist Republicans abandoning the party, which will take a lot.
Your #4 is actually what I meant by #3.
But, it should be said, centerist Repblicans are already abandoning the GOP. Even centerist Republican office-holders, who have a far stronger incentive not to do so than mere party members. (Lincoln Chaffe and Charlie Christ are just the first two that leap to mind.)
the enrage/rally/grift business model that right-wing radio, web, and TV all follow requires a constant push away from the left. so, i don’t see US conservatism moderating itself anytime soon.
Cleek, if you are talking about the US, you really ought to put “conservatism” in quotes. Just to make clear that you know that the label doesn’t mean what it once did — and still does in the rest of the world.
Well, heck, “West” doesn’t mean in the US what it means in Europe, or else we’d be calling the East coast the “Not as West coast”. You’ve got to use these terms relative to where you are, not the other side of the planet.
Imo the democrats already the center right party.
I don’t know what it take for a significant left to emerge in the US. if the last 15, or 35 for that matter, years haven’t done it, I don’t think it’s in the cards.
I feel sorry for Bruce. It’s bad enough that the guy has a mental illness, people had to go and enable it, instead of encouraging him to overcome it.
I must be exceptionally dense. Because I don’t understand why Brett supports the Republicans on social issues. Where one would expect his libertarian world-view would lead him the other direction.
In this case: Jenner can do what he pleases, since it is his life. And nobody should judge.
But that isn’t what is happening. Like I say, I must be dense not to understand.
“west” once was a word that had ‘relative to’ built into it while ‘conservative’ had a fixed position where difference had to be expressed by adding ‘more’ or ‘less’. Well, the old rule of conservative = on the political right does not apply anymore either since there are few guys more conservative (in the literal sense) than those on the ‘old left’* while the paleos shake their heads at the sight of the young ‘conservatives’.
*at least over here that does not depend on age. It’s both amazing and depressing to hear young adults today spew leftist slogans that had begun to grow stale in the late 1920ies.
“Where one would expect his libertarian world-view would lead him the other direction.”
Finally, a cut he won’t endorse.
wj, almost no one cares what Caitlin Jenner does. More people care that they are being told they should care, its brave and heroic, or bad and mental illness, but something they should care about. A very few, that create news, are aholes that say stupid things like giving back medals.
In the end almost no one could do what she did anyway. She has spent hundreds of thousands on all sorts of plastic surgery, not counting gender reassignment.
In the interest of justice, I’d like to publicly applaud this gem from Slartibartfast (above):
I have seen petitions to have Jenner’s gold medal revoked. I doubt those could be effective, but if they’re upset that he won a gold medal in the men’s decathlon using his sekrit advantages of being a woman on the inside, I say give him another gold medal just like it for even more awesomeness.
As a track fan for over 60 years, and someone who very nearly made it to the 1976 Montreal Olympics, my interest in Jenner is primarily in his track exploits. He was once considered the very best athlete in the world (how many of us have ever been even close to being the very best *anything* in the world?). That was a hell of an accomplishment, and whatever his fortunes and misfortunes have been over the succeeding decades, they can’t take that away from him/her. So I wish her well in whatever happens next. Well said, Slarti!
Yep. It was a hell of a thing, what Jenner did, and should be acknowledged irrespective of what you think about his/her current situation.
From Wikipedia: “as of 2011, Jenner is 25th on the all-time list [of decathlon scores] and the No. 9 American”.
After 35 years, Jenner’s accomplishments are STILL noteworthy when compared to all other athletes in the world, ever.
If Michael Phelps ever decided to make the switch, I’d have just as much regard for his accomplishments. They are, to me, unrelated to any conversation about gender switch.
Thanks for the kind words, doc!
It would be absurd to take his gold medal away, for any reason save some long after the fact discovery of cheating. He could have himself surgically altered into a talking dog, and it wouldn’t change his past athletic accomplishments.
I don’t question his right to have himself surgically altered in any way he wants. His madness isn’t of a sort to make him a danger to others, just himself, and he’s entitled to be a threat to himself, if he wants.
I just feel sorry for him, as I say, that instead of encountering people who’d help him overcome his insanity, he encountered people who’d enable it.
And now I hear that the same dynamic is starting up with the crippled, people claiming to be “transabled”, and wanting perfectly healthy limps amputated.
I would end up living my ‘golden years’ in Heinlein’s “Crazy years”.
“…drive out the Tea Party and their ilk, force the Scott Walkers and Sam Brownbacks to resign their positions for the utter failures they actually are, pull the Ted Cruzes and Bobby Jindals off the stages by the scruffs of their suits…”
In other words, become the Democrat Party Lite.
Ah, but the question is, is it insanity? I admit that I don’t understand it. But I have to doubt that it is any more insane that homosexuality — once also considered a form of insanity. (And, I have the distinct impression, still so considered by some here.)
wj: … I don’t understand why Brett supports the Republicans on social issues.
Simple transitivity. Republicans oppose the Democrats on social issues, ergo …
The question I have for you, wj, is the one John Oliver might ask:
How is the GOP still a thing?
What is it that holds together a coalition of sex-obsessed evangelicals, paranoid gun enthusiasts, panglossian free market worshippers, and unabashed chickenhawk militarists? What’s the unifying theme underlying science denialism and opposition to the “death tax”? What brings plutocrats and racists together in a single party?
I am not for a minute suggesting that you personally correspond to any one of those categories. So I am not asking “How can you call yourself a Republican?” I’m asking you the purely analytical question: how is the GOP still a thing?
–TP
I don’t support Republicans on all social issues. I’m for legalization of all victimless crimes. But, how much has the Democratic party done in that direction lately?
The GOP is still a “thing”, because 10-20 years ago, the GOP and the Democratic party conspired together to rewrite US ballot and campaign laws, and alter some less legalistic mechanisms having to do with elections and campaigns, so as to make 3rd parties infeasible in the US.
First past the post means two parties, 3rd parties are artificially suppressed, so the GOP will continue to fill that second opening.
wj,
centerist Repblicans are already abandoning the GOP. Even centerist Republican office-holders, who have a far stronger incentive not to do so than mere party members. (Lincoln Chaffe and Charlie Christ are just the first two that leap to mind.)
Maybe, but I don’t see it. The Republicans hold a majority in both Houses of Congress, and there are 30 Republican governors, many of them looneybags, as indeed many of those in Congress are.
And even the ones who are superficially non-looney have some strange ideas. An excellent example is Paul Ryan, regarded as the party’s budget genius, whose plans are either nonsensical or the kind of thing you’d expect from Louis XVI. When some Republican calls him out for what he is I’ll listen.
Charles WT,
I don’t know what you mean by “Democrat Party Lite.” Did you mean to say “Democratic Party Lite?” I don’t think recognizing that Jindal and Brownback have been disastrously bad governors, owing largely to their devotion to GOP tax orthodoxy, makes anyone a Democrat. I think it makes them a realist. Something the Republicans could use more of.
I’m going to assume that most of you don’t realize how *extremely* rude you’re being.
The person we’re talking about is a “she”, Caitlyn Jenner. Bruce Jenner was a lie.
It is very rude, unkind, dismissive, and arrogant to misgender someone who’s made such a point about their gender. I get misgendered a lot, but I’m not a person it really bothers, I just laugh and move on. Caitlyn Jenner *really* cares, and basic respect for persons (=courtesy) says, try to call people what they want to be called.
You may well think that the chances of you personally interacting with Caitlyn Jenner are negligible, so what difference does it make if you misgender her? The difference is that there are trans* people reading this blog (I know some specific cases, though I don’t have the right to name them), and they will use the way you speak of Jenner as an indicator for how you might think of them.
Cleek, if you are talking about the US, you really ought to put “conservatism” in quotes.
i usually do.
I feel sorry for Bruce. It’s bad enough that the guy has a mental illness, people had to go and enable it, instead of encouraging him to overcome it.
mental illness? “overcome it”?
WTF?
TP, the answer is that 10’s of millions of Republicans aren’t any of the things you name. Just as 10’s of millions of Democrats aren’t the absurd radical definition of their positions I could come up with. The GOP is a thing because there are rational differences between reasonable people that everyone hopes will be represented once people like you quit name calling.
Tony: I’m asking you the purely analytical question: how is the GOP still a thing?
As noted, creating a new party is an extremely difficult undertaking. So the GOP continues, combining the various disparate groups you list, for one simple pair of reasons:
a) tradition (they went there once), and
b) where else would they go?
A lot of those groups, for one reason or another, became Republicans at one point or another over the past half century. Most often, because they were embracing “the way thing used to be” (for all that the past they embraced frequently exists only in their imaginations), and the Democrats were so uncongenial for their mindset.
And they remain so they remain because, for a much the same reason, where else could each of them go?
Can’t become Democrats, for the same reason they became Republicans in the first place. It’s just so uncongenial.
And can’t successfully start a new party (although the libertarians, at least some of them, keep trying) . . . if only because, on their own, each is too small a group to succeed — and deep down, they know it.
That’s my analysis. Perhaps someone else can offer some alternate points.
Brett: because 10-20 years ago, the GOP and the Democratic party conspired together to rewrite US ballot and campaign laws, and alter some less legalistic mechanisms having to do with elections and campaigns, so as to make 3rd parties infeasible in the US.
I would say that, long before that, third parties in the US were pretty infeasible — in the sense of not being able to actually win a national election. The last time it happened was just before the Civil War, when the Republicans appeared (and the Whigs disappeared). Since then, nobody new has managed to pull it off — and that’s a century worth of elections before your start point.
Marty, I’m not sure I buy your numbers.
But that aside, the number of Republicans who don’t fit one of Tony’s categories is small enough, compared to those who do fit, that a national candidate has to fit his positions to them. At least, touch the hot buttons for most of the groups. And, for safety sake, try for all of them.
Whereas the number of Democrats who don’t buy that party’s more extreme postion is substantial compared to those who do. So they can successfully nominate someone who is not that extreme. Still nowhere near where the Republicans are, of course. But moderate enough to pull in most of the independent (i.e. not party members) nationally.
Belief in democracy was also once considered as a mental illness* (apart from being at minimum borderline treasonous). And Germans were sent to the madhouse for claiming during WW1 that there was a food shortage.
It’s less bad PR-wise to put people into padded cells than behind Swedish curtains or against the wall. Or at least it was until it became ‘weak on crime’ (and too expensive).
*China took up that tradition after Tienanmen labelling it an infectious disease on par with AIDS.
wj, I suspect that you may be correct in presidential elections on the numbers, but the Democrats real success is convincing Republicans like you that the majority of Republicans, even politicians, are somehow radical idiots. So really, you’re the problem.
“What is it that holds together a coalition of sex-obsessed evangelicals, paranoid gun enthusiasts, panglossian free market worshippers, and unabashed chickenhawk militarists?”
Hippy punching.
Bruce Jenner was male, both physiologically and genetically.
I personally am just being reality-based. At some point Cautlin will be clearly female in some sense, and I’ll be just fine with using the preferred gender when referring to her.
With gender ambiguity comes of necessity some ambiguity in pronouns. It’s part of the territory. It’s not intended to be dismissive.
I really don’t care to argue this. It’s not, as you say, likely that Caitlin Jenner will show, here.
…His madness isn’t of a sort to make him a danger to others, just himself, and he’s entitled to be a threat to himself, if he wants.
I just feel sorry for him, as I say, that instead of encountering people who’d help him overcome his insanity, he encountered people who’d enable it.
Unkind souls might question your own grip on reality, Brett.
Marty, the Democrats didn’t convince me of anything. It was watching (actually listening to and reading) the Republicans which convinced me.
You might try considering this. Given several of the policy decisions he made, and the legislation he championed, could Ronald Reagan (actually a politician of a different name who did those same things**) get nominated for President today by the Republican Party? I’d say he would have no chance at all. At least unless he (ala Romney) ran as hard as possible away from everything he had done in office.
** Just for reference, I’m thinking of:
– raising taxes (11 times!), when it turned out that the tax cuts he had made didn’t raise revenue and cut the deficit after all.
– supporting gun control, specifically the Brady Bill
– negotiating a reduction in a major military weapon (nuclear weapons) with a hostile foreign power.
No doubt there are more. But just those three would make it impossible for him to get the nomination.
O Ed Wood, where art thou?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glen_or_Glenda
Perhaps I should unpack, some.
Bruce Jenner was a very well-known public figure who was known and identified as male. You cannot erase the Bruce Jenner who was a world-class male athlete.
So, you can see that Jenner is a bit of an unusual case, by my reckoning.
Anyway. That’s how I see it. I certainly intend no insult to anyone.
wj,
1) not why he did that,in fact they dud exact what he expected, you do sound like a Democrat
2) If one of you great friends gets shot it can create an altered view
3)After deploying the Ground Launch Cruise Missile in Europe he created a strategic advantage that allowed a treaty to be signed on our terms. That’s good anytime.
On nomenclature, we’re all used to transitioning names, and if we (especially we historians) are chronology conscious, we adjust accordingly.
So: Cassius Clay won an Olympic gold medal. Later, as Muhammad Ali, he won the world heavyweight championship.
UCLA’s NCAA champion basketball teams were headed by Lew Alcindor, who only later became Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
The Kingdom of Siam became the Kingdom of Thailand.
Burma, which had once been Myanmar, became Myanmar again a few decades after independence. This transition was brought about by rulers who were widely (and justly) despised, so some people persist(ed) in still calling it Burma, just to show them! (Cf. white supremacists who insist on calling Ali “Clay”)
Thus: Bruce Jenner won the 1976 Olympics in a world record. Yes he did. He is now she, and as Caitlyn Jenner deserves our respect for her new nomenclature – but I’m not sure how much of it is retrospectively transitive; it would depend on grammatical and rhetorical context.
I *am* sure that I’m in no position to judge her sanity, and neither is anyone else here on ObWi.
Tony,
What is it that holds together a coalition of sex-obsessed evangelicals, paranoid gun enthusiasts, panglossian free market worshippers, and unabashed chickenhawk militarists? What’s the unifying theme underlying science denialism and opposition to the “death tax”? What brings plutocrats and racists together in a single party?
My guess is first that each group is fanatically devoted to its single issue and doesn’t care very much about the others. So they are comfortable in an alliance.
“if one of your great friends gets shot it can create an altered view”
Especially if you get shot at the same time.
That’s the key to conservatives and government action, whether it’s reasonable cream pie control or research dollars for diseases. If it doesn’t affect them directly at some personal level or their narrow interests, everyone else, including those in their base, can go pound sand.
If the Soviets had only targeted the poor of the world with their nuclear arsenal, Reagan would have done f*ck-all to try and neutralize it.
It makes a guy hope bad things happen to certain people just so the rest of us can have nice things.
An “altered view”: that’s exactly what gets deviationist RINOs in trouble with the certifiably batsh*t base of their Party, the conservative “media”, and the post-1990 war-declaring, name-calling pig Republican offspring in elective office at all levels of government who were spawned by the Gingrich/Luntz haters.
“if one of your great friends gets shot it can create an altered view”
Especially if you get shot at the same time.
That’s the key to conservatives and government action, whether it’s reasonable cream pie control or research dollars for diseases. If it doesn’t affect them directly at some personal level or their narrow interests, everyone else, including those in their base, can go pound sand.
If the Soviets had only targeted the poor of the world with their nuclear arsenal, Reagan would have done f*ck-all to try and neutralize it.
It makes a guy hope bad things happen to certain people just so the rest of us can have nice things.
An “altered view”: that’s exactly what gets deviationist RINOs in trouble with the certifiably batsh*t base of their Party, the conservative “media”, and the post-1990 war-declaring, name-calling pig Republican offspring in elective office at all levels of government who were spawned by the Gingrich/Luntz haters.
My mouse is a rat.
I think both Caitlan Jenner and the Dugger family deserve cake on demand.
THAT’s the sound of one Democrat’s hand clapping.
1) not why he did that,in fact they dud exact what he expected
I guess you missed all the discussions of the Laffer curve at the time.
My mouse is a rat.
A Siberian hamster! (named Basil)
An old Scotsman visited a museum of natural history, and approached a guide that was standing next to a stuffed specimen of a North American moose.
“What be that?”
“It’s an American Moose”
“Och! If that’s a moose, they must have rats the size of elephants!”
(must be done in cheesy fake scottish accent)
The GOP is a thing because there are rational differences between reasonable people that everyone hopes will be represented once people like you quit name calling.
Why does anyone who identifies as (R) care what names other people call them?
If there are reasonable people who want to be represented by (R)’s, I encourage them all to go vote. Why does having their reasonable points of view represented have to wait until Tony P, or anybody else, stops saying bad things?
Please, just get on with it! We will all thank you.
The GOP is still a “thing”, because 10-20 years ago, the GOP and the Democratic party conspired together to rewrite US ballot and campaign laws
Conspiracies, everywhere, always.
Reagan called union membership “one of the most elemental human rights”. he didn’t go to church. he sold weapons to terrorists, and negotiated with Iran.
he couldn’t even get into CPAC as a seat filler, these days.
He not only spoke like that of union membership. He was a union leader earlier in life. And apparently a relatviely effective one.
Well, it still depends to which terrorists you sell the weapons. If they fight against the enemy du jour, it’s till A OK (until they become the enemy du jour themselves).
My guess is first that each group is fanatically devoted to its single issue and doesn’t care very much about the others. So they are comfortable in an alliance.
To put it another way, on the specific issues that they care about, the defining characteristic of each of those groups is that deviation is simple not tolerated. They may tolerate differences of opinion on other issues (e.g. the ones that one of the other groups cares about), but absolutely not on that.
It must be said that the left has similar fanatics as well. They just don’t happen to be in large enough numbers, on most issues, to enforce absolute conformance on porential candidates. There is some enforced conformance, as we are doubtless all aware. But not on enough issues to leave all potentially viable candidates sounding essentially identical.
You mean all one viable candidate?
Marty: Just as 10’s of millions of Democrats aren’t the absurd radical definition of their positions I could come up with.
Actually, Marty, I’d love to hear your “absurd radical definition” of the Democratic positions. Let me get you started: tree-hugging environmentalists; godless socialist peaceniks; namby-pamby welfare-state liberals; dirty pot-smoking hippies. But don’t let me put words in your mouth. I’m sure you can come up with better ones.
In any case, I’d appreciate YOUR take on what unifies the “10’s of millions of Republicans” who are NOT “any of the things [I] named” into a political party.
–TP
Marty, there is certainly one leading candidate among the Democrats — so far and this time around. (But there are at least two others who have at least entered the running.)
And the fact that one candidate is leading substantially is not to say that things this time may not change over the next year or more.
And certainly in the past three elections for President not involving an incumbant there were potential Democratic candidates with rather different views on a variety of issues.
Are we on jokes that need Scottish accents?
What is the difference between Mickey Mouse and his creator?
Mickey Mouse has big ears and Walt Disney.
wj, there has been absolutely no space between the “viable” Democratic Presidential candidates platforms in decades. Anything left of Obama/Clinton couldn’t get enough independent votes, right of there not enough Democrats. The joke is the party represents none of those constituencies. IMO. Better social media management really doesn’t equal better government.
You mean all one viable candidate?
and that is a complete historical anomaly. it’s caused a bit of unrest within the party, too. we’re really not all 100% onboard. as of last week, she’s got about 60% who say she should be the nominee. that’s solid. but that number had been falling pretty steadily. if Sanders could get some press, he’d be doing much better. Clinton’s celebrity is crushing him.
and there were 8 official candidates in 2008 and the race was extremely hard-fought until the very end. and the Obama v Hillary fight caused a lot of rancor within the left.
