Weather Channel founder calls Global Warming "a scam."

Not necessarily.My asian friends have explained this to me that in a lot of asian cultures the concept of insurance is the most insulting thing there. It's almost as bad as a curse, if not as bad. To them, it's practically saying "break a leg" or "your house will burn down" when insurance is mentioned.I can see how some supersitious people like nem_jug would be offended by the very idea of insuring against possible disaster in the future.Edited by Taz, : No reason given.

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Owing to the deficiency of the English language, I have occasionally used the academic jargon generator to produce phrases that even I don't fully understand. The jargons are not meant to offend anyone or to insult anyone's intelligence!

You're right. I apologize to nem.I was just suggesting that the argument "what if there's no disaster" isn't completely invalid. Some do get offended at the suggestion that there might be a disaster.

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Owing to the deficiency of the English language, I have occasionally used the academic jargon generator to produce phrases that even I don't fully understand. The jargons are not meant to offend anyone or to insult anyone's intelligence!

Like the loss of some of the world's largest and oldest glaciers? How about the fact that our air is filled with more pollens than ever before, causing a lot of misery for people like me who have seasonal allergies? You do realize that the northwest passage is about to become a reality, right?I'm not a global warming facts buff, but even I could think of these off the top of my head. If you have such strong objection to global warming being a reality, shouldn't you at least know a few things about it first?Added by edit.Even now as we speak, Denmark, Canada, U.S., Iceland, Norway, Sweden and Finland, and Russia are having political battles over who owns the Arctic because once the northwest passage is completely open giving the closest route between Europe and Asia, whoever owns the Arctic can tax the hell out of all the ships that go through. Canada is treating this issue so seriously that last year they sent 2 warships to the opening of the northwest passage as a declaration of "this is all ours so get hands off our northwest passage". Denmark had previously put a flag on the Hans Island where the northwest passage will be with a note saying "Welcome to the Danish Island." Canada last year responded by stationing some 2,000 Canadian marines on that island.But ignoring all the politics, convoys after convoys are reaffirming again and again that the northwest passage is opening up rapidly. If the Bush administration really believes global warming is a scam, how come they are laying claim to the Arctic now? Edited by Taz, : No reason given.

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Owing to the deficiency of the English language, I have occasionally used the academic jargon generator to produce phrases that even I don't fully understand. The jargons are not meant to offend anyone or to insult anyone's intelligence!

You: What's 2+2?
Us: 4
You: You're not answering my question. What's 2+2?
Us: ???

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Owing to the deficiency of the English language, I have occasionally used the academic jargon generator to produce phrases that even I don't fully understand. The jargons are not meant to offend anyone or to insult anyone's intelligence!

Wars happen every goddamn day of the year somewhere around the world.Disappearing of the glaciers and melting of the arctic icesheet only happen once in hundreds of thousands of years. You're telling me that the scientists who made the predictions god lucky that out of all the hundreds of thousands of years since the last climate fluctuation it should happen within a few years of the predictions?

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Owing to the deficiency of the English language, I have occasionally used the academic jargon generator to produce phrases that even I don't fully understand. The jargons are not meant to offend anyone or to insult anyone's intelligence!

While it is true we have no definite way of knowing how fast temp fluc can occur naturally, we do have some indication that it should happen over the course of centuries, not decades. Take the little ice age, for example. It was a phenomenon that took course over centuries. This is a fact of life because the weather is a chaotic system. There really is no way anyone could account for enough initial conditions to make accurate predictions. All we are left with are general predictions, like the melting of the old glaciers and permafrost, and so far all these predictions are coming true.

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Owing to the deficiency of the English language, I have occasionally used the academic jargon generator to produce phrases that even I don't fully understand. The jargons are not meant to offend anyone or to insult anyone's intelligence!

Chaotic = very complicated.Chaotic does not mean random. In fact, many people, including myself, believe that there is no such thing as random. They're just chaotic. The seemingly random systems are actually chaotic. We just haven't figured out the pattern yet.

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Owing to the deficiency of the English language, I have occasionally used the academic jargon generator to produce phrases that even I don't fully understand. The jargons are not meant to offend anyone or to insult anyone's intelligence!

*sigh*I'm not going to argue with you on this one. You appear to put your faith in the layman definition of chaos. Chaos does not mean random. Again, you are putting your faith too much into the layman version of what chaos means. I don't know what you are smoking, but the reason why long term predictions are getting better is because technology is improving which allow meteorologists to account more initial conditions.The reason a chaotic system like the weather is so hard fo us to predict is because there are simply too many (possibly an infinite) variables for us to account. This is also why the further into the future we try to predict a chaotic system the less accurate we get. Are you pulling a strawman on me? Because despite the fact that I've repeatedly said chaos does not mean random, you keep saying that I say the weather is random.Mr Jack, I'm sorry to say this now, but you've been misinformed about what a chaotic system is. Or may be your brits use the word differently over there. Just so you know, I spent some years working on a project involving chaotic systems.

