Writing down you passcode, top level security.....the Chinese & Russians must piss themselves how moronic our officials are when it comes to basic op-sec.
All those claiming Boris Johnson to be a risk to national security wash your mouths out.
After 24 hours of waterboarding, the f***** wouldn't divulge his mobile phone PIN. Not least because he couldn't. Make him Foreign Secretary, and now!
Boris is definitely one of those people who uses the same password for every account and his phone pin is the same as credit card pin...with the failed thinking is ok because the password is some obscure latin or greek so nobody could guess it...
If all his accounts including credit cards are on one PIN and he's forgotten it, is that why he had to go to Richard Sharp to get some money?
Got to wonder where the Johnson story will go next. Thoughts of his running in a near-future by-election are nuts IMO, but the story's clearly not at an end yet.
Who even uses a PIN or ATM anymore for transactions? Both are obsolete. Use Apple Pay on phone or watch.
Boris must be a complete idiot if he persists in using cards.
As with your anti-cash crusade, you're assuming that everyone has adopted the tech that you've embraced. You err, I fear.
As a chronic late adopter, I'm still resisting using my phone more than I have to, mostly for people's irritating two-factor authorisations (and to make phone calls! Remember them?). I accept that most people have moved onto using smartphones, but paying by card, with PIN if necessary, is still the default for many (most?) people, and there's nearly always a queue at my nearest ATM with people wanting cash (probably just to annoy you).
I wonder what proportion of people still use landline phones? Wifi is weak where I live, so I prefer it where possible (the handset is more comfortable than a mobile too), though the unlimited free calls on my mobile contract tempt me away when signal isn't an issue.
Must be a roaring illegal drugs trade in Godalming!
You still pay for drugs with cash? Most people are on to NFTs for that these days.
Er - so I'm told anyway. I obviously don't have direct personal experience. And if I did I wouldn't say anything, so...I'm not digging myself out of this accidental hole I've put myself in very convincingly, am I?
Writing down you passcode, top level security.....the Chinese & Russians must piss themselves how moronic our officials are when it comes to basic op-sec.
All those claiming Boris Johnson to be a risk to national security wash your mouths out.
After 24 hours of waterboarding, the f***** wouldn't divulge his mobile phone PIN. Not least because he couldn't. Make him Foreign Secretary, and now!
Boris is definitely one of those people who uses the same password for every account and his phone pin is the same as credit card pin...with the failed thinking is ok because the password is some obscure latin or greek so nobody could guess it...
If all his accounts including credit cards are on one PIN and he's forgotten it, is that why he had to go to Richard Sharp to get some money?
Got to wonder where the Johnson story will go next. Thoughts of his running in a near-future by-election are nuts IMO, but the story's clearly not at an end yet.
Who even uses a PIN or ATM anymore for transactions? Both are obsolete. Use Apple Pay on phone or watch.
Boris must be a complete idiot if he persists in using cards.
ATM machines (just for @Selebian) I agree, but PINs I have all over the place.
I took an ATM card with me on my cycling trip, just in case. I have just employed a gardener and didn't know how he wanted to be paid so I used the card to get some cash, in case that was what he wanted (he doesn't). The card is a year out of date so it was lucky he was happy with a bank transfer and that I didn't need it on my trip.
Talking about cash (and @Anabobazina TRIGGER WARNING) I hadn't realised that HMG had had to change their bill to provide a little more protection for cash users.
"Previously the Bill did not specify whether withdrawal and deposit facilities should be free, or whether consumers might have to pay a charge.
But through a late amendment to the Bill, called for by Which?, it will now ensure that people across the country can withdraw and deposit cash for free.
This means the FCA will have greater power over major banks and building societies to ensure reasonable free access to cash is preserved for those who need it."
Good, I don't want to be charged when I have to trudge to the bank to deposit cash for those rude idiots who insist on transferring money they owe to me in stupid paper tokens.
That seems an odd thing to say. The only times I get given cash are on the vanishingly rare occasions I pay with it and get change. If you are not a retailer, your problem with sums of cash large enough to require banking is not going to be trudging, it's going to be the plod (money-laundering division). If you are a retailer, you are surely at liberty to stipulate card-only?
It's mainly transfers when I have bankrolled community stuff etc. Some old school elements at local clubs/parish councils seem to insist on paying me back in cash despite my heartfelt requests for them not to.
It's extremely annoying.
It’s very rude of you to upset people who are just trying to launder the proceeds of their drug dealing empires. Or from the sale of stolen fissile material.
I do longer how long it will take to go from 97% cashless to 100%.
I use cash for:
1. My cleaner (although the agency is DD) 2. My fish and chips 3. My barbers.
but that's been the case for 3 years now, no sign of changing.
I use my debit card for said cash and I occasionally take a card out if 'm going on a hike, should my phone run out of power and there is an issue with the backup.
So I'd say I'm now 92% cardless as well and you could pose the same question.
Three tax dodgers there –– avoid!
You've just potentially libelled four people through alleging a crime for no valid reason.
Do you work for the Sun by any chance?
*Grabs tinfoil hat and ducks*
(On a serious note, @Peck , we really don't go down this route. It just agitates him.)
Writing down you passcode, top level security.....the Chinese & Russians must piss themselves how moronic our officials are when it comes to basic op-sec.
All those claiming Boris Johnson to be a risk to national security wash your mouths out.
After 24 hours of waterboarding, the f***** wouldn't divulge his mobile phone PIN. Not least because he couldn't. Make him Foreign Secretary, and now!
Boris is definitely one of those people who uses the same password for every account and his phone pin is the same as credit card pin...with the failed thinking is ok because the password is some obscure latin or greek so nobody could guess it...
If all his accounts including credit cards are on one PIN and he's forgotten it, is that why he had to go to Richard Sharp to get some money?
Got to wonder where the Johnson story will go next. Thoughts of his running in a near-future by-election are nuts IMO, but the story's clearly not at an end yet.
Who even uses a PIN or ATM anymore for transactions? Both are obsolete. Use Apple Pay on phone or watch.
Boris must be a complete idiot if he persists in using cards.
Writing down you passcode, top level security.....the Chinese & Russians must piss themselves how moronic our officials are when it comes to basic op-sec.
All those claiming Boris Johnson to be a risk to national security wash your mouths out.
After 24 hours of waterboarding, the f***** wouldn't divulge his mobile phone PIN. Not least because he couldn't. Make him Foreign Secretary, and now!
Boris is definitely one of those people who uses the same password for every account and his phone pin is the same as credit card pin...with the failed thinking is ok because the password is some obscure latin or greek so nobody could guess it...
If all his accounts including credit cards are on one PIN and he's forgotten it, is that why he had to go to Richard Sharp to get some money?
Got to wonder where the Johnson story will go next. Thoughts of his running in a near-future by-election are nuts IMO, but the story's clearly not at an end yet.
Who even uses a PIN or ATM anymore for transactions? Both are obsolete. Use Apple Pay on phone or watch.
Boris must be a complete idiot if he persists in using cards.
ATM machines (just for @Selebian) I agree, but PINs I have all over the place.
I took an ATM card with me on my cycling trip, just in case. I have just employed a gardener and didn't know how he wanted to be paid so I used the card to get some cash, in case that was what he wanted (he doesn't). The card is a year out of date so it was lucky he was happy with a bank transfer and that I didn't need it on my trip.
Talking about cash (and @Anabobazina TRIGGER WARNING) I hadn't realised that HMG had had to change their bill to provide a little more protection for cash users.
"Previously the Bill did not specify whether withdrawal and deposit facilities should be free, or whether consumers might have to pay a charge.
But through a late amendment to the Bill, called for by Which?, it will now ensure that people across the country can withdraw and deposit cash for free.
This means the FCA will have greater power over major banks and building societies to ensure reasonable free access to cash is preserved for those who need it."
Do we have a view on cheques? I very rarely receive them, but have recently received quite a few (HMRC, TV licence, British Gas, Virgin, etc) in the settling my fathers estate. Don't know why that should be different to normal particularly as some organisations who had to pay me were happy with me providing my bank details. Very odd.
My wife commented that her last stub in her cheque book was dated 2016. I had to look for my cheque book and the last cheque I wrote was 2010.
I'm guessing for security reasons. They will send the cheque to the address they have on file.
Nope. Addressed to me at my address. They seem pretty good at updating their records when seeing a copy of a death certificate or probate document. Some specifically ask for my bank details and pay direct. Don't know why others don't.
Writing down you passcode, top level security.....the Chinese & Russians must piss themselves how moronic our officials are when it comes to basic op-sec.
All those claiming Boris Johnson to be a risk to national security wash your mouths out.
After 24 hours of waterboarding, the f***** wouldn't divulge his mobile phone PIN. Not least because he couldn't. Make him Foreign Secretary, and now!
Boris is definitely one of those people who uses the same password for every account and his phone pin is the same as credit card pin...with the failed thinking is ok because the password is some obscure latin or greek so nobody could guess it...
If all his accounts including credit cards are on one PIN and he's forgotten it, is that why he had to go to Richard Sharp to get some money?
Got to wonder where the Johnson story will go next. Thoughts of his running in a near-future by-election are nuts IMO, but the story's clearly not at an end yet.
Who even uses a PIN or ATM anymore for transactions? Both are obsolete. Use Apple Pay on phone or watch.
Boris must be a complete idiot if he persists in using cards.
Well that is a genuinely stupid comment since if you use contactless with a card you have to put it in and use your pin after a certain number of transactions or if the value is over £100.
So the answer is practically everyone.
Not for Android or Apple pay
Apple Pay demands my phone passcode when I use it, which I think of as a PIN. Is that unusual?
(Not that I mind, btw.)
It's a setting right?
Ah, it's under ID and passcode. I thought it would be under Wallet.
Although it doesn't matter a lot because I don't actually use it much.
If you use TouchID or FaceID to unlock your phone, that can also be used for Apple Pay. If you haven’t set them up, and you have only the PIN or passcode to open the phone, then Apple Pay will require that.
I encountered an ice cream van in the middle of nowhere the other day when on a long, warm walk.
Aha, I thought – finally I am done for...
"Do you take Apple Pay?" I said, expecting a firm no.
"Of course," said the ice cream man.
Cash is dead.
I've had a couple of places recently that could only accept cash - one being my local Co-Op, after the **** scrotes took out BT's cables - again.
OTOH, a play centre is now card only. Except for all the games inside, that still take pound coins...
Edit: another being a care near the pier in Southwold at the weekend, where there Internet connection seemed to depend on where seagulls were in the sky. Sometimes they could accept cards, other times it was cash-only
Edit2: and a church I went into on Sunday had a tap-in donations screen, which was cool (and given thefts from cashboes in churches, probably a good idea). First time I'd seen that outside cathedrals.
I saw a busker recently who took apple pay. However, it was set up for a £2 donation, which seemed a bit optimistic. There's an interesting optimisation problem there - if you can only take donations of one quantum, what should that be to maximise income? My guess: 50p. I suspect more than four times as many people will donate 50p as will donate £2. That said, if its apple pay it's probably catering to a market more than averagely keen to part with its money ;-)
Writing down you passcode, top level security.....the Chinese & Russians must piss themselves how moronic our officials are when it comes to basic op-sec.
All those claiming Boris Johnson to be a risk to national security wash your mouths out.
After 24 hours of waterboarding, the f***** wouldn't divulge his mobile phone PIN. Not least because he couldn't. Make him Foreign Secretary, and now!
Boris is definitely one of those people who uses the same password for every account and his phone pin is the same as credit card pin...with the failed thinking is ok because the password is some obscure latin or greek so nobody could guess it...
If all his accounts including credit cards are on one PIN and he's forgotten it, is that why he had to go to Richard Sharp to get some money?
Got to wonder where the Johnson story will go next. Thoughts of his running in a near-future by-election are nuts IMO, but the story's clearly not at an end yet.
Who even uses a PIN or ATM anymore for transactions? Both are obsolete. Use Apple Pay on phone or watch.
Boris must be a complete idiot if he persists in using cards.
Who? 90% of the population. Next question?
I should add there is a certain risk to both Apple and digital wallets as neither of them are regulated or come with government backed guarantees unlike banks and debit/credit cards. We're relying on Apple's goodwill.
Writing down you passcode, top level security.....the Chinese & Russians must piss themselves how moronic our officials are when it comes to basic op-sec.
All those claiming Boris Johnson to be a risk to national security wash your mouths out.
After 24 hours of waterboarding, the f***** wouldn't divulge his mobile phone PIN. Not least because he couldn't. Make him Foreign Secretary, and now!
Boris is definitely one of those people who uses the same password for every account and his phone pin is the same as credit card pin...with the failed thinking is ok because the password is some obscure latin or greek so nobody could guess it...
If all his accounts including credit cards are on one PIN and he's forgotten it, is that why he had to go to Richard Sharp to get some money?
Got to wonder where the Johnson story will go next. Thoughts of his running in a near-future by-election are nuts IMO, but the story's clearly not at an end yet.
Who even uses a PIN or ATM anymore for transactions? Both are obsolete. Use Apple Pay on phone or watch.
Boris must be a complete idiot if he persists in using cards.
Well that is a genuinely stupid comment since if you use contactless with a card you have to put it in and use your pin after a certain number of transactions or if the value is over £100.
So the answer is practically everyone.
Not for Android or Apple pay
Indeed. Amazes me that people don't even grasp this. Haven't taken a card out with me for years – they are utterly pointless nowadays.
I'm getting a distinct feeling of déjà vu reading this.
Indeed, it's stunning how the rank ignorance of established technologies continues on PB, among people who really ought to know better.
Oh, that's a bit harsh. I think you have a reasonable grasp of the technologies, just not of how most people use them.
Think you need to apply that comment to yourself TBH.
Well, duh. How could I apply it to myself when I've just revealed I didn't know how to set up Touch ID on Apple Pay?
Indeed.
The number of people who can’t spin up their own VPN, using a Docker container on their NAS box….
The annoying thing is, I can do most things with computers.
The point was, I seldom use Apple Pay (only really when I'm doing a shop on the way home from the gym) so I never bothered to find out if I could change it via another setting.
Yes.
My point was, that it is very easy to say - “technology x is easy, anyone who says they can’t is a moron or a liar”
Setting up contactless payment on a mobile is Deep Tech to a huge chunk of the population.
Most people don’t try stuff - they never explore the settings to tune the colour presentation on their TV etc.
Writing down you passcode, top level security.....the Chinese & Russians must piss themselves how moronic our officials are when it comes to basic op-sec.
All those claiming Boris Johnson to be a risk to national security wash your mouths out.
After 24 hours of waterboarding, the f***** wouldn't divulge his mobile phone PIN. Not least because he couldn't. Make him Foreign Secretary, and now!
Boris is definitely one of those people who uses the same password for every account and his phone pin is the same as credit card pin...with the failed thinking is ok because the password is some obscure latin or greek so nobody could guess it...
If all his accounts including credit cards are on one PIN and he's forgotten it, is that why he had to go to Richard Sharp to get some money?
Got to wonder where the Johnson story will go next. Thoughts of his running in a near-future by-election are nuts IMO, but the story's clearly not at an end yet.
Who even uses a PIN or ATM anymore for transactions? Both are obsolete. Use Apple Pay on phone or watch.
Boris must be a complete idiot if he persists in using cards.
Well that is a genuinely stupid comment since if you use contactless with a card you have to put it in and use your pin after a certain number of transactions or if the value is over £100.
So the answer is practically everyone.
Not for Android or Apple pay
Apple Pay demands my phone passcode when I use it, which I think of as a PIN. Is that unusual?
(Not that I mind, btw.)
It's a setting right?
Ah, it's under ID and passcode. I thought it would be under Wallet.
Although it doesn't matter a lot because I don't actually use it much.
If you use TouchID or FaceID to unlock your phone, that can also be used for Apple Pay. If you haven’t set them up, and you have only the PIN or passcode to open the phone, then Apple Pay will require that.
I'd set up Touch ID, but I hadn't set it up for Apple Pay.
I don't trust FaceID because I've got several cousins who look very like me and it works interchangeably on our devices as a result. It's not that I distrust *them* it just makes me feel nervous about how secure it is. If my phone was FaceID I'd keep the passcode only.
Writing down you passcode, top level security.....the Chinese & Russians must piss themselves how moronic our officials are when it comes to basic op-sec.
All those claiming Boris Johnson to be a risk to national security wash your mouths out.
After 24 hours of waterboarding, the f***** wouldn't divulge his mobile phone PIN. Not least because he couldn't. Make him Foreign Secretary, and now!
Boris is definitely one of those people who uses the same password for every account and his phone pin is the same as credit card pin...with the failed thinking is ok because the password is some obscure latin or greek so nobody could guess it...
If all his accounts including credit cards are on one PIN and he's forgotten it, is that why he had to go to Richard Sharp to get some money?
Got to wonder where the Johnson story will go next. Thoughts of his running in a near-future by-election are nuts IMO, but the story's clearly not at an end yet.
Who even uses a PIN or ATM anymore for transactions? Both are obsolete. Use Apple Pay on phone or watch.
Boris must be a complete idiot if he persists in using cards.
ATM machines (just for @Selebian) I agree, but PINs I have all over the place.
I took an ATM card with me on my cycling trip, just in case. I have just employed a gardener and didn't know how he wanted to be paid so I used the card to get some cash, in case that was what he wanted (he doesn't). The card is a year out of date so it was lucky he was happy with a bank transfer and that I didn't need it on my trip.
Talking about cash (and @Anabobazina TRIGGER WARNING) I hadn't realised that HMG had had to change their bill to provide a little more protection for cash users.
"Previously the Bill did not specify whether withdrawal and deposit facilities should be free, or whether consumers might have to pay a charge.
But through a late amendment to the Bill, called for by Which?, it will now ensure that people across the country can withdraw and deposit cash for free.
This means the FCA will have greater power over major banks and building societies to ensure reasonable free access to cash is preserved for those who need it."
Do we have a view on cheques? I very rarely receive them, but have recently received quite a few (HMRC, TV licence, British Gas, Virgin, etc) in the settling my fathers estate. Don't know why that should be different to normal particularly as some organisations who had to pay me were happy with me providing my bank details. Very odd.
My wife commented that her last stub in her cheque book was dated 2016. I had to look for my cheque book and the last cheque I wrote was 2010.
One further thought. After my first experiences, I'd always have a separate executry account - not just for the obvious reason of not muddling money with mine, but also because some of the cheques were to 'Executors of A B Carnyx Decd" or various wordings.
I've obviously been very lucky. So far all cheques have been made out in my name. All went into my account and I'm just keeping a separate spreadsheet. Mostly gone very smoothly and better than I would have thought. A few lost documents and Gas/Electricity suppliers have been a pain in the arse, but the rest have been very good (Council, Water, HMRC, etc).
I encountered an ice cream van in the middle of nowhere the other day when on a long, warm walk.
Aha, I thought – finally I am done for...
"Do you take Apple Pay?" I said, expecting a firm no.
"Of course," said the ice cream man.
Cash is dead.
I've had a couple of places recently that could only accept cash - one being my local Co-Op, after the **** scrotes took out BT's cables - again.
OTOH, a play centre is now card only. Except for all the games inside, that still take pound coins...
Edit: another being a care near the pier in Southwold at the weekend, where there Internet connection seemed to depend on where seagulls were in the sky. Sometimes they could accept cards, other times it was cash-only
Edit2: and a church I went into on Sunday had a tap-in donations screen, which was cool (and given thefts from cashboes in churches, probably a good idea). First time I'd seen that outside cathedrals.
I saw a busker recently who took apple pay. However, it was set up for a £2 donation, which seemed a bit optimistic. There's an interesting optimisation problem there - if you can only take donations of one quantum, what should that be to maximise income? My guess: 50p. I suspect more than four times as many people will donate 50p as will donate £2. That said, if its apple pay it's probably catering to a market more than averagely keen to part with its money ;-)
To me, that busker is on a level with a jaikie who insists that he will only accept smoked salmon sandwiches and Buckfast*. One thinks, shouldn't he be subsidising me?!
