I’m not eager to begin nuking volcanoes to throw particulate into the upper atmosphere. Or dumping gigatons of iron filings into the sea. Or any of the other geoengineering ideas really. Maybe a good idea to have these thought out in case we have a runaway cascading eco-clusterfuck. Then it might be too late, of course.

We could even look into making GMO versions of our current crops that are lower in albedo or soak up more CO2. Simple tweaks like that should be easy, and they would make the humans-is-evil! crowd a lot happier than engineering for RoundUp®™ resistance.

My problems with science (and related grant funding, etc) becoming politicized notwithstanding.

On the other hand, if the science turned around and figured out ACC is totally, like, not gonna happen, I bet most folks around these parts would go with the, you know, science. But I am equally sure that if the science keeps pointing towards a potential problem of considerable proportion, the right wingers are *never* going to change their opinion about shit. No hope for change there (to remix Barry’s song a bit).

and no, I’m not giving your gawdam ball back, you meddling kids!

Knarly is still on about his 9/11 conspiracy – and lots of everything else about climate change.

For the record, I find it disingenuous to say that climate change had anything to do with (or nothing to do with) Sandy. Admittedly, there is a corollary, We don’t know, and probably can’t know about causation or even contribution in a single case. As good as climate models have become (and the computers that they run on) – they’re not *that* good.

Now, for where I see this as disingenuous: Every time a person points to a cold winter as evidence that climate change is a myth, environmentalists are quick to point out that weather != climate change. So why, then, would anyone do the same thing and say that a different weather event is evidence of climate change?

There is plenty of other actual evidence supporting climate change, but the existence and cause of climate change is outside the scope of my post. I just feel like invoking this is a way of saying “I told you so”…which is lame, and not even technically correct, as it is not provable. One may as well invoke the name of God, which none of you can prove or disprove the existence of.

Anyone from the Westboro Baptist Church care to chime on this one? According to them, God has certain feelings for people of certain sexual orientations – and this could have easily been God’s will due to cultural changes. Do the climate models account for God’s wrath – or does is it just exist a tensor somewhere between ocean temperatures, gay rights, and hurricane activity? (ok, ok – pedantic joke…maybe I went too far)

(PS – hi again, everyone – I hope you’re well. Along the lines of nothing changing, I’m still an opinionated bastard, I still don’t know shit, and still stay the hell off of my lawn, you damn kids!)

But first you have to eliminate the impossible, whatever remains must be so regardless of how improbable. The problem is that it has not been adequately established as to what is impossible.

No, the jet fuel fires were not persistent. The jet fuel mostly burned off during the initial explosion and the remaining shortly thereafter flowed down the elevator shafts during the initial explosions, iirc that is not in dispute.

No, the buildings did not collapse a short time later. It took hour(s), enough time for heat from the jet fuel fires to dissipate and for the towers to demonstrate a level of structural integrity except at the collision floors.

Yes, unless I suspend my belief in basic physics and pretend that a jet fuel and office fire can create molten metal pools that linger for weeks in the rubble, I have no choice but to believe their must be other contributing factors. In looking for possible explanations, note AE911 papers on the presence and analysis of iron microsperes in WTC dust.

Yes for WTC 7 too, but this is even more anomolous since freefall uniform collapse is impossible without “something” to remove all the supporting structures near simultaneously and the uneven damage to the building.

No, the distrust I feel stems from a range of factors, least of which is the demonstrated means, motive and opportunity set out in Crossing the Rubicon and a whole host of suspicious activities ranging through the incredibly tight security/control of information, unprecedented and unlawful destruction of the evidence present in the debris and lengthy refusal to undertake an investigation then the eventual capitulation with an underfunded and tightly controlled “investigation” orchestrated by Phillip Zellikow who could well be complicit in any conspiracy. All that leads to distrust, not proof of anything. But if an investigator mistrusts people handling the evidence, is the investigator expected to turn a blind eye to other possibilities and continue on as if everything was as the people handling the evidence say?

1) A conspiracy by al Qaeda terrorists resulted in their hijacking multiple commercial airliners on 9/11/01. FOUR – likely more to it than that, in terms of assistance from others.

2) Two of those airliners were deliberately flown by the terrorists into WTC 1 and WTC 2. FOUR – not a FIVE as it is strange that interceptor jets were not positioned to make visual confirmation of cockpit, it is improbable but possible that remote control of aircraft cut off oxygen to cockpit and controlled planes to impact location.

3) The fires that resulted eventually weakened those buildings, causing the upper floors to collapse, which in turn caused the buildings to completely collapse. Between ZERO and ONE – refer to greater infernos in less robust structures e.g. Windsor Office Tower Madrid, and it is inconceivable that the top block of building would completely destroy remaining structure below at that speed and through the path of greatest resistance, refer also AE911truth.org evidence.

4) The damage from falling debris and its own resulting fires caused WTC 7 to collapse some hours later. ZERO – Even NIST states damage from falling debris did not contribute to the collapse, refer to digital journal article I linked to recently – NIST’s explanation which they even admit as having low probability of being right is that it was office fires alone that caused the collapse initiation. Office tower fires do not result in simultaneous symmetric collapse at freefall speed, especially when there is structural damage to one side of the building, the facts do not fit the story – again, refer to evidence at AE911.

