And this is a blog post to say as much. Consider it an open thread.
A question, however: I have found a number of interesting quotes relating to Tim Ball and Global Warming in .pdf format from old TO G&M articles. However, they will only save as image files when I drop them into Word and will not copy into posts. I've searched adobe documents and Word help etc and still haven't been able to find out how, with no special software, I can somehow post them as pictures to the blog or at least copy and paste the text (rather than retype everything). Any ideas?
Try Foxit pdf reader (http://www.foxitsoftware.com/). Open the pdf in Foxit; select, copy text; paste to Notebook or whatever.
ReplyDeleteThe regular Acrobat reader lets you copy and paste text. Just use the "select tool." If it's not on the tool bar, it'll be under "Tools>Basic" on the menu bar. When the text is highlighted, you can then copy it to the clipboard.
ReplyDeleteOr have I missed something?
Ti-Guy,
ReplyDeleteThese .pdfs will only let me copy and paste as an "image"
The Trouble With Science
ReplyDeleteby Robert Higgs
"At any given time, consensus may exist about all sorts of matters in a particular science. In retrospect, however, that consensus is often seen to have been mistaken. As recently as the mid-1970s, for example, a scientific consensus existed among climatologists and scientists in related fields that the earth was about to enter a new ice age. Drastic proposals were made, such as exploding hydrogen bombs over the polar icecaps (to melt them) or damming the Bering Strait (to prevent cold Arctic water from entering the Pacific Ocean), to avert this impending disaster. Well-reputed scientists, not just uninformed wackos, made such proposals. How quickly we forget.
Researchers who employ unorthodox methods or theoretical frameworks have great difficulty under modern conditions in getting their findings published in the "best" journals or, at times, in any scientific journal. Scientific innovators or creative eccentrics always strike the great mass of practitioners as nutcases – until their findings become impossible to deny, which often occurs only after one generation's professional ring-masters have died off. Science is an odd undertaking: everybody strives to make the next breakthrough, yet when someone does, he is often greeted as if he were carrying the Ebola virus. Too many people have too much invested in the reigning ideas; for those people an acknowledgment of their own idea's bankruptcy is tantamount to an admission that they have wasted their lives. Often, perhaps to avoid cognitive dissonance, they never admit that their ideas were wrong. Most important, as a rule, in science as elsewhere, to get along, you must go along."
You can read the rest at
http://www.lewrockwell.com/higgs
/higgs58.html
Deno
Yes, Deno, and the interesting thing is that most GW deniers tend to be old boys. Ball retired in 1986; Bryson Reid IS 86. Lindzen complains that its the younger crowd that is really into climate modelling and etc.
ReplyDeleteSome PDF's are simply an image.Probably a scanned document - a picture of a document.
ReplyDeleteYou need an OCR program. Optical Character Recognition software can convert images of text into hypertext that can be published as Word or HTML, etc.
Good OCR progs are expenseive. But, they offer trials. I'm using a trial of ReadIris Pro.
http://www.irislink.com/c2-480/Readiris-Pro-11-OCR-software.aspx
The trial allows something like 10 saves. In photoshop, you can paste several scanned images into one image and get the OCR to read it as a single saved doc. This gets you the most for the free trial.
There are open source, shareware and freeware OCR progs, too.
JB
"Yes, Deno, and the interesting thing is that most GW deniers tend to be old boys. Ball retired in 1986; Bryson Reid IS 86. Lindzen complains that its the younger crowd that is really into climate modelling and etc."
ReplyDeleteCome on BCL you give two examples and you call this "most"?
The point of the article is to show how often the consensus is wrong. In fact, every important scientific discovery of the last few hundred year went against the so-called consensus.
Also the article points out that scientist which are global warming believers/worshipers have a vested interest to keep saying that AGW is real even though more and more evidence is showing that it is not to keep their funding coming their way or to protect the integrity of their life work. After all, who want to admit that their life’s work is nothing but bogus science?
On the plus side, history shows us that eventually good science will push bogus science aside. As the scientific evidence keeps building up against AGW, the theory of AGW will go the way of “earth is the center of the universe, the earth is flat, and the creationist view of human evolution.
Deno
Three of the most prominent deniers (not 2; Lindzen is an old boy as well) is not evidence?
ReplyDeleteDeno, yes its true that the "concensus" has been overturned in the past. But then it has been replaced by a new concensus. You don't ever escape the term in science. I've even heard it come up with respect to results in mathematics.
Finally, as I have written before, if AGW scientists are doing it for the money they've failed miserably. Funds for climate science have been cut pretty steadily in the U.S. since evern before George W.
Some PDF's are simply an image.Probably a scanned document - a picture of a document.
ReplyDeleteBCL, JimBobby's right; that could be the problem.
Deno wrote:
ReplyDeleteThe point of the article is to show how often the consensus is wrong. In fact, every important scientific discovery of the last few hundred year went against the so-called consensus.