*actually, the M&S, if not quite Waitrose, option, on your actual West Central Scottish downtown.
Writing down you passcode, top level security.....the Chinese & Russians must piss themselves how moronic our officials are when it comes to basic op-sec.
All those claiming Boris Johnson to be a risk to national security wash your mouths out.
After 24 hours of waterboarding, the f***** wouldn't divulge his mobile phone PIN. Not least because he couldn't. Make him Foreign Secretary, and now!
Boris is definitely one of those people who uses the same password for every account and his phone pin is the same as credit card pin...with the failed thinking is ok because the password is some obscure latin or greek so nobody could guess it...
If all his accounts including credit cards are on one PIN and he's forgotten it, is that why he had to go to Richard Sharp to get some money?
Got to wonder where the Johnson story will go next. Thoughts of his running in a near-future by-election are nuts IMO, but the story's clearly not at an end yet.
Who even uses a PIN or ATM anymore for transactions? Both are obsolete. Use Apple Pay on phone or watch.
Boris must be a complete idiot if he persists in using cards.
Well that is a genuinely stupid comment since if you use contactless with a card you have to put it in and use your pin after a certain number of transactions or if the value is over £100.
So the answer is practically everyone.
Not for Android or Apple pay
Indeed. Amazes me that people don't even grasp this. Haven't taken a card out with me for years – they are utterly pointless nowadays.
I'm getting a distinct feeling of déjà vu reading this.
Indeed, it's stunning how the rank ignorance of established technologies continues on PB, among people who really ought to know better.
Oh, that's a bit harsh. I think you have a reasonable grasp of the technologies, just not of how most people use them.
Think you need to apply that comment to yourself TBH.
Well, duh. How could I apply it to myself when I've just revealed I didn't know how to set up Touch ID on Apple Pay?
Indeed.
The number of people who can’t spin up their own VPN, using a Docker container on their NAS box….
The annoying thing is, I can do most things with computers.
The point was, I seldom use Apple Pay (only really when I'm doing a shop on the way home from the gym) so I never bothered to find out if I could change it via another setting.
Yes.
My point was, that it is very easy to say - “technology x is easy, anyone who says they can’t is a moron or a liar”
Setting up contactless payment on a mobile is Deep Tech to a huge chunk of the population.
Most people don’t try stuff - they never explore the settings to tune the colour presentation on their TV etc.
And that is before you consider it requires everyone to keep a mobile tracking device on them at all times, not forget to charge it ever else no buying anything for you. Let big data hoover up all your purchase data etc.
Some of don't want to submit to intrusive surveillance, not because we are doing anything wrong but because its no one elses business. The same reason most of us close the curtains at night.
Writing down you passcode, top level security.....the Chinese & Russians must piss themselves how moronic our officials are when it comes to basic op-sec.
All those claiming Boris Johnson to be a risk to national security wash your mouths out.
After 24 hours of waterboarding, the f***** wouldn't divulge his mobile phone PIN. Not least because he couldn't. Make him Foreign Secretary, and now!
Boris is definitely one of those people who uses the same password for every account and his phone pin is the same as credit card pin...with the failed thinking is ok because the password is some obscure latin or greek so nobody could guess it...
If all his accounts including credit cards are on one PIN and he's forgotten it, is that why he had to go to Richard Sharp to get some money?
Got to wonder where the Johnson story will go next. Thoughts of his running in a near-future by-election are nuts IMO, but the story's clearly not at an end yet.
Who even uses a PIN or ATM anymore for transactions? Both are obsolete. Use Apple Pay on phone or watch.
Boris must be a complete idiot if he persists in using cards.
Well that is a genuinely stupid comment since if you use contactless with a card you have to put it in and use your pin after a certain number of transactions or if the value is over £100.
So the answer is practically everyone.
Not stupid at all. There's no limit on NFC transactions – Apple or Google etc.
Cards are almost a pointless as cash.
A total waste of space.
It’s fine 99% of the time. Perhaps even 99.99% of the time. Until you come down off a mountain walk, when you realise your phone is dead because it’s spent all day with the radio turned up trying to find a signal, and you need to get a taxi back to base several miles away, and end up with a long walk. Bonus points if you can’t buy water on the way.
Writing down you passcode, top level security.....the Chinese & Russians must piss themselves how moronic our officials are when it comes to basic op-sec.
All those claiming Boris Johnson to be a risk to national security wash your mouths out.
After 24 hours of waterboarding, the f***** wouldn't divulge his mobile phone PIN. Not least because he couldn't. Make him Foreign Secretary, and now!
Boris is definitely one of those people who uses the same password for every account and his phone pin is the same as credit card pin...with the failed thinking is ok because the password is some obscure latin or greek so nobody could guess it...
If all his accounts including credit cards are on one PIN and he's forgotten it, is that why he had to go to Richard Sharp to get some money?
Got to wonder where the Johnson story will go next. Thoughts of his running in a near-future by-election are nuts IMO, but the story's clearly not at an end yet.
Who even uses a PIN or ATM anymore for transactions? Both are obsolete. Use Apple Pay on phone or watch.
Boris must be a complete idiot if he persists in using cards.
Who? 90% of the population. Next question?
I should add there is a certain risk to both Apple and digital wallets as neither of them are regulated or come with government backed guarantees unlike banks and debit/credit cards. We're relying on Apple's goodwill.
Nick Palmer - About 1 in 4 American homes still have land lines. They are more common among the elderly -- no surprise -- and in the Northeast.
(Full disclosure: I have one, and like it enough so that I may keep it. I have a better phone than any smart phone I have seen. And, at almost 80 years old, I like the idea of having a back-up, in case of an emergency.)
Writing down you passcode, top level security.....the Chinese & Russians must piss themselves how moronic our officials are when it comes to basic op-sec.
All those claiming Boris Johnson to be a risk to national security wash your mouths out.
After 24 hours of waterboarding, the f***** wouldn't divulge his mobile phone PIN. Not least because he couldn't. Make him Foreign Secretary, and now!
Boris is definitely one of those people who uses the same password for every account and his phone pin is the same as credit card pin...with the failed thinking is ok because the password is some obscure latin or greek so nobody could guess it...
If all his accounts including credit cards are on one PIN and he's forgotten it, is that why he had to go to Richard Sharp to get some money?
Got to wonder where the Johnson story will go next. Thoughts of his running in a near-future by-election are nuts IMO, but the story's clearly not at an end yet.
Who even uses a PIN or ATM anymore for transactions? Both are obsolete. Use Apple Pay on phone or watch.
Boris must be a complete idiot if he persists in using cards.
Who? 90% of the population. Next question?
I should add there is a certain risk to both Apple and digital wallets as neither of them are regulated or come with government backed guarantees unlike banks and debit/credit cards. We're relying on Apple's goodwill.
Writing down you passcode, top level security.....the Chinese & Russians must piss themselves how moronic our officials are when it comes to basic op-sec.
All those claiming Boris Johnson to be a risk to national security wash your mouths out.
After 24 hours of waterboarding, the f***** wouldn't divulge his mobile phone PIN. Not least because he couldn't. Make him Foreign Secretary, and now!
Boris is definitely one of those people who uses the same password for every account and his phone pin is the same as credit card pin...with the failed thinking is ok because the password is some obscure latin or greek so nobody could guess it...
If all his accounts including credit cards are on one PIN and he's forgotten it, is that why he had to go to Richard Sharp to get some money?
Got to wonder where the Johnson story will go next. Thoughts of his running in a near-future by-election are nuts IMO, but the story's clearly not at an end yet.
Who even uses a PIN or ATM anymore for transactions? Both are obsolete. Use Apple Pay on phone or watch.
Boris must be a complete idiot if he persists in using cards.
ATM machines (just for @Selebian) I agree, but PINs I have all over the place.
I took an ATM card with me on my cycling trip, just in case. I have just employed a gardener and didn't know how he wanted to be paid so I used the card to get some cash, in case that was what he wanted (he doesn't). The card is a year out of date so it was lucky he was happy with a bank transfer and that I didn't need it on my trip.
Talking about cash (and @Anabobazina TRIGGER WARNING) I hadn't realised that HMG had had to change their bill to provide a little more protection for cash users.
"Previously the Bill did not specify whether withdrawal and deposit facilities should be free, or whether consumers might have to pay a charge.
But through a late amendment to the Bill, called for by Which?, it will now ensure that people across the country can withdraw and deposit cash for free.
This means the FCA will have greater power over major banks and building societies to ensure reasonable free access to cash is preserved for those who need it."
Good, I don't want to be charged when I have to trudge to the bank to deposit cash for those rude idiots who insist on transferring money they owe to me in stupid paper tokens.
That seems an odd thing to say. The only times I get given cash are on the vanishingly rare occasions I pay with it and get change. If you are not a retailer, your problem with sums of cash large enough to require banking is not going to be trudging, it's going to be the plod (money-laundering division). If you are a retailer, you are surely at liberty to stipulate card-only?
You can generally be card-only if you want to be. The law says that you must accept cash for a debt. If you can manage to drink the beer before anyone tells you it’s card-only…
Writing down you passcode, top level security.....the Chinese & Russians must piss themselves how moronic our officials are when it comes to basic op-sec.
All those claiming Boris Johnson to be a risk to national security wash your mouths out.
After 24 hours of waterboarding, the f***** wouldn't divulge his mobile phone PIN. Not least because he couldn't. Make him Foreign Secretary, and now!
Boris is definitely one of those people who uses the same password for every account and his phone pin is the same as credit card pin...with the failed thinking is ok because the password is some obscure latin or greek so nobody could guess it...
If all his accounts including credit cards are on one PIN and he's forgotten it, is that why he had to go to Richard Sharp to get some money?
Got to wonder where the Johnson story will go next. Thoughts of his running in a near-future by-election are nuts IMO, but the story's clearly not at an end yet.
Who even uses a PIN or ATM anymore for transactions? Both are obsolete. Use Apple Pay on phone or watch.
Boris must be a complete idiot if he persists in using cards.
ATM machines (just for @Selebian) I agree, but PINs I have all over the place.
I took an ATM card with me on my cycling trip, just in case. I have just employed a gardener and didn't know how he wanted to be paid so I used the card to get some cash, in case that was what he wanted (he doesn't). The card is a year out of date so it was lucky he was happy with a bank transfer and that I didn't need it on my trip.
Talking about cash (and @Anabobazina TRIGGER WARNING) I hadn't realised that HMG had had to change their bill to provide a little more protection for cash users.
"Previously the Bill did not specify whether withdrawal and deposit facilities should be free, or whether consumers might have to pay a charge.
But through a late amendment to the Bill, called for by Which?, it will now ensure that people across the country can withdraw and deposit cash for free.
This means the FCA will have greater power over major banks and building societies to ensure reasonable free access to cash is preserved for those who need it."
Do we have a view on cheques? I very rarely receive them, but have recently received quite a few (HMRC, TV licence, British Gas, Virgin, etc) in the settling my fathers estate. Don't know why that should be different to normal particularly as some organisations who had to pay me were happy with me providing my bank details. Very odd.
My wife commented that her last stub in her cheque book was dated 2016. I had to look for my cheque book and the last cheque I wrote was 2010.
One further thought. After my first experiences, I'd always have a separate executry account - not just for the obvious reason of not muddling money with mine, but also because some of the cheques were to 'Executors of A B Carnyx Decd" or various wordings.
I've obviously been very lucky. So far all cheques have been made out in my name. All went into my account and I'm just keeping a separate spreadsheet. Mostly gone very smoothly and better than I would have thought. A few lost documents and Gas/Electricity suppliers have been a pain in the arse, but the rest have been very good (Council, Water, HMRC, etc).
I know the feeling only too well!
I get the feeling that executry accounts are not as common as they were, partly for that reason, but there were enough payments specifically for that account for me to be very glad a coiuple of years back that I'd done a separate account which allowed payments in in the names of the executors and/or the deceased's estate.
I hope the house sale goes OK now - am slightly behind the times with how it is going?
Writing down you passcode, top level security.....the Chinese & Russians must piss themselves how moronic our officials are when it comes to basic op-sec.
All those claiming Boris Johnson to be a risk to national security wash your mouths out.
After 24 hours of waterboarding, the f***** wouldn't divulge his mobile phone PIN. Not least because he couldn't. Make him Foreign Secretary, and now!
Boris is definitely one of those people who uses the same password for every account and his phone pin is the same as credit card pin...with the failed thinking is ok because the password is some obscure latin or greek so nobody could guess it...
If all his accounts including credit cards are on one PIN and he's forgotten it, is that why he had to go to Richard Sharp to get some money?
Got to wonder where the Johnson story will go next. Thoughts of his running in a near-future by-election are nuts IMO, but the story's clearly not at an end yet.
Who even uses a PIN or ATM anymore for transactions? Both are obsolete. Use Apple Pay on phone or watch.
Boris must be a complete idiot if he persists in using cards.
ATM machines (just for @Selebian) I agree, but PINs I have all over the place.
I took an ATM card with me on my cycling trip, just in case. I have just employed a gardener and didn't know how he wanted to be paid so I used the card to get some cash, in case that was what he wanted (he doesn't). The card is a year out of date so it was lucky he was happy with a bank transfer and that I didn't need it on my trip.
Talking about cash (and @Anabobazina TRIGGER WARNING) I hadn't realised that HMG had had to change their bill to provide a little more protection for cash users.
"Previously the Bill did not specify whether withdrawal and deposit facilities should be free, or whether consumers might have to pay a charge.
But through a late amendment to the Bill, called for by Which?, it will now ensure that people across the country can withdraw and deposit cash for free.
This means the FCA will have greater power over major banks and building societies to ensure reasonable free access to cash is preserved for those who need it."
Do we have a view on cheques? I very rarely receive them, but have recently received quite a few (HMRC, TV licence, British Gas, Virgin, etc) in the settling my fathers estate. Don't know why that should be different to normal particularly as some organisations who had to pay me were happy with me providing my bank details. Very odd.
My wife commented that her last stub in her cheque book was dated 2016. I had to look for my cheque book and the last cheque I wrote was 2010.
I'm guessing for security reasons. They will send the cheque to the address they have on file.
Nope. Addressed to me at my address. They seem pretty good at updating their records when seeing a copy of a death certificate or probate document. Some specifically ask for my bank details and pay direct. Don't know why others don't.
I encountered an ice cream van in the middle of nowhere the other day when on a long, warm walk.
Aha, I thought – finally I am done for...
"Do you take Apple Pay?" I said, expecting a firm no.
"Of course," said the ice cream man.
Cash is dead.
I've had a couple of places recently that could only accept cash - one being my local Co-Op, after the **** scrotes took out BT's cables - again.
OTOH, a play centre is now card only. Except for all the games inside, that still take pound coins...
Edit: another being a care near the pier in Southwold at the weekend, where there Internet connection seemed to depend on where seagulls were in the sky. Sometimes they could accept cards, other times it was cash-only
Edit2: and a church I went into on Sunday had a tap-in donations screen, which was cool (and given thefts from cashboes in churches, probably a good idea). First time I'd seen that outside cathedrals.
I saw a busker recently who took apple pay. However, it was set up for a £2 donation, which seemed a bit optimistic. There's an interesting optimisation problem there - if you can only take donations of one quantum, what should that be to maximise income? My guess: 50p. I suspect more than four times as many people will donate 50p as will donate £2. That said, if its apple pay it's probably catering to a market more than averagely keen to part with its money ;-)
Many of the panhandling types in London now have one of the devices, that combined with a phone, creates a contactless payment terminal, which works with all phones, cards (Visa & Mastercard)
Writing down you passcode, top level security.....the Chinese & Russians must piss themselves how moronic our officials are when it comes to basic op-sec.
All those claiming Boris Johnson to be a risk to national security wash your mouths out.
After 24 hours of waterboarding, the f***** wouldn't divulge his mobile phone PIN. Not least because he couldn't. Make him Foreign Secretary, and now!
Boris is definitely one of those people who uses the same password for every account and his phone pin is the same as credit card pin...with the failed thinking is ok because the password is some obscure latin or greek so nobody could guess it...
If all his accounts including credit cards are on one PIN and he's forgotten it, is that why he had to go to Richard Sharp to get some money?
Got to wonder where the Johnson story will go next. Thoughts of his running in a near-future by-election are nuts IMO, but the story's clearly not at an end yet.
Who even uses a PIN or ATM anymore for transactions? Both are obsolete. Use Apple Pay on phone or watch.
Boris must be a complete idiot if he persists in using cards.
ATM machines (just for @Selebian) I agree, but PINs I have all over the place.
I took an ATM card with me on my cycling trip, just in case. I have just employed a gardener and didn't know how he wanted to be paid so I used the card to get some cash, in case that was what he wanted (he doesn't). The card is a year out of date so it was lucky he was happy with a bank transfer and that I didn't need it on my trip.
Talking about cash (and @Anabobazina TRIGGER WARNING) I hadn't realised that HMG had had to change their bill to provide a little more protection for cash users.
"Previously the Bill did not specify whether withdrawal and deposit facilities should be free, or whether consumers might have to pay a charge.
But through a late amendment to the Bill, called for by Which?, it will now ensure that people across the country can withdraw and deposit cash for free.
This means the FCA will have greater power over major banks and building societies to ensure reasonable free access to cash is preserved for those who need it."
Good, I don't want to be charged when I have to trudge to the bank to deposit cash for those rude idiots who insist on transferring money they owe to me in stupid paper tokens.
That seems an odd thing to say. The only times I get given cash are on the vanishingly rare occasions I pay with it and get change. If you are not a retailer, your problem with sums of cash large enough to require banking is not going to be trudging, it's going to be the plod (money-laundering division). If you are a retailer, you are surely at liberty to stipulate card-only?
I think we urgently need a French-style law requiring businesses to accept cash, whether they like the idea or not.
Results in Norfolk and Chippenham yesterday show a Conservative vote collapse to the Greens and Lib Dems respectively. The Greens have been doing will the last 8 weeks, I wonder whether they will do well enough at Selby next week, taking votes from Labour just enough to deprive Starmer of victory. They have a good base in Frome and could push Labour into fourth place at Somerton and Frome.
Writing down you passcode, top level security.....the Chinese & Russians must piss themselves how moronic our officials are when it comes to basic op-sec.
All those claiming Boris Johnson to be a risk to national security wash your mouths out.
After 24 hours of waterboarding, the f***** wouldn't divulge his mobile phone PIN. Not least because he couldn't. Make him Foreign Secretary, and now!
Boris is definitely one of those people who uses the same password for every account and his phone pin is the same as credit card pin...with the failed thinking is ok because the password is some obscure latin or greek so nobody could guess it...
If all his accounts including credit cards are on one PIN and he's forgotten it, is that why he had to go to Richard Sharp to get some money?
Got to wonder where the Johnson story will go next. Thoughts of his running in a near-future by-election are nuts IMO, but the story's clearly not at an end yet.
Who even uses a PIN or ATM anymore for transactions? Both are obsolete. Use Apple Pay on phone or watch.
Boris must be a complete idiot if he persists in using cards.
Well that is a genuinely stupid comment since if you use contactless with a card you have to put it in and use your pin after a certain number of transactions or if the value is over £100.
So the answer is practically everyone.
Not for Android or Apple pay
Apple Pay demands my phone passcode when I use it, which I think of as a PIN. Is that unusual?
(Not that I mind, btw.)
It's a setting right?
Ah, it's under ID and passcode. I thought it would be under Wallet.
Although it doesn't matter a lot because I don't actually use it much.
If you use TouchID or FaceID to unlock your phone, that can also be used for Apple Pay. If you haven’t set them up, and you have only the PIN or passcode to open the phone, then Apple Pay will require that.
I'd set up Touch ID, but I hadn't set it up for Apple Pay.
I don't trust FaceID because I've got several cousins who look very like me and it works interchangeably on our devices as a result. It's not that I distrust *them* it just makes me feel nervous about how secure it is. If my phone was FaceID I'd keep the passcode only.