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Owing to the deficiency of the English language, I have occasionally used the academic jargon generator to produce phrases that even I don't fully understand. The jargons are not meant to offend anyone or to insult anyone's intelligence!

Yes it does. With chaotic systems, the more initial conditions you know the more accurate your predictions will be. The problem is with chaotic systems, there are just too many variables to account, so after a certain amount of time the model breaks down. This is the case with the weather. I'm not disputing with this fact. I'm disputing the fact that just because we can account for more variables that this makes the weather not a chaotic system.Do you or do you not agree that with weather prediction the farther away in time we try to predict the less accurate our results are? Chaotic systems are still systems. They have structure to them if you look at the overall result. But they are certainly not random. With enough calculations, you can predict the outcome in the very near future. But the further away in the future you try to predict, the less accurate your predictions are. This is exactly the case with the weather. There are just too many variables. However, the more variables you can account for, the more accurate your results will be.I don't know where you got the idea that knowing more variables in the initial condition makes little to no difference in the prediction of a chaotic system. I have, and it still looks to me like you think the outcome of a chaotic system is random. Let me quote you directly.

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It means that tiny differences in the current state result in massive differences in eventual state. So that, in effect, the future is random because it cannot be accurately predicted from the present.

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But with chaotic systems, we can predict to a certain extent where the result will be. We can predict in a general sense.Just do a google search. I'm not the only one who thinks the weather is a chaotic system.

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Owing to the deficiency of the English language, I have occasionally used the academic jargon generator to produce phrases that even I don't fully understand. The jargons are not meant to offend anyone or to insult anyone's intelligence!

Well, you managed to quote mine me there and ignore the rest of my post. That's the point with chaotic system. The weather is a perfect example of such system. You can very accurately predict the weather a few minutes from now. You can reasonably predict the weather a few days from now. But a few weeks from now, the weather is a total mystery.Did you even read that wiki link?

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Chaotic behavior has been observed in the laboratory in a variety of systems including electrical circuits, lasers, oscillating chemical reactions, fluid dynamics, and mechanical and magneto-mechanical devices. Observations of chaotic behaviour in nature include the dynamics of satellites in the solar system, the time evolution of the magnetic field of celestial bodies, population growth in ecology, the dynamics of the action potentials in neurons, and molecular vibrations. Everyday examples of chaotic systems include weather and climate.[1] There is some controversy over the existence of chaotic dynamics in the plate tectonics and in economics.[2] [3] [4]

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But this is the problem. With chaotic systems, there are just too many variables for us to account. There will always be variables we haven't considered. Um, how so? Like I said before, the weather a few minutes from now is very predictable. The weather a few days from now are reasonably predictable. But try to predict the weather a few weeks from now and it will make a liar out of you. But Jack, in a non-chaotic system we can reasonably say that the determining variables in the initial condition are finite to such extent that we can virtually account for them all. A chaotic system, on the other hand, are harder to predict and the farther into the future we try to predict the less accurate we are because the the initial conditions that we did not account for become significant enough to change the result as time go on.Just do a google search. Every academic site you're going to stumble into about this subject will tell you that the weather is a chaotic system.Again, perhaps you brits are using a different definition of chaos? Um, no. The results may appear random, but the overall result will give you a definite structure. Random mean random. Chaos in a social sense is indistinquishable from random. Chaos in a physical or mathematical sense are predeterministic.I don't know why we are even arguing about this. Just do a google search for crying out loud. Even the wiki link you linked me to says that the weather is a chaotic system because (1) it is deterministic based on some simple rules and (2) it very sensitively depends on initial conditions.

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Owing to the deficiency of the English language, I have occasionally used the academic jargon generator to produce phrases that even I don't fully understand. The jargons are not meant to offend anyone or to insult anyone's intelligence!

*blink*You did not just say that did you?Ok, sorry. Had to do it.You're absolutely right. I was partly misinformed about that.However, my original argument still stands. The weather is a chaotic system because it is highly sensitive to initial conditions. It is also very complicated because there are just too many variables in the equation.I guess I was mashing the two characteristics together.

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Owing to the deficiency of the English language, I have occasionally used the academic jargon generator to produce phrases that even I don't fully understand. The jargons are not meant to offend anyone or to insult anyone's intelligence!