“The person we’re talking about is a “she”, Caitlyn Jenner. Bruce Jenner was a lie.”
The person we’re talking about has one X and one Y chromosome, until recently had matching male gentilia, an Adam’s apple, and so forth. You’re calling the physical reality a lie. You do realize that, right?
The person we’re talking about can legally change his name to “Caitlyn”, but was a guy, and is a guy, albeit now surgically altered to look like a woman. And all the disturbed ideation and delusions in the world can not change that fact.
Bruce Jenner is the objective truth, Caitlyn Jenner a disturbed fantasy surgeons have created an illusion to match. And the carefully collected statistics of medical researchers say that Bruce/Caitlyn is not going to become any less disturbed by paying to be surgically disfigured.
there has been absolutely no space between the “viable” Democratic Presidential candidates platforms in decades
You might recall some 6-7 years back, where one candidate seeking the Democratic nomination was enthused about the war in Iraq (and had voted for it), while the other had opposed it. One might consider that some space between the two.
the carefully collected statistics of medical researchers say that Bruce/Caitlyn is not going to become any less disturbed by paying to be surgically disfigured.
Got a cite for that, Brett?
Thanks
Upthread. It’s the third comment in this thread.
But here it is again.
Oh, a tip: If you can’t read a WSJ article, just copy the bit you can read, and do a search on it: They let you read it if you arrive via a search.
“On May 30, a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services review board ruled that Medicare can pay for the “reassignment” surgery sought by the transgendered—those who say that they don’t identify with their biological sex.”
Presumably HHS’ Review Board ruled that way because there is no real benefit? Hmmm.
Granted that the author of that article believes that transexuals are mentally ill. But it isn’t clear that this is a widespread view of professionals in the field.
I also note this comment on the author of the article you link to: “McHugh has spent his career imposing his religious beliefs on the bodies of others and on the practices of peers.”
libertarians who think genetics is destiny are the best kind of libertarians.
Presumably HHS’ Review Board ruled that way because there is no real benefit?
Medical benefit? Political benefit? Both? Neither?
I’ll never know what it feels like to strongly desire to express myself as a man, because that’s not part of my biological programming. On the other hand, I am very much aware of my attraction to other women, in defiance of what society deemed “normal” though that particular definition of “normal” is being whittled away, piece by piece, as the years go by. Therefore I can grant my sympathy to Caitlin Jenner, because I know what it feels like to be put upon by others solely for the way my biology works. But she doesn’t need my sympathy any longer. She now is who she feels she should be. Why is this simple fact so worthy of our societal scorn?
It is not up to anyone to label Caitlin as mentally ill for expressing a non-normative desire with regards to her gender. It is up to us, as a society, to choose how we want to deal with the knowledge that she was so clearly moved by this desire as to undergo a major physical transformation. Some may see having surgery to remove something you were born with as a sign of mental instability, but in that case why are people who undergo other physical alterations such as liposuction or breast reduction in an effort to improve their own lifestyles not viewed with the same lens? Why is it OK to tell someone, “Yes, go ahead and have the stomach band surgery and I’ll be here for you while you recover,” but not, “Yes, go ahead and have the gender reassignment surgery and I’ll be here for you while you transition,”?
Why do we not bat an eyelash at women who choose to have cosmetic breast augmentation so as to feel better about themselves, but immediately start throwing around words like ‘crazy’ and ‘insane’ when someone elects to have cosmetic gender augmentation surgery so as to feel better about herself?
If nature was the be-all, end-all decider of what we should and should not do as humans, then humanity is hearing nothing of it. We’ve got transplants to restore your hair if you feel you have too little, and laser application to remove it if you think you have too much. We have pills that give you an erection so you can father a child later in life, and ones that make it so a woman can decide when she wants to bring a child into the world instead of taking a gamble each and every time she has sex. We’ve got vaccines that protect us from all manner of dangerous microorganisms that otherwise run unchecked causing untold levels of misery. Why are these acceptable, but the idea of someone feeling more feminine than masculine is somehow going against nature and a sign that he/she needs mental help?
Again, Brett, there’s nothing there about how the cited study could hope to control for discrimination and isolation arising therefrom before before the article concludes that obviously it’s at best unhelpful.
I also really like how the author claims it’s a “transitory mental illness” that’ll pass on its own, while admitting that 25% of those tracked with it from a young age never “got better”.
Oh, and the part comparing it to an eating disorder was nice. I’ve had issues with eating disorders in the past, and I find his description of how they’re typically “contagious” to be amusing at best, and even entirely setting aside my anecdata, not really in keeping with what I’ve read about them elsewhere.
All in all, regardless of the author’s qualifications, said article is shallow and does very little to support its claims. It mostly just asserts that “of course it’s not normal or health” and then suggestively waves inconclusive studies around while declaring them to conclusively demonstrate that gender dysmorphia is a mental illness that can only be cured by repressing it.
Although again, this whole mess would be far less of an issue if we could just be less damned prominent and rigid with our gender roles in this society. I kid, I kid; I know we could never hope to do such a thing, because arbitrary social constructs are destiny!
On nomenclature, we’re all used to transitioning names, and if we (especially we historians) are chronology conscious, we adjust accordingly.
I’ve been mulling this comment over, which I find really thought provoking, especially after wj invokes Reagan. For some folks, there is a problem with the notion of being ‘chronology conscious’, in that sticking to a chronology can, in a sense, deny a connectedness and a subjective sense. This is not to suggest that dr ngo is wrong, but chronology conscious is just one way of being right and there are other ways of being right. (perhaps as many as being wrong)
Certainly, the person Ronald Reagan was in 1942 is not the 1967 Ronald Reagan, who in turn is not the 1994 Reagan. Naming both reveals and obscures, and you never reveal something without obscuring something else, even if it to the extent that the viewer’s attention is directed to something else while what was s/he was looking at still lies in plain sight.
“Again, Brett, there’s nothing there about how the cited study could hope to control for discrimination and isolation arising therefrom before before the article concludes that obviously it’s at best unhelpful.”
I suppose it’s conceivable that discrimination against people who’ve had sex change operations just conveniently negated all the positive effects. You’d want some kind of evidence of that, because the study is likely going to include people who got the operation, weren’t famous, and simply moved to someplace where everybody assumed they were what they looked like. But I admit it’s possible. It’s also possible that people deranged enough to think that they’re women when they’re really men, don’t stop being deranged just because you surgically alter them to look like women.
I don’t think that makes the study unhelpful. Johns Hopkins took the normal medical position that, if you’re going to be doing radically invasive surgery, you need evidence that it actually helps something. And a theory for why it didn’t help isn’t the same thing as evidence that it does.
“Although again, this whole mess would be far less of an issue if we could just be less damned prominent and rigid with our gender roles in this society.”
You mean, if we weren’t a sexually dimorphic species, where men and women are actually different, in a whole host of ways? Which just happen to end up reflected in gender roles?
To quote myself, “Johns Hopkins took the normal medical position that, if you’re going to be doing radically invasive surgery, you need evidence that it actually helps something.”
Now, this isn’t the only surgical viewpoint, or else you wouldn’t have piercing salons, and people getting their tongues split, and stuff like that. I think that’s the category “sex reassignment surgery” belongs in, not medical treatment.
And so, Bruce, being a competent adult, who’s presumably paying for this himself, is entitled to do it. But that doesn’t obligate anybody else to pretend that he’s really become a woman. His rights to modify his own body don’t extend to requiring everybody else to humor his delusions.
He was, and is, a guy.
But that doesn’t obligate anybody else to pretend that he’s really become a woman.
No, no one is obligated to do anything w/ regards to Jenner. I’m not obligated to stop using the nickname my brother hates, either. But because I’m not an ass, I see no reason to use the name my brother would like to be called. I likewise see no reason not to refer to Jenner (in the unlikely event I ever meet her) how she wants to be referred to.
It costs me nothing to be nice.
In the unlikely event I ever encounter him, I will try to refrain from calling him Bruce, and even avoid gender specific pronouns in his presence, so long as he doesn’t press the matter. That’s just being polite. Like ignoring it when your friend with Tourettes barks.
He’s not present, pretending he’s a woman has nothing to do with being nice. It has to do with complying with an ideological position concerning gender. A position I don’t hold. So I will continue to refer to him as “him”, because that’s what he is.
And, just to be clear, it’s not like it’s theoretically impossible to turn a man into a woman, or the other way around. I could imagine some application of molecular nanotechnology and very advanced biology that might accomplish that feat. But it would involve much more profound changes than remodeling the plumbing and taking some hormones. Men and women are genetically different, neurologically different, anatomically different. The differences go right down to the individual cells of our bodies, and the way our brains are wired.
You don’t make a man into a woman by sex reassignment surgery. You make him into a man who happens to look like a woman.
This disturbing result has as yet no explanation but probably reflects the growing sense of isolation reported by the aging transgendered after surgery.
Apparently, the experience of transgendered folks who had the surgery was not much different from those who did not.
So, perhaps surgery was not the solution to their sense of being “psycho-socially troubled”.
Perhaps that “sense of isolation” was a factor.
Maybe the fact that so many people consider transgendered people bizarre mentally ill freaks, whether they have had surgery or not, contributes to their sense of isolation, and their apparent psycho-social “troubles”.
I could imagine some application of molecular nanotechnology and very advanced biology that might accomplish that feat.
Maybe they can come up with something to help people not be jackasses. Maybe a simple and benign genetic modification that would enable people to be, for example, kind.
Now, that would be something.
“Maybe the fact that so many people consider transgendered people bizarre mentally ill freaks, whether they have had surgery or not, contributes to their sense of isolation, and their apparent psycho-social “troubles”.”
Alternatively, BEING mentally ill contributes to their sense of isolation. Since, you know, they’re one gender, and think they’re a different one, which is kind of by definition an example of mental illness.
Maybe the mental condition which causes them to reject their actual gender doesn’t go away when they get surgery? Losing weight doesn’t, after all, tend to cure anorexia.
Brett, 10 comments are listed in the latest comments and you have 6. Not sure why this seems to agitate you so much, but you really need to chill.
But that doesn’t obligate anybody else to pretend that he’s really become a woman. His rights to modify his own body don’t extend to requiring everybody else to humor his delusions.
Absolutely correct! Nobody else is required to go along with someone’s ‘prefered gender’.
You certainly made your point, Ms. Bellmore.
I’m happy to respect people’s desires regarding their own self-definition. The situation can be more complicated than that though.
Maybe “it takes a woman to make a better man” is a more profound thought than we imagined:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBLNYuKLYD0
Brett might explain:
Man don’t need to worry bout the motion of the ocean.
But just be there when I get the notion.
LJ: Certainly, the person Ronald Reagan was in 1942 is not the 1967 Ronald Reagan, who in turn is not the 1994 Reagan. Naming both reveals and obscures, and you never reveal something without obscuring something else
Here, as so often, politics is a world of its own. From what I have seen, politicians feel entirely free to fault each other (when convenient) for anything someone might have done previously, even if it was decades ago.
Other people may change their mind on something (in the light of new evidence, or simply after thinking it over), and even get complemented for being willing to do so. But if a politician does it, he will be accused of “flip-flopping” on the issue. Apparently politicians are not allowed to simply change their minds on something.
It’s always a great thing to be able to laugh at yourself. So we all probably ought to catch Dilbert http://dilbert.com/ today.
His rights to modify his own body don’t extend to requiring everybody else to humor his delusions.
Of course, no one is talking about what anyone is “required” to, except for being courteous or kind. But I guess Brett is being helpful by not humoring another person’s delusions. After all, he knows that anyone whose sense of self is at odds with his or her physical gender is, in fact, delusional and that it is better not to accept such a person’s preferences, for some reason or another. Brett’s just being awesome and super real.
People who see no reason not to comply with Caitlyn Jenner’s or any other transexual person’s preferred gender identity are the real jerks, doing harm to reality itself by feeding the delusions of the delusional, and for no good reason at that.
I suppose it’s conceivable that discrimination against people who’ve had sex change operations just conveniently negated all the positive effects. You’d want some kind of evidence of that, because the study is likely going to include people who got the operation, weren’t famous, and simply moved to someplace where everybody assumed they were what they looked like.
Good point! Because feelings of isolation and alterity are totally determined by how others perceive you, and not at all how you perceive others to perceive you! And the necessity of concealing and lying about your past to everyone around you to avoid being deemed a mentally ill freak couldn’t possibly lead to a sense of isolation!
I kinda get the sense that you’ve not had much experience perceiving yourself as being outside the dominant social group throughout your life.
You mean, if we weren’t a sexually dimorphic species, where men and women are actually different, in a whole host of ways? Which just happen to end up reflected in gender roles?
This is so true; I’m sorry I ignored it. Forex, western male humans were biologically programmed to favor pink over blue up until some radical event happened in the early 20th century which altered all their DNA and made western women favor pink while men favored blue. Much like the prior event (sunspots? a shift in the magnetic field?) that eliminated men’s genetic predisposition to wearing makeup, hose, and wigs. And we must consider those poor, mutated freaks living in societies where men’s genetic predisposition to be socially dominant is suppressed and bizarrely replaced by a strange sort of matriarchy or egalitarianism. Let’s just hope these are mutant freaks and not merely people infected with a contagious mental illness, like gender dysmorphia or anorexia.
Which is to say, biological differences in gender are not nearly so drastic as social differences in gender, and you’ll be hard-pressed to convince me otherwise (and likewise will be hard-pressed to come up “proof” of such outside of evo-psycho quackery).
Alternatively, BEING mentally ill contributes to their sense of isolation. Since, you know, they’re one gender, and think they’re a different one, which is kind of by definition an example of mental illness.
Alternately, being LABELED as mentally ill contributes to their sense of isolation. Since, you know, they don’t cleave to the gender role that society has dictated they must owing to their biology, which is kind of by definition an example of radical and subversive social non-conformity, which historically is one of the surest ways to be declared mentally ill.
I really hesitate to introduce anecdotal evidence in such a forum, but still, here goes: years ago I was very friendly with a transgender woman (I only knew her after the transition) who had been born an upper-middle class Englishman. Because of her sternly suppressed gender dissatisfaction, she overcompensated as so many trans-people do (see James/Jan Morris among others) and went into the British army, where she did well, including in combat, and rose to the rank of Colonel. She married, and had children. Eventually, when her children were grown up and her wife dead, she outed herself and had gender re-assignment surgery. Unfortunately, she was quite old (60s I think) so had already started male-pattern balding, and had developed a considerable pot-belly. It is unkind, (though she is dead, and cannot be hurt) but true, to say that she looked very like Winston Churchill in drag. However, and this is the really salient point, for the rest of her life (which lasted approximately 20 years) she was extraordinarily happy, entertained and socialised frequently, and not only never regretted what she had done, but said it had finally enabled her to live an authentic life for the first time in her life. Since knowing her, I have never referred to trans-people in any other way than their preferred gender, and having known her, it seems impossible to consider this phenomenon in the light of a mental illness.
“Alternatively, BEING mentally ill contributes to their sense of isolation. ”
this is what is known as “begging the question”.
Brett’s theory in this matter, which is his own, is something he’d be glad to share with you over and over and over and over and over and over again, in equivalently uncompelling ways.
That’s just how he rolls.
Jenner being mentally ill is a judgement I’d defer to a mental health professional, but usually gender-reassignment therapy is not done on the mentally ill. At least, that’s what I have heard.
Stay tuned for Chapters 47-103 of how Brett is utterly convinced that Jenner is a pathetic loser psycho. It’s a position he’s quite attached to, for some reason.
BTW, the Dilbert link posted by wj is precisely on point.
It may well be the best thing th
“and now, the web has democratized the outrage producing system. and made it bipartisan.
i don’t know how we recover from that.”
Posted by: cleek
Please. Both Sides Do It?
God, I hate my keyboard.
It may be the best thing that Scott Adams has ever done.
Dell keyboards were designed by Satan, I am convinced.
Please. Both Sides Do It?
yes, in fact, they do. there are plenty of lefty blogs that operate on the ALL OUTRAGE ALL THE TIME! MORE OUTRAGEOUS OUTRAGE! MORE! NOW! principle. and i get the panicked mailers from LEFTY groups begging for money and threatening dire consequences, which look exactly like the ones i get from the right.
the right’s machine is undoubtedly larger and far more organized, but the MO of BE AFRAID, BE MAD, BE PANICKED isn’t just something the right does.
[rats. i thought we could do underlines here. the typographical effect just isn’t complete without lots and lots of underlines]
Of course my argument is uncompelling. It’s not like an argument can physically grab you, and force you to agree. If you don’t want to accept an argument, it can’t ‘compel’ you.
But, as uncompelling as, “If someone thinks they’re a woman, they’re a woman.”? I think not.
Anyway, I quite realize that you’re going to privilege Ms. Jenner’s mental states over brute, physical reality. For some reason that’s gotten tied up in being a ‘liberal’, some kind of tribal signifier, I guess. So I’ll drop it.
I’ve already posted my views on the topic, Brett. You could have the grace to actually read and try to understand. I’m not that far away from you, actually, if you ignore my reticence to engage in armchair psychoanalysis.
But Dick from the Internet has to frame what others say in such a way that it practically invites outraged ridicule, or so I understand.
I’m under no illusions that Caitlyn Jenner is an actual, biological woman. I realize the Y chormosome still resides in her DNA and that without various forms of intervention, she would become more masculine in appearance. That’s just not really the point, but you can insist that it is.
I’m not so sure Caitlyn Jenner “thinks she’s a woman” in a purely scientific sense. I’m sure she realizes she was once very obviously male, having participated as a man in men’s athletics at a world-class level. I’m sure she realizes that she would still physically and outwardly be male without the surgery and other procedures she underwent.
She just doesn’t want to be a man, because she doesn’t feel like a man – afaict, at least. I see no reason to object to that or purposely work against her decision to live as a woman., even if only in how I conduct myself rhetorically on blogs or in private conversation.
“Anyway, I quite realize that you’re going to privilege Ms. Jenner’s mental states over brute, physical reality. For some reason that’s gotten tied up in being a ‘liberal’, some kind of tribal signifier, I guess. So I’ll drop it.”
i’ve been watching mr. bellmore demonstrate a single-minded obsession with being not just the ass he normally is but with being a world class, nay, a galactic class asshole. mr. bellmore also demonstrates repeatedly that he cannot understand the brute fact that within the solitude of her mind ms. jenner has always been a woman and that now her external characteristics finally match her perception for the first time in her life. he cannot recognize the very questionable nature of the johns hopkins statement for a variety of reasons that have already been mentioned here. and then he makes a pretense of dropping out of his amazingly insistent series of demonstration of some of the most profound assholery i’ve seen carried out on this blog by dismissing the nature of the discussion as some kind of “liberal” tribal signifier as though the slightest courtesy of addressing someone in the fashion they ask to be addressed represents such a radical break with the traditions of conservative libertarian thinking that it must be avoided at all costs.
since you regard common courtesy and addressing people in the manner they prefer as intolerable “liberal” pretensions i am henceforth going to refer to you exclusively as asshole bellmore and join you in your clear-headed libertarianism.
i thank you asshole bellmore for opening my eyes to the brute reality disguised by the delusion called courtesy.
Cleek is right, though I think the left usually has better reason for outrage.
It’s not quite the same thing, but I stopped reading the Commondreams website years ago because their headline always made it seem like The People were about to rise up in righteous anger any minute now. It was a weird sort of propaganda where you pretend the whole world thinks just the way you do. Or that’s how it came across. I don’t know if they are still like that, because I got tired of it.
Leaving Jenner out of the discussion altogether, the path from genotype -> phenotype -> behavior is not that deterministic.