Personally I’m going to buy three of the last phone Apple makes with TouchID. It’s a much better solution, except on a hot and humid day. Not that I ever see any of those!
So. Is the BBC biased politically (forget Huw Edwards) or not and if it is, which way?
I saw an old mate of mine last night. To the left, shall we say, and he was fuming that eg The Today Programme might as well be an arm of government.
Whereas from my right-leaning, civilised, thoughtful perspective I think the BBC leans left.
I dislike the fact that they always have to so maniacally strive for "balance" and "inclusivity" but I understand it also.
As they say if we're both convinced of our view then perhaps it is therefore doing something right.
Although annoying both left and right does not mean that the BBC is balanced.
FWIW I think the BBC tries very hard to be balanced on most things (not all - there is now no hint of skepticism left when reporting climate science, for instance, when some of the more out there claims/predictions ought to be at best queried). It does, however, tend to skew urban, metropolitan. I don't think it has a clue about the countryside and rural affairs, as shown by Countryfile, which is a programme about the countryside made by city dwellers, for city dwellers.
Yes there's plenty wrong with it.
And as for climate, my point to my friend was that they would never dare have someone from "the other side" to argue a different position on climate change.
When they ever did get someone from ‘the other side’, it would be a flat Earth fanatic rather than another scientist.
That may have been only partly their fault. FEFs so not have careers which they would endanger by voicing private doubts.
Which is actually a large part of the problem, that all the scientific research funding is on one side.
Balderdash. There’s research funding on the phenomenon, there’s also money for how to reduce CO2 production (either through technology and more efficiency, or through behaviour change), then there’s some on other approaches like carbon capture, and there’s some on how to mitigate the effects of climate change. So, all sorts of different positions on climate change are represented.
Results in Norfolk and Chippenham yesterday show a Conservative vote collapse to the Greens and Lib Dems respectively. The Greens have been doing will the last 8 weeks, I wonder whether they will do well enough at Selby next week, taking votes from Labour just enough to deprive Starmer of victory. They have a good base in Frome and could push Labour into fourth place at Somerton and Frome.
Writing down you passcode, top level security.....the Chinese & Russians must piss themselves how moronic our officials are when it comes to basic op-sec.
All those claiming Boris Johnson to be a risk to national security wash your mouths out.
After 24 hours of waterboarding, the f***** wouldn't divulge his mobile phone PIN. Not least because he couldn't. Make him Foreign Secretary, and now!
Boris is definitely one of those people who uses the same password for every account and his phone pin is the same as credit card pin...with the failed thinking is ok because the password is some obscure latin or greek so nobody could guess it...
If all his accounts including credit cards are on one PIN and he's forgotten it, is that why he had to go to Richard Sharp to get some money?
Got to wonder where the Johnson story will go next. Thoughts of his running in a near-future by-election are nuts IMO, but the story's clearly not at an end yet.
Who even uses a PIN or ATM anymore for transactions? Both are obsolete. Use Apple Pay on phone or watch.
Boris must be a complete idiot if he persists in using cards.
ATM machines (just for @Selebian) I agree, but PINs I have all over the place.
I took an ATM card with me on my cycling trip, just in case. I have just employed a gardener and didn't know how he wanted to be paid so I used the card to get some cash, in case that was what he wanted (he doesn't). The card is a year out of date so it was lucky he was happy with a bank transfer and that I didn't need it on my trip.
Talking about cash (and @Anabobazina TRIGGER WARNING) I hadn't realised that HMG had had to change their bill to provide a little more protection for cash users.
"Previously the Bill did not specify whether withdrawal and deposit facilities should be free, or whether consumers might have to pay a charge.
But through a late amendment to the Bill, called for by Which?, it will now ensure that people across the country can withdraw and deposit cash for free.
This means the FCA will have greater power over major banks and building societies to ensure reasonable free access to cash is preserved for those who need it."
Good, I don't want to be charged when I have to trudge to the bank to deposit cash for those rude idiots who insist on transferring money they owe to me in stupid paper tokens.
That seems an odd thing to say. The only times I get given cash are on the vanishingly rare occasions I pay with it and get change. If you are not a retailer, your problem with sums of cash large enough to require banking is not going to be trudging, it's going to be the plod (money-laundering division). If you are a retailer, you are surely at liberty to stipulate card-only?
You can generally be card-only if you want to be. The law says that you must accept cash for a debt. If you can manage to drink the beer before anyone tells you it’s card-only…
I think this one is generational, geographical and situational. Cheques are going out fast, but I would bet they still are available for current account holders, and used by some government agencies in 10 years time.
Debit cards will be with us for ages; relying on phone technology relies on 100% of the population having it, remembering to bring it and several stages of reliability. We are years off that.
Cash is great. I know places that only take cash. Children, small gifts, tips are all things where cash is good. In my small northern town I much prefer cash for smaller transactions in small shops, which I do all the time. And it can't fail technically. I think it will still be around in 20 years time, though I am sure in London it will be archaic.
Writing down you passcode, top level security.....the Chinese & Russians must piss themselves how moronic our officials are when it comes to basic op-sec.
All those claiming Boris Johnson to be a risk to national security wash your mouths out.
After 24 hours of waterboarding, the f***** wouldn't divulge his mobile phone PIN. Not least because he couldn't. Make him Foreign Secretary, and now!
Boris is definitely one of those people who uses the same password for every account and his phone pin is the same as credit card pin...with the failed thinking is ok because the password is some obscure latin or greek so nobody could guess it...
If all his accounts including credit cards are on one PIN and he's forgotten it, is that why he had to go to Richard Sharp to get some money?
Got to wonder where the Johnson story will go next. Thoughts of his running in a near-future by-election are nuts IMO, but the story's clearly not at an end yet.
Who even uses a PIN or ATM anymore for transactions? Both are obsolete. Use Apple Pay on phone or watch.
Boris must be a complete idiot if he persists in using cards.
Well that is a genuinely stupid comment since if you use contactless with a card you have to put it in and use your pin after a certain number of transactions or if the value is over £100.
So the answer is practically everyone.
Not stupid at all. There's no limit on NFC transactions – Apple or Google etc.
Cards are almost a pointless as cash.
A total waste of space.
It’s fine 99% of the time. Perhaps even 99.99% of the time. Until you come down off a mountain walk, when you realise your phone is dead because it’s spent all day with the radio turned up trying to find a signal, and you need to get a taxi back to base several miles away, and end up with a long walk. Bonus points if you can’t buy water on the way.
How are you summoning the taxi to K2 base camp if your phone is dead? Once you're in the taxi you can charge your because all taxi drivers are required, by law, to carry USB cables.
This reminds me of the relentless search for esoteric sets of circumstance that would cause people to be starved to death by the ULEZ.
So. Is the BBC biased politically (forget Huw Edwards) or not and if it is, which way?
I saw an old mate of mine last night. To the left, shall we say, and he was fuming that eg The Today Programme might as well be an arm of government.
Whereas from my right-leaning, civilised, thoughtful perspective I think the BBC leans left.
I dislike the fact that they always have to so maniacally strive for "balance" and "inclusivity" but I understand it also.
As they say if we're both convinced of our view then perhaps it is therefore doing something right.
Although annoying both left and right does not mean that the BBC is balanced.
FWIW I think the BBC tries very hard to be balanced on most things (not all - there is now no hint of skepticism left when reporting climate science, for instance, when some of the more out there claims/predictions ought to be at best queried). It does, however, tend to skew urban, metropolitan. I don't think it has a clue about the countryside and rural affairs, as shown by Countryfile, which is a programme about the countryside made by city dwellers, for city dwellers.
Yes there's plenty wrong with it.
And as for climate, my point to my friend was that they would never dare have someone from "the other side" to argue a different position on climate change.
When they ever did get someone from ‘the other side’, it would be a flat Earth fanatic rather than another scientist.
That may have been only partly their fault. FEFs so not have careers which they would endanger by voicing private doubts.
Which is actually a large part of the problem, that all the scientific research funding is on one side.
The scientific research funding follows the scientific evidence.
The vested interest funding, well there's been plenty of that for climate 'sceptics'. And probably much more lucrative for those involved.
(I do find the idea of funding bias bizarre. It's in no government's interest to fund only one side of climate science, if there were really two sides. Climate science as it stands is a massive headache for governments - it means taxing/regulating things that people like, in really unpopular areas. There's a massive incentive for governments to fund any science that would question the IPCC conclusions - making it all go away would solve a whole load of political problems. Unfortunately, science doesn't work like that - you can't just get the answers you want because if you do other people are going to point out what you've done and it's easy* for other groups to check)
*in most areas. Far less so in my field of epidemiology where we cannot share or publish the patient-level data for others to verify, due to entirely legitimate data protection concerns. Other groups could request the same data, but I'm not sure you'd get that far on public interest grounds to simply verify pre-existing research. We need more like openSAFELY where anyone can run their own code to check conclusions. This would be possible if e.g. NHS Digital had a service to hold copies of supplied data and run, on demand (at low fee) code on it and provide the results (there would still be a need to ensure no sensitive disclosure in analysis results, which is probably why this hasn't happened).
"Points" from someone whose head is obviously completely up the system.
The points about funding are definetely valid, even if they don't resolve the 'groupthink amongst academics' problem.
Yep, there's definite scope for problems there. One thing becomes accepted and everyone else takes it as read. We've seen that often enough - but we've seen that often enough because eventually someone shows that's not how things work afterall.
Again, I'm long out of this field and wasn't that closely involved to start with, but I saw a lot of disagreement among climate scientists on how the feedbacks worked and interacted. Plenty of 'out there' ideas being presented where if thing A works differently to the general perception then thing B will happen and we can test that witthin 5-10 years etc. I think there are enough people with different backgrounds in different centres studying data from different sources with different designs to reduce the risk of too much groupthink here.
I may be wrong, of course and maybe there are more people training in 'climate science' at a lower level and being taught 'truths'. The nice thing 15 years ago, which may or may not still be the case, was that climate research was brining together people from a lot of disparate disciplines with different ideas and, in most cases, not a great deal of formal training in any accepted truth of the field. The main danger was that most people on the modelling side were working on a limited number of base models, so a fundamental error in one base model could lead to errors in many people's research. But, if so, there would be a whole lot of research that quickly diverged from new observations, unless you were really unlucky. There are also, of course, a lot of people not working on models at all, but working on comparing model predictions, forwards or backwards with observations on the ground and finding better ways of doing those observations.
My concern with it all is that right now, dissent is not allowed. We are at a stage whereby no one would put their heads above the parapet. Well that means that the overwhelming majority - thousands upon thousands - of climate scientists agree hence it is settled. But without going all Galileo about it is that we are in a period of absolute orthodoxy whereby dissenting views are simply not entertained.
No one disputes that the temperatures are rising but it is modelling that is telling us what happens next. Is it like cigarettes where a link has been shown to exist? Not being a climate scientist I have no idea.
I just feel uncomfortable that there is no Jeremy Paxman ("why is this lying bastard lying to me") to question it all. Are all those on here, for example, comfortable not wanting to question what is, in the end, a prediction based upon modelling and hence originates in the human mind.
This is a fantasy put around by right-wing commentators. As you say, no one disputes that temperatures are rising: the evidence there is unavoidable. That this is largely caused by human activity producing greenhouse gases is also very clear. But what happens next, however, is very much discussed and argued over. There is plenty of dissent. How different factors interact, how we should model future change, what’s the best approach to deal with the problem, all extensively debated.
However, the point is that temperatures are already up a worrying amount, so when that’s your starting point, whether things will get much worse or just slightly worse doesn’t change that they are already bad.
"The fantasy put about..."
LOL & QED
The world has warmed previously when presumably it wasn't on account of human activity. It is warming again now and that is coinciding with us pumping huge amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. And it may well be that the current warming is due to us. But we don't know how much, nor exactly what effect it is having in total when other factors are taken into account.
For example, does warming lead to more evaporation and more cloud cover, reflecting more incident energy from the sun back into space? Does warming kill vegetation and increase desertification, which is also a better reflector of incident energy back into space than plants are?
We don't know the future, we model it. And we model it extremely diligently. But it is only a model and any model is only as good as its inputs. If I model a balance sheet for example I know that I can fiddle faddle, say, working capital requirements and associated fundraising requirements. All my own work.
And the thing which you are illustrating is how sad it is that today we all are supposed to accept the orthodoxy with dissenters chastised and ridiculed. We have of course been here before in history but let's not over-dramatise things, right, I mean we are only talking about extinction of the human race. Something that you, by your actions, btw, aren't all *that* bothered about.
All scientists can ever do is make predictions and see how well they turn out.
The predictions of the 1990 models didn't play out perfectly (+0.4 degrees compared with +0.55 degrees) but they are not far off. Close enough to be able to say that the big picture story is right and everything else is sorting out details.
How right do the scientists have to be for how long?
Yep good question. I don't know. In climate/geological terms of course 30 years is tiny but let's say that there was "natural" warming. (And cooling, such as the planet has seen for the past XXXXXXX years). What if the scientists are imposing their models on an existing trajectory ie making observations not predictions.
The key here is rate of change. Natural heating and cooling occurs in geological timescales*, while recent warming has occurred measurably over a matter of a few decades.
The fact half the C02 ever released into the atmosphere by mankind has been since I graduated Medical School, and 85% since WW2 ended may be the reason.
* barring massive volcanic eruption or asteroid impact.
Nick Palmer - About 1 in 4 American homes still have land lines. They are more common among the elderly -- no surprise -- and in the Northeast.
(Full disclosure: I have one, and like it enough so that I may keep it. I have a better phone than any smart phone I have seen. And, at almost 80 years old, I like the idea of having a back-up, in case of an emergency.)
Writing down you passcode, top level security.....the Chinese & Russians must piss themselves how moronic our officials are when it comes to basic op-sec.
All those claiming Boris Johnson to be a risk to national security wash your mouths out.
After 24 hours of waterboarding, the f***** wouldn't divulge his mobile phone PIN. Not least because he couldn't. Make him Foreign Secretary, and now!
Boris is definitely one of those people who uses the same password for every account and his phone pin is the same as credit card pin...with the failed thinking is ok because the password is some obscure latin or greek so nobody could guess it...
If all his accounts including credit cards are on one PIN and he's forgotten it, is that why he had to go to Richard Sharp to get some money?
Got to wonder where the Johnson story will go next. Thoughts of his running in a near-future by-election are nuts IMO, but the story's clearly not at an end yet.
Who even uses a PIN or ATM anymore for transactions? Both are obsolete. Use Apple Pay on phone or watch.
Boris must be a complete idiot if he persists in using cards.
Well that is a genuinely stupid comment since if you use contactless with a card you have to put it in and use your pin after a certain number of transactions or if the value is over £100.
So the answer is practically everyone.
Not stupid at all. There's no limit on NFC transactions – Apple or Google etc.
Cards are almost a pointless as cash.
A total waste of space.
It’s fine 99% of the time. Perhaps even 99.99% of the time. Until you come down off a mountain walk, when you realise your phone is dead because it’s spent all day with the radio turned up trying to find a signal, and you need to get a taxi back to base several miles away, and end up with a long walk. Bonus points if you can’t buy water on the way.
How are you summoning the taxi to K2 base camp if your phone is dead? Once you're in the taxi you can charge your because all taxi drivers are required, by law, to carry USB cables.
This reminds me of the relentless search for esoteric sets of circumstance that would cause people to be starved to death by the ULEZ.
The Metropolitan Police Public Carriage Office controls Nepali taxicabs?
Writing down you passcode, top level security.....the Chinese & Russians must piss themselves how moronic our officials are when it comes to basic op-sec.
All those claiming Boris Johnson to be a risk to national security wash your mouths out.
After 24 hours of waterboarding, the f***** wouldn't divulge his mobile phone PIN. Not least because he couldn't. Make him Foreign Secretary, and now!
Boris is definitely one of those people who uses the same password for every account and his phone pin is the same as credit card pin...with the failed thinking is ok because the password is some obscure latin or greek so nobody could guess it...
If all his accounts including credit cards are on one PIN and he's forgotten it, is that why he had to go to Richard Sharp to get some money?
Got to wonder where the Johnson story will go next. Thoughts of his running in a near-future by-election are nuts IMO, but the story's clearly not at an end yet.
Who even uses a PIN or ATM anymore for transactions? Both are obsolete. Use Apple Pay on phone or watch.
Boris must be a complete idiot if he persists in using cards.
ATM machines (just for @Selebian) I agree, but PINs I have all over the place.
I took an ATM card with me on my cycling trip, just in case. I have just employed a gardener and didn't know how he wanted to be paid so I used the card to get some cash, in case that was what he wanted (he doesn't). The card is a year out of date so it was lucky he was happy with a bank transfer and that I didn't need it on my trip.
Talking about cash (and @Anabobazina TRIGGER WARNING) I hadn't realised that HMG had had to change their bill to provide a little more protection for cash users.
"Previously the Bill did not specify whether withdrawal and deposit facilities should be free, or whether consumers might have to pay a charge.
But through a late amendment to the Bill, called for by Which?, it will now ensure that people across the country can withdraw and deposit cash for free.
This means the FCA will have greater power over major banks and building societies to ensure reasonable free access to cash is preserved for those who need it."
Good, I don't want to be charged when I have to trudge to the bank to deposit cash for those rude idiots who insist on transferring money they owe to me in stupid paper tokens.
That seems an odd thing to say. The only times I get given cash are on the vanishingly rare occasions I pay with it and get change. If you are not a retailer, your problem with sums of cash large enough to require banking is not going to be trudging, it's going to be the plod (money-laundering division). If you are a retailer, you are surely at liberty to stipulate card-only?
I think we urgently need a French-style law requiring businesses to accept cash, whether they like the idea or not.
Writing down you passcode, top level security.....the Chinese & Russians must piss themselves how moronic our officials are when it comes to basic op-sec.
All those claiming Boris Johnson to be a risk to national security wash your mouths out.
After 24 hours of waterboarding, the f***** wouldn't divulge his mobile phone PIN. Not least because he couldn't. Make him Foreign Secretary, and now!
Boris is definitely one of those people who uses the same password for every account and his phone pin is the same as credit card pin...with the failed thinking is ok because the password is some obscure latin or greek so nobody could guess it...
If all his accounts including credit cards are on one PIN and he's forgotten it, is that why he had to go to Richard Sharp to get some money?
Got to wonder where the Johnson story will go next. Thoughts of his running in a near-future by-election are nuts IMO, but the story's clearly not at an end yet.
Who even uses a PIN or ATM anymore for transactions? Both are obsolete. Use Apple Pay on phone or watch.
Boris must be a complete idiot if he persists in using cards.
Well that is a genuinely stupid comment since if you use contactless with a card you have to put it in and use your pin after a certain number of transactions or if the value is over £100.
So the answer is practically everyone.
Not stupid at all. There's no limit on NFC transactions – Apple or Google etc.
Cards are almost a pointless as cash.
A total waste of space.
It’s fine 99% of the time. Perhaps even 99.99% of the time. Until you come down off a mountain walk, when you realise your phone is dead because it’s spent all day with the radio turned up trying to find a signal, and you need to get a taxi back to base several miles away, and end up with a long walk. Bonus points if you can’t buy water on the way.
For that reason and many others you should ALWAYS do this the other way round: taxi out to the end point, walk back.
So. Is the BBC biased politically (forget Huw Edwards) or not and if it is, which way?
I saw an old mate of mine last night. To the left, shall we say, and he was fuming that eg The Today Programme might as well be an arm of government.
Whereas from my right-leaning, civilised, thoughtful perspective I think the BBC leans left.
I dislike the fact that they always have to so maniacally strive for "balance" and "inclusivity" but I understand it also.
As they say if we're both convinced of our view then perhaps it is therefore doing something right.
Although annoying both left and right does not mean that the BBC is balanced.
