The Final Globe Earth v Flat Earth Debate

[Larky Masher]

38 minutes ago, thplinth said:

They do but collectively it only adds up one way... God! The alternative does not require a God.

Listen Scotty has provoked more science by challenging it all than you ever will by agreeing with it all...and saying 'you can only talk to people who have done the maths, the experiments'... Is that how Feynman rolled? If you really understand you should be able to dance around Scotty. No?

 

The only things the Scotty has challenged are the boundaries of bullshit.

[thplinth]

Possibly. However he will be remembered like really long after you are really long forgotten. Go figure.

[Larky Masher]

3 minutes ago, thplinth said:

Possibly. However he will be remembered like really long after you are really long forgotten. Go figure.

You've been funnier Mick.

[Toepoke]

49 minutes ago, thplinth said:

If you really understand you should be able to dance around Scotty. No?

Well there's been plenty of questions on this thread he's not provided an answer to.

 

[thplinth]

Do you think I am glasgowredz? even after all this time...seriously? 

Ohhh man...

[thplinth]

You know Larky your weird confusion over this was the only compliment you ever paid me...dick.

[calmac_man]

4 hours ago, thplinth said:

Possibly. However he will be remembered like really long after you are really long forgotten. Go figure.

If I had to choose between being remembered because I was batshit crazy, or being forgotten because I accepted reality, I'd pick the latter every time.

[calmac_man]

5 hours ago, thplinth said:

There has been more proper thinking about 'science' on this board since Scotty posted his flat earth thread stuff than 12 years of Biffer threads.

The Flat Earth folk have an alternative explanation for everything! Added together it is crazy but piece by piece... That gets you really thinking fundamentally about why you think it is a sphere.  i think that is why they get so annoyed with Scotty. They got lazy and sloppy and when pushed for the first time in an age they cannot immediately overturn him - and oh boy that results in silent venom.

I can see what you're saying. It's always worth challenging what we know and how we know it.

What, in my opinion, is a waste of time is demonstrating clearly to someone why their idea is definitely wrong, only for them to ignore everything you've said and carry on regardless. Flat earthers don't have an answer to how triangulation shows the curve of the earth, or how you can see beyond the horizon as you gain height, or any one of the things I put in my long posts. 

And the things the do have answers for are mental. For instance, their only explanation for gravity that doesn't see people in Australia sliding northwards is that this disc we're on is accelerating upwards at 9.8 ms-2. At this rate we'd be past the speed of light within a single year. That's maths that anyone can do. We know that's not possible, but just in case it is, if we were doing that speed we wouldn't be able to see things below is because the light couldn't reach our eyes.

It's a worrying trend of our time that people seem to increasingly be believing in things that are manifestly stupid. And it doesn't matter how often their ideas are trashed, or that they have no answers, they just scream "conspiracy!" and carry on regardless.

I'll end with this: there was a time when the Islamic culture led the world in philosophy, science and art. For a whole bunch of historical and theological reasons they regressed into unquestioning obedience and the celebration of faith without doubt. We live in a time when half of the people in the richest, most powerful country in the world believe the Earth to be less than 10,000 years old, and now they've elected a barely functioning cretin who said climate change is a hoax invented by China, and he doesn't exercise because that uses up your energy. What happened to Islamic culture has happened to the Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Chinese, Ottomans and many others. Civilisations fall when they abandon reason for absolute bullshit and we're no different from those who have gone before.

[ParisInAKilt]

It's interesting that climate change is mentioned in this thread.

Well it is a settled science according to the good people at the BBC. 

Edited September 27, 2017 by ParisInAKilt

[calmac_man]

1 minute ago, ParisInAKilt said:

I do think climate change is something that needs to be questioned, anything that has obvious political and financial gain. It's link with eugeentics shouldn't be ignored either. 

Any questions, fire them my way.

The "obvious political and financial gain" thing is as much horsehsit as flat earthers screaming "conspiracy!" about the ISS. For one thing, there a helluva lot more to be gained, by people with a pretty shitty track record, from climate change denial than there is from climate science. And it misses the pretty obvious point that scientists don't achieve fame, glory and money by confirming the consensus, they get it by proving everyone else has been wrong all along. Einstein was a low-level office worker who sent a paper to some physicists saying "see that Newton? Yeah, he was wrong about everything." Those physicists immediately hailed a new hero. Any scientist who could present a strong case against AGW theory would rocket to prominence overnight.

In the meantime, can I ask, do you question the science behind landing space probes on comets, using relativity to tell the cheap, tiny device in your pocket precisely where you are in the world, and detecting the background radiation from the big bang? Or is it just measuring how hot it is that you question?

[ParisInAKilt]

1 minute ago, calmac_man said:

Any questions, fire them my way.