Not in any critter, actually, but particularly not in humans, because of the relative complexity of our brains.
navarro, please try to rein in the personal attacks. I think you will find that you can disagree with Brett, vigorous even, without calling him a “galactic class asshole”.
Brett, my opinion on the subject, as outlined above, is far closer to yours than you suggest it is (although it is still pretty far off). I don’t disagree that there are like as not regret and negative outcomes arising from many (but not necessarily a majority, let alone all) reassignment surgeries. I strongly disagree with your take on why they would occur, but still. A lot of the “hard, fast facts” about gender as laid out in our gender roles are arbitrary with either no relation to biological differences, or relations that have been exaggerated and inflated by centuries or millennia of social customs amplifying the differences. And that’s also ignoring the problematic complication to “clear, cut-and-dry biology” whereby biological sex exists on across a spectrum and is not a firm binary state, even if most individuals fall onto one side of the spectrum or the other.
So taking this baseline POV into account, if the problem an individual is experiencing is that society is dictating that they must think, act, and feel in a particularly defined manner or be “abnormal”, “perverse”, “deranged”, “insane”, etc. then switching from one constrained set of acceptable opinions, actions, and behaviors to another does not even begin to guarantee that said individual will manage to come to peace with themselves and their place in society. At the decided risk of being far too abstract, if your problem is that you’re being told that it’s unacceptable to do/feel ABYZ because it’s only acceptable for your gender to ABC, then changing to a gender that’s allowed to XYZ will not perforce result in contentment and harmony even if we set aside the issue of society deeming you not to really be entitled to XYZ or ABC following reassignment surgery…
I’ve got to agree with NV. Some study of Anthropology will reveal that human beings have come up with wildly differing systems of gender roles. Most of Europe these days has very similar views, and those are the ones most of us are most familiar with. But they are far from the only views around, even today. And in the past, the variations were even greater.
At the risk of forcibly dragging the discussion back to its origins, let me note that it seems unlikely that the issue of transsexuals will have much overall political impact. Certainly not soon.
What I think will have an impact, down the road if not immediately, is the GOP position of homosexuals. That is going to make it increasingly difficult to recruit young people into the party. Even young people who are otherwise quite conservative. The world has simply changed too much.
Why won’t it have an immediate impact? Because the change in the world has been too recent and too fast. And because young people simply don’t turn out and vote as often and as reliably as older folks.
I’d characterize it as short-term thinking. The same kind of thinking that leads companies to do things which will improve returns for the immediate quarter, but damage them a couple of years down the road.
That is going to make it increasingly difficult to recruit young people into the party. Even young people who are otherwise quite conservative.
they’ve been doing that as long as i’ve been alive.
the GOP’s conservatism is the conservatism of old people: old, white, Christian people. and that’s just not relevant to young people.
that’s why the phrase “College Republican” is so inherently funny. what kind of kid wants to advocate for his grandparent’s politics?
Yes, but it wasn’t always that way. Even in the late 60s, and at Berkeley, there were visible groups who were Republican. And at least moderately conservative, too. We weren’t a majority, but we weren’t invisible either.
I think the change really set in seriously a couple of decades later. And now, it’s almost like the GOP was consciously trying to drive out pretty much anyone under 35. They still get some libertarians, but even if you are pretty conservative, some things just don’t seem like the real world.
@wj
although my use of language was provocative it was less of a personal attack than an object lesson in the importance of language and courtesy. is his posts upstream mr. bellmore repeatedly and pointedly refers to caitlyn as bruce and insists on using masculine pronouns to refer to her. he excuses this conduct on the basis of “brute facts” and his perception of transgender issues as delusion and mental illness. i deliberately chose to repeatedly use language that might possibly be similarly offensive to mr. bellmore in order to demonstrate by counterexample the value of courtesy and the importance of the use of language as a means of showing respect, or its absence, to another.
i apologize if you or anyone else here aside from mr. bellmore were offended by this. i do not apologize to mr. bellmore if he was offended because the point of the statement was to be offensive with the purpose of causing him to reflect on his own use of language which demonstrated his lack of respect for the personal autonomy and personal identity of caitlyn jenner.
wj,
What I think will have an impact, down the road if not immediately, is the GOP position of homosexuals. That is going to make it increasingly difficult to recruit young people into the party.
I don’t agree with this. I don’t think there will be a big long-run effect simply because the issue is going to fade over time. That’s not to say all will be sweetness and light, but once the SSM issue is settled there will be less media attention and concern. Further, it’s the kind of issue that all but the most extreme types will find it easy to shy away from. And of course newcomers to politics will simply stay clear completely.
I do think, OTOH, that climate change may well bring the undoing of the GOP. Denialism will get tougher, and the impact of our failure to act sooner will be clearer, and it will be much harder for the GOP to walk away from its history on the matter.
I agree that SSM will get settled by the courts. Or, if the Supreme Court rules against, increasingly by the states — until a ruling is necessary on the requirement for states to recognize marriages done legally in other states.
But I don’t think that will be the end of it. There is going to be far too much demand, from a big chunk of the party, for opposition to remain a litmus test for GOP candidates for a long time. It may not get a lot of press, especially during the primaries, simply because it will have no value in differentiating candidates (sort of like signing Norquest’s no new taxes pledge). But come the general election, it will get raised. And unlike pledging not to raise taxes, it will actually be something that will turn out those in opposition.
I agree that climate change denialism will become hard to sustain. But what I expect will happen is a small shift — from denying that it is happening at all to just denying that human actions are a singificant contributor. And no amount of flooding of Florida or drought in Texas and the plains states will convince the base otherwise. Again, it becomes a litmus test.
I assure you, I wasn’t particularly offended. I’m actually pretty damned difficult to offend, especially if you limit yourself to words, directed at me.
BTW, it is discourteous to tell somebody to their face that they’re nuts. Sometimes accurate, but a bit short of polite even if it is.
It’s not discourteous to remark to somebody else that somebody is nuts, outside their hearing. You can’t be impolite to somebody who isn’t present.
“I do think, OTOH, that climate change may well bring the undoing of the GOP. Denialism will get tougher, and the impact of our failure to act sooner will be clearer, and it will be much harder for the GOP to walk away from its history on the matter.”
Or, it will get easier and easier, and the Democratic party will have trouble walking away from it’s advocacy of economically destructive policies on the pretext that Florida would otherwise drown.
You know, they’re going to commission another icebreaker for the Great Lakes, the ice is starting so early, and hanging around so late, thanks to global warming?
Newton incorrectly calculated the speed of sound. We better let all the engineering schools to stop teaching mechanics.
Brett, you do understand, I trust, that the fact that the globe overall is warming doesn’t mean that all of it will get warmer.
It does mean that there will be lots of climates changing. And, on balance, those changes will be for the warmer. But some places, thanks to changes in wind patterns, etc. will get colder. Nobody who believes in global warming doubts that. But those who deny it seem to have trouble with the concept.
I even understand that the fact that, at present, the globe overall isn’t warming.
Just out of curiosity, what timeframe are you using for your trending? And how many datapoints are you using?
Newton incorrectly calculated the speed of sound, and every climate model over the last fifty years has been wrong. But someday they will be right just you wait. Then we’ll tag those deniers.
None of that is science, its politics. Science is about theories and lifetimes of trying get data. Not calling people names because they don’t buy your unproven theory. As above, millions of people think the climate is changing, but the tragic consequences are given probabilities and confidence levels that are all over the place, so people aren’t going to react. But if you disagree with any progressive agenda plank they just come up with a nasty name to degrade you because their politics are all about creating a superior class.
Denialism will get tougher
I even understand that the fact that, at present, the globe overall isn’t warming.
Newton incorrectly calculated the speed of sound, and every climate model over the last fifty years has been wrong.
Is there anyone on this board who is, remotely, qualified to even have an opinion about the state of the climate change science?
I’m asking because lots of people seem to be very, very clear that what appears to be the consensus among people who are climate scientists, is actually wrong.
if you disagree with any progressive agenda plank they just come up with a nasty name to degrade you because their politics are all about creating a superior class.
Yes, ubermenschen, every one of us.
I also like the nice irony of the juxtaposition of “their politics are all about creating a superior class” and “they just come up with a nasty name”.
I know I have a mirror here somewhere…
“what appears to be the consensus among people who are climate scientists”
There is absolutely no consensus among anyone as to the midterm or long term effects of climate change. The only stat I’ve ever seen showed concurrence among 149 climate scientists in a phone survey. A full 99%.
Meanwhile, the Great Lakes and a handful of years don’t mean squat on the scale of the models, taken collectively and given their inherent uncertainties, whether the models are “right” or not.
At the risk of forcibly dragging the discussion back to its origins, let me note that it seems unlikely that the issue of transsexuals will have much overall political impact. Certainly not soon.
Actually, I’m not sure about that, at least looking on the world stage. Weekly, my family sits and watches a weekly 2 person talk show where one half of the team is a TV talent named Matsuko Deluxe. The drama that was on the TV last night had a person who I think was a recurring character who presents as a woman but is a man. The wikipedia article is pretty much on target and this link gives some more info on Matsuko and two others.
This is just Japan, but I don’t think that Japan is necessarily so out of whack with the rest of the world. Just some things off the top of my head (you can google them if you like, they should be pretty SFW
-Dana Eurovision
-Jennifer Pritzker billionaire
-Diego Neria Lejarrage pope Francis
This 538 post points out some other interesting things
I even understand that the fact that, at present, the globe overall isn’t warming.
Your understanding is, as usual, incorrect.
NASA :http://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/
weather underground : http://www.wunderground.com/resources/climate/928.asp
via the Guardian UK : http://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2014/nov/20/why-we-need-to-talk-about-scientific-consensus-on-climate-change
what is your basis for saying there is no consensus?
Neither a person’s gender nor a planet’s climate is allowed to change, and anybody who says otherwise is clearly not conservative.
This is getting fncking ridiculous.
–TP
There is absolutely no consensus among anyone as to the midterm or long term effects of climate change.
Yes, there is a scientific consensus regarding global climate change.
The real debate then becomes what to do about this fact.
the DoD : http://www.defense.gov/Releases/Release.aspx?ReleaseID=16976
insurance industry :http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/04/21/3649244/insurance-climate-change-disaster-relief/
but Brett and Marty know better
obwi is an interesting place, I’m always pleasantly surprised at the range of things that people can discuss with some authority.
if there are folks here who can actually provide a solid on-the-merits analysis of what the science does and does not say, I’d live to hear it.
but you will be arguing with NASA, the DoD, the insurance industry, and something like 97 percent of climate scientists.
or, so it would appear.
So here’s something about McKinney Texas. Not, not our friend McKinney Texas, but the town he shares a name with.
I want bets on where Eric Casebolt, the intrepid LEO starring in the video of McKinney’s Finest in action, stands on either gender change or climate change.
I should have been clearer earlier: America is getting fucking ridiculous.
–TP
Maybe anything short of 99% (or 99.9%) agreement doesn’t count as “concensus”…?
that’s why the phrase “College Republican” is so inherently funny. what kind of kid wants to advocate for his grandparent’s politics?
My instinctive thought when I hear “College Republican” is “sociopath-in-training” mostly independent of actual policy, a club of cheaters and sufferers from chronic backstabbing syndrome. Over here in Europe youth organisations of political parties show similar tendencies but weaker than in the past. What also comes to mind is “Kaderschmiede”, the place where THE Party drills its caste of functionaries (can’t find an English word that has the same connotation and vibrations).
Well, McKinney, Garland and Waco are on a line…
Is there anyone on this board who is, remotely, qualified to even have an opinion about the state of the climate change science?
I am just a (mediocre) chemist, so I am not qualified on the global scale but I have encountered enough denialists that go as far as denying that the greenhouse effect itself exists outside actual greenhouses*. On this point I feel qualified enough to say there is a consenus among actual scientists about effetcs like wavelength dependent absorption of electromagnetic radiation and that black body radiation is not about radioactive n-words. But of course IR spectrometers have a well-known liberal bias.
*to be nasty, those guys plead for a return of the concepts of “Aryan physics” and Lyssenkoism.
Hartmut for the win!
Even Hartmut has to acknowledge, though, that the Earth is not a greenhouse.
Possibly not, though. Maybe there is a glass roof up there, somewhere.
“Your understanding is, as usual, incorrect.”
Yeah, I heard about that ‘study’; They took the readings of all those carefully calibrated precision thermometers on buoys, deployed for exactly the purpose of monitoring water temperature, and adjusted them upwards based on gross temperature readings taken from engine cooling water intakes on some ships.
A new record, it became a laughing stock within weeks of being released. Even the usual PR flacks for climate change are having a hard time keeping a straight face over THAT effort to make the ‘hiatus’ go away.
Well, of course carbon compounds can have no greenhouse effect since greenhouses do only work with glass (next to no carbon included) not with plastic (made of hydrocarbons). And the feminazis broke all the glass ceilings (and refuse to pay for the damage), so earth can’t be a greenhouse. We will get rid of all the useless green too sooner or later anyway (and astroturf will switch to red, white and blue to celebrate the success).
My prior comment was rendered irrelevant by the observation that the Earth’s greenhouse is made of plastic, not glass.
I stand corrected.
don’t go trying to put no ‘study’ past climate scientist and world renowned statisticians like Mr Bellmore here. he knows what he knows and that’s all there is to it.
Of course there’s a greenhouse effect. Without it, at this distance from the sun, the Earth would be a frozen ice ball. Spends quite a bit of the time as a frozen iceball even WITH the greenhouse effect, actually. We call those “ice ages”, and most people don’t appreciate that ice ages are the more usual state of the Earth, we’re actually enjoying a short respite from them at the moment, and better hope it continues.
The question has never been whether there was a greenhouse effect, but instead whether some kind of positive feedback mechanism in the climate would enormously amplify the otherwise fairly trivial temperature increase to be expected from recent increases in CO2 levels.
You do realize that, in order for man-made increases in CO2 to actually be a threat, you have to assume that the climate is subject to positive feedbacks right on the edge of thermal runaway? That it’s actually radically unstable?
The climate equivalent of an avalanche just waiting for some fool to toss a pebble.
That’s what the argument is about, the degree of the feedbacks, not whether there’s a greenhouse effect.
“don’t go trying to put no ‘study’ past climate scientist and world renowned statisticians like Mr Bellmore here. he knows what he knows and that’s all there is to it.”
The “study” in question is a laughing stock. It throws out the result of precision scientific instruments deployed specifically to measure ocean temperatures, on the basis of incidental measurements of dubious accuracy. And doesn’t explain why the satelites do show a hiatus.
In fact, I was aware of that study, I limited my comment above to one line just to see if somebody would embarass themselves by pulling it out.
The “study” in question is a laughing stock.
Sez who? Some guy tossing off wingnut hackery on a blog? You can’t be serious. I am not embarrassed in the least. You, on the other hand, should be.
If you ask me, the trouble started way back, a couple million years back, when some folks had the bizarre fantasy that perfectly good rounded river rocks were sharp-edged choppers, and then proceeded to bash and break them. Next thing you know, us African ground-dwelling small-band-living gathering-hunting hominids with an average speed of several miles/hour are practicing agriculture, living in concrete-and-steel cities packed with millions of people, zipping along at tens of miles an hour on a regular basis – not to mention crossing vast oceans, traveling *underwater*, and flying (at hundreds of miles/hour, no less) from one part of the world to almost any other in a single day – communicating with others instantly while separated by enormous distances, functioning as part of rigid, highly stratified political entities covering entire continents, transforming whole ecosystems, ambling about on the moon, and sending immensely-complicated collections of metal and plastic and suchlike to crawl about on Mars or travel to Pluto!
And if there are any alien observers conducting a longitudinal study, I suspect they would not find us any happier than those generations who lived in simpler times when rocks were rocks and having one’s child snatched away and eaten by large eagles was a realistic possibility. Certainly a look at current events – from descriptions of hideous atrocities carried out with incredibly-sophisticated rocks to the supposed need to put bits of various kinds of organisms into other kinds of organisms in order to avoid malnutrition and starvation for multitudes – does not suggest otherwise.
But we can’t just blame engineering for this bizarre state of affairs. For what greater madness is there than defacing a cave wall with smears of pigment and calling the resulting mess mammoths and horses and lions and aurochs!? It’s just that sort of twisted thinking that no doubt lead to all this ‘literacy’ nonsense. What can be more strange and unnatural than abandoning our birthright of memory and our great unbroken heritage of oral tradition, preserved and passed down from the ancestors, to rely on mere squiggles and dots scrawled on crushed plant matter, or projected upon melted sand? And to further fantasize, while doing so, that *others* – from friends and relatives to people we’ve never met – are speaking to us, and us to them … Or even more delusionally, that by staring at lines on pulped-up wood, or scratches on rock, we hear the dead speaking to us, or people who never even existed!
Madness, all of it.
just think of all the man-hours wasted by these incompetent fools. all we need to do is put Brett in charge of global temperature monitoring and we’d know the Real Truth.
Have some sympathy for the people who planned and built those ocean temperature monitoring buoys, only to have the readings they produced replaced with temperatures gotten by hanging a themometer in the engine intakes of ocean freighters. Makes you wonder why they bothered outfitting them with precision, calibrated instruments, if the readings were just going to be thrown away.
The question has never been whether there was a greenhouse effect
By now there is since some found it insufficient to just deny that we have a problem and went after the basic physics behind it (i.e. they claim that it is a lie that CO2 and other greenhouse gases absorb any radiation, probably hoping that that enough people will mistake logarithm for yoga rhythm). Given that The Onion’s idea of ‘intelligent falling’ was taken up for real by some of the usual suspects, this seems less moronic than just purely cynical. Bonus: infrared spectrum turns into IRS when abbreviated.
who needs experts when you have cranks?
Who needs to evaluate these things yourself, when you’ve got a scientific community increasingly rife with fraud and papers that can’t be replicated? The appeal to authority has never looked better, right?
I’ve been busy, so only just got around to fact checking Brett’s rather tasteless comments upthread.
The WSJ article he relied on to justify his ad hoc diagnosis of mental illness is by an octogenarian bigot –
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_R._McHugh
– whose reading of the Swedish study was obtuse to the point of perversity:
http://www.transadvocate.com/clinging-to-a-dangerous-past-dr-paul-mchughs-selective-reading-of-transgender-medical-literature_n_13842.htm
I’m sorry, Brett, but I find your stance on this contemptible.
Who needs to evaluate these things yourself, when you’ve got a right wing echo chamber just chock full of lies and ignorance? The appeal to “oh look, a wookie!” has never looked better.
It throws out the result of precision scientific instruments deployed specifically to measure ocean temperatures, on the basis of incidental measurements of dubious accuracy. And doesn’t explain why the satelites do show a hiatus.
I read the Guardian article. The lead investigator for the paper discussed there states that their analysis of the surface temperature numbers were tweaked to reflect the following:
Sea surface readings taken from ships tend to be warmer than those taken from buoys, because it’s warmer on ships than on buoys for reasons having nothing to do with ambient ocean temperature.
Some satellite readings were factored out because they were unable to account for inaccuracies due to cloud cover.
To me, the casual observer, it sounds like the issues you raise have been accounted for in the research in question. I.e., Karl specifically states that their analysis accounted for the fact that sea surface readings taken on ships tends to be warmer, for reasons other htan the actual sea surface temperature. And, he gives what seems, to me, an interested but scientifically challenged person, a reasonable explanation for why satellite data shows a hiatus.
You claim that your issues have not been addressed, and further that in fact the readings from buoys have been discarded in favor of those from ships.
I’d like to know who to give more credibility to, you or Dr. Karl.