FWIW I think the BBC tries very hard to be balanced on most things (not all - there is now no hint of skepticism left when reporting climate science, for instance, when some of the more out there claims/predictions ought to be at best queried). It does, however, tend to skew urban, metropolitan. I don't think it has a clue about the countryside and rural affairs, as shown by Countryfile, which is a programme about the countryside made by city dwellers, for city dwellers.
Yes there's plenty wrong with it.
And as for climate, my point to my friend was that they would never dare have someone from "the other side" to argue a different position on climate change.
When they ever did get someone from ‘the other side’, it would be a flat Earth fanatic rather than another scientist.
That may have been only partly their fault. FEFs so not have careers which they would endanger by voicing private doubts.
Which is actually a large part of the problem, that all the scientific research funding is on one side.
The scientific research funding follows the scientific evidence.
The vested interest funding, well there's been plenty of that for climate 'sceptics'. And probably much more lucrative for those involved.
(I do find the idea of funding bias bizarre. It's in no government's interest to fund only one side of climate science, if there were really two sides. Climate science as it stands is a massive headache for governments - it means taxing/regulating things that people like, in really unpopular areas. There's a massive incentive for governments to fund any science that would question the IPCC conclusions - making it all go away would solve a whole load of political problems. Unfortunately, science doesn't work like that - you can't just get the answers you want because if you do other people are going to point out what you've done and it's easy* for other groups to check)
*in most areas. Far less so in my field of epidemiology where we cannot share or publish the patient-level data for others to verify, due to entirely legitimate data protection concerns. Other groups could request the same data, but I'm not sure you'd get that far on public interest grounds to simply verify pre-existing research. We need more like openSAFELY where anyone can run their own code to check conclusions. This would be possible if e.g. NHS Digital had a service to hold copies of supplied data and run, on demand (at low fee) code on it and provide the results (there would still be a need to ensure no sensitive disclosure in analysis results, which is probably why this hasn't happened).
"Points" from someone whose head is obviously completely up the system.
The points about funding are definetely valid, even if they don't resolve the 'groupthink amongst academics' problem.
Yep, there's definite scope for problems there. One thing becomes accepted and everyone else takes it as read. We've seen that often enough - but we've seen that often enough because eventually someone shows that's not how things work afterall.
Again, I'm long out of this field and wasn't that closely involved to start with, but I saw a lot of disagreement among climate scientists on how the feedbacks worked and interacted. Plenty of 'out there' ideas being presented where if thing A works differently to the general perception then thing B will happen and we can test that witthin 5-10 years etc. I think there are enough people with different backgrounds in different centres studying data from different sources with different designs to reduce the risk of too much groupthink here.
I may be wrong, of course and maybe there are more people training in 'climate science' at a lower level and being taught 'truths'. The nice thing 15 years ago, which may or may not still be the case, was that climate research was brining together people from a lot of disparate disciplines with different ideas and, in most cases, not a great deal of formal training in any accepted truth of the field. The main danger was that most people on the modelling side were working on a limited number of base models, so a fundamental error in one base model could lead to errors in many people's research. But, if so, there would be a whole lot of research that quickly diverged from new observations, unless you were really unlucky. There are also, of course, a lot of people not working on models at all, but working on comparing model predictions, forwards or backwards with observations on the ground and finding better ways of doing those observations.
My concern with it all is that right now, dissent is not allowed. We are at a stage whereby no one would put their heads above the parapet. Well that means that the overwhelming majority - thousands upon thousands - of climate scientists agree hence it is settled. But without going all Galileo about it is that we are in a period of absolute orthodoxy whereby dissenting views are simply not entertained.
No one disputes that the temperatures are rising but it is modelling that is telling us what happens next. Is it like cigarettes where a link has been shown to exist? Not being a climate scientist I have no idea.
I just feel uncomfortable that there is no Jeremy Paxman ("why is this lying bastard lying to me") to question it all. Are all those on here, for example, comfortable not wanting to question what is, in the end, a prediction based upon modelling and hence originates in the human mind.
This is a fantasy put around by right-wing commentators. As you say, no one disputes that temperatures are rising: the evidence there is unavoidable. That this is largely caused by human activity producing greenhouse gases is also very clear. But what happens next, however, is very much discussed and argued over. There is plenty of dissent. How different factors interact, how we should model future change, what’s the best approach to deal with the problem, all extensively debated.
However, the point is that temperatures are already up a worrying amount, so when that’s your starting point, whether things will get much worse or just slightly worse doesn’t change that they are already bad.
"The fantasy put about..."
LOL & QED
The world has warmed previously when presumably it wasn't on account of human activity. It is warming again now and that is coinciding with us pumping huge amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. And it may well be that the current warming is due to us. But we don't know how much, nor exactly what effect it is having in total when other factors are taken into account.
For example, does warming lead to more evaporation and more cloud cover, reflecting more incident energy from the sun back into space? Does warming kill vegetation and increase desertification, which is also a better reflector of incident energy back into space than plants are?
We don't know the future, we model it. And we model it extremely diligently. But it is only a model and any model is only as good as its inputs. If I model a balance sheet for example I know that I can fiddle faddle, say, working capital requirements and associated fundraising requirements. All my own work.
And the thing which you are illustrating is how sad it is that today we all are supposed to accept the orthodoxy with dissenters chastised and ridiculed. We have of course been here before in history but let's not over-dramatise things, right, I mean we are only talking about extinction of the human race. Something that you, by your actions, btw, aren't all *that* bothered about.
All scientists can ever do is make predictions and see how well they turn out.
The predictions of the 1990 models didn't play out perfectly (+0.4 degrees compared with +0.55 degrees) but they are not far off. Close enough to be able to say that the big picture story is right and everything else is sorting out details.
How right do the scientists have to be for how long?
Yep good question. I don't know. In climate/geological terms of course 30 years is tiny but let's say that there was "natural" warming. (And cooling, such as the planet has seen for the past XXXXXXX years). What if the scientists are imposing their models on an existing trajectory ie making observations not predictions.
The key here is rate of change. Natural heating and cooling occurs in geological timescales*, while recent warming has occurred measurably over a matter of a few decades.
The fact half the C02 ever released into the atmosphere by mankind has been since I graduated Medical School, and 85% since WW2 ended may be the reason.
* barring massive volcanic eruption or asteroid impact.
Yes, at some point you have to apply Occam's razor. While the possibility always remains open that some as yet unidentified process has made the climate suddenly start to warm at breakneck pace coinciding with a sudden increase in greenhouse gases, the most obvious explanation - that the greenhouse gases are causing the warming - is most probably the correct one.
Nick Palmer - About 1 in 4 American homes still have land lines. They are more common among the elderly -- no surprise -- and in the Northeast.
(Full disclosure: I have one, and like it enough so that I may keep it. I have a better phone than any smart phone I have seen. And, at almost 80 years old, I like the idea of having a back-up, in case of an emergency.)
Probably 3/4 here in the UK.
How do the others in US get internet?!
Hmm - depends how you define this one, I've got a landline in theory off my FTTP but no actual phone connected.
The frontline NATO states have no time for baldy Ben's talk of ingratitude.
Finnish foreign minister Elina Valtonen tells @felschwartz that “we in the west need to understand that obviously, this is not charity because Ukraine is fighting for us. They are fighting for our liberty and the European security architecture.” https://twitter.com/ChristopherJM/status/1679744886822649856
So. Is the BBC biased politically (forget Huw Edwards) or not and if it is, which way?
I saw an old mate of mine last night. To the left, shall we say, and he was fuming that eg The Today Programme might as well be an arm of government.
Whereas from my right-leaning, civilised, thoughtful perspective I think the BBC leans left.
I dislike the fact that they always have to so maniacally strive for "balance" and "inclusivity" but I understand it also.
As they say if we're both convinced of our view then perhaps it is therefore doing something right.
Although annoying both left and right does not mean that the BBC is balanced.
FWIW I think the BBC tries very hard to be balanced on most things (not all - there is now no hint of skepticism left when reporting climate science, for instance, when some of the more out there claims/predictions ought to be at best queried). It does, however, tend to skew urban, metropolitan. I don't think it has a clue about the countryside and rural affairs, as shown by Countryfile, which is a programme about the countryside made by city dwellers, for city dwellers.
Yes there's plenty wrong with it.
And as for climate, my point to my friend was that they would never dare have someone from "the other side" to argue a different position on climate change.
When they ever did get someone from ‘the other side’, it would be a flat Earth fanatic rather than another scientist.
That may have been only partly their fault. FEFs so not have careers which they would endanger by voicing private doubts.
Which is actually a large part of the problem, that all the scientific research funding is on one side.
The scientific research funding follows the scientific evidence.
The vested interest funding, well there's been plenty of that for climate 'sceptics'. And probably much more lucrative for those involved.
(I do find the idea of funding bias bizarre. It's in no government's interest to fund only one side of climate science, if there were really two sides. Climate science as it stands is a massive headache for governments - it means taxing/regulating things that people like, in really unpopular areas. There's a massive incentive for governments to fund any science that would question the IPCC conclusions - making it all go away would solve a whole load of political problems. Unfortunately, science doesn't work like that - you can't just get the answers you want because if you do other people are going to point out what you've done and it's easy* for other groups to check)
*in most areas. Far less so in my field of epidemiology where we cannot share or publish the patient-level data for others to verify, due to entirely legitimate data protection concerns. Other groups could request the same data, but I'm not sure you'd get that far on public interest grounds to simply verify pre-existing research. We need more like openSAFELY where anyone can run their own code to check conclusions. This would be possible if e.g. NHS Digital had a service to hold copies of supplied data and run, on demand (at low fee) code on it and provide the results (there would still be a need to ensure no sensitive disclosure in analysis results, which is probably why this hasn't happened).
"Points" from someone whose head is obviously completely up the system.
The points about funding are definetely valid, even if they don't resolve the 'groupthink amongst academics' problem.
Yep, there's definite scope for problems there. One thing becomes accepted and everyone else takes it as read. We've seen that often enough - but we've seen that often enough because eventually someone shows that's not how things work afterall.
Again, I'm long out of this field and wasn't that closely involved to start with, but I saw a lot of disagreement among climate scientists on how the feedbacks worked and interacted. Plenty of 'out there' ideas being presented where if thing A works differently to the general perception then thing B will happen and we can test that witthin 5-10 years etc. I think there are enough people with different backgrounds in different centres studying data from different sources with different designs to reduce the risk of too much groupthink here.
I may be wrong, of course and maybe there are more people training in 'climate science' at a lower level and being taught 'truths'. The nice thing 15 years ago, which may or may not still be the case, was that climate research was brining together people from a lot of disparate disciplines with different ideas and, in most cases, not a great deal of formal training in any accepted truth of the field. The main danger was that most people on the modelling side were working on a limited number of base models, so a fundamental error in one base model could lead to errors in many people's research. But, if so, there would be a whole lot of research that quickly diverged from new observations, unless you were really unlucky. There are also, of course, a lot of people not working on models at all, but working on comparing model predictions, forwards or backwards with observations on the ground and finding better ways of doing those observations.
My concern with it all is that right now, dissent is not allowed. We are at a stage whereby no one would put their heads above the parapet. Well that means that the overwhelming majority - thousands upon thousands - of climate scientists agree hence it is settled. But without going all Galileo about it is that we are in a period of absolute orthodoxy whereby dissenting views are simply not entertained.
No one disputes that the temperatures are rising but it is modelling that is telling us what happens next. Is it like cigarettes where a link has been shown to exist? Not being a climate scientist I have no idea.
I just feel uncomfortable that there is no Jeremy Paxman ("why is this lying bastard lying to me") to question it all. Are all those on here, for example, comfortable not wanting to question what is, in the end, a prediction based upon modelling and hence originates in the human mind.
This is a fantasy put around by right-wing commentators. As you say, no one disputes that temperatures are rising: the evidence there is unavoidable. That this is largely caused by human activity producing greenhouse gases is also very clear. But what happens next, however, is very much discussed and argued over. There is plenty of dissent. How different factors interact, how we should model future change, what’s the best approach to deal with the problem, all extensively debated.
However, the point is that temperatures are already up a worrying amount, so when that’s your starting point, whether things will get much worse or just slightly worse doesn’t change that they are already bad.
"The fantasy put about..."
LOL & QED
The world has warmed previously when presumably it wasn't on account of human activity. It is warming again now and that is coinciding with us pumping huge amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. And it may well be that the current warming is due to us. But we don't know how much, nor exactly what effect it is having in total when other factors are taken into account.
For example, does warming lead to more evaporation and more cloud cover, reflecting more incident energy from the sun back into space? Does warming kill vegetation and increase desertification, which is also a better reflector of incident energy back into space than plants are?
We don't know the future, we model it. And we model it extremely diligently. But it is only a model and any model is only as good as its inputs. If I model a balance sheet for example I know that I can fiddle faddle, say, working capital requirements and associated fundraising requirements. All my own work.
And the thing which you are illustrating is how sad it is that today we all are supposed to accept the orthodoxy with dissenters chastised and ridiculed. We have of course been here before in history but let's not over-dramatise things, right, I mean we are only talking about extinction of the human race. Something that you, by your actions, btw, aren't all *that* bothered about.
All scientists can ever do is make predictions and see how well they turn out.
The predictions of the 1990 models didn't play out perfectly (+0.4 degrees compared with +0.55 degrees) but they are not far off. Close enough to be able to say that the big picture story is right and everything else is sorting out details.
How right do the scientists have to be for how long?
Yep good question. I don't know. In climate/geological terms of course 30 years is tiny but let's say that there was "natural" warming. (And cooling, such as the planet has seen for the past XXXXXXX years). What if the scientists are imposing their models on an existing trajectory ie making observations not predictions.
The key here is rate of change. Natural heating and cooling occurs in geological timescales*, while recent warming has occurred measurably over a matter of a few decades.
The fact half the C02 ever released into the atmosphere by mankind has been since I graduated Medical School, and 85% since WW2 ended may be the reason.
* barring massive volcanic eruption or asteroid impact.
Not true. And this is one of the annoying 'facts' that has crept into the argument. Rates of change now are no different to those in the past. It is only in recent years we have come to realise that entry and exit from glaciations and other less extreme warming and cooling events can occur in decades rather than centuries. The ending of the Younger Dryas involved a 9 degree increase in temperature in just over a decade.
Mortimer - Cable, WiFi, and, recently, fiber. Companies often offer "bundles", which may include a landline, in various forms. Someone who watches sports a lot would be likely to get a cable bundle.
(All three are available to me. Fiber is probably the best, technically, but the company offering it has so annoyed me that I am -- perhaps temporarily -- using a smart phone as a "hot spot", instead.)
So. Is the BBC biased politically (forget Huw Edwards) or not and if it is, which way?
I saw an old mate of mine last night. To the left, shall we say, and he was fuming that eg The Today Programme might as well be an arm of government.
Whereas from my right-leaning, civilised, thoughtful perspective I think the BBC leans left.
I dislike the fact that they always have to so maniacally strive for "balance" and "inclusivity" but I understand it also.
As they say if we're both convinced of our view then perhaps it is therefore doing something right.
Although annoying both left and right does not mean that the BBC is balanced.
FWIW I think the BBC tries very hard to be balanced on most things (not all - there is now no hint of skepticism left when reporting climate science, for instance, when some of the more out there claims/predictions ought to be at best queried). It does, however, tend to skew urban, metropolitan. I don't think it has a clue about the countryside and rural affairs, as shown by Countryfile, which is a programme about the countryside made by city dwellers, for city dwellers.
Yes there's plenty wrong with it.
And as for climate, my point to my friend was that they would never dare have someone from "the other side" to argue a different position on climate change.
When they ever did get someone from ‘the other side’, it would be a flat Earth fanatic rather than another scientist.
That may have been only partly their fault. FEFs so not have careers which they would endanger by voicing private doubts.
Which is actually a large part of the problem, that all the scientific research funding is on one side.
The scientific research funding follows the scientific evidence.
The vested interest funding, well there's been plenty of that for climate 'sceptics'. And probably much more lucrative for those involved.
(I do find the idea of funding bias bizarre. It's in no government's interest to fund only one side of climate science, if there were really two sides. Climate science as it stands is a massive headache for governments - it means taxing/regulating things that people like, in really unpopular areas. There's a massive incentive for governments to fund any science that would question the IPCC conclusions - making it all go away would solve a whole load of political problems. Unfortunately, science doesn't work like that - you can't just get the answers you want because if you do other people are going to point out what you've done and it's easy* for other groups to check)
*in most areas. Far less so in my field of epidemiology where we cannot share or publish the patient-level data for others to verify, due to entirely legitimate data protection concerns. Other groups could request the same data, but I'm not sure you'd get that far on public interest grounds to simply verify pre-existing research. We need more like openSAFELY where anyone can run their own code to check conclusions. This would be possible if e.g. NHS Digital had a service to hold copies of supplied data and run, on demand (at low fee) code on it and provide the results (there would still be a need to ensure no sensitive disclosure in analysis results, which is probably why this hasn't happened).
"Points" from someone whose head is obviously completely up the system.
The points about funding are definetely valid, even if they don't resolve the 'groupthink amongst academics' problem.
Yep, there's definite scope for problems there. One thing becomes accepted and everyone else takes it as read. We've seen that often enough - but we've seen that often enough because eventually someone shows that's not how things work afterall.
Again, I'm long out of this field and wasn't that closely involved to start with, but I saw a lot of disagreement among climate scientists on how the feedbacks worked and interacted. Plenty of 'out there' ideas being presented where if thing A works differently to the general perception then thing B will happen and we can test that witthin 5-10 years etc. I think there are enough people with different backgrounds in different centres studying data from different sources with different designs to reduce the risk of too much groupthink here.
I may be wrong, of course and maybe there are more people training in 'climate science' at a lower level and being taught 'truths'. The nice thing 15 years ago, which may or may not still be the case, was that climate research was brining together people from a lot of disparate disciplines with different ideas and, in most cases, not a great deal of formal training in any accepted truth of the field. The main danger was that most people on the modelling side were working on a limited number of base models, so a fundamental error in one base model could lead to errors in many people's research. But, if so, there would be a whole lot of research that quickly diverged from new observations, unless you were really unlucky. There are also, of course, a lot of people not working on models at all, but working on comparing model predictions, forwards or backwards with observations on the ground and finding better ways of doing those observations.
My concern with it all is that right now, dissent is not allowed. We are at a stage whereby no one would put their heads above the parapet. Well that means that the overwhelming majority - thousands upon thousands - of climate scientists agree hence it is settled. But without going all Galileo about it is that we are in a period of absolute orthodoxy whereby dissenting views are simply not entertained.
No one disputes that the temperatures are rising but it is modelling that is telling us what happens next. Is it like cigarettes where a link has been shown to exist? Not being a climate scientist I have no idea.
I just feel uncomfortable that there is no Jeremy Paxman ("why is this lying bastard lying to me") to question it all. Are all those on here, for example, comfortable not wanting to question what is, in the end, a prediction based upon modelling and hence originates in the human mind.
This is a fantasy put around by right-wing commentators. As you say, no one disputes that temperatures are rising: the evidence there is unavoidable. That this is largely caused by human activity producing greenhouse gases is also very clear. But what happens next, however, is very much discussed and argued over. There is plenty of dissent. How different factors interact, how we should model future change, what’s the best approach to deal with the problem, all extensively debated.
However, the point is that temperatures are already up a worrying amount, so when that’s your starting point, whether things will get much worse or just slightly worse doesn’t change that they are already bad.
"The fantasy put about..."
LOL & QED
The world has warmed previously when presumably it wasn't on account of human activity. It is warming again now and that is coinciding with us pumping huge amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. And it may well be that the current warming is due to us. But we don't know how much, nor exactly what effect it is having in total when other factors are taken into account.
For example, does warming lead to more evaporation and more cloud cover, reflecting more incident energy from the sun back into space? Does warming kill vegetation and increase desertification, which is also a better reflector of incident energy back into space than plants are?
We don't know the future, we model it. And we model it extremely diligently. But it is only a model and any model is only as good as its inputs. If I model a balance sheet for example I know that I can fiddle faddle, say, working capital requirements and associated fundraising requirements. All my own work.