The "obvious political and financial gain" thing is as much horsehsit as flat earthers screaming "conspiracy!" about the ISS. For one thing, there a helluva lot more to be gained, by people with a pretty shitty track record, from climate change denial than there is from climate science. And it misses the pretty obvious point that scientists don't achieve fame, glory and money by confirming the consensus, they get it by proving everyone else has been wrong all along. Einstein was a low-level office worker who sent a paper to some physicists saying "see that Newton? Yeah, he was wrong about everything." Those physicists immediately hailed a new hero. Any scientist who could present a strong case against AGW theory would rocket to prominence overnight.

In the meantime, can I ask, do you question the science behind landing space probes on comets, using relativity to tell the cheap, tiny device in your pocket precisely where you are in the world, and detecting the background radiation from the big bang? Or is it just measuring how hot it is that you question?

I don't. 

But in terms of climate change I've watched some documentaries and read various things from scientists and independent journalists which give me reason to be skeptical. I could be completely wrong to do some but I guess we'll wait and see. 

[biffer]

4 hours ago, ParisInAKilt said:

I don't. 

But in terms of climate change I've watched some documentaries and read various things from scientists and independent journalists which give me reason to be skeptical. I could be completely wrong to do some but I guess we'll wait and see. 

On climate change there's some fundamental science to understand about how carbon dioxide absorbs infrared radiation (heat, basically) at one wavelength and emits it at a different wavelength. If you want to understand global warming you need to understand /accept this first as it's the basis of everything. After that it's just a debate about scale. 

Bear in mind that if it wasn't for carbon dioxide and water vapour in the atmosphere the average surface temperature of earth would be about 15C lower. If we change the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, this is pretty obviously going to change the effect as well. 

[thplinth]

Anyway you are all wrong.

The earth is expanding!

http://www.dinox.org/expandingearth.html

Explains a lot of shit! 

[Orraloon]

13 hours ago, calmac_man said:

Any questions, fire them my way.

The "obvious political and financial gain" thing is as much horsehsit as flat earthers screaming "conspiracy!" about the ISS. For one thing, there a helluva lot more to be gained, by people with a pretty shitty track record, from climate change denial than there is from climate science. And it misses the pretty obvious point that scientists don't achieve fame, glory and money by confirming the consensus, they get it by proving everyone else has been wrong all along. Einstein was a low-level office worker who sent a paper to some physicists saying "see that Newton? Yeah, he was wrong about everything." Those physicists immediately hailed a new hero. Any scientist who could present a strong case against AGW theory would rocket to prominence overnight.

In the meantime, can I ask, do you question the science behind landing space probes on comets, using relativity to tell the cheap, tiny device in your pocket precisely where you are in the world, and detecting the background radiation from the big bang? Or is it just measuring how hot it is that you question?

I am fairly confident that Einstein would never have said anything like that. Have you got any quotes to that effect?

 

[calmac_man]

21 hours ago, ParisInAKilt said:

I don't. 

But in terms of climate change I've watched some documentaries and read various things from scientists and independent journalists which give me reason to be skeptical. I could be completely wrong to do some but I guess we'll wait and see. 

Ok.

But we don't really need to wait and see. The amount of carbon dioxide in the air is up by 40%, about a third higher than at any time in the last half million years and probably much longer, and we know that's from human activity. 

Other greenhouse gases have rocketed too. Methane is 25 times worse as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, and nitrous oxide is almost 300 times worse. Both of these have shot up, mostly through agriculture and land use.

Air temperatures are over 1 degree warmer than pre-industrial times, with most of that coming since the 1970s. It would be very weird if the increase in temperature was due to something other than the increase in greenhouse gases. The vast bulk of the warming has gone into the oceans, having impacts on measured sea levels, ocean circulation and marine life.The effect closer to home is that Scotland is notably warmer and wetter, with most of the additional rainfall coming in the summer. We have far, far fewer days of ground frost in the winter. 

You sometimes hear people say the models are rubbish, but that's not remotely true, we've been within the margins of the models for many years now, and the past three years has pushed us ahead of what they projected.

There are many debates in climate science, but there is no debate about the fundamentals - that the planet is warming, and that it's due to greenhouse gases that humans are causing.

I can only theorise why people argue against that, but there's a paper in the Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of Climate Science this month looking at this: http://climatescience.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228620.001.0001/acrefore-9780190228620-e-328#

[calmac_man]

8 hours ago, Orraloon said:

I am fairly confident that Einstein would never have said anything like that. Have you got any quotes to that effect?

 

 Funnily enough he didn't literally say that.

Newtonian physics is predicated on space and time being absolute, and separate. Einstein's two papers on general and special relativity showed that space and time are relative, and are the same thing. These turned science on their head. Most scientists we've heard of became famous because they overturned what went before.

[calmac_man]

16 hours ago, biffer said:

On climate change there's some fundamental science to understand about how carbon dioxide absorbs infrared radiation (heat, basically) at one wavelength and emits it at a different wavelength. If you want to understand global warming you need to understand /accept this first as it's the basis of everything. After that it's just a debate about scale. 

Bear in mind that if it wasn't for carbon dioxide and water vapour in the atmosphere the average surface temperature of earth would be about 15C lower. If we change the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, this is pretty obviously going to change the effect as well. 

