What Else Are We Wrong About?

As a scientist, you NEVER assume anything, always question whether the results are due to the particular method used or if they are true scientific findings, and NEVER EVER close your minds to the other possible results... because quite often the experiments don't give the results expected, and in turn lead to a better overall understanding of the system being studied. Just think like a scientist for one minute and you will realize how wrong "conventional thinking" is and always has been... it is always those that think outside the box who make the biggest difference in the world... Einstein, Marie Curie, Galileo, Darwin, Newton, Coppernicus, and Plank... ALL went against contemporary wisdom, were disliked for their viewpoints, but turned out to be the victors in the end...
Always think outside the box, question all contemporary wisdom (no matter the qualifications of the source), and be open to the possibility that you are wrong. Think like a scientist!

Anyone on here ACTUALLY a scientist? Of any form? How about Ph.D? Anyone have one? If you did, you would know that there really is never a "consensus" on anything, and almost every theory has undergone revisions if it has not already been completely thrown out.
How about this theory... "Global Cooling" ... 1970's... ring a bell??? Hmmm... all those poor alarmists were put out of jobs to be replaced with people screaming "Global Warming"
Think about this... WHERE do they measure the temperatures used to "calculate" the "mean global temperature"?
Cities maintain heat... many buildings, asphalt roads, and people breathing (an amazing oxidation reaction that converts oxygen to carbon dioxide while releasing heat as well)... and the cities were not so large when they first started taking temperature readings.
Also, think about this.... 6 BILLION PEOPLE... HMMM, and how exactly do we expect the world to support so large of a population... maybe "global warming" is more of an overpopulation problem than an industrial one... just let that sink in real quick. We cut down so many trees, replace them with buildings that retain heat, and reproduce like rabbits... any biologist knows that cell culture can only maintain so much growth before killing the entire population in the petri dish... and the earth in this case is similar to a giant petri dish in which the organisms have only so many nutrients they can consume before they either slow in growth or all die. Also very similar to cancer... normal cells understand that they must only live as long as is productive and safe for the body... it is the "selfish" cancer cell that refuses to die and instead spreads throughout the body until it induces death of the whole! Enough biology analogies, how about some true environmental science for those who have some knowledge of the subject. The maximum carrying capacity of the world has been greatly exceeded. The environment has several webs of feedback mechanisms that would not allow for the world to escape greatly from the equilibrium. Pull one string, and a myriad of compensatory changes occur which leads to re-establishment of a sustainable equilibrium. Our minute contribution to atmospheric CO2 have minimal effect when compared to those released each time a volcano erupts. (1 eruption = 3 years of CO2 released from 6 billion people)

Wow, talk about closed minds. The entire point of the article was that all of us should OPEN our minds, challenge the "facts" and THINK more. Who could possibly be against this?

Asking questions - questioning assumptions or even facts - is NEVER a bad idea. On the contrary, it's what intelligent people do. I try and do the same on my blog (www.RuZiKeJiao.com) every day.

CYBERSECURITY CHINA AND RUSSIA. THESE IS THREE REASONS WHY GATES IS NOT A GENIUS BUT RATHER AN INTELLIGENT MAN FOLLOWING A MISGUIDED AGENDA. IF WE DO NOT WAKE UP FAST WE ARE GOING TO GET BURNED AND NEVER RECOVER FROM THE SCARS. THE FACT that I have a computer forensics background allows me to understand all sides of the this spectrum. WE NEED TO SET UP A CYBERSECURITY ARMY THAT WILL SECURE OUR INSTITUTIONS AND KEEP "BORDER WATCH". CYBERSECURITY BREACHES CAN SHUT DOWN OUR DEFENSES AND LEAVE US VERY VUNERABLE. THE HEAD OF THIS ARMY must assign a division dedicated to penetrating our own defenses it is the only way we will get better.
We MUST MUST BUILD A STRONG ALLIANCES WITH OTHER NATIONS TO HELP COMBAT THIS PROBLEM. WE MUST RECRUIT RUSSIAN AND CHINESE individuals who are fimiliar with their countries tactics, especially when it comes to SOCIAL ENGINEERIING.

Buick tied Jaguar in a reliability survey? Yeah.., for last place. Pass the koolaid to Newt "we've got a full tank" Gingrich.

Buick tied Jaguar in a reliability survey! Yeah.., for last place. Pass the koolaid to Newt "we've got a full tank" Gingrich.

Weisberg, try being a healthy family living in an apartment! Good luck pal. Apartment living is cramped and dangerous for children. There's your obesity problem for children--no place to run around, safely. Many families can't afford to rent a home either. Better to bite the bullet and suffer home ownership responsibilities and bills so you can enjoy space, quiet, and better schools. Renting only works if you are a DINK.