5) While there clearly was some non-specific knowledge of the plan before the fact on the part of some US anti-terrorism authorities, those who had that knowledge were unable to alert their fellows and coordinate an effective response, such that the attack came as more or less of a surprise to top leaders in the US government. I can’t say, this gets too complex for me, but if you are interested then as a start refer to Crossing the Rubicon http://www.amazon.com/Crossing-Rubicon-Decline-American-Empire/dp/0865715408

6) To the extent efforts to prevent the attacks or respond to them once they were happening were ineffective, that is much more likely to have been the result of human error, garden-variety confusion, and incompetence, rather than any knowing plan aimed at enabling the attacks. TWO –some might be explained that way especially at lower levels, but no-one has been held to account, those in charge for the worst mistakes were promoted, and it defies belief that so many anomalies across so many security systems would be the result of such colossal incompetence. As a stat, refer to http://www.amazon.com/The-New-Pearl-Harbor-Revisited/dp/1566567297/ref=sr_1_sc_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1353091762&sr=1-2-spell&keywords=david+ray+griffon )

7) To the extent there have been efforts to paint the attacks in a particular way that departs from the truth, that is much more likely to be the result of garden-variety butt-covering, minimizing various actors’ culpability, and advancing various pre-existing policy goals (e.g., invading Iraq), rather than some sort of conspiracy aimed at deluding people into believing a largely false-to-fact version of what the attacks were and who carried them out. (ZERO to FIVE – it depends on the individual in question)

1) A conspiracy by al Qaeda terrorists resulted in their hijacking multiple commercial airliners on 9/11/01.

2) Two of those airliners were deliberately flown by the terrorists into WTC 1 and WTC 2.

3) The fires that resulted eventually weakened those buildings, causing the upper floors to collapse, which in turn caused the buildings to completely collapse.

4) The damage from falling debris and its own resulting fires caused WTC 7 to collapse some hours later.

5) While there clearly was some non-specific knowledge of the plan before the fact on the part of some US anti-terrorism authorities, those who had that knowledge were unable to alert their fellows and coordinate an effective response, such that the attack came as more or less of a surprise to top leaders in the US government.

6) To the extent efforts to prevent the attacks or respond to them once they were happening were ineffective, that is much more likely to have been the result of human error, garden-variety confusion, and incompetence, rather than any knowing plan aimed at enabling the attacks.

7) To the extent there have been efforts to paint the attacks in a particular way that departs from the truth, that is much more likely to be the result of garden-variety butt-covering, minimizing various actors’ culpability, and advancing various pre-existing policy goals (e.g., invading Iraq), rather than some sort of conspiracy aimed at deluding people into believing a largely false-to-fact version of what the attacks were and who carried them out.

For whichever of those points (if any) you believe to be untrue, please tell me why an objective observer should believe you that they have a good chance of being untrue. Please note that the mere presence of anomalies is not enough to seriously undercut the credibility of any of those points. There are bound to be anomalies. The question is, are there anomalies that have enough weight to overcome the very large amount of Bayesian “priors” that support those points.

Thanks.

Yes, shcb. I understand the point you’re making.

Thing is, I’m not even looking for anything technical here, just something that shows the number or severity of hurricanes has gone up, that’s all. Sure that doesn’t disprove the whole theory, but it goes a long way to establishing credibility.

There’s a part of me that envies your belief. I mean, it must really feel awesome to believe you’re capable of that.

I assure you I put the same level of fact checking to both sides of the argument, it’s just the way I’m wired. At one point Knarly had a picture of molten metal coming from one of the towers. Knarly’s side that it couldn’t be aluminum because aluminum is grey when it is molten, a commenter said that it turns red if the temperature is elevated to that of the burning jet fuel. I thought “I can do this ” so, I welded a crucible, melted 6061 to just above the melting point, poured on the floor and yes it is grey. Then I melted some more at the fuel temp (don’t remember the temps, 1700 as I recall, not really hot and guess what? It poured red. This is the lengths I will go to find out which side is correct.

“Well, if the case for global warming had been built on medium-term trends in hurricane intensity, it would be in real trouble now. Sadly, it wasn’t, and isn’t.”

Yes, I realize that there are people on “my” side who are overstating the amount of knowable cause-and-effect connection between climate change and Sandy. In fact, that was pretty much the point of the original item this discussion is attached to (even though we haven’t really been discussing that subject much in this discussion): How much do we actually know, and what are the arguments for and against overstating that connection as a device for driving public opinion?

I think the thing about your arguments on this subject that I find most obviously fallacious is the way you seem to try to consistently reduce everything to a really simplistic formulation, in which there are good guys (who think like you) and bad guys (who disagree with you). And you hunt around for examples of things you believe show the bad guys to be wrong, and then you construct these elaborate castles in air in which you confidently describe why these bad guys think they way they do, and what their nefarious schemes are intended to accomplish. And the whole construct is ridiculously over-simplified (in terms of ignoring the actual complexity of the overall scientific case for climate change as being human-caused and problematic, or substituting a junior-high-school-type playground-bullies characterization for the actions and motivations of hundreds of scientists you don’t bother to actually learn anything about). But you haven’t really bothered to learn much about the thing you imagine you’re describing, so you’re unaware that your description of it comes off as comically over-simplified.

None of that is a new observation, I realize.