mcallister3200
mcallister3200
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May 19th, 2016 at 5:04:19 PM permalink
Quote: AZDuffman





I heard an old timer say it well. We are born with a bucket filled with common sense. As you add too much learning to the bucket, the common sense starts to spill out.



That is a gem. I don't know why ME wasted his time after AZ appears to state that, essentially, he doesn't want to learn things because if he does he believes he will lose his common sense. Maybe learned to much because, common sense tells me that's a really dumb thing to believe.
Last edited by: mcallister3200 on May 19, 2016
MathExtremist
MathExtremist
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May 19th, 2016 at 5:27:47 PM permalink
Quote: mcallister3200

That is a gem. I don't know why ME wasted his time after AZ appears to state that, essentially, he doesn't want to learn things because if he does he believes he will lose his common sense

I must have learned far too much far too early, because I don't think I ever believed that drowning a bear would turn it into a fish or that rocks can have puppies. I want someone to try to teach that in science class:

Creationist: "If you're going to teach the theory of evolution, you must also teach the theory that rocks can have puppies."
Science Teacher: "What? That's nonsense. We know how puppies are born, we've seen it."
Creationist: "Are you sure? What did you see?"
Science Teacher: "Two dogs mate, then the female carries a litter to term, then gives birth. We have literally watched the puppies emerge from their mother."
Creationist: "Okay, but were there any rocks nearby?"
Science Teacher: "Uhh, yeah, I guess..."
Creationist: "A-HA!!! Now stop being so closed-minded, we demand that you devote equal time to all the theories."

Imagine what would happen if science teachers demanded to be given equal time in church on Sundays. Turnabout is fair play, no?
"In my own case, when it seemed to me after a long illness that death was close at hand, I found no little solace in playing constantly at dice." -- Girolamo Cardano, 1563
MathExtremist
MathExtremist
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May 19th, 2016 at 5:51:43 PM permalink
Quote: RS

It would be like measuring the average depth of a river, every 500 feet, and claiming at no point is it more than 100 feet deep. Then at one current point, take a specific (non-averaged) depth of the river, find it's 200 feet deep, then report there's a huge issue. While, in reality, there could be numerous points in the river with depths of 200 feet, while no average-depth was at 200 feet.

I'm not saying the data is averaged by the scientists, I'm saying the data is averaged due to the way the environment traps the air in the ice/air bubble.

That's a fair concern, and it's actually raised by one of the commenters on that page. I think several of the other comments to that page touch on some of those questions, specifically the bit about pumping air out of the porous snow from the surface until the bubbles close off. But a bigger point is that in the time we've been measuring the atmosphere directly instead of via ice cores, we haven't seen the kind of outliers you're talking about. In other words, the variance of CO2 or other greenhouse gasses from year to year is not very high, so if you assume that the historical variance is equivalent, then the fact that levels may be somewhat muddied between two or three adjacent years in an ice core doesn't actually lead to a very large error. Here are the monthly levels from Hawaii since before 1960, and though there are seasonal/monthly variances in maybe a 5-8ppm range, the annual mean doesn't change by more than 2-3ppm per year:

http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/full.html

It's a different issue, I think, as to whether you can precisely date what year an ice layer is from, but it's pretty clear just from visual inspection that the ice is in annual layers like tree rings:

I think the reason the data seems averaged is more due to this timing issue than the fidelity of the measurements. In other words, based on what I read just then, I think the ancient data is actually more averaged by the scientists due to timing uncertainty than the environmental issues you're looking at. I could be wrong, but I have no actual basis to dispute the validity of the methods presented.
"In my own case, when it seemed to me after a long illness that death was close at hand, I found no little solace in playing constantly at dice." -- Girolamo Cardano, 1563
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