That's exactly right. It's easy to wonder how burning a bit of coal can make much difference, but the amount of CO2 in the air is very small - it was under 0.03% (or 300 parts per million) before the industrial revolution, while water vapour makes up only 0.4%. Over 99.5% of our atmosphere does practically nothing to retain heat. A very small part of our atmosphere plays a huge role in temperature regulation, and if we didn't have them we'd be bloody freezing every night as heat radiated into space.

[biffer]

2 minutes ago, calmac_man said:

That's exactly right. It's easy to wonder how burning a bit of coal can make much difference, but the amount of CO2 in the air is very small - it was under 0.03% (or 300 parts per million) before the industrial revolution, while water vapour makes up only 0.4%. Over 99.5% of our atmosphere does practically nothing to retain heat. A very small part of our atmosphere plays a huge role in temperature regulation, and if we didn't have them we'd be bloody freezing every night as heat radiated into space.

...and if anyone wants to examine a runaway greenhouse effect, have a look at Venus. A study of planetary science away from earth very quickly makes you realise that the chemical makeup of an atmosphere has a huge effect on the physical characteristics of the atmosphere.

[thplinth]

You can find this graph everywhere... is it correct?

So if it is a fair representation of earth's past - why would Earth's climate suffer a runaway greenhouse effect now when CO2 is so low versus millions and millions of years when it was much much higher?

[thplinth]

Also higher temperatures causes more evaporation and then condensation. Leading to a warmer, wetter earth. And go look at the chemistry of photosynthesis - last time I looked CO2 played a pretty big role in it. So plants love CO2. Commercial farmers often pump it into greenhouses etc to boost growth. So higher CO2 would lead to a warmer, wetter, more tropical earth. It is no more a threat to the planet than you or I. What it will feck with is human beings and their ongoing rape of planet earth. All the chat is climate change no chat about species extinction or consumption of wild habitats... no just worried about something interrupting our consumption of every last natural resource first. I welcome higher CO2 as it will flood all the cities and set us back to the stone age where we belong and can do the least harm. 

Edited September 28, 2017 by thplinth

[thplinth]

And also on that graph the earth going into and coming out of ice ages does not seem to bear much relationship to CO2 levels. So could it be that say peculiarities of the earth's orbit around the sun is the bigger driver here and man made CO2 is only a minor additive effect?

Also given we are at low temperatures versus the earth's past should you not be more worried about the truly terrifying White Earth threat. This is where so much of the earth is covered in ice that it reflects so much sunlight that it then becomes a runaway effect and the earth becomes slowly covered in ice reflecting more and more sunlight and temperatures plunge lower and lower...

Edited September 28, 2017 by thplinth

[phart]

The thing that stumps me is pan evaporation being down. That's a simple direct experimentation with no models just nice easy repeatable experiment folk have been doing world wide for decades. Models predict it should increase. Models are incorrect as it hasn't, now introducing variables like solar energy, wind speed and vapour pressure.

 

Modelling is never a replacement for actual experimentation.

There's a crisis in some sciences atm, called the replication crisis, where no one can actually replicate experiments. Huge numbers of experiments that fail the scientific method at the first hurdle. It's not getting much press cause of the implications but it shows how much nonsense is produced by "scientists", folk can't even replicate their own experiments.

1/6 scientists know a colleague who falsified their own experimental results.

[thplinth]

I read that when they first started modelling global weather systems on computers the White Earth outcome was a problem as the models all tended to fall into it if ran forward in time for long enough. And once it happens there is no coming back from it apparently. The earth is still historically very cold right now... It is almost like these climate change folk are trying tip the earth into the deep freezer. 

[phart]

Got to love the doublethink by researchers.

"More than 70% of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist's experiments, and more than half have failed to reproduce their own experiments. Those are some of the telling figures that emerged from Nature's survey of 1,576 researchers who took a brief online questionnaire on reproducibility in research.

The data reveal sometimes-contradictory attitudes towards reproducibility. Although 52% of those surveyed agree that there is a significant 'crisis' of reproducibility, less than 31% think that failure to reproduce published results means that the result is probably wrong, and most say that they still trust the published literature."

Last sentence is astonishing. It's probably the right answer even though when i do it i get a different one...

 

http://www.nature.com/news/1-500-scientists-lift-the-lid-on-reproducibility-1.19970?WT.mc_id=SFB_NNEWS_1508_RHBox

Edited September 28, 2017 by phart

[phart]

There's a guy called Mathew Syned who proclaims to be a journalist but is actually a team sky cult member. He wrote books about "black box thinking" based on the marginal gains technique SKY use as a cover for their great performances in cycling. The thing is Marginal Gains isn't the reason for their performances it's careful use of TUE's and doping.

Once fancybears revealed Wiggins extensive use of a nassive dose of kenalog before his successful Tours, you'd think folk would re-evaluate but they just become more entrenched. It's the human way.