What can you point to to substantiate your argument?
What I should also say on this topic in general is that I have no idea to what degree the earth is warming, nor to what degree that is due to human activity. I don’t have the chops to hold an opinion of my own.
My point of view on all of it is basically one of basic prudence. If the doctor tells you it’s time to quit smoking, or that it’s time to chill on the three martini lunches, then maybe it’s time to quit smoking and chill on the martinis. I don’t feel the need to go investigate the cellular dynamics of cancer metastasis, or liver function.
That’s what doctors are for.
If you tell me that no, the doctor is full of shit, and I should feel free to smoke and drink at will, I might actually be inclined to say “hooray!” and throw a big cigarette and martini party.
But first I’d like you to show your work.
Shorter me:
Why the hell should I take the word of Brett Bellmore, i.e. some guy in a yellow shirt, over that of what appears to be the truly vast and overwhelming majority of climatologists, as well as most large organizations that have skin in the game?
What the hell do you know about climate science?
I had no idea that Brett is a personal friend of Scott Adams.
You’re FAMOUS!
The Realclimate blog on the NOAA study–
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2015/06/noaa-temperature-record-updates-and-the-hiatus/#more-18571
Who needs to evaluate these things yourself,
thing is, unlike you apparently, most people are not actually trained in climatology, statistics, oceanic current studies and thermodynamics and so they don’t feel qualified to offhandedly dismiss the work of thousands of people who are trained in those things. so, our “evaluation” of these things is necessarily a bit more circumspect and humble, in regards to people who know WTF they’re talking about.
but, since you are clearly a world-renowned expert in all things climate-related are more than capable of reading a few wingnut summaries and coming up with your own conclusion.
shorter me: i’m not a climatologist and neither are you. so it would be laughably stupid of me to assume that you or i have anything to contribute to the science.
Um, actually I AM trained in thermodynamics. Aced it in college. It IS a pretty basic part of any engineering curriculum, you know. Or at least was, back when I was in college. Maybe they’re neglecting it today.
The Realclimate blog post was interesting to contrast with the Wattsupwiththat blog post. Worth reading both.
AND . . . after a hiatus of a month or so, Brett’s back, and Obsidian Wings descends immediately into Bellmore’s Funhouse, where otherwise perceptive commentators waste their time and mine trying to break through his invincible ignorance and general assholery. This is not just “Shifting Goalposts,” it’s changing the whole field of discourse, alas.
Sic Transit Gloria Mundi.
Brett: “In the unlikely event I ever encounter him, I will try to refrain from calling him Bruce, and even avoid gender specific pronouns in his presence, so long as he doesn’t press the matter. That’s just being polite. Like ignoring it when your friend with Tourettes barks.”
‘Polite’. I see.
I chose this excerpt (emphasis from source) as a summary, from DJ’s link:
Um, actually I AM trained in thermodynamics.
That’s great.
Kindly apply your aced-it-in-college mastery of thermodynamics to explain how the study in question discards readings from buoys in favor of readings from ships, and fails to account for how satellite readings show a hiatus.
You brought it up, dude, show your work.
after a hiatus of a month or so, Brett’s back, and Obsidian Wings descends immediately into Bellmore’s Funhouse
Don’t tell anyone, but Crooked Timber paid us to take him back.
:-J
“‘Polite’. I see.”
Yup. Polite is ignoring it when your friend Bob with Tourettes barks. Stupid is demanding that you refer to him as “differently ennunciated”, and agree that Bob should take up a career in radio announcing.
Harrumphing from other quarters, The Cato Institute, that paragraph is exactly why I have no faith in anything these people say. There is simply nothing in there except “you are not wrong, you are BAD for disagreeing with my methodology or conclusions”. The raw data was manipulated to achieve the outcome desired, that is not science.
started a comment, but it’s not worth it.
Pr. 26:4 or 26:5?
Always a dilemna.
Brett’s WSJ cited study compared post-operative transgender individuals with the general population.
When one compares them with the general transgender population – a rather more sensible idea if one is trying to assess the effect of surgery – a quite different conclusion is reached:
http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2458/15/525
Our findings provide evidence that social inclusion (social support, gender-specific support from parents, identity documents), protection from transphobia (interpersonal, violence), and undergoing medical transition have the potential for sizeable effects on the high rates of suicide ideation and attempts in trans communities…
So actually there is rather more evidence that Brett’s transphobia is contributing, in its own very small way, to the suicide risk for transgender individuals, than there is for anything in the study which he cites.
Don’t tell anyone, but Crooked Timber paid us to take him back.
And it was not anywhere near enough.
Marty, you are taking a position on a scientific issue because you feel personally insulted.
Here is the Science article that is the topic of discussion.
As noted upthread, folks here on ObWi have a remarkably broad range of areas of expertise. If anyone wants to take the time to actually read the paper and offer a layman’s level interpretation of what Karl et al did there, I’d welcome it.
I am, straight up, absolutely uninterested in the opinions of the Cato Institute or the WSJ on the topic.
The real question is whether there’s much difference between the outcome with all that supportive stuff and surgery, and all that supportive stuff without surgery. I’m pretty sure that social support and dog biscuts would reduce suicide rates, too, with rather lower chance of surgical complications.
I’ll see if I can’t read that study this evening.
The raw data was manipulated to achieve the outcome desired, that is not science.
actually, it is.
read the paper.
The raw data was manipulated to achieve the outcome desired
Again, typical of the deniers, a baseless claim asserted with no evidence backing it up. It is indeed significant that the deniers, for the most part, do NOT do science, do NOT have any theories, but they can carp and moan about “bad science”. How the fuck would they know what bad science is? They don’t do any.
If you wish to engage in a debate about the science, then do so, and please do stop with the bullshitting.
The trend of global warming is undeniable. Research points overwhelmingly to the fact that driving this trend is human carbon emissions.
The real debate is what, if anything, can we do about it.
Um, actually I AM trained in thermodynamics.
excellent!
you’re 25% of the way to being someone who i think might know something about climate science.
The raw data was manipulated to achieve the outcome desired, that is not science.
Yeah, Marty the “desired” result was to reduce the warming trend.
Of course, you’ll probably say they manipulated the data to minimize the reduction, but you won’t have any evidence to support that.
The real question is whether there’s much difference between the outcome with all that supportive stuff and surgery, and all that supportive stuff without surgery.
No.
The real question is whether the adjustments made to the numbers provide a more accurate, or less accurate, measure of whatever the warming trend actually is or is not.
I’ll see if I can’t read that study this evening.
So, you have been offering your dead-certain, I-studied-thermodynamics-in-college opinion that the numbers in the study are purposefully manipulated, without having read the study?
How do you even know what the study says?
There is simply nothing in there except “you are not wrong, you are BAD for disagreeing with my methodology or conclusions”.
I think it’s quite the opposite. They’re objecting to the critics for being wrong. Nowhere do I see anything about how “BAD” they are.
If anything, climate-change deniers are first to impute bad faith to climate scientists when disputing their findings. It’s almost never presented as the findings being just wrong, but purposely manipulated for nefarious purposes (useful to the Obama administration, even).
The real question is whether the adjustments made to the numbers provide a more accurate, or less accurate, measure of whatever the warming trend actually is or is not.
Brett’s fighting a war on two fronts, russell. He’s back on transgender delusions.
“The real question is whether there’s much difference between the outcome with all that supportive stuff and surgery, and all that supportive stuff without surgery.
No.
The real question is whether the adjustments made to the numbers provide a more accurate, or less accurate, measure of whatever the warming trend actually is or is not.”
We’re discussing two different topics here, Russell. They can have two different real questions.
My I-studied-thermodynamics, quick read of the science paper, on the other topic we’re discussing, is that the adjustments they made redistributed earlier warming into the ‘hiatus’, thus reducing the earlier trend, and making the hiatus go away. But I’ll add the whole paper to my reading list for tonight.
We’re discussing two different topics here, Russell.
Hey, my bad.
If you care to share your thoughts after you’ve read the actual paper, I’d be interested.
thus reducing the earlier trend, and making the hiatus go away
thus the question is : is that a valid approach to the data ?
assuming that “making the hiatus go away” was the goal all along guarantees you’ll come up with an answer of ‘no’. but since that’s the answer you want anyway, you’d be doing exactly what you’re accusing Karl et al of doing.
The trend of global warming is undeniable. Research points overwhelmingly to the fact that driving this trend is human carbon emissions.
The real debate is what, if anything, can we do about it.
What I find annoying about climate deniers (other than the fact that they, for political reasons, deny science consensus) is that most of what we know we could do about climate change is helpful in so many ways to the environment, and probably even to the economy. Fewer fossil fuels? Better air, cleaner water, prettier landscape, more jobs to innovate better energy solutions. I guess I just don’t get the downside.
To be fair, I just don’t get why almost all climate alarmists reject nuclear power. Low CO2, proven to work, you could even use coal fly ash dumps as a fuel source, and thus throw some remediation into the mix.
“and probably even to the economy.”
I think I’ve already brought up in the past, the problem with switching to lower EROEI energy sources. Bottom line, NOT helpful to the economy.
Thermodynamics is studying us too.
“just to see if somebody would embarrass themselves by pulling it out.”
Yet another another thing Caitlyn Jenner, now as her better self, won’t be doing anytime soon.
However, while she was trapped in a man’s body, she at least kept it in tip top shape to set an Olympic Decathlon record so that she could fall back on those voice and muscle resources for later when Brett puts it to her at lunch over her gender legitimacy, her desire for freedom fries, or maybe even insults the motives of scientists over global warming by pulling his out:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8J28SsItYo
I guess I just don’t get the downside.
The amount of the book value of extractive industry companies that is represented by so-far-unrecovered fossil fuel reserves.
FWIW, I’ve been looking at some of the pieces cited in Brett’s Watt’s Up With That blog link.
The general argument against the findings of the research described in the Science article is that they “make the hiatus go away” by adjusting sea surface temps taken by buoys upward, so that they are consistent with readings taken from ships.
However, the buoys are generally considered to be more accurate.
IMO that’s a reasonable criticism, and to the degree that it’s valid, Brett’s general point has merit.
There is a broader issue here, which is – assuming the hiatus is real, what of it? If temps are rising, but simply not as fast, I can see that we might have more breathing room to think about how to respond.
I don’t see that we can simply ignore the whole issue.
I’m going to go read the Real Climate stuff now to see what they say.
http://thebreakthrough.org/index.php/programs/energy-and-climate/top-climate-scientists-urge-support-of-nuclear-power
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/nuclear-power-is-the-greenest-option-say-top-scientists-9955997.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pro-nuclear_environmentalists
I’d like to see Brett call James Hanson a fraud and a liar while simultaneously licking his face over their agreement on nuclear power.
I’ll bet Hanson would be courteous and receptive to his views even if Brett wore a dress to the meeting.
Makes you wonder why they bothered outfitting them with precision, calibrated instruments, if the readings were just going to be thrown away.
“Thrown away”? Or, as you say later, adjusted?
And, more important, were those adjustments just tacked on later? Or were they part of the planned experiment all along? Because, in my experience (including in thermodynamics classes) lots of experiments have know and expected requirements to adjust the data in known directions and by known (before the experiment) amounts. No evil intentions required.
Russell,
The important thing to consider from the study is this: The “hiatus”, whatever its magnitude does not contradict or blunt the trend.
The trend is a warmer planet.
Bottom line, NOT helpful to the economy.
Coming from somebody who confidently predicted trillion dollar deficits “as far as the eye can see” (not very far, I guess!)not all that long ago and is allied with a political movement that asserts, as a matter of deeply held faith (and cocktail napkins), that cutting taxes always increases economic output.
I guess I just don’t get the downside.
The supply of leisure is limited, so only rich people are entitled to enjoy it.
My views on global warming come down near sapient’s — there is no appreciably downside to both being concerned and taking what measures we can to ameliorate its effects.
In the other hand, if the downside effects are as deleterious to the human race as the consensus forecasts claim and we do nothing because a coterie of hard heads, mostly scientific amateurs at best, or malign political/corporate/media interests at worst, block any action, what will an angry human race do to these people?
I spose we could eat them and their children as the waters rise/or disappear in all the wrong places.
We’ll just have to see, won’t we?
” I just don’t get why almost all climate alarmists reject nuclear power. Low CO2, proven to work, you could even use coal fly ash dumps as a fuel source”
Utter nonsense. “Containing some uranium” != “usable as a fuel source”.
As for ship vs buoy temperatures, it may make more sense to adjust the (historic) ship-measured temperatures down, rather than the buoy temperatures up, but if you’re just looking at the first time derivative, it’s a distinction without a difference.
it’s a distinction without a difference.
That’s the conclusion drawn by the Real Climate piece.
As bobbyp notes, hiatus or no hiatus, the overall trend is warming.
Coal ash contains quite a lot of radioactive stuff, enough to be a real problem. Unfortunately it’s a wild mix of isotopes that could at best be used for radioisotope thermoelectric generators but not in a nuclear power plant. And the extraction would be quite a mess too. Imo it would be less efficient than using ‘conventional’ nuclear waste.
Yet another another thing Caitlyn Jenner, now as her better self, won’t be doing anytime soon.
You mean they didn’t put it in the jar with Ted Williams’ head?
“Unfortunately it’s a wild mix of isotopes that could at best be used for radioisotope thermoelectric generators but not in a nuclear power plant.”
“The trace elements in coal that are naturally radioactive are uranium
(U), thorium (Th), and their decay products, including radium (Ra) and radon (Rn).”
Actually, most of the radioisotope content of fly ash is Thorium and Uranium. It’s not as concentrated as normal ore, to be sure, but I think that if you combined extraction of it with fly ash remediation, it would be a useful byproduct.
Actually accounting for more energy than the coal that was originally burned…
For coal ash to be viable as a fuel source, it needs to contain more (or more easily extracted) uranium than uranium ore.
Wikipedia: “A 1997 analysis by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) found that fly ash typically contained 10 to 30 ppm of uranium”
Low grade U ore (~0.05% = 500 ppm) is generally not economic to use. About the only economic advantages to fly ash are (a) you don’t need to grind it up, and (b) nobody wants it…but even after extracting U, you’re left with 99.999% of the ash to dispose of.
So: utter nonsense.
This alarmist is fine with expanding nuclear power, FWIW. Apparently, I’m not the only one. Maybe it’s a no-true-Scotsman kind of thing, though. I keep hearing that we don’t exist, in spite of evidence to the contrary. It’s a familiar pattern, arising in various situations.
Coal ash from a given amount of coal contains the same amount of radioactive material as the original coal did. The difference is that, once you’ve gotten rid of (burned) most of the carbon, for any give volume, you’ve concentrated the radioactive bits.
That’s why coal ash is considered “more radioactive” than the original coal was. It may be still not enough to be useful, but enough to be harmful. Just as only partially refined uranium can be a problem for those around it (hence all the safety stuff at refinement facilities) while not yet being concentrated enough for other purposes.
wj: completely correct; fly ash has all those teeny tiny little particles that can carry alpha emitters deep into your lungs, where they can lodge, decay, and do maximum damage.
Still not concentrated enough to be worth “mining”; by over a factor of 20.
coal ash? the stuff Duke Energy is going to store 8 million tons of, less than ten miles from my house? less than 2 miles from the water supply for a half-million people?
good stuff.
“For coal ash to be viable as a fuel source, it needs to contain more (or more easily extracted) uranium than uranium ore.”
Is this still the case, if you combine Uranium and Thorium extraction with remediation of the fly ash dump? After all, remediation doesn’t have to be profitable to be worth doing. I’m looking at nuclear fuel as a byproduct of needed remediation, not as the sole justification for going after the fly ash.
Even, if the useful isotopes were concentrated enough, one would have to separate them from the other radioactive ones and the neutron catchers. Not a trivial thing chemically and thus driving the costs up even further. Find the iron needles in that pile of magnets please.
If remediation is “not profitable”, who pays for it, and why do they pay for it?
Why do we not drop all of it on ISIS, so their lungs become as black as their hearts?
[/sarcasm]
I think adjusting data is a fairly normal research procedure. There is nothing unscientific about it. There’s a reason it’s called “raw” data after.
Raw measurements often have error of various types, some of which are due to known problems and can be adjusted for.
Take a simple example: people who look at baseball statistics often apply what are called “park factors” to the raw data. If you want to compare home run hitters, for example, you have to allow for th efact that some stadiums are more amenable to HR hitting than others, and adjust the totals somehow to adjust for that. Similarly with pitchers.
As another example raw economic data is routinely adjusted for known seasonal factors. If you estimate annual retail sales by taking the fourth quarter and multiplying by four, you are making a big mistake.
You can call that “manipulation” if you like, but if you think it’s making the numbers inaccurate you really should explain why, rather than yelling “raw data.”
Two problems with dropping fly ash on ISIS:
One, wind — it’s likely to blow from where we drop it onto people we like.
Two, even without wind, we also end up trashing the vast majority of the population, who already have the rare pleasure (/sarcasm) of living under ISIS’ governance.
I think that adjusting data is a fairly normal research procedure, but it is usually the output of inaccurate, poorly calibrated instruments being adjusted according to checks by accurate, well calibrated instruments.
For instance, if I were using a scale all day long, it was reasonably repeatable, I could occasionally double check it with a much more precise and accurate scale, and work up a chart showing how my readings on the cheap scale should be adjusted.
But you wouldn’t buy a new scale, high precision, traceable to the bureau of standards, and then adjust the numbers it produced because they failed to agree with past readings from your bathroom scale.
Adjusting raw data can be the proper thing to do, and it can be how research fraud is accomplished, and the difference is if you can justify the adjustments, and do so transparently.
One of the things the proprietor of the Wattsupwiththat site is famous for, is his program to actually investigate physically, and document, the situation of weather stations. Because, you know, the raw data from them is typically being adjusted algorithmically, not based on individual circumstances.
He really got raked over the coals for doing this. But, guess what? A couple years back they had to close about 600 stations he’d identified as no longer being reliable due to this or that. (Like the one getting blown on by somebody’s airconditioner outlet.)
His argument is that they’re statistically adjusting weather stations’ output, instead of actually going to look at what has been happening with them. And he makes a case that, if you just look at the high quality stations, that are ideally situated, and haven’t been impacted by urban heat island expansion or things like that, they show half the warming the over-all set of stations does.
Clearly, if they were doing a good job of adjusting the stations’ readings, compensating for the heat island effect, rural stations and urban stations should end up showing the same rise; It is a global phenomenon, after all.
Three problems, Wj: Remember the neutron bomb problem: It doesn’t help you a bit to give opposing soldiers long term fatal conditions. You want them either dying right away, or being concerned about missing out on a long life. Not in a condition to fight, but expecting to die soon.
His argument is that they’re statistically adjusting weather stations’ output
Point and counter-point.
Watt is, apparently, a former TV meteorologist. A curious aspect of the whole climate change controversy is the number of meterologists (as opposed to climate scientists) who are skeptics.
There are tons of them.
I draw no conclusion from it, it’s just an oddity. It’d be like all high school biology teachers being skeptical of evolution.
remember, wj, justifications for collective guilt are a dime a dozen.
Two problems with dropping fly ash on ISIS:
One, wind — it’s likely to blow from where we drop it onto people we like.
Two, even without wind, we also end up trashing the vast majority of the population, who already have the rare pleasure (/sarcasm) of living under ISIS’ governance.
Since when has either ever mattered?
The only objection would be constant winds towards Israel. At this time of the year the main drift would be towards Iraq/Iran. The former are already used to US made uranium (oxide) dust and anything angering the latter would be a bonus, wouldn’t it? There are negotiations to sabotage!