And the thing which you are illustrating is how sad it is that today we all are supposed to accept the orthodoxy with dissenters chastised and ridiculed. We have of course been here before in history but let's not over-dramatise things, right, I mean we are only talking about extinction of the human race. Something that you, by your actions, btw, aren't all *that* bothered about.
All scientists can ever do is make predictions and see how well they turn out.
The predictions of the 1990 models didn't play out perfectly (+0.4 degrees compared with +0.55 degrees) but they are not far off. Close enough to be able to say that the big picture story is right and everything else is sorting out details.
How right do the scientists have to be for how long?
Yep good question. I don't know. In climate/geological terms of course 30 years is tiny but let's say that there was "natural" warming. (And cooling, such as the planet has seen for the past XXXXXXX years). What if the scientists are imposing their models on an existing trajectory ie making observations not predictions.
The key here is rate of change. Natural heating and cooling occurs in geological timescales*, while recent warming has occurred measurably over a matter of a few decades.
The fact half the C02 ever released into the atmosphere by mankind has been since I graduated Medical School, and 85% since WW2 ended may be the reason.
* barring massive volcanic eruption or asteroid impact.
Not true. And this is one of the annoying 'facts' that has crept into the argument. Rates of change now are no different to those in the past. It is only in recent years we have come to realise that entry and exit from glaciations and other less extreme warming and cooling events can occur in decades rather than centuries. The ending of the Younger Dryas involved a 9 degree increase in temperature in just over a decade.
So what other than Co2 production do you postulate for the recent rise?
Nick Palmer - About 1 in 4 American homes still have land lines. They are more common among the elderly -- no surprise -- and in the Northeast.
(Full disclosure: I have one, and like it enough so that I may keep it. I have a better phone than any smart phone I have seen. And, at almost 80 years old, I like the idea of having a back-up, in case of an emergency.)
Probably 3/4 here in the UK.
How do the others in US get internet?!
Hmm - depends how you define this one, I've got a landline in theory off my FTTP but no actual phone connected.
Yup.
From talking to the installers of my fibre connection, nearly no new customers are bothering with the landline additional option.
Writing down you passcode, top level security.....the Chinese & Russians must piss themselves how moronic our officials are when it comes to basic op-sec.
All those claiming Boris Johnson to be a risk to national security wash your mouths out.
After 24 hours of waterboarding, the f***** wouldn't divulge his mobile phone PIN. Not least because he couldn't. Make him Foreign Secretary, and now!
Boris is definitely one of those people who uses the same password for every account and his phone pin is the same as credit card pin...with the failed thinking is ok because the password is some obscure latin or greek so nobody could guess it...
If all his accounts including credit cards are on one PIN and he's forgotten it, is that why he had to go to Richard Sharp to get some money?
Got to wonder where the Johnson story will go next. Thoughts of his running in a near-future by-election are nuts IMO, but the story's clearly not at an end yet.
Who even uses a PIN or ATM anymore for transactions? Both are obsolete. Use Apple Pay on phone or watch.
Boris must be a complete idiot if he persists in using cards.
ATM machines (just for @Selebian) I agree, but PINs I have all over the place.
I took an ATM card with me on my cycling trip, just in case. I have just employed a gardener and didn't know how he wanted to be paid so I used the card to get some cash, in case that was what he wanted (he doesn't). The card is a year out of date so it was lucky he was happy with a bank transfer and that I didn't need it on my trip.
Talking about cash (and @Anabobazina TRIGGER WARNING) I hadn't realised that HMG had had to change their bill to provide a little more protection for cash users.
"Previously the Bill did not specify whether withdrawal and deposit facilities should be free, or whether consumers might have to pay a charge.
But through a late amendment to the Bill, called for by Which?, it will now ensure that people across the country can withdraw and deposit cash for free.
This means the FCA will have greater power over major banks and building societies to ensure reasonable free access to cash is preserved for those who need it."
Good, I don't want to be charged when I have to trudge to the bank to deposit cash for those rude idiots who insist on transferring money they owe to me in stupid paper tokens.
That seems an odd thing to say. The only times I get given cash are on the vanishingly rare occasions I pay with it and get change. If you are not a retailer, your problem with sums of cash large enough to require banking is not going to be trudging, it's going to be the plod (money-laundering division). If you are a retailer, you are surely at liberty to stipulate card-only?
You can generally be card-only if you want to be. The law says that you must accept cash for a debt. If you can manage to drink the beer before anyone tells you it’s card-only…
I think this one is generational, geographical and situational. Cheques are going out fast, but I would bet they still are available for current account holders, and used by some government agencies in 10 years time.
Debit cards will be with us for ages; relying on phone technology relies on 100% of the population having it, remembering to bring it and several stages of reliability. We are years off that.
Cash is great. I know places that only take cash. Children, small gifts, tips are all things where cash is good. In my small northern town I much prefer cash for smaller transactions in small shops, which I do all the time. And it can't fail technically. I think it will still be around in 20 years time, though I am sure in London it will be archaic.
I was running a book stand last weekend doing both signings and selling second hand books. Looking at my takings they were just about equal - 50:50 cash and card (I use sumup) - with a very tiny drift in favour of cash. I did also have two transactions where the card was refused and they paid cash instead.
So. Is the BBC biased politically (forget Huw Edwards) or not and if it is, which way?
I saw an old mate of mine last night. To the left, shall we say, and he was fuming that eg The Today Programme might as well be an arm of government.
Whereas from my right-leaning, civilised, thoughtful perspective I think the BBC leans left.
I dislike the fact that they always have to so maniacally strive for "balance" and "inclusivity" but I understand it also.
As they say if we're both convinced of our view then perhaps it is therefore doing something right.
Although annoying both left and right does not mean that the BBC is balanced.
FWIW I think the BBC tries very hard to be balanced on most things (not all - there is now no hint of skepticism left when reporting climate science, for instance, when some of the more out there claims/predictions ought to be at best queried). It does, however, tend to skew urban, metropolitan. I don't think it has a clue about the countryside and rural affairs, as shown by Countryfile, which is a programme about the countryside made by city dwellers, for city dwellers.
Yes there's plenty wrong with it.
And as for climate, my point to my friend was that they would never dare have someone from "the other side" to argue a different position on climate change.
When they ever did get someone from ‘the other side’, it would be a flat Earth fanatic rather than another scientist.
That may have been only partly their fault. FEFs so not have careers which they would endanger by voicing private doubts.
Which is actually a large part of the problem, that all the scientific research funding is on one side.
The scientific research funding follows the scientific evidence.
The vested interest funding, well there's been plenty of that for climate 'sceptics'. And probably much more lucrative for those involved.
(I do find the idea of funding bias bizarre. It's in no government's interest to fund only one side of climate science, if there were really two sides. Climate science as it stands is a massive headache for governments - it means taxing/regulating things that people like, in really unpopular areas. There's a massive incentive for governments to fund any science that would question the IPCC conclusions - making it all go away would solve a whole load of political problems. Unfortunately, science doesn't work like that - you can't just get the answers you want because if you do other people are going to point out what you've done and it's easy* for other groups to check)
*in most areas. Far less so in my field of epidemiology where we cannot share or publish the patient-level data for others to verify, due to entirely legitimate data protection concerns. Other groups could request the same data, but I'm not sure you'd get that far on public interest grounds to simply verify pre-existing research. We need more like openSAFELY where anyone can run their own code to check conclusions. This would be possible if e.g. NHS Digital had a service to hold copies of supplied data and run, on demand (at low fee) code on it and provide the results (there would still be a need to ensure no sensitive disclosure in analysis results, which is probably why this hasn't happened).
"Points" from someone whose head is obviously completely up the system.
The points about funding are definetely valid, even if they don't resolve the 'groupthink amongst academics' problem.
Yep, there's definite scope for problems there. One thing becomes accepted and everyone else takes it as read. We've seen that often enough - but we've seen that often enough because eventually someone shows that's not how things work afterall.
Again, I'm long out of this field and wasn't that closely involved to start with, but I saw a lot of disagreement among climate scientists on how the feedbacks worked and interacted. Plenty of 'out there' ideas being presented where if thing A works differently to the general perception then thing B will happen and we can test that witthin 5-10 years etc. I think there are enough people with different backgrounds in different centres studying data from different sources with different designs to reduce the risk of too much groupthink here.
I may be wrong, of course and maybe there are more people training in 'climate science' at a lower level and being taught 'truths'. The nice thing 15 years ago, which may or may not still be the case, was that climate research was brining together people from a lot of disparate disciplines with different ideas and, in most cases, not a great deal of formal training in any accepted truth of the field. The main danger was that most people on the modelling side were working on a limited number of base models, so a fundamental error in one base model could lead to errors in many people's research. But, if so, there would be a whole lot of research that quickly diverged from new observations, unless you were really unlucky. There are also, of course, a lot of people not working on models at all, but working on comparing model predictions, forwards or backwards with observations on the ground and finding better ways of doing those observations.
My concern with it all is that right now, dissent is not allowed. We are at a stage whereby no one would put their heads above the parapet. Well that means that the overwhelming majority - thousands upon thousands - of climate scientists agree hence it is settled. But without going all Galileo about it is that we are in a period of absolute orthodoxy whereby dissenting views are simply not entertained.
No one disputes that the temperatures are rising but it is modelling that is telling us what happens next. Is it like cigarettes where a link has been shown to exist? Not being a climate scientist I have no idea.
I just feel uncomfortable that there is no Jeremy Paxman ("why is this lying bastard lying to me") to question it all. Are all those on here, for example, comfortable not wanting to question what is, in the end, a prediction based upon modelling and hence originates in the human mind.
This is a fantasy put around by right-wing commentators. As you say, no one disputes that temperatures are rising: the evidence there is unavoidable. That this is largely caused by human activity producing greenhouse gases is also very clear. But what happens next, however, is very much discussed and argued over. There is plenty of dissent. How different factors interact, how we should model future change, what’s the best approach to deal with the problem, all extensively debated.
However, the point is that temperatures are already up a worrying amount, so when that’s your starting point, whether things will get much worse or just slightly worse doesn’t change that they are already bad.
"The fantasy put about..."
LOL & QED
The world has warmed previously when presumably it wasn't on account of human activity. It is warming again now and that is coinciding with us pumping huge amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. And it may well be that the current warming is due to us. But we don't know how much, nor exactly what effect it is having in total when other factors are taken into account.
For example, does warming lead to more evaporation and more cloud cover, reflecting more incident energy from the sun back into space? Does warming kill vegetation and increase desertification, which is also a better reflector of incident energy back into space than plants are?
We don't know the future, we model it. And we model it extremely diligently. But it is only a model and any model is only as good as its inputs. If I model a balance sheet for example I know that I can fiddle faddle, say, working capital requirements and associated fundraising requirements. All my own work.
And the thing which you are illustrating is how sad it is that today we all are supposed to accept the orthodoxy with dissenters chastised and ridiculed. We have of course been here before in history but let's not over-dramatise things, right, I mean we are only talking about extinction of the human race. Something that you, by your actions, btw, aren't all *that* bothered about.
All scientists can ever do is make predictions and see how well they turn out.
The predictions of the 1990 models didn't play out perfectly (+0.4 degrees compared with +0.55 degrees) but they are not far off. Close enough to be able to say that the big picture story is right and everything else is sorting out details.
How right do the scientists have to be for how long?
Yep good question. I don't know. In climate/geological terms of course 30 years is tiny but let's say that there was "natural" warming. (And cooling, such as the planet has seen for the past XXXXXXX years). What if the scientists are imposing their models on an existing trajectory ie making observations not predictions.
So you’re saying we should base policy on the off chance that the preponderance of highly trained professionals might be wrong? Do you extend this attitude to other areas?
“Chemotherapy’s a bitch and hella inconvenient, I really like my hair, so I won’t do it on the off chance the doctor has misdiagnosed this fucking huge lump that’s suddenly appeared”
So. Is the BBC biased politically (forget Huw Edwards) or not and if it is, which way?
I saw an old mate of mine last night. To the left, shall we say, and he was fuming that eg The Today Programme might as well be an arm of government.
Whereas from my right-leaning, civilised, thoughtful perspective I think the BBC leans left.
I dislike the fact that they always have to so maniacally strive for "balance" and "inclusivity" but I understand it also.
As they say if we're both convinced of our view then perhaps it is therefore doing something right.
Although annoying both left and right does not mean that the BBC is balanced.
FWIW I think the BBC tries very hard to be balanced on most things (not all - there is now no hint of skepticism left when reporting climate science, for instance, when some of the more out there claims/predictions ought to be at best queried). It does, however, tend to skew urban, metropolitan. I don't think it has a clue about the countryside and rural affairs, as shown by Countryfile, which is a programme about the countryside made by city dwellers, for city dwellers.
Yes there's plenty wrong with it.
And as for climate, my point to my friend was that they would never dare have someone from "the other side" to argue a different position on climate change.
When they ever did get someone from ‘the other side’, it would be a flat Earth fanatic rather than another scientist.
That may have been only partly their fault. FEFs so not have careers which they would endanger by voicing private doubts.
Which is actually a large part of the problem, that all the scientific research funding is on one side.
The scientific research funding follows the scientific evidence.
The vested interest funding, well there's been plenty of that for climate 'sceptics'. And probably much more lucrative for those involved.
(I do find the idea of funding bias bizarre. It's in no government's interest to fund only one side of climate science, if there were really two sides. Climate science as it stands is a massive headache for governments - it means taxing/regulating things that people like, in really unpopular areas. There's a massive incentive for governments to fund any science that would question the IPCC conclusions - making it all go away would solve a whole load of political problems. Unfortunately, science doesn't work like that - you can't just get the answers you want because if you do other people are going to point out what you've done and it's easy* for other groups to check)
*in most areas. Far less so in my field of epidemiology where we cannot share or publish the patient-level data for others to verify, due to entirely legitimate data protection concerns. Other groups could request the same data, but I'm not sure you'd get that far on public interest grounds to simply verify pre-existing research. We need more like openSAFELY where anyone can run their own code to check conclusions. This would be possible if e.g. NHS Digital had a service to hold copies of supplied data and run, on demand (at low fee) code on it and provide the results (there would still be a need to ensure no sensitive disclosure in analysis results, which is probably why this hasn't happened).
"Points" from someone whose head is obviously completely up the system.
The points about funding are definetely valid, even if they don't resolve the 'groupthink amongst academics' problem.
Yep, there's definite scope for problems there. One thing becomes accepted and everyone else takes it as read. We've seen that often enough - but we've seen that often enough because eventually someone shows that's not how things work afterall.
Again, I'm long out of this field and wasn't that closely involved to start with, but I saw a lot of disagreement among climate scientists on how the feedbacks worked and interacted. Plenty of 'out there' ideas being presented where if thing A works differently to the general perception then thing B will happen and we can test that witthin 5-10 years etc. I think there are enough people with different backgrounds in different centres studying data from different sources with different designs to reduce the risk of too much groupthink here.
I may be wrong, of course and maybe there are more people training in 'climate science' at a lower level and being taught 'truths'. The nice thing 15 years ago, which may or may not still be the case, was that climate research was brining together people from a lot of disparate disciplines with different ideas and, in most cases, not a great deal of formal training in any accepted truth of the field. The main danger was that most people on the modelling side were working on a limited number of base models, so a fundamental error in one base model could lead to errors in many people's research. But, if so, there would be a whole lot of research that quickly diverged from new observations, unless you were really unlucky. There are also, of course, a lot of people not working on models at all, but working on comparing model predictions, forwards or backwards with observations on the ground and finding better ways of doing those observations.
My concern with it all is that right now, dissent is not allowed. We are at a stage whereby no one would put their heads above the parapet. Well that means that the overwhelming majority - thousands upon thousands - of climate scientists agree hence it is settled. But without going all Galileo about it is that we are in a period of absolute orthodoxy whereby dissenting views are simply not entertained.
No one disputes that the temperatures are rising but it is modelling that is telling us what happens next. Is it like cigarettes where a link has been shown to exist? Not being a climate scientist I have no idea.
I just feel uncomfortable that there is no Jeremy Paxman ("why is this lying bastard lying to me") to question it all. Are all those on here, for example, comfortable not wanting to question what is, in the end, a prediction based upon modelling and hence originates in the human mind.
This is a fantasy put around by right-wing commentators. As you say, no one disputes that temperatures are rising: the evidence there is unavoidable. That this is largely caused by human activity producing greenhouse gases is also very clear. But what happens next, however, is very much discussed and argued over. There is plenty of dissent. How different factors interact, how we should model future change, what’s the best approach to deal with the problem, all extensively debated.
However, the point is that temperatures are already up a worrying amount, so when that’s your starting point, whether things will get much worse or just slightly worse doesn’t change that they are already bad.
"The fantasy put about..."
LOL & QED
The world has warmed previously when presumably it wasn't on account of human activity. It is warming again now and that is coinciding with us pumping huge amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. And it may well be that the current warming is due to us. But we don't know how much, nor exactly what effect it is having in total when other factors are taken into account.
For example, does warming lead to more evaporation and more cloud cover, reflecting more incident energy from the sun back into space? Does warming kill vegetation and increase desertification, which is also a better reflector of incident energy back into space than plants are?
We don't know the future, we model it. And we model it extremely diligently. But it is only a model and any model is only as good as its inputs. If I model a balance sheet for example I know that I can fiddle faddle, say, working capital requirements and associated fundraising requirements. All my own work.
And the thing which you are illustrating is how sad it is that today we all are supposed to accept the orthodoxy with dissenters chastised and ridiculed. We have of course been here before in history but let's not over-dramatise things, right, I mean we are only talking about extinction of the human race. Something that you, by your actions, btw, aren't all *that* bothered about.
All scientists can ever do is make predictions and see how well they turn out.
The predictions of the 1990 models didn't play out perfectly (+0.4 degrees compared with +0.55 degrees) but they are not far off. Close enough to be able to say that the big picture story is right and everything else is sorting out details.
How right do the scientists have to be for how long?
Yep good question. I don't know. In climate/geological terms of course 30 years is tiny but let's say that there was "natural" warming. (And cooling, such as the planet has seen for the past XXXXXXX years). What if the scientists are imposing their models on an existing trajectory ie making observations not predictions.
The key here is rate of change. Natural heating and cooling occurs in geological timescales*, while recent warming has occurred measurably over a matter of a few decades.
The fact half the C02 ever released into the atmosphere by mankind has been since I graduated Medical School, and 85% since WW2 ended may be the reason.
* barring massive volcanic eruption or asteroid impact.
Not true. And this is one of the annoying 'facts' that has crept into the argument. Rates of change now are no different to those in the past. It is only in recent years we have come to realise that entry and exit from glaciations and other less extreme warming and cooling events can occur in decades rather than centuries. The ending of the Younger Dryas involved a 9 degree increase in temperature in just over a decade.
A 9 degree increase in certain locations, such as Greenland. The change in the global average temperature was, of course, far less than this.
Nick Palmer - About 1 in 4 American homes still have land lines. They are more common among the elderly -- no surprise -- and in the Northeast.
(Full disclosure: I have one, and like it enough so that I may keep it. I have a better phone than any smart phone I have seen. And, at almost 80 years old, I like the idea of having a back-up, in case of an emergency.)
Probably 3/4 here in the UK.
How do the others in US get internet?!
Hmm - depends how you define this one, I've got a landline in theory off my FTTP but no actual phone connected.
This is true for about a quarter of landlines.
The average talk time on a landline is 35 minutes per week, which should tell you everything you need to know.
The frontline NATO states have no time for baldy Ben's talk of ingratitude.
Finnish foreign minister Elina Valtonen tells @felschwartz that “we in the west need to understand that obviously, this is not charity because Ukraine is fighting for us. They are fighting for our liberty and the European security architecture.” https://twitter.com/ChristopherJM/status/1679744886822649856
So. Is the BBC biased politically (forget Huw Edwards) or not and if it is, which way?