You know, such a grossly irresponsible statement does nothing to enhance your credibility. Sometimes the scientific consensus obviously is wrong, but such errors are an inevitable by product of the scientific method. The salient fact is surely that the errors are eventually acknowledged and corrected, not that they were committed in the first place. To demand that science always get it right on the first try, which is essentially what you are doing here, is to set the bar impossibly high and then complaining that scientists are incapable of the impossible.
But your argument is even more ridiculous than that -basically you infer that because the consensus is sometimes wrong, it must always be wrong, and therefore the scientific consensus about global warming must be wrong. I will not patronize you by pointing out why this chain of reasoning is logically indefensible.
And why are you wasting your time with Higgs? I'll give you a tip: when someone makes a statement like As recently as the mid-1970s, for example, a scientific consensus existed among climatologists and scientists in related fields that the earth was about to enter a new ice age, but can offer not even a single citation in the literature to support such a claim, he's basically making sh*t up. Higgs didn't even bother reviewing the literature (hence the complete absence of footnotes), not leastly because he obviously doesn't have the background to understand it.
Yet this buffoon is telling you the scientists have it wrong, and you're lapping it up. For me, I'll put my trust in the people who have actually made the intellectual effort to master the science, not in some hack with an ideological hatchet to grind.
"And why are you wasting your time with Higgs? I'll give you a tip: when someone makes a statement like As recently as the mid-1970s, for example, a scientific consensus existed among climatologists and scientists in related fields that the earth was about to enter a new ice age, but can offer not even a single citation in the literature to support such a claim, he's basically making sh*t up. Higgs didn't even bother reviewing the literature (hence the complete absence of footnotes), not leastly because he obviously doesn't have the background to understand it.
ReplyDeleteYet this buffoon is telling you the scientists have it wrong, and you're lapping it up. For me, I'll put my trust in the people who have actually made the intellectual effort to master the science, not in some hack with an ideological hatchet to grind. "
lexintion
How old are you 5?
There are no footnotes because anyone in the 1970’s old enough to read knows that our leading scientist at that time were all absolutely sure that a new ice age was coming. It was in all the papers, TV news and all scientific journals at that time. I remember my grade 9 teacher telling us we should be very afraid of the coming ice age.
Maybe next time you should do a little research before you attack someone and make yourself look like a fool.
Also, anyone who takes the time to look at the scientific evidence that back ups AGW will quickly see that the science is weak and is based more on the scientist who support this bad science ideology and beliefs then on good scientific evidence.
The science that is backing up AGW today is only one step above the science that proved a women was a witch back in the 1700’s. It is almost entirely base on faith and not science.
AGW is the new global religion of the 21 century. You must have “faith” to believe in it because the scientific evidence sure does not back it up.
Deno
Hot Air, Cold Cash
ReplyDeleteWho are the Merchants of Fear?
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
"In fact, when it comes to corporate sponsorship of crackpot theories about why the world is getting warmer, the best documented conspiracy of interest is between the Greenhouser fearmongers and the nuclear industry, now largely owned by oil companies, whose prospects twenty years ago looked dark, amid headlines about the fall-out from Chernobyl, aging plants and nuclear waste dumps leaking from here to eternity. The apex Greenhouse fearmongers are well aware that the only exit from the imaginary crisis they have been sponsoring is through a door marked "nuclear power", with a servant's sidedoor labeled "clean coal". James Lovelock, the Rasputin of Gaia-dom, has said that "Nuclear power has an important contribution to make." (I refer those who rear back at the words "imaginary crisis" to my last column on this topic, where I emphasize that there is still zero empirical evidence that anthropogenic production of CO2 is making any measurable contribution to the world's present warming trend. The greenhouse fearmongers rely entirely on unverified, crudely oversimplified computer models to finger mankind's sinful contribution.)
The world's best known hysteric and self promoter on the topic of man's physical and moral responsibility for global warming is Al Gore, a shill for the nuclear industry and the coal barons from the first day he stepped into Congress entrusted with the sacred duty to protect the budgetary and regulatory interests of the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Oakridge National Lab. White House "task forces" on climate change in the Clinton-Gore years were always well freighted by Gore and his adviser John Holdren with nukers like John Papay of Bechtel.
As a denizen of Washington since his diaper years Gore has always understood that threat inflation is the surest tool to plump up budgets and rabblerouse the voters. By the mid Nineties he positioned himself at the head of a strategic and tactical alliance formed around "the challenge of climate change", which had now stepped forward to take Communism's place in the threatosphere essential to all political life. Indeed, it was in the New Republic, a tireless publicist of the Soviet menace in the late 70s and Reagan 80s, that Gore announced in 1989 that the war on warming couldn't be won without a renewal in spiritual values.
The footsoldiers in this alliance have been the grant-guzzling climate modelers and their Internationale, the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose collective scientific expertise is reverently invoked by all devotees of the Greenhouse fearmongers' catechism. Aside from the fact that the graveyard of intellectual error is stuffed with the myriad tombstones of "overwhelming scientific consensus", the IPCC has the usual army of functionaries and grant farmers, and the merest sprinkling of actual scientists with the prime qualification of being climatologists or atmospheric physicists."
you can read more at
http://www.counterpunch.org:80/
cockburn05122007.html
Deno