One theory would be they know enough about the subject to spot bs, and have no financial incentive to not raise a fuss, because they’re not the ones getting the research grants.
Another would be that they’re painfully aware of how bad short term modeling is, and assume long term modeling is the same sort of thing.
These theories point in opposite directions, of course.
Brett is also an expert mind-reader.
Can somebody tell me who is behind the torrent of money seeking to prove that human activity is causing climate change?
Karl, the guy who found the hiatus questionable, is a NOAA employee, so presumably his sugar daddy is the American taxpayer.
He really got raked over the coals for doing this.
Deservedly so.
Russel, you forget that it’s not about money. It’s part of the godless and satanic gay agenda to undermine Kristianity(TM) in the name of Marx and Darwin. The evilgasms that creates are reward enough.
Can somebody tell me who is behind the torrent of money seeking to prove that human activity is causing climate change?
Teacher’s unions, Hollywood hacks, Clinton, tenured professors, Soros, fat Al, and those dang-nabbed black people.
I hear some is coming across the southern border as well, but the pattern of cross border cash flows paints an ambiguous picture at best.
Meanwhile, regarding our buddy Watts:
Heartland Institute are a conservative / libertarian / free-marketeer organization.
I’m not bringing all of this up to assassinate Watts’ character, he does a pretty good job of that on his own. People say stuff, I’m not in a position to evaluate all of the issues on the merits, so I go and see who they are and what they are about as a way to evaluate how many grains of salt to sprinkle on their pronouncements.
On the one hand, the head of NOAA’s National Climactic Data Center, winner of multiple professional awards.
On the other, a guy with a website who dropped out of college, was an on-air meteorologist, and whose website was started with seed money from a free-marketer organization, and who gets paid to speak at their conferences.
You tell me whose point of view I should give more weight to.
I would be, if I could tell you which theory was correct. As I was just tossing out possiblities, no mind reading was involved.
“Can somebody tell me who is behind the torrent of money seeking to prove that human activity is causing climate change?”
I’d say that Gore made a small fortune off it, if it weren’t that it was a large one. So, it’s not like nobody is financially benefiting from it. But not everything that goes wrong is a conspiracy, even if fortunes get made. Sometimes incentives just lead group behavior off a cliff.
Now that it’s become some kind of moral cause of course, it becomes much harder for people on either side to change their views.
My view, BTW, isn’t that human activity isn’t causing climate change. Merely that it hasn’t been demonstrated to be causing dangerous climate change. I think there’s a bit of hysterical exageration going on.
“He really got raked over the coals for doing this.
Deservedly so.”
No, not really. If there’s a systematic difference, in EITHER direction, between the well situated and poorly situated stations, that demonstrates pretty conclusively that the statistical adjustment doesn’t really work. If the adjustments were properly done, they’d both show the same trends.
So, he exposed bad science that ended up working against his cause? He still exposed bad science.
Merely that it hasn’t been demonstrated to be causing dangerous climate change
That’s not an unreasonable position, the Statue of Liberty is not yet up to her knees in elevated Atlantic Ocean waters. Or whatever Gore’s movie told us we were certain to experience Almost Immediately!!!!!
My point of view is that “demonstrating dangerous climate change” is sort of like demonstrating the lethal dose of arsenic.
Clear and uncontrovertible proof is sort of beside the point, once it arrives.
Yeah, but we know arsenic is toxic. More like demonstrating a lethal dose of selenium, which is actually a nutrient at some levels.
Lotta work on proving warming, not so much work on proving it bad. That mostly just gets assumed.
My view, BTW, isn’t that human activity isn’t causing climate change. Merely that it hasn’t been demonstrated to be causing dangerous climate change. I think there’s a bit of hysterical exageration going on.
This is a relatively subtle distinction to be making. One would expect very good evidence from which to glean such a distinction. Otherwise, it would be extremely difficult to tell the difference, even if one had a fair amount of expertise in climate science.
I see no evidence of significant bias, though I’m open to the idea that it’s entirely possible that the best, current climate science will turn out to be wrong to some degree or other, possibly a large one. I would guess it would come from a failure to account (fully) for some natural stabilization mechanism, if only because I think there’s a tendency among humans to underestimate Mother Earth.
But the evidence for it being largely wrong is still lacking. I promise to be patient.
He still exposed bad science.
No. He did not. He made a claim that turned out to be utterly false. The measurement “errors” were found, upon further review by real investigators, to be more or less a wash.
…..if only because I think there’s a tendency among humans to underestimate Mother Earth.
Well, since the sun will expand and burn the earth into a crisp at some point, what’s to worry? That’s Father Solar System.
What can Mother Earth come up with? Well, it seems fairly well established that every species goes extinct sooner or later (evolution deniers may not grasp this point, but they’re all going to hell anyway–and some of them even claim to know thermodynamics!).
if I could tell you which theory was correct..
You posed a couple of poorly constructed and unfalsifiable hypotheses, not anything that could even remotely be called a “theory”.
And you claim to have aced thermo?
gone?
Yeah, but we know arsenic is toxic
Fair enough. CO2 at high levels isn’t necessarily toxic, nor are elevated global temperatures.
It just depends on what you, as an organism, are capable of adapting to.
As a point of fact, the temperatures that folks consider to be really scary were the norm around the beginning of the Holocene. I.e., when humans began to make the transition from hunter-gatherer nomadic life, to the kind of settled social lifestyle that still persists.
Last summer my wife and I were planning a trip to France and I was struck by a description of the Cosquer Cave, inhabited by humans about 20,000 BC. The entrance to the cave is 37 meters underwater now, well over a hundred feet. Apparently the level of the Med in southern France has varied by something like 100 meters over the period from the end of the last ice age to now.
So, humans have lived in very hot times and very cold times.
Unlike in the year 20,000 BC, or at the beginning of the Holocene, there are something like 7 billion of us running around now. “Migrate somewhere else” is not really a viable option anymore.
So, the bar for “dangerous change” is not really the same now as it may have been at other times. The margin for error is less generous.
I would think that that should prompt a more pro-active, rather than a re-active, mindset when thinking about this stuff.
Just my opinion.
“My view, BTW, isn’t that human activity isn’t causing climate change. Merely that it hasn’t been demonstrated to be causing dangerous climate change. I think there’s a bit of hysterical exageration going on.”
Well, the title of wj’s post IS “Goalpost Shifting ……”.
So, you decided to punt at third down and 350 yards to go?
Maybe Caitlyn Nye the Science Gal can invite you to a debate and we can get back to talking about sex.
Actually, my view, BTW, isn’t that the title of wj’s post isn’t exactly like “Goalpost Shifting”.
Merely that it is “Shifting Goalposts”.
I think that adjusting data is a fairly normal research procedure, but it is usually the output of inaccurate, poorly calibrated instruments being adjusted according to checks by accurate, well calibrated instruments.
Not necessarily. These are not laboratory experiments or measurements carried out under otherwise carefully controlled conditions. There can be many problems with the raw data obtained even from precise, well-calibrated instruments. This is especially so when the critical thing is measuring a trend over time.
Going back to economics, we don’t look at prices and wages over time without making an adjustment for inflation, even though the sign at the supermarket tells us exactly what they are charging for tomatoes.
Lotta work on proving warming, not so much work on proving it bad. That mostly just gets assumed.
Well, lets think about what global warming will do.
1) Rising temperatures will reduce the amount of ice, thus raising ocean levels. Any argument that this would not be the case?
Raising ocean levels means flooding (some) dry land, some of which is currently inhabited. Is this not a bad thing? Especially for the people being displaced.
2) Rising temperatures will result in changes to the climate (of various kinds). Some places will become warmer, some colder; some will become wetter, some dryer. Any argument about that one?
Changing climate will cause a variety of problems. For example, places which currently produce most of the world’s food supply will, at minimum, have to change what they produce. Yes, some (few) places will actually become more suitable for agriculture. But far more will become less so. Especially as the ones where the weather becomes better for growing things have not built up the soil needed for agriculture. Is this not a bad thing? At least for those of us addicted to eating.
So, what positive results can you foresee? And are they enough to outweigh the bad ones?
P.S. Am I correct that you are now arguing that, while global warming and climate change is indeed happening, it’s whether the results are negative that you are doubting?
Some warming, up to a point, can be a net positive. A lot more people die from exposure to cold than to heat. And, increased CO2 levels will make crops more productive. Perhaps especially so on marginal land.
Quick question: Which kills more people: Heat or cold?
Cold, it’s not even close.
“Rising temperatures will reduce the amount of ice, thus raising ocean levels. Any argument that this would not be the case?”
Rising temperatures causes more evaporation, which causes more precipitation, some of which can fall as snow and become ice. Whether rising temperatures will reduce the amount of ice, and thus raise the ocean, thus depends. An awful lot of things depend.
They depend on how much warmer it gets. They depend on where it gets warmer. They depend on whether the warming is primarily during the day, or during the night.
So, no argument about 2, climate change implies the climate changes, but is rather ambivalent about the nature of the change, which is after all why climate “change” replaced “global warming”; Less falsifiable.
“Yes, some (few) places will actually become more suitable for agriculture. But far more will become less so.”
Cute assertion. This is precisely one of the points that actually needs to be established, not just asserted.
The climate is always changing. It is indeed whether the changes the climate is currently undergoing are negative or positive, and how much, which is at doubt.
1. The trend is for a warmer planet.
2. A warmer planet in a relatively short period of time does not provide much leeway for the slow pace of evolutionary adaptions for both plants and animals.
3. The melting of the polar ice caps would be catastrophic for those living in coastal areas and low altitude river basins. They are indeed melting.
4. Melting permafrost and massive release of stored methane would accelerate the feedback loops from global warming. That your houseplants may love it is rather inconsequential.
5. The warming of our oceans is already having some dramatic and adverse effects on ocean life and (I would surmise) weather patterns.
6. Humans are adapted for cooler climes. The ability to adapt to warmer climate is unknown.
But by all means, do look forward to planting palm trees in Alberta once the tar sands are excavated.
Yippie, skippie.
“The climate is always changing.”
That ain’t all.
It went from arguing nearly total denial of the consensus on global warming to geez, I can’t wait until siestas become part of our tropical routine so we conservatives can complain even more about all of the lazy people — all in the space of about 30 comments.
This thread experienced more hot and cold flashes than Caitlyn Jenner did on her first week of hormone therapy.
Rising temperatures causes more evaporation, which causes more precipitation, some of which can fall as snow and become ice.
I’m sure we’ve all observed how well that works in the American Southwest and in central Australia. Not to mention the Sahara. “It depends” indeed.
Well, being in North Carolina, you probably won’t have to deal with the New Dust Bowl as precipitation in the Great Plains fails to follow your scenario. But do plant a garden.
The climate is always changing. It is indeed whether the changes the climate is currently undergoing are negative or positive, and how much, which is at doubt.
So which is it? The measurements are phoney and nothing is happening, or something is happening but we don’t knwo if it’s good or bad?
And if it’s the latter, then shouldn’t we recognize that there are major risks here, and try to do something about that? I mean, I think it very unlikely that my house is going to burn down, but I do have insurance.
Once you concede that something is going on, about which you are uncertain, you are conceding that there are risks.
If Brett had a buoy tied to his leg monitoring the variations in the things he tells us he is certain about, Wattsupwitdat would have to flick the meters with its index finger and conclude he has a space heater to the left of him and an open fridge to the right, the better to grab a homemade brew.
Hey, I heard there was an open thread around somewheres:
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum
The misery for the sick and the poor, and a good section of the middle class, once the Republican Supreme Court and the Republican Congress begin their program of mass murder is going to be a sight to behold.
Can women withstand a warmer climate better than men?
Does Jenner know something we don’t?
–TP
I’m digging into the science article now, and even on the first page it’s not looking good.
” In essence, the bias correction involved calculating the average difference between collocated buoy and ship SSTs. The average difference globally was −0.12°C, a correction
which is applied to the buoy SSTs at every grid cell in ERSST version 4. [Notably, IPCC (1) used a global analysis from the UK Met Office that found the same average shipbuoy difference globally, although the corrections in that
analysis were constrained by differences observed within each ocean basin (18).] More generally, buoy data have been proven to be more accurate and reliable than ship data, with better known instrument characteristics and automated sampling (16).”
So, the very first page, they explain that they looked at the difference between ship and buoy readings, and based on that corrected the buoys. Only a few lines later, they note that the buoy data is the more accurate data.
Page one, they admit to altering the readings of the more accurate data source to agree with the less accurate data source. I don’t see any place where they explain why a discrepancy between a good data source and a bad one would compel correcting the good one.
And that is the exact point they’re being mocked for.
Maybe Caitlyn Nye the Science Gal can invite you to a debate and we can get back to talking about sex.
So speaking of sex, and Caitlyn, nobody commented on the New Yorker article I linked to. But then there was a New York Times editorial, and then a Slate commentator who objected to it (and I thought gave short shrift to some very important issues that were raised). I think an incredibly important article was written by Rhonda Garelick.
We discuss feminism here from time to time. I’m not interested in telling people what to do or how to present themselves to the public (after all, we all choose costumes, masks and sometimes pseudonyms). Some of us choose surgical means to keep us in a body that syncs with our minds. So I’m completely in favor of anyone’s preferences. Libertarian in that way, in fact.
However, I thought the implications for women, who have to struggle with body image from the earliest age and throughout life, as well as menstruation, pregnancy (possibly, or infertility, possibly), menopause,etc. – all having very definite cultural effects (witness women who can’t get acting jobs after a certain age) – the conversation really hasn’t included these issues at all.
Because I hope that people accept me (at face value) as I present myself, so I am willing to try to do the same for other people. But, on a deeper level, everyone’s experience is unique, and while it doesn’t completely fall within the confines of gender,what I find in common with people has more to do with experience and attitudes than with appearance.
Quick question: Which kills more people: Heat or cold?
Cold, it’s not even close.
So what’s your point here, with regard to climate change?
Quick question: Which kills more people: Heat or cold?
If it gets significantly hotter, that will probably change.
I second sapient’s question – what the heck is the point of this question?
Should we all go out immediately and start a bunch of coal fires, to see if we can speed the warming up?
Then, far fewer people will die of cold.
Win!
And that is the exact point they’re being mocked for.
Yes, it’s odd that they adjusted the buoy numbers up, when they considered the buoy numbers to be more accurate in general.
The net effect on the long term trend is, basically, negligible, but it’s still puzzling.
sapient, your comment has made me curious to follow your links. thanks for posting them again.
sorry, the “whats your point” comment was hair shirt.
Compare the following cut-and-paste to Brett’s version. See if you can spot the difference.
I took thermo, too. From what I remember, thermodynamics is not relevant to whatever the final sentence may mean.
–TP
sapient, your comment has made me curious to follow your links. thanks for posting them again.
Thank you, russell, for your interest in reading them. I hope, if you have a chance, you will return to comment. I’m fascinated by it, and think it’s more than an academic squabble (as Amanda Marcotte suggested).
I’m very uncertain about some of the issue involved in transgenderism, especially since people are talking about surgery for minors, etc. I’m not sure that our understanding of the issue allows me to be comfortable with that.
I’m not a sooper-dooper thermodynamics wizard, but isn’t this sentence
buoy data have been proven to be more accurate and reliable than ship data, with better known instrument characteristics and automated sampling
Discussing the accuracy and reliability of the instrumentation rather than the ‘accuracy’ of the reading? Or, as tony points out, this sentence is related to the last sentence rather than the correction?
It’s a bit over my head, and I imagine it’s over Brett’s, too. It seems to me that he’s over-simplifying the nature of the data reconstruction, possibly in a particular way because of his own bias on the general subject of climate change. They must be doing something silly or underhanded, rather than something that makes perfect sense (to someone sufficiently knowledgeable in the kind of data analysis in question), but that he can’t fully grasp (even if he wants to).
I incline towards spaient’s position. Except that I am sure I don’t like the idea of such surgey for minors.
a) I don’t think anyone else should make that that kind of a decision. And
b) it is a well-established legal point that minors are not legally competent to make some kinds of decisions, including for elective surgery.
I will go so far as telling them that, when they are adults, it is an option. That may be helpful in coping, if they truly are transexual — to know that a change they desire will become possible. But that only far, and no further.
Finished the paper, and then got into the supplementary material.
Remember that I complained above about adjusting instrument readings algorithmically, instead of actually checking each instrument? Seems that’s what they did here: At one time ships normally checked sea temperatures by lowering a bucket. Then around WWII they switched over to doing it by a thermometer in the engine cooling water intake line. Which is presumed to be more accurate, because the water doesn’t have an opportunity to change it’s temperature while waiting in the bucket to be checked.
They found that a few ships were still using the bucket method, so they apparently corrected them ALL for bucket use. Not just the ones they found still using buckets. No justification for why they didn’t just correct the ones they knew used buckets, but instead applies a bucket correction to ships that mostly weren’t using them.
What they’ve said is that they corrected the buoy readings based on the ship readings. (The corrected ship’s readings, mind you.) The suplementary material confirm that, and it’s just plain silly to have done. And the effect was to just barely boost the warming during the hiatus from insignificant to significant.
Significant at 0.1, they said. And that’s another point. The usual test for significance is 0.05, one chance in twenty of getting the result by blind chance. It’s an arbitrary cutoff, but virtually everybody uses it.
For some reason, they didn’t. They used a 0.1 cutoff, one chance in TEN of getting the result by random chance. This tells me that, with all their adjustments, they still didn’t manage to get “significant” warming during the hiatus according to standard criteria, and instead had to relax the significance cutoff in order to claim their results were significant.
I’d call that strike 2. Maybe 3, depending on how important you consider applying a bucket correction to ships using inline thermometers was.
This paper deserved to be mocked.
“Quick question: Which kills more people: Heat or cold?
If it gets significantly hotter, that will probably change.
I second sapient’s question – what the heck is the point of this question?”
Just to point out that we actually know, pretty reliably, that a little warming could be a positive thing.
How much warming? What time of day and year? Where? These are all very important questions.
If the answer to them is, “Not much, winter and at night, in places that are currently very cold.”, warming is very likely to be a good thing.
If the answer to them is, “A whole lot, summer and noon, in places that are particularly hot already.”, warming is very likely to be a bad thing.
What I’m saying here, is that you can’t just declare any warming to be bad. It depends. But all the time I see people taking it for granted that, if you prove warming is happening At All, you’ve proven that something must be done.
No, you haven’t. Good or bad is in the details.
Back to (sorta) OT, re: climate change.
The sequence of arguments (aka, ‘Dance of the Deniers’;
omitting the diversions into conspiracy theories)
1. It isn’t happening
2. It’s not certain it’s happening
3. Okay, it’s happening, but it isn’t our fault
4. Okay, it’s our fault, but it’s good/tolerable
5. ..and besides it’s too hard/expensive to fix
6. It’s too late.
(pause for memory/goalpost reset, then start again at #1)
Apparently, if you refuse to swallow the koolaide, you’re not allowed to have the slightest bit of nuance in your views.
My position, not much altered over the last few years, (Why should my views have changed, when the climate hasn’t?) is,
1. Of course the planet is warming, we’re still on the rebound from the Little Ice age. We’d better be warming, ice ages are no fun.
2. Adding CO2 to the atmosphere probably is going to increase this, to SOME extent. Maybe we should figure out how much before screaming?
3. “Fault” involves already assuming it’s bad. Why don’t you try establishing that before talking about “fault”?
4. “Fault” involves already assuming it’s bad. Why don’t you try establishing that before talking about “fault”?
5. Yeah, the proposals to “fix” it, (Why don’t you establish it’s broken, first?) do tend to be expensive. Especially if you’re spending money to avert a benefit, not a harm.