I saw an old mate of mine last night. To the left, shall we say, and he was fuming that eg The Today Programme might as well be an arm of government.
Whereas from my right-leaning, civilised, thoughtful perspective I think the BBC leans left.
I dislike the fact that they always have to so maniacally strive for "balance" and "inclusivity" but I understand it also.
As they say if we're both convinced of our view then perhaps it is therefore doing something right.
Although annoying both left and right does not mean that the BBC is balanced.
FWIW I think the BBC tries very hard to be balanced on most things (not all - there is now no hint of skepticism left when reporting climate science, for instance, when some of the more out there claims/predictions ought to be at best queried). It does, however, tend to skew urban, metropolitan. I don't think it has a clue about the countryside and rural affairs, as shown by Countryfile, which is a programme about the countryside made by city dwellers, for city dwellers.
Yes there's plenty wrong with it.
And as for climate, my point to my friend was that they would never dare have someone from "the other side" to argue a different position on climate change.
When they ever did get someone from ‘the other side’, it would be a flat Earth fanatic rather than another scientist.
That may have been only partly their fault. FEFs so not have careers which they would endanger by voicing private doubts.
Which is actually a large part of the problem, that all the scientific research funding is on one side.
The scientific research funding follows the scientific evidence.
The vested interest funding, well there's been plenty of that for climate 'sceptics'. And probably much more lucrative for those involved.
(I do find the idea of funding bias bizarre. It's in no government's interest to fund only one side of climate science, if there were really two sides. Climate science as it stands is a massive headache for governments - it means taxing/regulating things that people like, in really unpopular areas. There's a massive incentive for governments to fund any science that would question the IPCC conclusions - making it all go away would solve a whole load of political problems. Unfortunately, science doesn't work like that - you can't just get the answers you want because if you do other people are going to point out what you've done and it's easy* for other groups to check)
*in most areas. Far less so in my field of epidemiology where we cannot share or publish the patient-level data for others to verify, due to entirely legitimate data protection concerns. Other groups could request the same data, but I'm not sure you'd get that far on public interest grounds to simply verify pre-existing research. We need more like openSAFELY where anyone can run their own code to check conclusions. This would be possible if e.g. NHS Digital had a service to hold copies of supplied data and run, on demand (at low fee) code on it and provide the results (there would still be a need to ensure no sensitive disclosure in analysis results, which is probably why this hasn't happened).
"Points" from someone whose head is obviously completely up the system.
The points about funding are definetely valid, even if they don't resolve the 'groupthink amongst academics' problem.
Yep, there's definite scope for problems there. One thing becomes accepted and everyone else takes it as read. We've seen that often enough - but we've seen that often enough because eventually someone shows that's not how things work afterall.
Again, I'm long out of this field and wasn't that closely involved to start with, but I saw a lot of disagreement among climate scientists on how the feedbacks worked and interacted. Plenty of 'out there' ideas being presented where if thing A works differently to the general perception then thing B will happen and we can test that witthin 5-10 years etc. I think there are enough people with different backgrounds in different centres studying data from different sources with different designs to reduce the risk of too much groupthink here.
I may be wrong, of course and maybe there are more people training in 'climate science' at a lower level and being taught 'truths'. The nice thing 15 years ago, which may or may not still be the case, was that climate research was brining together people from a lot of disparate disciplines with different ideas and, in most cases, not a great deal of formal training in any accepted truth of the field. The main danger was that most people on the modelling side were working on a limited number of base models, so a fundamental error in one base model could lead to errors in many people's research. But, if so, there would be a whole lot of research that quickly diverged from new observations, unless you were really unlucky. There are also, of course, a lot of people not working on models at all, but working on comparing model predictions, forwards or backwards with observations on the ground and finding better ways of doing those observations.
My concern with it all is that right now, dissent is not allowed. We are at a stage whereby no one would put their heads above the parapet. Well that means that the overwhelming majority - thousands upon thousands - of climate scientists agree hence it is settled. But without going all Galileo about it is that we are in a period of absolute orthodoxy whereby dissenting views are simply not entertained.
No one disputes that the temperatures are rising but it is modelling that is telling us what happens next. Is it like cigarettes where a link has been shown to exist? Not being a climate scientist I have no idea.
I just feel uncomfortable that there is no Jeremy Paxman ("why is this lying bastard lying to me") to question it all. Are all those on here, for example, comfortable not wanting to question what is, in the end, a prediction based upon modelling and hence originates in the human mind.
This is a fantasy put around by right-wing commentators. As you say, no one disputes that temperatures are rising: the evidence there is unavoidable. That this is largely caused by human activity producing greenhouse gases is also very clear. But what happens next, however, is very much discussed and argued over. There is plenty of dissent. How different factors interact, how we should model future change, what’s the best approach to deal with the problem, all extensively debated.
However, the point is that temperatures are already up a worrying amount, so when that’s your starting point, whether things will get much worse or just slightly worse doesn’t change that they are already bad.
"The fantasy put about..."
LOL & QED
The world has warmed previously when presumably it wasn't on account of human activity. It is warming again now and that is coinciding with us pumping huge amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. And it may well be that the current warming is due to us. But we don't know how much, nor exactly what effect it is having in total when other factors are taken into account.
For example, does warming lead to more evaporation and more cloud cover, reflecting more incident energy from the sun back into space? Does warming kill vegetation and increase desertification, which is also a better reflector of incident energy back into space than plants are?
We don't know the future, we model it. And we model it extremely diligently. But it is only a model and any model is only as good as its inputs. If I model a balance sheet for example I know that I can fiddle faddle, say, working capital requirements and associated fundraising requirements. All my own work.
And the thing which you are illustrating is how sad it is that today we all are supposed to accept the orthodoxy with dissenters chastised and ridiculed. We have of course been here before in history but let's not over-dramatise things, right, I mean we are only talking about extinction of the human race. Something that you, by your actions, btw, aren't all *that* bothered about.
All scientists can ever do is make predictions and see how well they turn out.
The predictions of the 1990 models didn't play out perfectly (+0.4 degrees compared with +0.55 degrees) but they are not far off. Close enough to be able to say that the big picture story is right and everything else is sorting out details.
How right do the scientists have to be for how long?
Yep good question. I don't know. In climate/geological terms of course 30 years is tiny but let's say that there was "natural" warming. (And cooling, such as the planet has seen for the past XXXXXXX years). What if the scientists are imposing their models on an existing trajectory ie making observations not predictions.
The key here is rate of change. Natural heating and cooling occurs in geological timescales*, while recent warming has occurred measurably over a matter of a few decades.
The fact half the C02 ever released into the atmosphere by mankind has been since I graduated Medical School, and 85% since WW2 ended may be the reason.
* barring massive volcanic eruption or asteroid impact.
Not true. And this is one of the annoying 'facts' that has crept into the argument. Rates of change now are no different to those in the past. It is only in recent years we have come to realise that entry and exit from glaciations and other less extreme warming and cooling events can occur in decades rather than centuries. The ending of the Younger Dryas involved a 9 degree increase in temperature in just over a decade.
So what other than Co2 production do you postulate for the recent rise?
We don't know because we don't yet have a good enough understanding of the way the atmosphere works. I am not saying it is not CO2 but as a basic point of scientific principle you can only assign a definite cause once you have eliminated all other possible causes. And since we don't know what caused the Bronze Age, Roman and Medieval warming periods either but we do know it wasn't burning hydrocarbons, it is scientifically illiterate to assign a single cause to the current situation. (It was Michael Mann's idiotic attempts to eliminate any previous post glacial warming from the record that made me first look at this)
As I have said in the past, my interest in arguing this is rather limited because I actually like what we are doing in terms of changing our energy production for reasons entirely unconnected with any climate effects. We should not be burning hydrocarbons (though we should still be drilling for them for other uses). So it is rather churlish of me to argue against something I am generally quite happy with. But once in a while it is nice to set the record straight on the underlying science (such as rates of change) particularly when being stated as fact by people who don't actually know what they are talking about.
So. Is the BBC biased politically (forget Huw Edwards) or not and if it is, which way?
I saw an old mate of mine last night. To the left, shall we say, and he was fuming that eg The Today Programme might as well be an arm of government.
Whereas from my right-leaning, civilised, thoughtful perspective I think the BBC leans left.
I dislike the fact that they always have to so maniacally strive for "balance" and "inclusivity" but I understand it also.
As they say if we're both convinced of our view then perhaps it is therefore doing something right.
Although annoying both left and right does not mean that the BBC is balanced.
FWIW I think the BBC tries very hard to be balanced on most things (not all - there is now no hint of skepticism left when reporting climate science, for instance, when some of the more out there claims/predictions ought to be at best queried). It does, however, tend to skew urban, metropolitan. I don't think it has a clue about the countryside and rural affairs, as shown by Countryfile, which is a programme about the countryside made by city dwellers, for city dwellers.
Yes there's plenty wrong with it.
And as for climate, my point to my friend was that they would never dare have someone from "the other side" to argue a different position on climate change.
When they ever did get someone from ‘the other side’, it would be a flat Earth fanatic rather than another scientist.
That may have been only partly their fault. FEFs so not have careers which they would endanger by voicing private doubts.
Which is actually a large part of the problem, that all the scientific research funding is on one side.
The scientific research funding follows the scientific evidence.
The vested interest funding, well there's been plenty of that for climate 'sceptics'. And probably much more lucrative for those involved.
(I do find the idea of funding bias bizarre. It's in no government's interest to fund only one side of climate science, if there were really two sides. Climate science as it stands is a massive headache for governments - it means taxing/regulating things that people like, in really unpopular areas. There's a massive incentive for governments to fund any science that would question the IPCC conclusions - making it all go away would solve a whole load of political problems. Unfortunately, science doesn't work like that - you can't just get the answers you want because if you do other people are going to point out what you've done and it's easy* for other groups to check)
*in most areas. Far less so in my field of epidemiology where we cannot share or publish the patient-level data for others to verify, due to entirely legitimate data protection concerns. Other groups could request the same data, but I'm not sure you'd get that far on public interest grounds to simply verify pre-existing research. We need more like openSAFELY where anyone can run their own code to check conclusions. This would be possible if e.g. NHS Digital had a service to hold copies of supplied data and run, on demand (at low fee) code on it and provide the results (there would still be a need to ensure no sensitive disclosure in analysis results, which is probably why this hasn't happened).
"Points" from someone whose head is obviously completely up the system.
The points about funding are definetely valid, even if they don't resolve the 'groupthink amongst academics' problem.
Yep, there's definite scope for problems there. One thing becomes accepted and everyone else takes it as read. We've seen that often enough - but we've seen that often enough because eventually someone shows that's not how things work afterall.
Again, I'm long out of this field and wasn't that closely involved to start with, but I saw a lot of disagreement among climate scientists on how the feedbacks worked and interacted. Plenty of 'out there' ideas being presented where if thing A works differently to the general perception then thing B will happen and we can test that witthin 5-10 years etc. I think there are enough people with different backgrounds in different centres studying data from different sources with different designs to reduce the risk of too much groupthink here.
I may be wrong, of course and maybe there are more people training in 'climate science' at a lower level and being taught 'truths'. The nice thing 15 years ago, which may or may not still be the case, was that climate research was brining together people from a lot of disparate disciplines with different ideas and, in most cases, not a great deal of formal training in any accepted truth of the field. The main danger was that most people on the modelling side were working on a limited number of base models, so a fundamental error in one base model could lead to errors in many people's research. But, if so, there would be a whole lot of research that quickly diverged from new observations, unless you were really unlucky. There are also, of course, a lot of people not working on models at all, but working on comparing model predictions, forwards or backwards with observations on the ground and finding better ways of doing those observations.
My concern with it all is that right now, dissent is not allowed. We are at a stage whereby no one would put their heads above the parapet. Well that means that the overwhelming majority - thousands upon thousands - of climate scientists agree hence it is settled. But without going all Galileo about it is that we are in a period of absolute orthodoxy whereby dissenting views are simply not entertained.
No one disputes that the temperatures are rising but it is modelling that is telling us what happens next. Is it like cigarettes where a link has been shown to exist? Not being a climate scientist I have no idea.
I just feel uncomfortable that there is no Jeremy Paxman ("why is this lying bastard lying to me") to question it all. Are all those on here, for example, comfortable not wanting to question what is, in the end, a prediction based upon modelling and hence originates in the human mind.
This is a fantasy put around by right-wing commentators. As you say, no one disputes that temperatures are rising: the evidence there is unavoidable. That this is largely caused by human activity producing greenhouse gases is also very clear. But what happens next, however, is very much discussed and argued over. There is plenty of dissent. How different factors interact, how we should model future change, what’s the best approach to deal with the problem, all extensively debated.
However, the point is that temperatures are already up a worrying amount, so when that’s your starting point, whether things will get much worse or just slightly worse doesn’t change that they are already bad.
"The fantasy put about..."
LOL & QED
The world has warmed previously when presumably it wasn't on account of human activity. It is warming again now and that is coinciding with us pumping huge amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. And it may well be that the current warming is due to us. But we don't know how much, nor exactly what effect it is having in total when other factors are taken into account.
For example, does warming lead to more evaporation and more cloud cover, reflecting more incident energy from the sun back into space? Does warming kill vegetation and increase desertification, which is also a better reflector of incident energy back into space than plants are?
We don't know the future, we model it. And we model it extremely diligently. But it is only a model and any model is only as good as its inputs. If I model a balance sheet for example I know that I can fiddle faddle, say, working capital requirements and associated fundraising requirements. All my own work.
And the thing which you are illustrating is how sad it is that today we all are supposed to accept the orthodoxy with dissenters chastised and ridiculed. We have of course been here before in history but let's not over-dramatise things, right, I mean we are only talking about extinction of the human race. Something that you, by your actions, btw, aren't all *that* bothered about.
All scientists can ever do is make predictions and see how well they turn out.
The predictions of the 1990 models didn't play out perfectly (+0.4 degrees compared with +0.55 degrees) but they are not far off. Close enough to be able to say that the big picture story is right and everything else is sorting out details.
How right do the scientists have to be for how long?
Yep good question. I don't know. In climate/geological terms of course 30 years is tiny but let's say that there was "natural" warming. (And cooling, such as the planet has seen for the past XXXXXXX years). What if the scientists are imposing their models on an existing trajectory ie making observations not predictions.
The key here is rate of change. Natural heating and cooling occurs in geological timescales*, while recent warming has occurred measurably over a matter of a few decades.
The fact half the C02 ever released into the atmosphere by mankind has been since I graduated Medical School, and 85% since WW2 ended may be the reason.
* barring massive volcanic eruption or asteroid impact.
Not true. And this is one of the annoying 'facts' that has crept into the argument. Rates of change now are no different to those in the past. It is only in recent years we have come to realise that entry and exit from glaciations and other less extreme warming and cooling events can occur in decades rather than centuries. The ending of the Younger Dryas involved a 9 degree increase in temperature in just over a decade.
A 9 degree increase in certain locations, such as Greenland. The change in the global average temperature was, of course, far less than this.
Nope. Globally it is calculated at around 7 degrees so very much the same ball park.
Nick Palmer - About 1 in 4 American homes still have land lines. They are more common among the elderly -- no surprise -- and in the Northeast.
(Full disclosure: I have one, and like it enough so that I may keep it. I have a better phone than any smart phone I have seen. And, at almost 80 years old, I like the idea of having a back-up, in case of an emergency.)
Probably 3/4 here in the UK.
How do the others in US get internet?!
Hmm - depends how you define this one, I've got a landline in theory off my FTTP but no actual phone connected.
This is true for about a quarter of landlines.
The average talk time on a landline is 35 minutes per week, which should tell you everything you need to know.
So. Is the BBC biased politically (forget Huw Edwards) or not and if it is, which way?
I saw an old mate of mine last night. To the left, shall we say, and he was fuming that eg The Today Programme might as well be an arm of government.
Whereas from my right-leaning, civilised, thoughtful perspective I think the BBC leans left.
I dislike the fact that they always have to so maniacally strive for "balance" and "inclusivity" but I understand it also.
As they say if we're both convinced of our view then perhaps it is therefore doing something right.
Although annoying both left and right does not mean that the BBC is balanced.
FWIW I think the BBC tries very hard to be balanced on most things (not all - there is now no hint of skepticism left when reporting climate science, for instance, when some of the more out there claims/predictions ought to be at best queried). It does, however, tend to skew urban, metropolitan. I don't think it has a clue about the countryside and rural affairs, as shown by Countryfile, which is a programme about the countryside made by city dwellers, for city dwellers.
Yes there's plenty wrong with it.
And as for climate, my point to my friend was that they would never dare have someone from "the other side" to argue a different position on climate change.
When they ever did get someone from ‘the other side’, it would be a flat Earth fanatic rather than another scientist.
That may have been only partly their fault. FEFs so not have careers which they would endanger by voicing private doubts.
Which is actually a large part of the problem, that all the scientific research funding is on one side.
The scientific research funding follows the scientific evidence.
The vested interest funding, well there's been plenty of that for climate 'sceptics'. And probably much more lucrative for those involved.
(I do find the idea of funding bias bizarre. It's in no government's interest to fund only one side of climate science, if there were really two sides. Climate science as it stands is a massive headache for governments - it means taxing/regulating things that people like, in really unpopular areas. There's a massive incentive for governments to fund any science that would question the IPCC conclusions - making it all go away would solve a whole load of political problems. Unfortunately, science doesn't work like that - you can't just get the answers you want because if you do other people are going to point out what you've done and it's easy* for other groups to check)
*in most areas. Far less so in my field of epidemiology where we cannot share or publish the patient-level data for others to verify, due to entirely legitimate data protection concerns. Other groups could request the same data, but I'm not sure you'd get that far on public interest grounds to simply verify pre-existing research. We need more like openSAFELY where anyone can run their own code to check conclusions. This would be possible if e.g. NHS Digital had a service to hold copies of supplied data and run, on demand (at low fee) code on it and provide the results (there would still be a need to ensure no sensitive disclosure in analysis results, which is probably why this hasn't happened).
"Points" from someone whose head is obviously completely up the system.
The points about funding are definetely valid, even if they don't resolve the 'groupthink amongst academics' problem.
Yep, there's definite scope for problems there. One thing becomes accepted and everyone else takes it as read. We've seen that often enough - but we've seen that often enough because eventually someone shows that's not how things work afterall.
Again, I'm long out of this field and wasn't that closely involved to start with, but I saw a lot of disagreement among climate scientists on how the feedbacks worked and interacted. Plenty of 'out there' ideas being presented where if thing A works differently to the general perception then thing B will happen and we can test that witthin 5-10 years etc. I think there are enough people with different backgrounds in different centres studying data from different sources with different designs to reduce the risk of too much groupthink here.
I may be wrong, of course and maybe there are more people training in 'climate science' at a lower level and being taught 'truths'. The nice thing 15 years ago, which may or may not still be the case, was that climate research was brining together people from a lot of disparate disciplines with different ideas and, in most cases, not a great deal of formal training in any accepted truth of the field. The main danger was that most people on the modelling side were working on a limited number of base models, so a fundamental error in one base model could lead to errors in many people's research. But, if so, there would be a whole lot of research that quickly diverged from new observations, unless you were really unlucky. There are also, of course, a lot of people not working on models at all, but working on comparing model predictions, forwards or backwards with observations on the ground and finding better ways of doing those observations.
My concern with it all is that right now, dissent is not allowed. We are at a stage whereby no one would put their heads above the parapet. Well that means that the overwhelming majority - thousands upon thousands - of climate scientists agree hence it is settled. But without going all Galileo about it is that we are in a period of absolute orthodoxy whereby dissenting views are simply not entertained.
No one disputes that the temperatures are rising but it is modelling that is telling us what happens next. Is it like cigarettes where a link has been shown to exist? Not being a climate scientist I have no idea.
I just feel uncomfortable that there is no Jeremy Paxman ("why is this lying bastard lying to me") to question it all. Are all those on here, for example, comfortable not wanting to question what is, in the end, a prediction based upon modelling and hence originates in the human mind.
