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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Cogito who wrote (72244)	6/14/2008 7:19:43 PM
From: spiral3	Respond to of 542749

The Coleman piece posted yesterday is a terrible mish-mash of logical errors. I stopped reading when I read this: Let me ask a key question: how can this tiny trace upset the entire balance of the climate of Earth? It can’t. That’s all there is to it; it can’t. Terrible argument and utter ignorance from a weatherman blowing hot air out his you know where. Surprising he can't tell which way the wind blows. The guy is scientifically clueless about Chaos theory or is that Theory, and the implications for GW. Must be his big balls getting in the way of the flow. The meaning of the butterfly Why pop culture loves the 'butterfly effect,' and gets it totally wrong. By Peter Dizikes \| June 8, 2008 SOME SCIENTISTS SEE their work make headlines. But MIT meteorologist Edward Lorenz watched his work become a catch phrase. Lorenz, who died in April, created one of the most beguiling and evocative notions ever to leap from the lab into popular culture: the "butterfly effect," the concept that small events can have large, widespread consequences. The name stems from Lorenz's suggestion that a massive storm might have its roots in the faraway flapping of a tiny butterfly's wings. Translated into mass culture, the butterfly effect has become a metaphor for the existence of seemingly insignificant moments that alter history and shape destinies. Typically unrecognized at first, they create threads of cause and effect that appear obvious in retrospect, changing the course of a human life or rippling through the global economy. In the 2004 movie "The Butterfly Effect" - we watched it so you don't have to - Ashton Kutcher travels back in time, altering his troubled childhood in order to influence the present, though with dismal results. In 1990's "Havana," Robert Redford, a math-wise gambler, tells Lena Olin, "A butterfly can flutter its wings over a flower in China and cause a hurricane in the Caribbean. They can even calculate the odds." Such borrowings of Lorenz's idea might seem authoritative to unsuspecting viewers, but they share one major problem: They get his insight precisely backwards. The larger meaning of the butterfly effect is not that we can readily track such connections, but that we can't. To claim a butterfly's wings can cause a storm, after all, is to raise the question: How can we definitively say what caused any storm, if it could be something as slight as a butterfly? Lorenz's work gives us a fresh way to think about cause and effect, but does not offer easy answers. boston.com

To: Cogito who wrote (72244)	6/14/2008 11:29:33 PM
From: Bridge Player	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 542749

There was a time, not even that long ago, when the vast majority of educated people believed the earth was flat. Yes indeed. I like that analogy and have thought about using it myself. Because a lot of educated people today believe things that may not prove to be true. I read some of what they write every day.

To: Cogito who wrote (72244)	6/15/2008 8:55:26 AM
From: Mary Cluney	Respond to of 542749

<<< He cites some letter signed by "31,000 scientists", a whopping 9,100 of whom are PhDs. He says that's more than the 2,500 scientists in the IPC.>>> I can infer and question the following: 1. 21,900 of these "scientists" do not have a phd. 2. Of the 9,100 with phd's, how many of these are in the sciences. 3. How many of these "scientists" are weathermen on local tv and radio (I remember there was a highly respected weatherman on local radio and tv, Dr. Bob, who was a school dropout). 4. How many of these "scientists" have published papers in scientific journals for peer review. This list of 31,000 "scientists" sound very suspiciously like the list of Communists that Senator Joe McCarthy use to scare people with. Unless there is some credible CV behind this list, this list is utter garbage, IMHO.

To: Cogito who wrote (72244)	6/15/2008 12:15:54 PM
From: Rambi	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 542749

I'm an agnostic also. Went looking for a list of scientists on both sides and came across just about everything. There was a list of scientists who at first were believers and then recanted after more research. There is an interesting list on wiki of many qualified scientists that divides them into those who think research and projections are inadequate, or that it's not really happening, or even some that think it's a positive thing! And there are of course lists of those who DO believe. Seems to me that arguing it here- when none of us is highly qualified -is sort of fruitless.