6. Pretty much. If it’s bad, geoengineering will be the only answer, because the 3rd world isn’t going to volunteer to stay poor.
Argument by science deniers who count on climate change for their grants:
1) Global warming – horrible consequences
2) Global Climate Change – horrible consequences
3) Global Climate Change – well no consequences as predicted, but they are coming
4) Global Warming – not sure about consequences, but why not assume they will happen, what could it hurt?
5) Church of Global Climate Change – You guys suck because you don’t believe us unconditionally
Now, anyone want to do something wild and crazy, like address my points concerning the paper?
Maybe defend using a 0.1 instead of 0.05 signficance cutoff?
Maybe defend adjusting all the ships’ readings based on finding a few still use buckets?
Maybe defend adjusting the precise and accurate buoy readings based on the not so great, and adjusted, ship readings?
Of course the planet is warming, we’re still on the rebound from the Little Ice age. We’d better be warming, ice ages are no fun.
This is actually false. The planet has been significantly warmer than it is now, since the last Ice Age.
Adding CO2 to the atmosphere probably is going to increase this, to SOME extent. Maybe we should figure out how much before screaming?
That’s the point of the modeling.
Now, anyone want to do something wild and crazy, like address my points concerning the paper?
Yes.
They are all reasonable questions about the paper. I share most if not all of your questions, and IMO it would be reasonable for Dr. Karl and/or NOAA to address them.
All of that said, in the context of the long term trend, which is not really in question by any credible that I can find, the difference between the numbers with and without Karl’s adjustments is negligible.
Marty, can you, or anyone else, give examples of people getting big juicy grants as a result of, or on the promise of, doing research that favors the global warming hypothesis?
Examples in the other direction are very, very easy to find. For the record.
And, while your disdain for what you perceive as the snotty superior attitude of “progressives” is plain to see, it’s irrelevant to the topic.
Things are either happening, or they’re not.
Regarding the overall question of climate change, as far as I can tell, the basic facts of the matter are:
CO2 levels have increased a lot since the beginning of the industrial period.
The human contribution to those increased levels are significant.
Increased levels of CO2 are likely to raise the ambient temperature on Earth.
Many of the effects predicted by models of this phenomenon have occurred, and are occurring.
Am I missing anything? If not, WTF? Why is there even a debate about this?
Brett,
I haven’t read the paper, but I can easily defend using a .1 significance level.
It’s true that .05 is almost universally used. It’s also true that this is an arbitrary choice.
Way back when I first took a statistics course and we got to the part about hypothesis testing we had some discussion of Type I and Type II errors, and the tradeoffs involved and so on. I’m sure you had much the same.
Part of this material explained that the choice of a significance level should depend on the costs of being wrong in different ways. That makes perfect sense, of course. It’s why we demand a high level of proof for a criminal conviction, for example. Of course, all that was pretty much immediately abandoned, as we started almost always using .05.
But that practice doesn’t invalidate the previous logic about costs. If the cost of wrongly rejecting the alternative hypothesis is high it is perfectly reasonable, in fact desirable, to use a higher significance level. It is, after all, a bet, and not all bets have the same odds.
Maybe defend adjusting the precise and accurate buoy readings based on the not so great, and adjusted, ship readings?
i believe that’s because much of the old data is from ship bucket readings, and there’s a known (or, averaged) temperature offset associated with those. so, to normalize the whole data set you either offset the new, buoy, readings or your offset the old, bucket, readings. they adjusted the buoy readings because that keeps their results in the same range as everyone else who has used the bucket readings.
“It’s true that .05 is almost universally used. It’s also true that this is an arbitrary choice.”
I said as much myself. But it IS almost universally used, which is why the choice to use 0.1 pretty much guarantees that their results didn’t meet the usual standard for statistical significance. If they had, they would have used it.
Which is an arbitrary standard, but is still an arbitrary standard, if you catch my drift. Which you have to justify departing from, and they didn’t.
At most this paper would be sugestive, rather than establishing anything, for that reason alone. It’s certainly not being treated as merely suggestive. It’s being treated as though it were a stake driven through the heart of the hiatus.
But that’s not the only reason for being sceptical of the paper.
I know nothing whatsoever about thermodynamics and perhaps even less about statistics. So, I have no comment about the pros and cons of the specific adjustments made in the Science article.
The basic motivation of the research appears, to me, to have been to smooth out, or account for, variations in the historical SST and other observations, by artificially adjusting for biases that are known to exist between observations from different sources.
So, buoys vs ships, and ships before and after the bucket method began to be replaced by observations at the intake.
The specific adjustments made had the effect of moving the observations from the 90’s on upward.
Presumably, the researchers could have gone about it by adjusting the older historical numbers *downward*. So that, for instance, they could have adjusted the ship observations down by 0.12 C, to align with the apparently more accurate buoy numbers, instead of the other way around.
The result of that would have been to move the historical numbers *down*, creating a cooler baseline.
In either case, the trend line would show consistent warming over time.
From the discussion about this paper found on various climate-related websites, my sense is that the UK datasets are in general better than NOAA’s, because the adjustments made to those make a greater effort to account for regional differences.
In all cases, using whatever datasets you like, the long term trend during the period for which we have surface temperature observations is that we’re warming up.
That is as much sense as I can make of it. Carry on, thermodynamicists.
We offer this statement in the belief that both human prosperity and an ecologically vibrant planet are not only possible, but also inseparable. By committing to the real processes, already underway, that have begun to decouple human well-being from environmental destruction, we believe that such a future might be achieved. As such, we embrace an optimistic view toward human capacities and the future.
An Ecomodernist Manifesto: A manifesto to use humanity’s extraordinary powers in service of creating a good Anthropocene.
We offer this statement in the belief that both human prosperity and an ecologically vibrant planet are not only possible, but also inseparable. By committing to the real processes, already underway, that have begun to decouple human well-being from environmental destruction, we believe that such a future might be achieved. As such, we embrace an optimistic view toward human capacities and the future.
An Ecomodernist Manifesto: A manifesto to use humanity’s extraordinary powers in service of creating a good Anthropocene.
“they adjusted the buoy readings because that keeps their results in the same range as everyone else who has used the bucket readings.”
That is not, to put it mildly, a valid reason for adjusting the readings of the new, more precise, more accurate instruments to agree with the older, less precise, less accurate instruments.
“Presumably, the researchers could have gone about it by adjusting the older historical numbers *downward*. So that, for instance, they could have adjusted the ship observations down by 0.12 C, to align with the apparently more accurate buoy numbers, instead of the other way around.”
I don’t think the 0.12 C adjustment is justified, in either direction. They applied the ‘bucket’ adjustment to ships that weren’t using buckets.
Essentially, they found that there were a few ships still using buckets, and used it as an excuse to apply to all ships, most of which weren’t using buckets, an adjustment which only makes sense in the context of bucket measurements. What does the night time air temperature have to do with measuring temperatures in a pipe that’s not exposed to the nightime air?
Nothing. There wasn’t any justification for the magnitude of adjustment they made, even if they’d properly made it to the ship data.
Essentiallyl, I think, this was not an exercise in science. It was an exercise in PR. They groped around to find some tweaks to the numbers that would make that annoying hiatus go away, and then applied them regardless of whether they actually made sense.
And then had to use a non-standard test for signficance to claim their results weren’t junk anyway.
They groped around to find some tweaks to the numbers that would make that annoying hiatus go away, and then applied them regardless of whether they actually made sense.
If that’s true, it may have been all the more silly, since it lends credence to a purported hiatus that, thus far, has been too short to be meaningful. I guess we’ll see if the hiatus goes away all by itself.
I actually hope it doesn’t. You may think people who think climate change/global warming is real somehow “like” it, but that’s not the case.
That is not, to put it mildly, a valid reason for adjusting the readings of the new, more precise, more accurate instruments to agree with the older, less precise, less accurate instruments.
adding a constant to all values is irrelevant to the first derivative.
They groped around to find some tweaks to the numbers that would make that annoying hiatus go away, and then applied them regardless of whether they actually made sense.
while also lowering the estimate of change since the 19th C.. seems like a bad way to further the great evil hoax, to me.
I think the hiatus is separate from the issue of whether there really is global warming. It has more signficance on the subject of whether the climate models are yet good enough to rely upon.
As for the hiatus, how soon it’s going away is pretty dependent on why it happened in the first place. If it’s due to some climate cycles happening to line up, it’s probably going to be over in a few years. OTOH, if it’s due to the Sun going into a Maunder minimum, it would probably end in temperatures dropping, and that wouldn’t be good at all.
the question i have is why the “hiatus” matters in the first place.
look at Figure 2 on page 6 of the paper and compare the adjusted numbers vs the unadjusted numbers, and the old adjustment vs Karl’s adjustments.
the difference appears, to me, to be noise.
the rate of warming as measured at the surface of the earth has slowed since 1998. as it has in any number of other short-term periods over the time frame under consideration.
It hasn’t stopped warming, the rate at which warming was observed has shown down.
is there any disagreement or debate about the longer term trend? where for “longer term” I mean the industrial period, rather than thousands-of-year periods of time.
the earth has been warmer than it is now, with people on it, so it’s unlikely that we’re talking about annihilating the human race.
what is possible is massive disruption of settled patterns of life. and, we’ve been through that before, also, so one way or another we’re likely to adapt.
the question, to my eye, is whether we do so in chaotic and stupid ways, or whether we do so thoughtfully and with the least overall impact on everything else that lives on the planet.
I suspect that we are going to proceed in chaotic and stupid ways, because I see no effective concerted effort to do anything else.
So, my assumption is that lots of people – many millions of people – are basically going to be FUBAR. Most of those are probably people who are already kind of FUBAR, it’ll just be a lot worse, for a lot of them.
But nothing constructive is really going to happen in any kind of organized way. Why? Because the degree of certainty isn’t going to be any greater than it is now, until either things settle down on their own through some miracle of nature, or they don’t and it’ll be too late to mitigate the larger effects.
The debate is going to be about whether Dr. Karl should have used the bucket temperature numbers of the water intake numbers, which does not have enough juice to move folks off the dime.
I’ll be delighted to be wrong.
Cleek, IMHO your ‘both sides do it’ examples are weak. To start with name the liberal Fox News.
I’ll add that I generally don’t bother getting into discussions about global warming, because in general it’s a lot of wankery.
People, not least me, think they know things that they have no qualifications to even have an opinion about. The discussion ends up being about buckets vs no buckets, or the incredibly arcane details of paleodendrology, which all of a sudden everybody is an armchair expert in.
Questions like: what happens to all of the people who currently live in low-lying areas if the ocean level does rise? Where do they go?
What if the various breadbasket agricultural areas of the world can no longer sustain current levels of production?
What happens if water becomes scarce, or scarcer, in heavily populated areas?
What if entire regions of the world become politically unstable, or even more politically unstable than they are now?
If you don’t discuss that stuff, it’s not a serious discussion. It’s armchair scientist, and it amounts to nothing.
I don’t mean to disparage the discussion here, not least because I’ve been in the middle of it. It’s just that if the debate is about whether the temperature numbers for the hiatus period should be adjusted by 0.12 C or not, or if we should start counting the hiatus from 1997 or 1998, nothing is going to happen.
We will be a the mercy of whatever fate brings our way.
Slartibartfast: “Stay tuned for Chapters 47-103 of how Brett is utterly convinced that Jenner is a pathetic loser psycho. It’s a position he’s quite attached to, for some reason.”
To the audience:
Slart and I agree – and you all had the privilege of being here to witness it.
On your deathbeds, remember to tell your grandchildren this story, and to make them swear to pass it on to their own grandchildren, when the time comes.
“the question i have is why the “hiatus” matters in the first place.
look at Figure 2 on page 6 of the paper and compare the adjusted numbers vs the unadjusted numbers, and the old adjustment vs Karl’s adjustments.
the difference appears, to me, to be noise.”
It matters because the hiatus makes the models look bad. The models didn’t predict a hiatus. They predicted continued warming. Up until now it has been just within the error bar for the predictions, but that can’t last if it goes on, because the predictions keep getting hotter, and the weather doesn’t.
Even a few years ago the climate modelers were starting to say that, if the hiatus didn’t end soon, there was something basic wrong with the way they’re modeling climate.
The models are the whole game here, Russell. If they’re not accurate, they’re not a basis for making policy. And the hiatus is at best and embarassment, giving people reason to doubt the models. If it keeps up, nobody will trust them, and all the demands that are based on the models being right will be rejected.
That’s why the hiatus matters in the first place. In science, it matters if your predictions prove out, and the hiatus isn’t what was predicted.
“Brett is utterly convinced that Jenner is a pathetic loser psycho.”
Actually, Brett thinks that Jenner is a remarkable athlete who sadly has a mental illness, and even more sadly fell in with people who encouraged it, instead of getting him help.
But I don’t think you could really describe a wealthy gold medal winner as a “pathetic loser psycho”, even if he does have BDD. Mental health problems exist on a continuum, and that’s a fairly mild one.
Cleek, IMHO your ‘both sides do it’ examples are weak. To start with name the liberal Fox News.
FFS, i’m not saying left and right are equivalent on this, so could you please knock that shit off?
if you look around and can’t find any lefty websites that seem to favor outrage over analysis, then maybe we’re too far apart to even have this conversation.
It matters because the hiatus makes the models look bad. The models didn’t predict a hiatus.
which means the models need to be adjusted. and they are, and in the process we’re learning more. would you prefer we stopped?
but the models aren’t the historical data, which shows a recent, dramatic, warming.
Up until now it has been just within the error bar for the predictions, but that can’t last if it goes on, because the predictions keep getting hotter, and the weather doesn’t.
Yes. If the future climate turns out not to be within the margin of error of a given model, the model was wrong (to some degree or other, depending on how far outside the margin of error the climate turns out to be.) It has always been thus. There’s always an “if” of that sort.
It may mean that more investigation is required to improve the model(s) that turned out not to be predictive. Of couse, an improved model that is consistent with all the available data will be subject to the same future possibility.
New models may still predict significant climate-related problems, even with less rapid warming. And they will still be subject to both valid and invalid criticism. In other words, we’ll never “know,” until something actually happens.
So I guess, what russell said.
Presumably, the researchers could have gone about it by adjusting the older historical numbers *downward*. So that, for instance, they could have adjusted the ship observations down by 0.12 C, to align with the apparently more accurate buoy numbers, instead of the other way around.
Of course, if they did that, the screams of outrage would instead be about “falsifing the previously recorded data”.
It comes down to this. If you don’t like what the data shows, the easiest thing to do is attack the methodology. And carefully ignore any reasoning behind that methodology. After all, if your target audience bothers checking at all, they are unlikely to go that deep in.
The models are the whole game here, Russell. If they’re not accurate, they’re not a basis for making policy.
Over the rather short time span of this line of research (can be measured in decades), the models have proven to be rather robust. They generally have predicted a warming trend.
A warming trend has been observed.
It would seem the degree of this trend is a matter of some dispute. Some scientists are actually conducting and publishing research on the available data.
Denialists, on the other hand, conduct no research. They do no science. They present no theory as to why we observe the trend of global warming.
They just bullshit.
When Bellmore finishes with the crib notes provided by the Cato Institute, perhaps he can explain to us how this organization is, to the 95th level of confidence, a right wing propaganda tool.
“a right wing propaganda tool”
= bucket shop.
heh.
“who sadly has a mental illness”
Dr. Landy, I suppose that could be true, but I hope you’re arriving at this medical diagnosis from a different armchair than the Endowed Chair of Thermodynamics in the den.
Did you ace freshman psychology too?
If I may ask, what is the medical nomenclature for Jenner’s mental condition?
I look forward to your submissions to the major peer-reviewed psychiatric journals.
If you blatantly misdiagnose Jenner’s condition and go on to prescribe various therapies and psychotropic drugs for her, you could run afoul of state psychiatric board certifications and be disbarred from practicing.
Of course, I expect you have your own private board, a la Rand Paul, consisting of a dog, a cat, a parrot (always handy on a self-appointed board), and a jar of pickled herring.
I have it on good authority that Caitlyn Jenner offered you a cigar but you turned it down because it was only a cigar and nothing more.
“which means the models need to be adjusted. and they are, and in the process we’re learning more. would you prefer we stopped?”
No, I’d prefer we not pretend the models are good until they actually are good. Go ahead, keep improving them, eventually they’ll actually be capable of making reliable predictions.
“but the models aren’t the historical data, which shows a recent, dramatic, warming.”
Which showed, past tense, recent warming right up until it STOPPED showing warming. For going on nearly two decades now. Which is kind of the point. Desperate warnings based on models that don’t show a hiatus, actual climate not budging year after year.
Who should I believe, the models, or my lying thermometer?
Which showed, past tense, recent warming right up until it STOPPED showing warming.
2014 was the warmest year on record.
the other 9 warmest years on record are, in order:
2007, 2009, 2006, 2002, 2003, 2013, 1998, 2005, 2010.
average temperature is going up. year to year noise doesn’t change that.
This is from Brett’s link to the supplemtary info:
The trend of uncorrected ship minus buoy data was -0.066°C dec-1 over the period 2000-2014, while the trend in corrected ship minus buoy data was -0.002°C dec-1. This close agreement in the trend of the corrected ship data indicates that these time dependent ship adjustments did indeed correct an artifact in ship data impacting the trend over this hiatus period.
It seems the correction made the ship data line up much better with the buoy data. You know – the more accurate and precise buoys.
And why is it that you don’t think the 0.12 C adjustment is justified in either direction, Brett, aside from their adjusting the buoy data rather than the ship data? (And if they had done it the other way around, as I think cleek mentioned, wouldn’t the year-to-year deltas remain the same?)
The models didn’t predict a hiatus. They predicted continued warming.
Which showed, past tense, recent warming right up until it STOPPED showing warming. For going on nearly two decades now.
Wiki. I apologize for referring to Wiki, but I’m not a climatologist. I have to work from information that I can understand.
Which showed, past tense, recent warming right up until it STOPPED showing warming.
You can’t even read. The article is about “the apparent decrease in the upward trend of global surface temperatures since 1998”.
The trend is still there. There is no data that shows global warming has, to use your highly technical term “STOPPED” (wingnut caps).
Pathetic. Really.
Nasa climate scientists: We said 2014 was the warmest year on record… but we’re only 38% sure we were right
A statistical model is just not good enough for the Bellmores of the world, yet they will (going on now for decades) ceaselessly advocate public policies affecting millions of people based on a“>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve”> napkin sketch worked up in a cocktail lounge.
And, of course, new improved models that correctly describe whatever remains of the “hiatus” must establish a track record before they can be accepted. (See #2 on my list above).
How long will that take? A century or so? Why, last time we “trusted” models (not that Brett + wingnutistan ever did) they failed after ~20 years, so better wait for AT LEAST 3 or 4 times that long.
And if the data says that the temperature is shooting up? Well, back to #1 and whose bucket reading is correct, anyhow? Oh look, it snowed in Bucksnort AK, plus Al Gore is fat.
Personally, I think we’re going to have to go with the terraforming, because humanity, on average, is too stupid to do otherwise. The best we can do now is to document the deniers so that they can be first in line for the death-panels while the Earth is cooking.
You know, if the temperature was going up, and the stalls, you’re going to expect a lot of new “records”, none of which are particularly different from each other. Like climbing to the top of a hill, and then pretending you’re still going up because occasionally you encounter a rock that’s a mm taller than the last one. Actually, the whole decade was constant within the margin of error.
We said 2014 was the warmest year on record… but we’re only 38% sure we were right
said the headline in the fncking Daily Mail.
come on.