This is a fantasy put around by right-wing commentators. As you say, no one disputes that temperatures are rising: the evidence there is unavoidable. That this is largely caused by human activity producing greenhouse gases is also very clear. But what happens next, however, is very much discussed and argued over. There is plenty of dissent. How different factors interact, how we should model future change, what’s the best approach to deal with the problem, all extensively debated.
However, the point is that temperatures are already up a worrying amount, so when that’s your starting point, whether things will get much worse or just slightly worse doesn’t change that they are already bad.
"The fantasy put about..."
LOL & QED
The world has warmed previously when presumably it wasn't on account of human activity. It is warming again now and that is coinciding with us pumping huge amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. And it may well be that the current warming is due to us. But we don't know how much, nor exactly what effect it is having in total when other factors are taken into account.
For example, does warming lead to more evaporation and more cloud cover, reflecting more incident energy from the sun back into space? Does warming kill vegetation and increase desertification, which is also a better reflector of incident energy back into space than plants are?
We don't know the future, we model it. And we model it extremely diligently. But it is only a model and any model is only as good as its inputs. If I model a balance sheet for example I know that I can fiddle faddle, say, working capital requirements and associated fundraising requirements. All my own work.
And the thing which you are illustrating is how sad it is that today we all are supposed to accept the orthodoxy with dissenters chastised and ridiculed. We have of course been here before in history but let's not over-dramatise things, right, I mean we are only talking about extinction of the human race. Something that you, by your actions, btw, aren't all *that* bothered about.
All scientists can ever do is make predictions and see how well they turn out.
The predictions of the 1990 models didn't play out perfectly (+0.4 degrees compared with +0.55 degrees) but they are not far off. Close enough to be able to say that the big picture story is right and everything else is sorting out details.
How right do the scientists have to be for how long?
Yep good question. I don't know. In climate/geological terms of course 30 years is tiny but let's say that there was "natural" warming. (And cooling, such as the planet has seen for the past XXXXXXX years). What if the scientists are imposing their models on an existing trajectory ie making observations not predictions.
The key here is rate of change. Natural heating and cooling occurs in geological timescales*, while recent warming has occurred measurably over a matter of a few decades.
The fact half the C02 ever released into the atmosphere by mankind has been since I graduated Medical School, and 85% since WW2 ended may be the reason.
* barring massive volcanic eruption or asteroid impact.
Not true. And this is one of the annoying 'facts' that has crept into the argument. Rates of change now are no different to those in the past. It is only in recent years we have come to realise that entry and exit from glaciations and other less extreme warming and cooling events can occur in decades rather than centuries. The ending of the Younger Dryas involved a 9 degree increase in temperature in just over a decade.
Was that local or global ?
If the AMOC were to shut down, we'd probably see a drop of similar proportions in Europe, on a similarly rapid timescale.
So. Is the BBC biased politically (forget Huw Edwards) or not and if it is, which way?
I saw an old mate of mine last night. To the left, shall we say, and he was fuming that eg The Today Programme might as well be an arm of government.
Whereas from my right-leaning, civilised, thoughtful perspective I think the BBC leans left.
I dislike the fact that they always have to so maniacally strive for "balance" and "inclusivity" but I understand it also.
As they say if we're both convinced of our view then perhaps it is therefore doing something right.
Although annoying both left and right does not mean that the BBC is balanced.
FWIW I think the BBC tries very hard to be balanced on most things (not all - there is now no hint of skepticism left when reporting climate science, for instance, when some of the more out there claims/predictions ought to be at best queried). It does, however, tend to skew urban, metropolitan. I don't think it has a clue about the countryside and rural affairs, as shown by Countryfile, which is a programme about the countryside made by city dwellers, for city dwellers.
Yes there's plenty wrong with it.
And as for climate, my point to my friend was that they would never dare have someone from "the other side" to argue a different position on climate change.
When they ever did get someone from ‘the other side’, it would be a flat Earth fanatic rather than another scientist.
That may have been only partly their fault. FEFs so not have careers which they would endanger by voicing private doubts.
Which is actually a large part of the problem, that all the scientific research funding is on one side.
The scientific research funding follows the scientific evidence.
The vested interest funding, well there's been plenty of that for climate 'sceptics'. And probably much more lucrative for those involved.
(I do find the idea of funding bias bizarre. It's in no government's interest to fund only one side of climate science, if there were really two sides. Climate science as it stands is a massive headache for governments - it means taxing/regulating things that people like, in really unpopular areas. There's a massive incentive for governments to fund any science that would question the IPCC conclusions - making it all go away would solve a whole load of political problems. Unfortunately, science doesn't work like that - you can't just get the answers you want because if you do other people are going to point out what you've done and it's easy* for other groups to check)
*in most areas. Far less so in my field of epidemiology where we cannot share or publish the patient-level data for others to verify, due to entirely legitimate data protection concerns. Other groups could request the same data, but I'm not sure you'd get that far on public interest grounds to simply verify pre-existing research. We need more like openSAFELY where anyone can run their own code to check conclusions. This would be possible if e.g. NHS Digital had a service to hold copies of supplied data and run, on demand (at low fee) code on it and provide the results (there would still be a need to ensure no sensitive disclosure in analysis results, which is probably why this hasn't happened).
"Points" from someone whose head is obviously completely up the system.
The points about funding are definetely valid, even if they don't resolve the 'groupthink amongst academics' problem.
Yep, there's definite scope for problems there. One thing becomes accepted and everyone else takes it as read. We've seen that often enough - but we've seen that often enough because eventually someone shows that's not how things work afterall.
Again, I'm long out of this field and wasn't that closely involved to start with, but I saw a lot of disagreement among climate scientists on how the feedbacks worked and interacted. Plenty of 'out there' ideas being presented where if thing A works differently to the general perception then thing B will happen and we can test that witthin 5-10 years etc. I think there are enough people with different backgrounds in different centres studying data from different sources with different designs to reduce the risk of too much groupthink here.
I may be wrong, of course and maybe there are more people training in 'climate science' at a lower level and being taught 'truths'. The nice thing 15 years ago, which may or may not still be the case, was that climate research was brining together people from a lot of disparate disciplines with different ideas and, in most cases, not a great deal of formal training in any accepted truth of the field. The main danger was that most people on the modelling side were working on a limited number of base models, so a fundamental error in one base model could lead to errors in many people's research. But, if so, there would be a whole lot of research that quickly diverged from new observations, unless you were really unlucky. There are also, of course, a lot of people not working on models at all, but working on comparing model predictions, forwards or backwards with observations on the ground and finding better ways of doing those observations.
My concern with it all is that right now, dissent is not allowed. We are at a stage whereby no one would put their heads above the parapet. Well that means that the overwhelming majority - thousands upon thousands - of climate scientists agree hence it is settled. But without going all Galileo about it is that we are in a period of absolute orthodoxy whereby dissenting views are simply not entertained.
No one disputes that the temperatures are rising but it is modelling that is telling us what happens next. Is it like cigarettes where a link has been shown to exist? Not being a climate scientist I have no idea.
I just feel uncomfortable that there is no Jeremy Paxman ("why is this lying bastard lying to me") to question it all. Are all those on here, for example, comfortable not wanting to question what is, in the end, a prediction based upon modelling and hence originates in the human mind.
This is a fantasy put around by right-wing commentators. As you say, no one disputes that temperatures are rising: the evidence there is unavoidable. That this is largely caused by human activity producing greenhouse gases is also very clear. But what happens next, however, is very much discussed and argued over. There is plenty of dissent. How different factors interact, how we should model future change, what’s the best approach to deal with the problem, all extensively debated.
However, the point is that temperatures are already up a worrying amount, so when that’s your starting point, whether things will get much worse or just slightly worse doesn’t change that they are already bad.
"The fantasy put about..."
LOL & QED
The world has warmed previously when presumably it wasn't on account of human activity. It is warming again now and that is coinciding with us pumping huge amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. And it may well be that the current warming is due to us. But we don't know how much, nor exactly what effect it is having in total when other factors are taken into account.
For example, does warming lead to more evaporation and more cloud cover, reflecting more incident energy from the sun back into space? Does warming kill vegetation and increase desertification, which is also a better reflector of incident energy back into space than plants are?
We don't know the future, we model it. And we model it extremely diligently. But it is only a model and any model is only as good as its inputs. If I model a balance sheet for example I know that I can fiddle faddle, say, working capital requirements and associated fundraising requirements. All my own work.
And the thing which you are illustrating is how sad it is that today we all are supposed to accept the orthodoxy with dissenters chastised and ridiculed. We have of course been here before in history but let's not over-dramatise things, right, I mean we are only talking about extinction of the human race. Something that you, by your actions, btw, aren't all *that* bothered about.
All scientists can ever do is make predictions and see how well they turn out.
The predictions of the 1990 models didn't play out perfectly (+0.4 degrees compared with +0.55 degrees) but they are not far off. Close enough to be able to say that the big picture story is right and everything else is sorting out details.
How right do the scientists have to be for how long?
Yep good question. I don't know. In climate/geological terms of course 30 years is tiny but let's say that there was "natural" warming. (And cooling, such as the planet has seen for the past XXXXXXX years). What if the scientists are imposing their models on an existing trajectory ie making observations not predictions.
The key here is rate of change. Natural heating and cooling occurs in geological timescales*, while recent warming has occurred measurably over a matter of a few decades.
The fact half the C02 ever released into the atmosphere by mankind has been since I graduated Medical School, and 85% since WW2 ended may be the reason.
* barring massive volcanic eruption or asteroid impact.
Not true. And this is one of the annoying 'facts' that has crept into the argument. Rates of change now are no different to those in the past. It is only in recent years we have come to realise that entry and exit from glaciations and other less extreme warming and cooling events can occur in decades rather than centuries. The ending of the Younger Dryas involved a 9 degree increase in temperature in just over a decade.
So what other than Co2 production do you postulate for the recent rise?
We don't know because we don't yet have a good enough understanding of the way the atmosphere works. I am not saying it is not CO2 but as a basic point of scientific principle you can only assign a definite cause once you have eliminated all other possible causes. And since we don't know what caused the Bronze Age, Roman and Medieval warming periods either but we do know it wasn't burning hydrocarbons, it is scientifically illiterate to assign a single cause to the current situation. (It was Michael Mann's idiotic attempts to eliminate any previous post glacial warming from the record that made me first look at this)
As I have said in the past, my interest in arguing this is rather limited because I actually like what we are doing in terms of changing our energy production for reasons entirely unconnected with any climate effects. We should not be burning hydrocarbons (though we should still be drilling for them for other uses). So it is rather churlish of me to argue against something I am generally quite happy with. But once in a while it is nice to set the record straight on the underlying science (such as rates of change) particularly when being stated as fact by people who don't actually know what they are talking about.
Frankly, your apparent conflation of local and global changes would seem to indicate that it is you who doesn't know what he is talking about.
Writing down you passcode, top level security.....the Chinese & Russians must piss themselves how moronic our officials are when it comes to basic op-sec.
All those claiming Boris Johnson to be a risk to national security wash your mouths out.
After 24 hours of waterboarding, the f***** wouldn't divulge his mobile phone PIN. Not least because he couldn't. Make him Foreign Secretary, and now!
Boris is definitely one of those people who uses the same password for every account and his phone pin is the same as credit card pin...with the failed thinking is ok because the password is some obscure latin or greek so nobody could guess it...
If all his accounts including credit cards are on one PIN and he's forgotten it, is that why he had to go to Richard Sharp to get some money?
Got to wonder where the Johnson story will go next. Thoughts of his running in a near-future by-election are nuts IMO, but the story's clearly not at an end yet.
Who even uses a PIN or ATM anymore for transactions? Both are obsolete. Use Apple Pay on phone or watch.
Boris must be a complete idiot if he persists in using cards.
Well that is a genuinely stupid comment since if you use contactless with a card you have to put it in and use your pin after a certain number of transactions or if the value is over £100.
So the answer is practically everyone.
Not for Android or Apple pay
Indeed. Amazes me that people don't even grasp this. Haven't taken a card out with me for years – they are utterly pointless nowadays.
I'm getting a distinct feeling of déjà vu reading this.
Indeed, it's stunning how the rank ignorance of established technologies continues on PB, among people who really ought to know better.
Oh, that's a bit harsh. I think you have a reasonable grasp of the technologies, just not of how most people use them.
Think you need to apply that comment to yourself TBH.
Well, duh. How could I apply it to myself when I've just revealed I didn't know how to set up Touch ID on Apple Pay?
Indeed.
The number of people who can’t spin up their own VPN, using a Docker container on their NAS box….
The annoying thing is, I can do most things with computers.
The point was, I seldom use Apple Pay (only really when I'm doing a shop on the way home from the gym) so I never bothered to find out if I could change it via another setting.
Yes.
My point was, that it is very easy to say - “technology x is easy, anyone who says they can’t is a moron or a liar”
Setting up contactless payment on a mobile is Deep Tech to a huge chunk of the population.
Most people don’t try stuff - they never explore the settings to tune the colour presentation on their TV etc.
And that is before you consider it requires everyone to keep a mobile tracking device on them at all times, not forget to charge it ever else no buying anything for you. Let big data hoover up all your purchase data etc.
Some of don't want to submit to intrusive surveillance, not because we are doing anything wrong but because its no one elses business. The same reason most of us close the curtains at night.
Quite right. And I don't want a statements with gazillions of transactions of about £1.79 on them. Anything under £20, I use cash, and if you don't take it, I'll go to someone else next time.
Nick Palmer - About 1 in 4 American homes still have land lines. They are more common among the elderly -- no surprise -- and in the Northeast.
(Full disclosure: I have one, and like it enough so that I may keep it. I have a better phone than any smart phone I have seen. And, at almost 80 years old, I like the idea of having a back-up, in case of an emergency.)
Probably 3/4 here in the UK.
How do the others in US get internet?!
Hmm - depends how you define this one, I've got a landline in theory off my FTTP but no actual phone connected.
This is true for about a quarter of landlines.
The average talk time on a landline is 35 minutes per week, which should tell you everything you need to know.
So. Is the BBC biased politically (forget Huw Edwards) or not and if it is, which way?
I saw an old mate of mine last night. To the left, shall we say, and he was fuming that eg The Today Programme might as well be an arm of government.
Whereas from my right-leaning, civilised, thoughtful perspective I think the BBC leans left.
I dislike the fact that they always have to so maniacally strive for "balance" and "inclusivity" but I understand it also.
As they say if we're both convinced of our view then perhaps it is therefore doing something right.
Although annoying both left and right does not mean that the BBC is balanced.
FWIW I think the BBC tries very hard to be balanced on most things (not all - there is now no hint of skepticism left when reporting climate science, for instance, when some of the more out there claims/predictions ought to be at best queried). It does, however, tend to skew urban, metropolitan. I don't think it has a clue about the countryside and rural affairs, as shown by Countryfile, which is a programme about the countryside made by city dwellers, for city dwellers.
Yes there's plenty wrong with it.
And as for climate, my point to my friend was that they would never dare have someone from "the other side" to argue a different position on climate change.
When they ever did get someone from ‘the other side’, it would be a flat Earth fanatic rather than another scientist.
That may have been only partly their fault. FEFs so not have careers which they would endanger by voicing private doubts.
Which is actually a large part of the problem, that all the scientific research funding is on one side.
The scientific research funding follows the scientific evidence.
The vested interest funding, well there's been plenty of that for climate 'sceptics'. And probably much more lucrative for those involved.
(I do find the idea of funding bias bizarre. It's in no government's interest to fund only one side of climate science, if there were really two sides. Climate science as it stands is a massive headache for governments - it means taxing/regulating things that people like, in really unpopular areas. There's a massive incentive for governments to fund any science that would question the IPCC conclusions - making it all go away would solve a whole load of political problems. Unfortunately, science doesn't work like that - you can't just get the answers you want because if you do other people are going to point out what you've done and it's easy* for other groups to check)
*in most areas. Far less so in my field of epidemiology where we cannot share or publish the patient-level data for others to verify, due to entirely legitimate data protection concerns. Other groups could request the same data, but I'm not sure you'd get that far on public interest grounds to simply verify pre-existing research. We need more like openSAFELY where anyone can run their own code to check conclusions. This would be possible if e.g. NHS Digital had a service to hold copies of supplied data and run, on demand (at low fee) code on it and provide the results (there would still be a need to ensure no sensitive disclosure in analysis results, which is probably why this hasn't happened).
"Points" from someone whose head is obviously completely up the system.
The points about funding are definetely valid, even if they don't resolve the 'groupthink amongst academics' problem.
Yep, there's definite scope for problems there. One thing becomes accepted and everyone else takes it as read. We've seen that often enough - but we've seen that often enough because eventually someone shows that's not how things work afterall.
Again, I'm long out of this field and wasn't that closely involved to start with, but I saw a lot of disagreement among climate scientists on how the feedbacks worked and interacted. Plenty of 'out there' ideas being presented where if thing A works differently to the general perception then thing B will happen and we can test that witthin 5-10 years etc. I think there are enough people with different backgrounds in different centres studying data from different sources with different designs to reduce the risk of too much groupthink here.
I may be wrong, of course and maybe there are more people training in 'climate science' at a lower level and being taught 'truths'. The nice thing 15 years ago, which may or may not still be the case, was that climate research was brining together people from a lot of disparate disciplines with different ideas and, in most cases, not a great deal of formal training in any accepted truth of the field. The main danger was that most people on the modelling side were working on a limited number of base models, so a fundamental error in one base model could lead to errors in many people's research. But, if so, there would be a whole lot of research that quickly diverged from new observations, unless you were really unlucky. There are also, of course, a lot of people not working on models at all, but working on comparing model predictions, forwards or backwards with observations on the ground and finding better ways of doing those observations.
My concern with it all is that right now, dissent is not allowed. We are at a stage whereby no one would put their heads above the parapet. Well that means that the overwhelming majority - thousands upon thousands - of climate scientists agree hence it is settled. But without going all Galileo about it is that we are in a period of absolute orthodoxy whereby dissenting views are simply not entertained.
No one disputes that the temperatures are rising but it is modelling that is telling us what happens next. Is it like cigarettes where a link has been shown to exist? Not being a climate scientist I have no idea.
I just feel uncomfortable that there is no Jeremy Paxman ("why is this lying bastard lying to me") to question it all. Are all those on here, for example, comfortable not wanting to question what is, in the end, a prediction based upon modelling and hence originates in the human mind.
This is a fantasy put around by right-wing commentators. As you say, no one disputes that temperatures are rising: the evidence there is unavoidable. That this is largely caused by human activity producing greenhouse gases is also very clear. But what happens next, however, is very much discussed and argued over. There is plenty of dissent. How different factors interact, how we should model future change, what’s the best approach to deal with the problem, all extensively debated.
However, the point is that temperatures are already up a worrying amount, so when that’s your starting point, whether things will get much worse or just slightly worse doesn’t change that they are already bad.
"The fantasy put about..."
LOL & QED
The world has warmed previously when presumably it wasn't on account of human activity. It is warming again now and that is coinciding with us pumping huge amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. And it may well be that the current warming is due to us. But we don't know how much, nor exactly what effect it is having in total when other factors are taken into account.
For example, does warming lead to more evaporation and more cloud cover, reflecting more incident energy from the sun back into space? Does warming kill vegetation and increase desertification, which is also a better reflector of incident energy back into space than plants are?
We don't know the future, we model it. And we model it extremely diligently. But it is only a model and any model is only as good as its inputs. If I model a balance sheet for example I know that I can fiddle faddle, say, working capital requirements and associated fundraising requirements. All my own work.
And the thing which you are illustrating is how sad it is that today we all are supposed to accept the orthodoxy with dissenters chastised and ridiculed. We have of course been here before in history but let's not over-dramatise things, right, I mean we are only talking about extinction of the human race. Something that you, by your actions, btw, aren't all *that* bothered about.
All scientists can ever do is make predictions and see how well they turn out.
