Recent content by meromorph

The similarity between Pascal's wager and AGW proponent's risk analysis is that they both assign infinite weight to one of the outcomes. Infinite positive weight for believing in God and being right in Pascal's case, and infinite negative weight for denying Global Warming and being wrong in...

I offered a refutation. I said that science has to make predictions that have the potential to be falsifiable. Modeling after the fact is not science, it is the same thing that geocentric astronomers did adding "epicycles on epicycles" to account for observations after the fact, to protect...

I don't understand, but that's OK, I apologize for being antagonistic over this minor point. All that matters for the discussion in this thread is that precisely modeling the climate is impossible, and we agree about that, so I won't continue this derail. I will reconsider how I involve...

Here is my explanation of the difference: chaotic systems are deterministic with a high sensitivity to initial conditions. Stochastic systems are, by definition, not deterministic. Since you say that chaotic systems are not deterministic, I don't understand what separates them from...

Do you understand the difference between a chaotic system and a stochastic system?

We both agree that the climate is unpredictable and stochastic. The only point of disagreement is whether chaotic systems are deterministic. "Deterministic" here means that the state of the system at the current time determines the state of the system at all future times. The correct...

Chaotic systems are deterministic. I've done numerical simulations of the Lorentz equations to produce the "butterfly attractor." I've published peer reviewed research on chaotic systems in nature, pulse-variable stars and sunspots, although I do not work in that area nowadays. Most...

Actually I am waiting to dispute the science, but no one has presented any. I could do both sides of the work, and present the case for AGW before debunking it, but then I could be accused of debunking a straw man, and would be working harder than the alarmists deserve. What does it...

I certainly agree that oil companies prefer political stability in these countries, and in the culture and history of the middle east stability usually comes from totalitarian dictators. Also I'm not insinuating that the US is in the pocket of big oil, no corruption or profit motive is needed...

Yes those propositions are equivalent, but they don't capture the notion "q is provable from p." In logic this is written p ⊢ q ("p yields q"), and a contradiction is written ⊥. If q is a tautology, then we can write ⊢ q. This is equivalent to the statement that the...

Here is a pattern to list the rationals between 0 and 1: 0, 1, 1/2, 1/3, 2/3, 1/4, 2/4, 3/4,... I find it simpler than the usual method based on the diagonals of the square lattice, but I guess it appears less frequently because it only lists the rationals between 0 and 1, rather than all...

It's just a bunch of unfounded assertions, ad hominem attacks, and attempts to elicit sympathy. That video has no logical content at all, it's 100% rhetorical. This is a real problem for climate alarmists. Whenever I try to read serious rebuttals from their side about the controversy, I...

The transition from geocentric to heliocentric astronomy is one of the main examples in Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions. An important point is that the geocentric model didn't go away when the evidence refuted it, instead the astronomers of the day forced their model to match...

That's not the point. We are discussing whether changing an oppressive regime is a reason for the US to go to war. I argue that the answer is "no", based on past and current events that is not a sufficient reason, the country also needs to have large oil reserves for us to intervene. The...

The security council did not approve the Iraq war either. All I ask is that they tell the truth and admit to acting in their own self-interest, instead of hiding behind a sham of humanitarian concern.