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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: steve harris who wrote (214561)	1/10/2005 9:37:00 AM
From: Suma	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1575181

This issue of Global Warming has been a bug a boo tossed around by both side of the political spectrum. However, nothing made me more of a believer in the viability of it's occurring than a leading scientist on the subject late night radio talk show. Art Bell's show to be specific. I stayed awake over and hour to hear his predictions and they were rather scary. He was not taking political sides. In fact he said when we have enough hurricanes and water rising on the coasts the politicians might start paying attention. The waters' warming is what is encouraging hurricanes of greater severity.. and they will continue. The fact that Alaska has had no snow. The event of one coast having record rain and another nothing. Farmers perplexed as to why they cannot grow the crops they once did. He also discussed the Michael Creighton's (ex.sp.)new book which he feels is all science fiction and should not be taken seriously. In it the author dispels the entire theory of GW as factitious.... His admonitions came from a scientific point of view and not political. So, I was very persuaded that we have a real problem with global warming that will persist.

To: steve harris who wrote (214561)	1/10/2005 9:54:40 AM
From: combjelly	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1575181

"Meteorologists said it was the most snow the Reno-Lake Tahoe area has seen since 1916." You forgot about the snow we had in Texas. Point events don't indicate trends. Things like sea level rising some 2 mm a year due to thermal expansion does. Things like plants and animals extending their normal ranges north by kilometers over the past couple of decades is another. Things like increasing average night time temperatures do this also. the loss of mid-latitude glaciers in the Alps, Andes, Rockies etc, is yet another. Global warming is happening. Whether or not it is due to human causes or is part of some other process or processes might be debatable. But to claim it isn't happening at all is to ignore reality.

To: steve harris who wrote (214561)	1/10/2005 11:29:44 AM
From: neolib	Respond to of 1575181

The liberal mind is a terrible thing..... In some fields, like Law, Philosophy and Mathematics, finding a counterexample invalidates an argument. Most science however, is concerned with means and variance. Finding a blip way out on the tail of a distribution does not in ANY way invalidate the mean and variance of the distribution. It surely contributes a small shift in their values, but this is not equivalent to the logical notion of falsity. Science is largely the process of devising theoretical explanations for the mean and variance of observed phenomena. A blip way out on the tail often indicates something else at work which might well generate a few Phd's to explain it, and it may prove to be related or unrelated to the central theory. But even when explained, the old mean and variance still remain as facts. Many of my conservative friends, whose backgrounds are in the man made sciences of politics, law, math, economics, etc. have this problem of trying to find counter examples to invalidate scientific theories in biology or the physical sciences. It does not work that way.