Guy is running out of ideas or is just pure shallow...
RE: China

I totally agree that China is not stable. But the logic supporting the argument is flawed.

"...rising living standards tend to produce political discontent;" "regimes become vulnerable at a level of per capita income".

It might be true elsewhere. But in China it's the ever increasing inequality that's incubating social upheavals. In a society where some people can be as rich as the richest in the richest countries, and others can be as poor as the poorest in the poorest countries, you bet it's unstable. However, at the same level of per capita income, if the majority of the population belong to a middle class with the rich not terribly richer and the poor not miserably poorer, it would be the stablest society any one can imagine.

Therefore the issue is not with the average of per capita income (mean), but how different those incomes can be (standard deviation).

China missed the chance of developing a fast economy while maintaining a stable society. 30 years ago when the economic reform was initiated, the focus was first on the poorest farming population, which was a perfectly perfect strategy. A few years later with a great success in the countryside, the government turns to urban reform, resulting in a stronger middle class and an insanely rich class.

As Deng Xiaoping once mentioned at the beginning of the reform, "We allow a group of people become rich first." People assumed that the government would turn back to the rest, mostly the farmers. But in reality the rest were forever left behind.

What the Chinese government should have followed is a strategy of controlled prosperity. After a certain population group become richer, the reform should then focus on other poorer groups, keeping the income discrepancy within a stable range. As a totalitarian government, this is what they could have done but they failed to do.

Instead the farmers have been treated as nothing more than sheer cheap labor producing cheap products for wealthy countries. Treated better, the farming population could have become a huge domestic market by itself, fueling the economic growth in a different but more stable way. Lesson learned from Henry Ford, anybody?

A lot of problems can be symbolized by the "9%". For years, the Chinese government operates like the CEXs of a big corporation. All they care about is the numbers on the statements. Anything else is ignored. Environmental issues (local, regional and global), healthcare, social issues, crime, corruption, food safety and security, energy security, etc, etc. If all of these are getting worse each year by over 10%, then all the economic growth is meaningless.

Problem is, all those problems are not on the government's agenda (at least not until recently), and they just keep accumulating energy at the bottom of the society, like a volcano, waiting for a weak point to erupt.

Conclusions?
China is a ve

Guy is running out of ideas or is just pure shallow...
RE: Climate Change

Jacob quoted another shallow and suicidal person for this topic.

I don't know where this Freeman Dyson lives, but he surely doesn't feel the catastrophic effect of global

warming. For one thing, some tropical islands have already seen so much flooding that the residents are forced

to move out. I guess it's pretty catastrophic for those people. And what about New Orleans? How many more

future Katrinas and New Orleanses there should be for it to be catastrophic enough?

How about driving so many species to extinction? I call it biblically catastrophic. Why? Because we are

terminating God's creations. If there are devils, it's us.

Then on global cooling. It's a fact no problem. But isn't it precisely for that matter that we should totally stop

burning fossil fuels now, so that hundreds of years later when the earth really cools down, our future

generations would still have something to keep warm with?

If you don't call it stupid that we burn out all the fuels when it's still hot and then freeze to death in the next

ice age, I don't know what is stupidity.

Hey, how about we all get buried in the depleted oil wells when we die and try to become oil, just to keep

our grand-grand-children alive?

Conclusions?
1. Sometimes no-brainers are always no-brainers.
2. Freeman Dyson is surely shallow, or dangerously suicidal.
3. Jacob Weisberg is either running out of ideas for his column or is just pure shallow...
4. I appreciate Newsweek's efforts of presenting all different views. But sometimes the arguments are just

outrageously shallow and lack of logic.

Guy is running out of ideas or is just pure shallow...
RE: Nuclear Proliferation

Kenneth Waltz is surely shallow, or dangerously suicidal.

His argument of nuclear check and balance is correct only within a certain limit. The unstated (or unquoted) assumption is that all players are rational, so much so that they know any of their preemptive nuclear attack would inevitably result in the death of everybody including themselves. Hence the nuclear peace. An assumption within this assumption is that nobody wants to die.

What if this assumption is not true, that somebody wishes to die? And that somebody happens to be in control of some nuclear missiles? Remember Jim Jones? What if somebody believes himself to be the anti-Christ who needs to fulfill his mission by killing everyone in the world (like so many people out there believing themselves to be something, anything)? And, hey, what about someone dreaming about his 72 virgins and decides to kill all the infidels to get them?

Just like the assumption of owning guns would protect people, it doesn't work well when people use their guns to kill their wives, their kids, their relatives, cops, people they don't know, and then themselves. Are there too many of these cases lately? Imagine giving nukes to those people!