But Bobby, if you don’t refuse to accept how a noisy signal works, you have a much harder time “refuting” things that you would prefer not be true.
Because, after all, if they were true then it would become desisrable to do something about them. And that would require the kind of group action which is antithetical.
“And, of course, new improved models that correctly describe whatever remains of the “hiatus” must establish a track record before they can be accepted. (See #2 on my list above).”
Well, yeah. That’s what “prediction” means, after all.
Basically you’re demanding that the output of the models be accepted as true without proof that the models are any good. After we already know that the last time we were told the models were good, they turned out to be wrong.
Sorry, there’s no “But it’s really important” exemption from proving that your model is actually good.
Fun in the (fictional!) Bellmore house:
“Honey, the roof is leaking”
“No it’s not”
“See, there’s water dripping from the ceiling”
“It’s just condensation, not from the roof”
“I checked in the attic, it’s from the roof”
“Did you check the exact amount of rain on the outside of the room matched what you saw in the attic, and from the ceiling? If those values aren’t exactly the same, with zero error, then your model is wrong and the roof is okay as-is”
“It’s trashing all our stuff! And soon the drywall is going to collapse on us!”
“You’re just an alarmist, trying to get a new roof because you want to take away my beer money”
“Look! The puddles are getting larger!”
“But they don’t match the buckets, so the roof isn’t leaking”
“It’s still a lot of water, and increasing, either way”
“But the weatherman said dry weather, and he was wrong, so why should I believe it any time he predicts rain, ever again?”
and around and around and around it goes…
WJ, if you don’t understand how noisy signals work, you might just think that a series of “hottest years on record” all within the margin of error of each other actually demonstrate the temperature is still rising, rather than that it has stopped rising.
Here’s a clue: If it were still rising, the new records wouldn’t all be within the margin of error of each other. Each new record would be significantly higher than the previous.
“Basically you’re demanding that the output of the models be accepted as true without proof that the models are any good.”
I’m not demanding anything. I’m mocking gross stupidity.
If that shoe fits, that’s your problem.
Each new record would be significantly higher than the previous.
You, sir, are definitely no statistician.
Get a clue.
Sorry, there’s no “But it’s really important” exemption from proving that your model is actually good.
This is indeed true.
On the other hand, suppose there is a model which predicts a wild fire in your area. At what point to you bestir yourself and disc a firebreak? I submit that, if the expected damage is burning up the bird feeder in your yard, you would want a far higher level of accuracy in the model than if the expected damage is burning down your house.
See, the size of the damage matters. Not for the validity of the model but for the precision of its predictions at which it is worthwhile taking action.
I realize you’re mocking my stupidity. That you’re doing so without proof of said stupidity hasn’t been lost on me, either.
Here’s another clue: Disagreeing with you about something is not proof of stupidity. As comforting as that belief may be.
Basically you’re demanding that the output of the models be accepted as true without proof that the models are any good.
So basically you are demanding that the usual standards of the scientific method are to be waived when it comes to climate science because you insist on absolute certainty, a standard that apparently you don’t have a problem with in other fields of scientific inquiry.
Again: Bullshit.
it appears we’re back to “it’s not really warming anyway”.
so f it. it’s pointless to discuss this stuff. i mean, it’s interesting in a gee-i’m-curious-about-science way, but I don’t see that anyone is particularly serious about doing anything about it. For “anyone” here I mean actors who can operate at the scale needed to make effective changes – states, industries.
There is too much money and too much stupid involved. Bad combination.
it appears we’re back to “it’s not really warming anyway”.
Well, this post did start out with something to do about “shifting goalposts” did it not?
You mean we are not in Kansas any more?
I still want to know why Brett objects to the 0.12 C adjustment in either direction (by which I assume he means adjusting the ship-collected data to match the buoy-collected data or vice versa).
I’d also like him to excerpt where it says they applied the bucket-data adjustment to all ship-collected data, regardless of the method, because I can’t find that. All I saw was that they applied the adjustment over a number of year to which it hadn’t previously been applied.
“So basically you are demanding that the usual standards of the scientific method are to be waived when it comes to climate science because you insist on absolute certainty,”
Asking for 0.05 instead of 0.1 is insisting on absolute certainty?
“There is too much money and too much stupid involved. Bad combination.”
Hey, we can agree. Kind of, anyway.
This from Brett’s Daily Mail article:
Data: Gavin Schmidt, of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, admits there’s a margin of error
The horror!
(Are we really supposed to take this sort of thing seriously?)
there’s always the opt-out.
if you don’t understand how noisy signals work, you might just think that a series of “hottest years on record” all within the margin of error of each other actually demonstrate the temperature is still rising, rather than that it has stopped rising.
And you would be right to think so. Once you have a series of measurements, each greater than the previous one, albeit “within the margin of error,” it is quite sensible to conclude that you have an upward trend. Remember, this “margin of error” as applied to the series drops sharply as more observations are added, even if the individual margin of a particular measurement doesn’t change.
Let’s say you have the following series:
100 +/-5
102 +/-5
104 +/-5
107 +/-5
If you don’t think that shows an upward trend then you, sir, are, as bobbyp says, no statistician.
Indeed, taking just the first two numbers in the above series, it’s better than a 50-50 bet that the value being measured is higher in the second observation than the first.
Here’s a clue: If it were still rising, the new records wouldn’t all be within the margin of error of each other. Each new record would be significantly higher than the previous.
You sound like those newscasters who like to call political races dead heats because the candidates are within the margin of error according to some poll.
Kind of, anyway.
Probably not.
Asking for 0.05 instead of 0.1 is insisting on absolute certainty?
So, basically, you are willing to roll the dice and take short odds when the expectation is 10-1 against you?
Smart play.
byomtov,
Except that every time the temperature goes down within the margin of error it changes the certainty level, unlike your sequential series, and confidence in the trend tends to reduce. While I am willing to concede, based on the data, that it is likely there is a very long term trend upward, that doesn’t come close to supporting the hysterical predictions of climate change politics.
Let’s say you have the following series:
100 +/-5
100 +/-5
100 +/-5
100 +/-5
Unless by sheer chance the first signal you get is 105, you’re going to get a random series of readings, some of which will be “records”. The records will come rapidly at first, then further and further apart.
When a noisy signal stops going up, you’re going to keep getting record high readings for a while.
the hysterical predictions of climate change politics.
What are those?
Is this still all about Al Gore? If we all concede that Al Gore is fat, flies in planes, and is kind of an insufferable bore, can we then just move on and deal with this stuff?
Here is the EPA page, describing their very scary programs to address climate change. What is there to be alarmed about in any of that?
I don’t understand why this stuff is even a matter of debate. It’s getting warmer or it’s not. CO2 is a likely contributor to that, or it’s not. Human activity contributes significantly to the increase of CO2, or it doesn’t.
It seems like everybody with a brain in their head is on board with “it is, it is, and it does”.
So what is the problem?
Let’s say you have the following series
Do we have that series?
I don’t understand why this stuff is even a matter of debate.
it’s very important to oppose liberals. it’s very important to oppose environmentalists. it’s very important ensure that industry is unimpeded. Al Gore is fat.
dear media, can we stop talking about Rick Santorum now ?
So what is the problem?
The problem is a fear of “ruinous” economic policies based on the “science” of cocktail napkin graphs and a “free market” ideological and normative belief system based on huge public subsidies to rich people.
And yes, Al Gore is overly heavy within the margin of error.
“Do we have that series?”
That’s the point: We don’t know which series we have, because they are both the same, within measurement error.
You’d be getting new record high temperatures with either series, because of the noise.
why does the noise always go in one direction?
This is why I don’t really tend to argue these things: they’re not things that get resolved via argumentation very much.
And it’s probably because large quantities of people are frequently in the habit of denying things that are solidly established in science, like gravity and conservation laws, and relativity.
Because politics.
Brett,
Are you talking about a measurement series with a margin of error or a predicted series with a margin of error, within which a series of measurements fits?
At this point, you seem to be making up hypotheticals that may or may not apply to the actual predictions and the actual measurements, for whatever purpose. It’s becoming less and less clear to me what your friggin’ point actually is.
What gives you the idea that it always goes in one direction?
And, to repeat my 1:08 PM comment:
I still want to know why Brett objects to the 0.12 C adjustment in either direction (by which I assume he means adjusting the ship-collected data to match the buoy-collected data or vice versa).
I’d also like him to excerpt where it says they applied the bucket-data adjustment to all ship-collected data, regardless of the method, because I can’t find that. All I saw was that they applied the adjustment over a number of year to which it hadn’t previously been applied.
What gives you the idea that it always goes in one direction?
It doesn’t. Not always.
This is why I don’t really tend to argue these things: they’re not things that get resolved via argumentation very much.
Thanks for the reminder.
Over and out.
I hope, if you have a chance, you will return to comment.
Well, if no one else will… I’d agree with you that Garelick’s article raises important points, and the last paragraph is biting.
I’ll also observe that the Burkett piece was infuriating for all the reasons that commentary rooted deeply in identity politics typically is infuriating – namely, that it at once asserts that identity is the sum of experiences which are profoundly individual and personal, yet at the same time asserts that all members of a given class prima facie share unifying experiences. An intersectionalist perspective may blunt this particular problem, but it’s very rooted in identity politics, and hard to dispel even when acknowledging that people simultaneously hold multiple identities – not least because many intersectionalists fail to consider or dismiss the fact that the targets of their criticisms may have multiple identities as well. E.g., transwomen, as having experienced the perception of being a man, enjoy male privilege and cannot understand what it is to be female, even if they have lived openly as a woman – indeed, by becoming “superficially” female they’re just asserting their privilege all the more! That sort of thing. It’s a highly problematic POV because of the painful amount of conflation it requires, but also because it devolves into that awful leftist passtime, the Oppression Olympics.
One the one hand, I can sympathize with a desire to only identify with individuals who one perceives to have shared common experiences with. On the other, this is to no small degree a problem they’ve created nearly ex nihilo – if the fundamental essence of being a woman is “having experienced life as a woman”, and if you define “having experienced life as a woman” as “having had all the common experiences of womanhood from birth onwards”, unless you seriously unpack that second definition, you’re just obfuscating a definition of woman as “someone born a biological female, regardless of their life experiences”. Which is to say, the whole artifice balances on the conceit that there is a universal experience, but at the same time it regulates personal experience as the ne plus ultra of comprehension. Identity politics too often wants to have it both ways, while simultaneously holding the feet of those they disagree with to the fire, and this particular instance looks like an infuriatingly good example of that. Declaring that a person can’t really be a woman w/o undergoing an arbitrary set of experiences that not all women undergo fetishizes a rigid and artificial conception of gender… which, as Garelick points out in her final paragraph, comes at a price. At the same time, however, taking the opposite tack and saying that visible markers and behaviors are the most important aspect of identity is far worse.
It’s a tricky mess, and what strikes me as the key point coming out of this is that our society really, really likes fixed, well-defined gender roles, and I’m tempted to say it’s because we prefer simplicity and lazy thinking. Alas.
our society really, really likes fixed, well-defined gender roles
lately i’ve been trying to figure out which of the common assumptions / ways of thinking common to my generation (Gen-X, i guess) will be mocked by future generations – the way we look at people who were afraid of living near people of different races, or thought interracial marriage would corrupt the borg, etc..
i think that is likely to be only of them.
future generations will look at our insistence on a hard binary and just roll their eyes.
And yet, we do seem to be making progress away from that kind of similicity and lazy thinking.
For example, homosexuality is pretty clearly outside the “fixed, well-defined gender roles” of the past. And yet, it is increasingly accepted — albeit with still some very loud objections. Still, its general acceptance is a visible step, by a majority of the population, towards a society which is more flexible.
It’s a tricky mess, and what strikes me as the key point coming out of this is that our society really, really likes fixed, well-defined gender roles, and I’m tempted to say it’s because we prefer simplicity and lazy thinking. Alas.
I think this is a simplistic and lazy way of looking at things.
(Sorry, I just couldn’t not type that.)
That, or the preference falsification hasn’t broken down yet. I tend to think opinion doesn’t change THAT fast.
OTOH, if there isn’t any actual basis for disliking homosexuality, preference falsification will change into real opinion in a generation or less.
Brett,
Is your flat series what you suggest as the actual data, or the measured data? It seems to me that you re jumping back and forth.
Certainly if you keep observing 100 year after year there is likely no trend.
And it is possible, just possible, that if the actual values are 100 we will observe a rising trend due to error. But let’s be blunt here. Measurement error or not, if our observations have a rising trend, then the likelihood is that the actual values are also rising.
You know this and shouldn’t pretend otherwise.
If we observe 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, and our measurements have MofE of +/-5 it is possible that the true values are all 100, or that they are something like 100, 99, 101,100, 100. But that’s a bad bet.
A margin of error of +/-5 emphatically does not mean that all values within five of the true value are equally likely to be observed. You are pissing on our shoes and calling it rain.
We’re not, for the last 16 or so years, seeing a monotonically rising series. I already linked above to the actual data with error bars. Here it is, again.
You’re fooling yourself, I think, by saying
100 +/-5
101 +/-5
102 +/-5
103 +/-5
104 +/-5.
By putting it that way, you make the 100-104 visible. It’s not showing up like that. What you’re actually seeing is,
Random value between 95 and 105
Random value between 96 and 106
Random value between 97 and 107
Random value between 98 and 108…
Where the actual value is all you see, and not the precisely expressed range, and you’ve got a whole collection of possible trends the actual values are consistent with.
I hope, if you have a chance, you will return to comment.
There was a lot of stuff packed into just a couple of pieces there.
I was surprised to find that there is so much conflict between the transgender folks who present themselves as women, and feminists. It seems like they are in some kind of battle to own the idea of “female”. But, it also seems like their interests and concerns are fairly distinct.
The radical feminists seem to want to not be bound by common social definitions of what it means to be a woman. The trans community seems to want to embrace and step into common social definitions of what it means to be a woman.
I’m not sure they really have to be enemies.
I generally share what I take to be NV’s impatience with identity politics, but then again I occupy an identity that is basically right at the top of the food chain. So, I’m not sure I’m in a position to be critical.
What I always wish, about things like this, is that there was room for everyone to live out whatever life is meaningful to them.
As far as the transgender thing per se, or really any kind of coloring outside the lines sexuality-wise, I just think there’s a lot of leeway between genotype and phenotype, and between both of those and behavior. Humans are in the womb for a long time, and are subject to developmental influences there that go well beyond whether they are XX or XY. Human brains are very much not completely developed at birth, and are subject to a million different influences post-partum.
We’re complicated. Complication brings opportunities for variation.
As far as the surgical stuff goes, if it’s what someone wants I’m not sure who is in a position to say much about it. But I wonder, if there were more social room for people to manifest their own natures without judgement or condemnation, if it would be that important for transgender people to surgically convert themselves into something different, physically.
As far as minors go, IMO it’s crazy to be performing those kinds of surgeries on minors. I know, and I’m sure we all know, kinds who have embraced about a hundred different identities before they’re out of their teens. Making that kind of thing physically permanent seems like a really bad idea, to me.
Thanks for the links, sapient, they were interesting reading.
preference falsification
Every time I turn around, another meme pops up.
“What you’re actually seeing is,
Random value between 95 and 105
Random value between 96 and 106
Random value between 97 and 107
Random value between 98 and 108…”
Each of those has a mean value, which you are leaving out, only mentioning the ends of the error bars. Which might (but don’t have to be) symmetric.
Doing that makes you flunk out of kindergarten data analysis. Or demonstrate that dishonest behavior. Your choice.
What we know (and are increasingly learning more) is that genetics is not absolutely destiny. For lots of stuff, tow people with identical genes can end up expressing them differently.
Granted, some genes seem to be more inclined to consistent expression, while others are more mutable. But even the most consistent are not really absolute across the board.
Which leads to the reasonable suspicion that even XX vs XY, however far it is into the limited mutability end of the spectrum, might have some instances where it didn’t control, for example, how people felt about themselves.
We’re not, for the last 16 or so years, seeing a monotonically rising series
Is there any 16 year period in the available record from, say, the mid 19th C to now that contains a monotonically rising series?
Not performing surgeries on minors may be a reasonable limitation, but the onset of puberty creates physical changes that can be emotionally disturbing to a child who has identified as trans for years before the hormones kick in.
So suppressing hormones to delay puberty is, while still controversial, a way to stall until the trans-identifying person is older and more competent to make decisions about other procedures.
http://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/2010/08/jdsc1-1008.html
Random value between 95 and 105
Random value between 96 and 106
Random value between 97 and 107
Random value between 98 and 108..
What are you talking about? If I observe 100 I observe 100. I recognize that there is error in my observation. But that doesn’t mean that the likelihood the true value is 95 is the same as the likelihood it’s 100. And even if the possible measurements are, for some reason, uniformly distributed around the actula value, observing a rising series of measurements means, in all likelihood, that the true values are rising also.
The probability that an underlying flat series of 100 values will generate the numbers I give is way less than the likelihood that a rising set of values will generate them.
Stop blowing smoke.
“Each of those has a mean value, which you are leaving out, only mentioning the ends of the error bars. Which might (but don’t have to be) symmetric.”
I’m leaving the mean value out, because you don’t know what it is. You can’t MEASURE that mean value. You can only measure the actual value that turns up.
I think that’s the problem here: You look at the point in the middle of the error bar, and just throw away the error bar, assuming that point is the right value.
But that point isn’t known to be the right value, it’s just the middle of the error bar.
I’ll also observe that the Burkett piece was infuriating for all the reasons that commentary rooted deeply in identity politics typically is infuriating – namely, that it at once asserts that identity is the sum of experiences which are profoundly individual and personal, yet at the same time asserts that all members of a given class prima facie share unifying experiences.
Burkett is 68 years old, which means that she really did look at the newspaper and see two sets of help wanted ads, one for men and one for women. Identity has been her life story, which is why “identity politics” was her politics. If she had been a pregnant unwed teen, she would have (most likely) had to give birth, and hand the child over for adoption. Either that, or be shamed. She’s spent a long time fighting for things that many women take for granted now. Most of those political battles had a lot to do with women’s bodies. Many had to do with appearance. Some of those discussions aren’t over, but have been put aside.
Burkett, a 68-year-old woman who has worked in the film industry, has probably seen a lot of what this recent skit illustrates. Or this.
Many people enjoy being sexually attractive, whatever that means to them and their social circle, and they dress and “present” according to achieve that. But there are a lot of women whose lives, and livelihoods either depend on their being sexualized, or are derailed by it. Burkett’s article raises some very legitimate questions about what makes a “woman”. Her comments (based on her experience) shouldn’t be dismissed as “identity politics”. She speaks for a lot of women.
But that point isn’t known to be the right value, it’s just the middle of the error bar.
But that point is the most likely to be right, with points within the error bar closer to that point more likely to be right than those further from it.
You’r either disputing that or you aren’t. I still don’t really know what you’re trying to say, other than arguing for the sake of it.
But that point is the most likely to be right, with points within the error bar closer to that point more likely to be right than those further from it.
The central limit theorem and Mr. Bellmore are not on the best of terms.
“It seems like everybody with a brain in their head is on board with “it is, it is, and it does”.”
Exactly, anyone who disagrees has no brain. Every argument defines the opposition as stupid.
I’ve spun off sapient’s link and made a separate post with parts of his comments and NV’s.
“It seems like everybody with a brain in their head is on board with “it is, it is, and it does”.”
Exactly, anyone who disagrees has no brain. Every argument defines the opposition as stupid.