The world is much less rational than we hope, and there sure are a lot of lunatics in power. No nuclear proliferation, please!

Another issue with nuclear proliferation is dirty bombs which is not a government-controlled weapon, much less technically complicated to use, but equally deadly. The more governments there are that own nuclear weapons, the easier for terrorists to acquire them for dirty bombs.

Conclusions?
1. Sometimes no-brainers are always no-brainers.
2. Kenneth Waltz is surely shallow, or dangerously suicidal.
3. Jacob Weisberg is either running out of ideas for his column or is just pure shallow...
4. I appreciate Newsweek's efforts of presenting all different views. But sometimes the arguments are just outrageously shallow and lack of logic.

a) China is a Dictatorial Country (why anybody dare to say it? It's a fact, communist or not it's a dictatorship of a group of men)
b) "maybe Iran" justifies the invansion of the country, but there's no proof that that's true, so like Irak's weapons of mass destruction, you're lying.
c) "warming will not be catastrophic": LOL.

Just write about economic stuff..., it'll be great for all...

Freeman Dyson's views on global warming have been discredited by all the scientific experts. Global warming is real and the scientific evidence is overwhelming. I'd suggest Weisberg try a google search: type "Siberia, permafrost, methane." and see what he comes up with. Russia's secret weapon of mass desctruction is as frightening as the ICBM's Obama is striving to dismantle. And that's only for opener. What Dyson does not seem to get is that among other things global warming will rise sea levels significantly. In his documentary "An Inconveniet Truth", Al Gore showed a revised map of the United States when global warming takes effect. The same applies to many other parts of the world.
For Weisberg to cite Dyson as some sort of expert, is beyond igonrant, beyond idiotic and beyond irresponsible.

Excuse me Mr. Weisberg, but "Before 2003, neocon hawks and French lefties agreed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction"?!? Is that your little way of trying to absolve your gullibility? Did you actually buy the WMD snake-oil? Well many people didn't. As someone who works in the media, I image you remember that up to ten million people (according to the BBC) staged mass protests on February 15, 2003 in anticipation of the upcoming Iraq War. Most of those protesters were smart enough to figure out what you couldn't. And for every one of them, many more unbelievers sat at home.

Myself? I just used common sense to figure out that WMDs were a lie before the invasion even began. You see, America is terrified to attack North Korea because it actually has WMDs. Therefore the administration's willingness to attack Iraq (and advertise it well in advance) told me everything I needed to know.

I find the notion that higher atmospheris CO2 would increase the earth's fertility to be quite absurd. It ist based on the simplistic fact that plants consume CO2 and use the carbon to produce more biomass. Therefore, more CO2 = more plants, right? Well, no actually.. This theory neglects the following, more intricate, facts:

Fertility of ecosystems is dependent on many factors, CO2 being the least of them. Think about it; atmospheric CO2 levels are the same all around the world; and yet we have both the Amazon Rainforest and the Sahara Desert. Important differentiating factors include weather patterns, fresh water access, and soil conditions (nutrients etc.)

Global warming will more quickly melt, or outright prevent, seasonal snow packs in places like the mountains of California. This snow pack melting throughout the warm season is important to providing water for year round agriculture and wild plant life.

More CO2 in the air means more CO2 absorbed into the oceans, which converts to carbonic acid and acidifies the ocean. The result is vast destruction of coral reefs, which are the "rain forest" of diversity in the ocean. I assume "fertility" should apply to the entire earth, not just land.

In short; Mr. Dyson should stick to physics.

We are unaware about what is too big to fail.

And it is not our wasteline:

http://blogdredd.blogspot.com/2009/04/too-big-to-stop-killing-war-class.html

How slimy of Mr. Weisberg to cherry pick what he wants others to believe as truth and as fallacies? I wonder how Slate would choose to publish such gibberish. Isn't that the biggest danger that such articles leak through to the media without factual and scientific scrutiny. He wants to cover his own big lies and fear with a hundred other lies. He is trying to cleverly mix up scientific studies about climate and fossil fuel reserves (in spite of the political vendetta to discredit some of the most difficult and challenging scientific investigations that we have made in recent history) with speculations on China, Detroit, Nuclear Proliferation etc. We need to pay our highest regards to the scientists and based on the evidence so far, enforce the "Precautionary Principle".

"We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked and dejected with a lost opportunity. The "tide in the affairs of men" does not remain at the flood; it ebbs. We may cry out deperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is deaf to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residue of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: "Too late." There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. "The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on..." We still have a choice today..."

We are in that moment, now, and we couldn't be "Too late".

God forbid we should stop and reassess things once in a while.
Think of what's at stake. man!
Entire careers and reputations are staked on the 'conventional wisdom' of our day.

What is this man smoking?