No one is disputing relativity here, another discussion altogether. What’s being challenged is the set of assumptions derived from questionable models that are being used to create policy planks that are deleterious in multiple ways to society and the economy. S
I’m leaving the mean value out, because you don’t know what it is. You can’t MEASURE that mean value. You can only measure the actual value that turns up.
Again. What are you talking about. You have a measurement. The measurement has error associated with it. But the actual measurement is not an error bar, it’s a number. I just measured the distance from the edge of my desk to the left end of my keyboard. It’s 3.5 inches per the ruler. I doubt that’s exact and a better device would be more accurate. Now I measured the distance to the right end. It’s 3 3/4 inches.Two points are worth mentioning:
1. It’s more likely that the distance to the left edge is 3.6″ than that it’s 3.8″, even though both are with the error bars.
2. It’s vastly more likely that the right edge of the keyboard is further away from the desk edge than the left edge than that they are the same distance.
At this point I can only conclude that you really are just trolling – trying stir things up for your own amusement, no matter how silly your arguments.
What’s being challenged is the set of assumptions derived from questionable models . . .
No, Marty, what’s being argued here is whether or not the models are questionable. And, in some cases, whether the uncertainties and inaccuracies in the model (and every model has some) are deliberate fabrications or the result of trying to model imperfect data.
Exactly, anyone who disagrees has no brain.
Is the global mean temperature on the planet getting warmer? Not over the last 10 or 15 years, over the period for which we have a record.
Is the level of CO2 in the atmosphere increasing?
Do humans make a significant contribution to the CO2 level?
When I say “everybody with a brain in their head is on board with that”, I mean that to my knowledge those three points are not in question.
Do you know them to be in question by any informed source?
And by “informed” I don’t mean “anyone who agrees with me”, I mean anybody who has any information on the topic.
Does anyone disagree with any of those three points? That has nothing to do with what the models predict, nothing to do with how severe the long or short term impacts are going to be. Just fairly straightforward points of fact.
Are those three basic points in dispute?
“a sufficiently large number of iterates of independent random variables”
Is 16-18 years a large number? I think not.
“And, in some cases, whether the uncertainties and inaccuracies in the model (and every model has some) are deliberate fabrications or the result of trying to model imperfect data.”
Actually wj, I’m arguing the data from the models is insufficiently reliable to be the basis for the major policy shifts the climate change community supports. I also am arguing that each successive study is less definitive not more and, imo, the scientists are fudging to better support their conclusions.
Is 16-18 years a large number? I think not.
That’s why your argument here has no relevance to the larger issue.
The standard sampling period for climate is 30 years.
If the “hiatus” lasts for 30 years, it will be a hiatus, for purposes of discussing the climate.
the models is insufficiently reliable to be the basis for the major policy shifts the climate change community supports.
What “major policy shifts”?
What do you think is being called for?
I’m arguing the data from the models is insufficiently reliable to be the basis for the major policy shifts the climate change community supports.
How certain the models have to be to support policy changes depends, as noted above, on the magintude of the consequences. For a 5% chance that a fire will take out your backyard bird feeder, you probably don’t change anything. For that 5% chance of it taking out you house, you definitely take action.
The science is straightforward: You dump more carbon into the atmosphere then ceterus paribus, things get warmer.
This is pure physics. There is nothing “unreliable” about it. It is also widely recognized that physical systems have tipping points where imbalances are revealed suddenly and dramatically.
Based on what we know of the physical world, what would a reasonable person expect to observe?
1. A trend of warming surface temperatures.
2. A trend of warming oceans.
3. More carbon sequestration in our oceans and more oceanic acidification.
4. Melting ice sheets and receding glaciers.
5. Changes in the distribution, locations, and populations of plants and animals.
This is what we observe. All predicted from simple physics.
They deny it.
Neither Brett nor Marty seem to acknowledge these facts. Both go to great pains to attack some minor quibbles or impugn the personal integrity of the researchers with absolutely not one iota of evidence (about as dishonest a fucking tactic as I can imagine). Neither have put forward an alternate explanation. Neither have presented peer reviewed research taking down directly the hypothesis of global warming. Both argue essentially by assertion (“I think that…, therefore it is true.”)
In sum. They bring nothing.
Pure physics says more CO2 means the planet gets warmer. But “pure” physics says it doesn’t get very much warmer. You have to add an awful lot of ‘impure’ physics, because you can’t model things like cloud formation, let alone plant response to humidity, from first principles.
The problem with that sort of ‘impure’ physics, is that it’s easy to get wrong.
And, yes, some systems have tipping points. If your model can’t predict a hiatus in advance, it probably isn’t good enough to identify a tipping point; Systems are better behaved and easier to model away from tipping points.
Generally speaking, your points 1-5 are correct, and devoid of magnitude. It’s magnitude that makes the difference between bad and good.
It’s not my fault you can’t admit the models have been getting that magnitude wrong.
Going back to an earlier point russell made, is the insurance industry full of dummies or are they biased in favor of climate change because they’re a bunch of liberals? Can someone explain why they’ve been taken in by this dubious pseudo-science conspiracy?
And Brett, weren’t you the one who earlier admitted that the “hiatus” was still within the error of the models?
Can someone explain why they’ve been taken in by this dubious pseudo-science conspiracy?
oddly, all the big denialist webshites have nothing to say about that. they must be afraid of Big Underwriter.
Why yes, I did say so. Temperatures have not risen for a while, not within the limits of measurement. But we are still within the much larger error bounds of the models.
Right at the lower edge of most of them, however.
“about as dishonest a fucking tactic as I can imagine”
I always have worried that bobbyp suffers from a lack of imagination. Enough of this. Nothing he says in that comment is true. But oddly no objection to him speaking for me, in direct conflict to words i have posted.
You wrote this, Marty: “…imo, the scientists are fudging to better support their conclusions.”
Denialists seem fond of this one, because they bring nothing, or they just make stuff up…demonstrating their vivid imaginations I guess.
Bring evidence. That is not an unreasonable request.
5. Changes in the distribution, locations, and populations of plants and animals.
The planet, as a whole, has gotten greener—more vegetation—over the pass three decades.
Yes, terrible, isn’t it? At this rate, the Sahara might not even be a desert for much longer.
And, to repeat the repeat of my 1:08 PM comment:
I still want to know why Brett objects to the 0.12 C adjustment in either direction (by which I assume he means adjusting the ship-collected data to match the buoy-collected data or vice versa).
I’d also like him to excerpt where it says they applied the bucket-data adjustment to all ship-collected data, regardless of the method, because I can’t find that. All I saw was that they applied the adjustment over a number of year to which it hadn’t previously been applied.
Brett and Marty apparently live in The Economy and not in The Environment.
When Marty speaks of “questionable models that are being used to create policy planks that are deleterious in multiple ways to society and the economy“, Marty seems to be working from a model of The Economy. But is it a questionable model? Do its parameters have error bars? Does it measure “inflation” by looking at the changes (up, down, and sideways) in thousands and thousands of prices and trying to extract a single number from them, say in the manner of Global Surface Temperature models?
Is Marty a less cocksure economist than Karl et al are cocksure climatologists?
–TP
Good point, Tony.
On a related note, I’m wondering if anyone has seen/could help track down a cartoon I saw, years ago:
Three guys standing at a bus stop, two in overcoat, hat, umbrella, galoshes. One in shorts and Hawaiian shirt, sunglass, big smile.
The caption: “Guess which one is the economic forecaster”
It wasn’t a “political” cartoon, more in the vein of Sidney Harris, but not in his distinctive drawing style, IIRC.
Since Brett wants to claim natural variability is the cause of the observed warming, I think this slightly earlier entry at Real Climate is relevant.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2015/05/global-warming-and-unforced-variability-clarifications-on-recent-duke-study/#more-18514
The planet, as a whole, has gotten greener—more vegetation—over the pass three decades.
Yes. But more lichen is not necessarily a good thing. Compare and contrast to the degradation of our oceans.
Yes, terrible, isn’t it? At this rate, the Sahara might not even be a desert for much longer.
That does not seem to be the case.
The fact that we may be able to grow palm trees in Calgary is not necessarily a good thing.
But is it a questionable model?
Since the economy, to conservatives, is a morality play, no model is necessary. Good people get all the goodies. Bad people suffer.
Thus, drawing up a graph on a cocktail napkin proving that taxes must always go down is a work of inspired genius, but thousands of scientists working endless hours collecting data to research our global climate is a waste of time because their models are “unconvincing”, and can be dismissed because the Wall Street editorial page said they should be.
You know, it’s pretty damned obvious that if all these scientists could so easily be bought that there would be way less unanimity on this matter in the scientific community.
But alas, I lack the imagination to consider it.
Not only is the Saraha not disappearing, it is growing.
While the growth is man-caused, some here will be relieved to know that it isn’t due to global climate change. Rather, it is due to people over-farming in the Sahel (the semi-arid band south of the Sahara. As this happens, erosion speeds up and the soil blows away. Leaving desert (more Sahara) in its wake.
“Since Brett wants to claim natural variability is the cause of the observed warming,”
I’m pretty sure I said nothing of the sort.
What I said was that natural variability could be the cause of the hiatus, but that if it were, the hiatus would have to end quite soon.
Mind you, if natural cycles caused the hiatus, this implies that prior to it they were amplifying warming, (No minus without a plus!) which implies that the forcing coeficients derived from that period, and inserted in the models, would be too high.
if natural cycles caused the hiatus, this implies that prior to it they were amplifying warming
no, it doesn’t imply that at all.
add random noise to y=x and you’ll get some areas where the curve appears to be changing to y=c. but that won’t be true; and it also won’t be true that the random noise it responsible for y=x.
I think I have to expand on something:
The models don’t just have thermal error bars. They have, implicitly, temporal error bars. By which I mean, for a model to be valid, deviations between it’s predictions and actual measurments aren’t just limited in the reading, but also how long the reading deviates. Small deviations can go on a long time, large deviations must be brief, deviations should be to BOTH sides of the prediction.
If you project a trend, and actual behavior is consistently off to one side of your projection, even if it’s within the error bar, at some point you must admit you got the projection wrong.
That’s why it matters that the hiatus has gone on for nearly two decades, even if it’s within the 95% confidence level for any given year. The problem is it’s always been to the SAME SIDE of the error bar.
You’ve got to adjust your mean, when that happens.
Cleek, random noise isn’t all one polarity. It averages to zero. Any component that doesn’t average to zero is signal.
And, in any event, they’re not blaming the hiatus on “noise”, they’re blaming it on “cycles”.
So you know the range of the temporal error bars, Brett, and have determined that measurements consistently lower than the mean have lasted beyond them? You should present a paper on that.
What’s up with the risk- and data-challenged insurance industry?
And what about my questions regarding the 12 C adjustment and the bucket adjustment?
Cleek, random noise isn’t all one polarity.
not sure why you think i said otherwise.
It averages to zero.
over a series of infinite length, sure.
HSH: 0.12C adjustment.
Brett has sent your question up the line to the FoxConKochGOP Central Committee, and will respond when the Partei line is decided and communicated to him.
Patience, Comrade!
Well, unless the answer is “stall until the libtard relents”, in which case Hell Michigan will be buried under glaciers before there’s an answer.
On the 0.12C adjustment:
1. It can’t properly be applied to the buoys, because the buoys are the new, precise, accurate, calibrated instrument, admittedly so according to the paper, and you do not adjust your postal scale because it disagrees with your bathroom scale.
2. I read the paper to say that the 0.12C adjustment was derived by applying the ‘bucket’ compensation to all ship readings. Because they nowhere said otherwise. Obviously, it’s improper to apply a bucket compensation to ships not using buckets, and that would be almost all of the ships they’re getting readings from.
Normally I would assume that they hadn’t done anything so stupid, but see item 1. They’re clearly willing to do things exactly that stupid.
1. It can’t properly be applied to the buoys, because the buoys are the new, precise, accurate, calibrated instrument, admittedly so according to the paper, and you do not adjust your postal scale because it disagrees with your bathroom scale.
But, if you’re determining the differences between measurements over time, it doesn’t matter which one you adjust, so long as they agree. The result is the same either way. I’d guess there’s a reason they did it the way they did, probably involving staying consistent with established baselines. The buckets came first and everyone else studying this has been using that data.
2. I read the paper to say that the 0.12C adjustment was derived by applying the ‘bucket’ compensation to all ship readings. Because they nowhere said otherwise. Obviously, it’s improper to apply a bucket compensation to ships not using buckets, and that would be almost all of the ships they’re getting readings from.
I read the paper to say that the 12 C adjustment was based on an average difference for all ship-collected data, by whatever method, relative to buoy data. It wasn’t just based on the difference between bucket-collected data and buoy-collected data and then applied to all ship-collected data. I think you’re wrong.
AND . . . after a hiatus of a month or so, Brett’s back, and Obsidian Wings descends immediately into Bellmore’s Funhouse
Truer words never.
We – i.e., the human race – use mathematical models to represent any number of complex systems. Climate, but also for example the economy at various scales, war gaming, behaviors of large populations of people or other organisms.
We do so because the systems we are trying to understand are too complex to analyze without the use of models.
We have used climatological models for, at this point, about 50 or 60 years. The first model-based predictions that a rise in CO2 would yield a rise in global temperature dates from the 70’s. We are currently proving out, or not, that prediction.
There is currently not one climatological model, but many. Not one dataset of source information, but many, comprising information from overlapping sets of sources, technologies, degrees of granularity and accuracy, time periods, etc. The outputs of these various models, as applied to these various source data sets, are compared and used both to provide feedback to each other, and to fine-tune the inferences we draw from them.
There is no model that provides a completely accurate representation of whatever it is supposed to represent. Nobody is claiming that every thing that any climatological model predicts is sure to happen.
The claims that are made for climatological models, like every other model of a complex system, is that the outcomes are plausible, within a certain range of probability.
The models of the climate that we currently work with generally tell us that more overall warming is on the way. “More warming” doesn’t mean “it’s gonna be really hot outside every day”, it means there will be more overall heat energy in the overall climatological system of the earth.
They also tell us that there may be certain outcomes from that. Some may actually be seen as desirable, for certain people and places. Others, less so.
Whether we want to take any kind of action about all of that depends on (a) what we think the likelihood is that the predicted outcome may occur, (b) what the cost would be (not just in money) of the outcome happening, and (c) what the cost would be (not just in money) of taking any of the various actions we could take to avoid or mitigate the undesirable outcome.
It would be interesting, to me at least, to discuss the issue of climate change at something like that level.
What we’re doing here, it seems to me, is indulging Brett’s appetite for argument and generally pull-it-out-my-ass wankery. Nothing personal, Brett, that’s just my take on it.
If that’s how this is going to continue to play out, I suggest we close this thread, because I don’t think anything new has been said for about 100 comments.
I think this one is wj’s, so I will leave it to him as to whether he wants to do that or not.
Or, Russell, you could just move on to the next thread without shutting down any discussion. I am not sure why it should be a problem to let this thread go on as long as anybody wants to engage Brett. I’m dine, but that doesn’t call for the thread to be closed?
“I read the paper to say that the 12 C adjustment was based on an average difference for all ship-collected data, by whatever method, relative to buoy data. It wasn’t just based on the difference between bucket-collected data and buoy-collected data and then applied to all ship-collected data. I think you’re wrong.”
See, that’s one of the things wrong with this paper. They weren’t really explicit enough about what they really did. They didn’t say, “We identified which ships used which methods.”, just that they’d found SOME ships used the old method.
And they did at least one thing so grossly wrong, adjusting the buoy data instead of the ship data, (And they were quite explicit that they’d done that.) that I can’t assume the things they were vague about were done right.
They didn’t say, “We identified which ships used which methods.”, just that they’d found SOME ships used the old method.
You’re confusing two different things. There was a previous adjustment to bucket-collected data that varied consistently from intake-collected data. That was extended to ships still using buckets after WWII. That was a separate adjustment.
They were explicit that they were talking about all ship-collected data relative to buoy-collected data, applying the average difference, thereby accounting for two kinds of variance to the extent that each mattered numerically. The ambiguity is in your reading, not in the paper itself.
Perhaps you could address this, specifically, rather than re-stating your easily-understood position on the 12 C adjustment:
But, if you’re determining the differences between measurements over time, it doesn’t matter which one you adjust, so long as they agree. The result is the same either way. I’d guess there’s a reason they did it the way they did, probably involving staying consistent with established baselines. The buckets came first and everyone else studying this has been using that data.
“That was extended to ships still using buckets after WWII.”
That is exacly what they didn’t say. Even if they had done that, there was no excuse for adjusting the buoy rather than the ship data.
“The result is the same either way. I’d guess there’s a reason they did it the way they did, probably involving staying consistent with established baselines.”
Again, that would not have been an acceptable excuse for correcting the wrong instruments.
russell, IIRC the first rough “model” of CO2 and climate was in the late 1940’s. Extremely primitive, back-of-the-envelope.
The first “hey, this CO2 could heat up the Earth” ideas were soon after IR absorbance was measured, back in the 1890’s.
Or, Russell, you could just move on to the next thread without shutting down any discussion.
Will do.
I am not sure why it should be a problem to let this thread go on as long as anybody wants to engage Brett.
If folks want to argue with Brett about buckets vs water intakes for another 1,000 comments, far be it from me to gainsay it.
Carry on.
russell, IIRC the first rough “model” of CO2 and climate was in the late 1940’s. Extremely primitive, back-of-the-envelope.
I was thinking of the general circulation models starting in the 50’s, with Wanabe’s models from the late 60’s and 70’s being the first (I think) to model longer time series, and also the first to “predict” increases in warming due to higher concentrations of CO2.
If you know more about the history of the models in general, I’d be curious to hear.
I’m probably mixing up “late 40’s” with “50’s”, and it was
from a ‘history of science’ type article.
Article from 1997:
…Syante Arrhenius published the idea: As human activity puts ever more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, global warming becomes ever more likely. His paper attracted notice, and one might suppose that knowledge of the so‐called “greenhouse effect” has grown steadily ever since. But that is not in fact how the science proceeded. During more than half a century after 1896 almost nothing of value was learned about global warming…
That is exacly what they didn’t say. Even if they had done that, there was no excuse for adjusting the buoy rather than the ship data.
It’s exactly what they did say. And it has nothing to do with buoys. You’re not understanding, and it’s not because of how the paper was written. I don’t know why you’re not understanding, but it’s not the paper, because it’s rather clear to me.
Is not changing the established baseline widely in use in climatology a good enough excuse for adjusting the buoys, particularly considering that it doesn’t matter which one you adjust as it concerns year-to-year deltas? Perhaps, if this paper is widely accepted, everyone will agree to adjust their baselines so they can go back and switch the method of adjustment to correct the ship-collected data and leave the buoy-collected data as measured.
Even if the paper wasn’t perfectly written for the purpose of fully informing Brett Bellmore, free of any possibly vagueness or ambiguity from his point of view, it doesn’t make it bad science or a conspiracy. It may well be that they’re writing for an audience for whom some things will be perfectly obvious without being spelled out, because it’s their area of expertise – what they do day after day after day and have done for years.
Beyond that, we’re arguing over a pimple on an elephant. It’s one piece of one piece of on piece of one piece of the current climate science. You have to ignore several large-scale and uncontroversial global phenomena to think this paper is that big of a deal. You’re endlessly picking a nit, because that’s all you can do in the face of overwhelming, undeniable physical evidence for climate change / global warming.
So I’m done now, too. Think whatever you like.
I think Russell is right. We’ve beaten this topic (pair of topics?) pretty much into the ground. So I’ll be closing out comments (if I can figure out how to do that…). And besides, it’s Wednesday
If someone wants to start up another thread (preferably on something a little more focused), feel free.