The predictions of the 1990 models didn't play out perfectly (+0.4 degrees compared with +0.55 degrees) but they are not far off. Close enough to be able to say that the big picture story is right and everything else is sorting out details.
How right do the scientists have to be for how long?
Yep good question. I don't know. In climate/geological terms of course 30 years is tiny but let's say that there was "natural" warming. (And cooling, such as the planet has seen for the past XXXXXXX years). What if the scientists are imposing their models on an existing trajectory ie making observations not predictions.
The key here is rate of change. Natural heating and cooling occurs in geological timescales*, while recent warming has occurred measurably over a matter of a few decades.
The fact half the C02 ever released into the atmosphere by mankind has been since I graduated Medical School, and 85% since WW2 ended may be the reason.
* barring massive volcanic eruption or asteroid impact.
Not true. And this is one of the annoying 'facts' that has crept into the argument. Rates of change now are no different to those in the past. It is only in recent years we have come to realise that entry and exit from glaciations and other less extreme warming and cooling events can occur in decades rather than centuries. The ending of the Younger Dryas involved a 9 degree increase in temperature in just over a decade.
A 9 degree increase in certain locations, such as Greenland. The change in the global average temperature was, of course, far less than this.
Nope. Globally it is calculated at around 7 degrees so very much the same ball park.
Writing down you passcode, top level security.....the Chinese & Russians must piss themselves how moronic our officials are when it comes to basic op-sec.
All those claiming Boris Johnson to be a risk to national security wash your mouths out.
After 24 hours of waterboarding, the f***** wouldn't divulge his mobile phone PIN. Not least because he couldn't. Make him Foreign Secretary, and now!
Boris is definitely one of those people who uses the same password for every account and his phone pin is the same as credit card pin...with the failed thinking is ok because the password is some obscure latin or greek so nobody could guess it...
If all his accounts including credit cards are on one PIN and he's forgotten it, is that why he had to go to Richard Sharp to get some money?
Got to wonder where the Johnson story will go next. Thoughts of his running in a near-future by-election are nuts IMO, but the story's clearly not at an end yet.
Who even uses a PIN or ATM anymore for transactions? Both are obsolete. Use Apple Pay on phone or watch.
Boris must be a complete idiot if he persists in using cards.
Well that is a genuinely stupid comment since if you use contactless with a card you have to put it in and use your pin after a certain number of transactions or if the value is over £100.
So the answer is practically everyone.
Not stupid at all. There's no limit on NFC transactions – Apple or Google etc.
Cards are almost a pointless as cash.
A total waste of space.
It’s fine 99% of the time. Perhaps even 99.99% of the time. Until you come down off a mountain walk, when you realise your phone is dead because it’s spent all day with the radio turned up trying to find a signal, and you need to get a taxi back to base several miles away, and end up with a long walk. Bonus points if you can’t buy water on the way.
I do a lot of hiking.
There's this amazing innovation called a battery pack. Weighs very little and will charge a phone three times over.
Writing down you passcode, top level security.....the Chinese & Russians must piss themselves how moronic our officials are when it comes to basic op-sec.
All those claiming Boris Johnson to be a risk to national security wash your mouths out.
After 24 hours of waterboarding, the f***** wouldn't divulge his mobile phone PIN. Not least because he couldn't. Make him Foreign Secretary, and now!
Boris is definitely one of those people who uses the same password for every account and his phone pin is the same as credit card pin...with the failed thinking is ok because the password is some obscure latin or greek so nobody could guess it...
If all his accounts including credit cards are on one PIN and he's forgotten it, is that why he had to go to Richard Sharp to get some money?
Got to wonder where the Johnson story will go next. Thoughts of his running in a near-future by-election are nuts IMO, but the story's clearly not at an end yet.
Who even uses a PIN or ATM anymore for transactions? Both are obsolete. Use Apple Pay on phone or watch.
Boris must be a complete idiot if he persists in using cards.
ATM machines (just for @Selebian) I agree, but PINs I have all over the place.
I took an ATM card with me on my cycling trip, just in case. I have just employed a gardener and didn't know how he wanted to be paid so I used the card to get some cash, in case that was what he wanted (he doesn't). The card is a year out of date so it was lucky he was happy with a bank transfer and that I didn't need it on my trip.
Talking about cash (and @Anabobazina TRIGGER WARNING) I hadn't realised that HMG had had to change their bill to provide a little more protection for cash users.
"Previously the Bill did not specify whether withdrawal and deposit facilities should be free, or whether consumers might have to pay a charge.
But through a late amendment to the Bill, called for by Which?, it will now ensure that people across the country can withdraw and deposit cash for free.
This means the FCA will have greater power over major banks and building societies to ensure reasonable free access to cash is preserved for those who need it."
Do we have a view on cheques? I very rarely receive them, but have recently received quite a few (HMRC, TV licence, British Gas, Virgin, etc) in the settling my fathers estate. Don't know why that should be different to normal particularly as some organisations who had to pay me were happy with me providing my bank details. Very odd.
My wife commented that her last stub in her cheque book was dated 2016. I had to look for my cheque book and the last cheque I wrote was 2010.
The only people I still write cheques for are the cattery owners, who don’t use any type of card. The time I resent using cash is when out for a meal with friends who prefer cash, and expect my half of the bill also to be paid in cash, and who seem suspicious when I pay the entire bill be card and pocket their contribution.
Nick Palmer - About 1 in 4 American homes still have land lines. They are more common among the elderly -- no surprise -- and in the Northeast.
(Full disclosure: I have one, and like it enough so that I may keep it. I have a better phone than any smart phone I have seen. And, at almost 80 years old, I like the idea of having a back-up, in case of an emergency.)
Probably 3/4 here in the UK.
How do the others in US get internet?!
Hmm - depends how you define this one, I've got a landline in theory off my FTTP but no actual phone connected.
This is true for about a quarter of landlines.
The average talk time on a landline is 35 minutes per week, which should tell you everything you need to know.
The scam calls we get are mainly on our landline. Although, to be fair, we have had a few on our iPhones recently.
I was recently puzzled to hear a voice in the next room, which turned out to be a teacher from my daughter's school leaving a message. Going back to listen to it, there turned out to be at least two dozen message on there from the past two years - messages from teachers, offers of jobs, my parents... but by far the most common messages were robotic voices asking me to call back for some dubious reason. Anyway, the usual use of the landline in our house is to phone one of the mobiles when we can't find it.
Writing down you passcode, top level security.....the Chinese & Russians must piss themselves how moronic our officials are when it comes to basic op-sec.
All those claiming Boris Johnson to be a risk to national security wash your mouths out.
After 24 hours of waterboarding, the f***** wouldn't divulge his mobile phone PIN. Not least because he couldn't. Make him Foreign Secretary, and now!
Boris is definitely one of those people who uses the same password for every account and his phone pin is the same as credit card pin...with the failed thinking is ok because the password is some obscure latin or greek so nobody could guess it...
If all his accounts including credit cards are on one PIN and he's forgotten it, is that why he had to go to Richard Sharp to get some money?
Got to wonder where the Johnson story will go next. Thoughts of his running in a near-future by-election are nuts IMO, but the story's clearly not at an end yet.
Who even uses a PIN or ATM anymore for transactions? Both are obsolete. Use Apple Pay on phone or watch.
Boris must be a complete idiot if he persists in using cards.
Well that is a genuinely stupid comment since if you use contactless with a card you have to put it in and use your pin after a certain number of transactions or if the value is over £100.
So the answer is practically everyone.
Not stupid at all. There's no limit on NFC transactions – Apple or Google etc.
Cards are almost a pointless as cash.
A total waste of space.
It’s fine 99% of the time. Perhaps even 99.99% of the time. Until you come down off a mountain walk, when you realise your phone is dead because it’s spent all day with the radio turned up trying to find a signal, and you need to get a taxi back to base several miles away, and end up with a long walk. Bonus points if you can’t buy water on the way.
I do a lot of hiking.
There's this amazing innovation called a battery pack. Weighs very little and will charge a phone three times over.
Which doesn't help if the taxi broke down or there's no signal or the walk took 2 hours longer than expected. Taxi out, walk back.
Writing down you passcode, top level security.....the Chinese & Russians must piss themselves how moronic our officials are when it comes to basic op-sec.
All those claiming Boris Johnson to be a risk to national security wash your mouths out.
After 24 hours of waterboarding, the f***** wouldn't divulge his mobile phone PIN. Not least because he couldn't. Make him Foreign Secretary, and now!
Boris is definitely one of those people who uses the same password for every account and his phone pin is the same as credit card pin...with the failed thinking is ok because the password is some obscure latin or greek so nobody could guess it...
If all his accounts including credit cards are on one PIN and he's forgotten it, is that why he had to go to Richard Sharp to get some money?
Got to wonder where the Johnson story will go next. Thoughts of his running in a near-future by-election are nuts IMO, but the story's clearly not at an end yet.
Who even uses a PIN or ATM anymore for transactions? Both are obsolete. Use Apple Pay on phone or watch.
Boris must be a complete idiot if he persists in using cards.
Well that is a genuinely stupid comment since if you use contactless with a card you have to put it in and use your pin after a certain number of transactions or if the value is over £100.
So the answer is practically everyone.
Not stupid at all. There's no limit on NFC transactions – Apple or Google etc.
Cards are almost a pointless as cash.
A total waste of space.
It’s fine 99% of the time. Perhaps even 99.99% of the time. Until you come down off a mountain walk, when you realise your phone is dead because it’s spent all day with the radio turned up trying to find a signal, and you need to get a taxi back to base several miles away, and end up with a long walk. Bonus points if you can’t buy water on the way.
I do a lot of hiking.
There's this amazing innovation called a battery pack. Weighs very little and will charge a phone three times over.
Which doesn't help if the taxi broke down or there's no signal or the walk took 2 hours longer than expected. Taxi out, walk back.
A phone and a battery pack weighs many times what a debit card or a 20£ note does
Does it matter to her what the voters think? She's already been duly elected and won't seek re-election, so its Somebody Else's Problem what the voters think of her now.
And she's not going to stand down, because talentless MPs are grossly overpaid versus what they could attain in the real world, earning more than 97% of the British public for what is actually a Part Time job anyway, so she has absolutely no intention of standing down and losing her sinecure without a replacement.
This has always been a problem of electing MPs. Once elected, there is no requirement to do anything. It's largely just collecting salary until the next election. They don't have to do anything. Usually they do, because they want to rise the greasy pole, or else they want re-election, but if both those things aren't wanted, then the MP can (and does) just give up.
Dorries is hardly new in that regard. Gordon Brown did nowt after 2010. O'Mara did less than nothing, just claimed expenses for things he hadn't done.
I know there are recall petitions now, but perhaps they also should be triggered if an MP doesn't do any work.
Say 100 days a year verified work. Can be either in the constituency, or at Westminster. And you could even be fairly broad with the requirements. Holding a surgery should count, as would the day at Westminster. But even attending the village fete and being seen should probably count to. Basically, doing something to represent or meet the people who elected you. Doesn't seem too much, but I don't know why it hasn't been introduced.
Lots of paperwork and difficult to verify.
What’s the point
And if people want to elect an absentee MP why shouldn’t they?
Although Nadine Dorries doing nothing might be value added compared to her doing something…
As I received a notification, and going straight off topic:
1. I don't think my suggestion of monitoring MPs is that difficult. Don't House of Lords already do it (signing in)? Simply clock in and out at Westminster. At a surgery, your assistant can surely verify you were there (And your constituents you had a meeting with). And the village fete event will be all over the "Little Snoozing Gazette". I'm not suggesting timesheets and clock cards. Just a general verifiable number of days when you were; at Westminster; at your surgery; being seen out and about.
I mean, front and centre of my MP's page: https://peterdowd.com/ I recognise half those locations on his pictures.
2. Now, I realise an issue might be with Sinn Fein, but you know what, if they can't get their 100 days (or whatever) then yes I do think a by-election might be the best way forward. If the people of the constituent are happy with an absent MP, they'll keep voting for them for each of the four intervening years between a GE.
3. And if they don't do any work, and their constituents aren't happy with that, then they ARE kicked out. Who wants an MP who, on 7th May 2010 announced, 'bugger you all. I'm off to my house to write a book and never see anyone again' (Brown) and then be lumbered with that situation for five years.
Nick Palmer - About 1 in 4 American homes still have land lines. They are more common among the elderly -- no surprise -- and in the Northeast.
(Full disclosure: I have one, and like it enough so that I may keep it. I have a better phone than any smart phone I have seen. And, at almost 80 years old, I like the idea of having a back-up, in case of an emergency.)
Probably 3/4 here in the UK.
How do the others in US get internet?!
Hmm - depends how you define this one, I've got a landline in theory off my FTTP but no actual phone connected.
This is true for about a quarter of landlines.
The average talk time on a landline is 35 minutes per week, which should tell you everything you need to know.
Writing down you passcode, top level security.....the Chinese & Russians must piss themselves how moronic our officials are when it comes to basic op-sec.
All those claiming Boris Johnson to be a risk to national security wash your mouths out.
After 24 hours of waterboarding, the f***** wouldn't divulge his mobile phone PIN. Not least because he couldn't. Make him Foreign Secretary, and now!
Boris is definitely one of those people who uses the same password for every account and his phone pin is the same as credit card pin...with the failed thinking is ok because the password is some obscure latin or greek so nobody could guess it...
If all his accounts including credit cards are on one PIN and he's forgotten it, is that why he had to go to Richard Sharp to get some money?
Got to wonder where the Johnson story will go next. Thoughts of his running in a near-future by-election are nuts IMO, but the story's clearly not at an end yet.
Who even uses a PIN or ATM anymore for transactions? Both are obsolete. Use Apple Pay on phone or watch.
Boris must be a complete idiot if he persists in using cards.
ATM machines (just for @Selebian) I agree, but PINs I have all over the place.
I took an ATM card with me on my cycling trip, just in case. I have just employed a gardener and didn't know how he wanted to be paid so I used the card to get some cash, in case that was what he wanted (he doesn't). The card is a year out of date so it was lucky he was happy with a bank transfer and that I didn't need it on my trip.
Talking about cash (and @Anabobazina TRIGGER WARNING) I hadn't realised that HMG had had to change their bill to provide a little more protection for cash users.
"Previously the Bill did not specify whether withdrawal and deposit facilities should be free, or whether consumers might have to pay a charge.
But through a late amendment to the Bill, called for by Which?, it will now ensure that people across the country can withdraw and deposit cash for free.
This means the FCA will have greater power over major banks and building societies to ensure reasonable free access to cash is preserved for those who need it."
Good, I don't want to be charged when I have to trudge to the bank to deposit cash for those rude idiots who insist on transferring money they owe to me in stupid paper tokens.
That seems an odd thing to say. The only times I get given cash are on the vanishingly rare occasions I pay with it and get change. If you are not a retailer, your problem with sums of cash large enough to require banking is not going to be trudging, it's going to be the plod (money-laundering division). If you are a retailer, you are surely at liberty to stipulate card-only?
I think we urgently need a French-style law requiring businesses to accept cash, whether they like the idea or not.
No, we don't.
What a daft idea.
Retailers don't need to accept ANY payment: cash, card, Apple Pay, Google Pay, groats, heads of cattle, gifts or sexual favours. They can point blank refuse to sell you a can of lemonade even if you offer them a wad of fresh twenties.
The idea they should be forced to accept an anachronistic form of payment because AndyJS, the bloke on the internet, would like them to is for the birds.
Writing down you passcode, top level security.....the Chinese & Russians must piss themselves how moronic our officials are when it comes to basic op-sec.
All those claiming Boris Johnson to be a risk to national security wash your mouths out.
After 24 hours of waterboarding, the f***** wouldn't divulge his mobile phone PIN. Not least because he couldn't. Make him Foreign Secretary, and now!
Boris is definitely one of those people who uses the same password for every account and his phone pin is the same as credit card pin...with the failed thinking is ok because the password is some obscure latin or greek so nobody could guess it...
If all his accounts including credit cards are on one PIN and he's forgotten it, is that why he had to go to Richard Sharp to get some money?
Got to wonder where the Johnson story will go next. Thoughts of his running in a near-future by-election are nuts IMO, but the story's clearly not at an end yet.
Who even uses a PIN or ATM anymore for transactions? Both are obsolete. Use Apple Pay on phone or watch.
Boris must be a complete idiot if he persists in using cards.
Well that is a genuinely stupid comment since if you use contactless with a card you have to put it in and use your pin after a certain number of transactions or if the value is over £100.
So the answer is practically everyone.
Not stupid at all. There's no limit on NFC transactions – Apple or Google etc.
Cards are almost a pointless as cash.
A total waste of space.
It’s fine 99% of the time. Perhaps even 99.99% of the time. Until you come down off a mountain walk, when you realise your phone is dead because it’s spent all day with the radio turned up trying to find a signal, and you need to get a taxi back to base several miles away, and end up with a long walk. Bonus points if you can’t buy water on the way.
How are you summoning the taxi to K2 base camp if your phone is dead? Once you're in the taxi you can charge your because all taxi drivers are required, by law, to carry USB cables.
This reminds me of the relentless search for esoteric sets of circumstance that would cause people to be starved to death by the ULEZ.
Writing down you passcode, top level security.....the Chinese & Russians must piss themselves how moronic our officials are when it comes to basic op-sec.
All those claiming Boris Johnson to be a risk to national security wash your mouths out.
After 24 hours of waterboarding, the f***** wouldn't divulge his mobile phone PIN. Not least because he couldn't. Make him Foreign Secretary, and now!
Boris is definitely one of those people who uses the same password for every account and his phone pin is the same as credit card pin...with the failed thinking is ok because the password is some obscure latin or greek so nobody could guess it...
If all his accounts including credit cards are on one PIN and he's forgotten it, is that why he had to go to Richard Sharp to get some money?
Got to wonder where the Johnson story will go next. Thoughts of his running in a near-future by-election are nuts IMO, but the story's clearly not at an end yet.
Who even uses a PIN or ATM anymore for transactions? Both are obsolete. Use Apple Pay on phone or watch.
Boris must be a complete idiot if he persists in using cards.
Well that is a genuinely stupid comment since if you use contactless with a card you have to put it in and use your pin after a certain number of transactions or if the value is over £100.
So the answer is practically everyone.
Not stupid at all. There's no limit on NFC transactions – Apple or Google etc.
Cards are almost a pointless as cash.
A total waste of space.
It’s fine 99% of the time. Perhaps even 99.99% of the time. Until you come down off a mountain walk, when you realise your phone is dead because it’s spent all day with the radio turned up trying to find a signal, and you need to get a taxi back to base several miles away, and end up with a long walk. Bonus points if you can’t buy water on the way.
I do a lot of hiking.
There's this amazing innovation called a battery pack. Weighs very little and will charge a phone three times over.
Which doesn't help if the taxi broke down or there's no signal or the walk took 2 hours longer than expected. Taxi out, walk back.
A phone and a battery pack weighs many times what a debit card or a 20£ note does
None of those 4 things is the slightest help with any of those problems.
Nick Palmer - About 1 in 4 American homes still have land lines. They are more common among the elderly -- no surprise -- and in the Northeast.
(Full disclosure: I have one, and like it enough so that I may keep it. I have a better phone than any smart phone I have seen. And, at almost 80 years old, I like the idea of having a back-up, in case of an emergency.)
Probably 3/4 here in the UK.
How do the others in US get internet?!
Hmm - depends how you define this one, I've got a landline in theory off my FTTP but no actual phone connected.
This is true for about a quarter of landlines.
The average talk time on a landline is 35 minutes per week, which should tell you everything you need to know.
Writing down you passcode, top level security.....the Chinese & Russians must piss themselves how moronic our officials are when it comes to basic op-sec.
All those claiming Boris Johnson to be a risk to national security wash your mouths out.
After 24 hours of waterboarding, the f***** wouldn't divulge his mobile phone PIN. Not least because he couldn't. Make him Foreign Secretary, and now!
Boris is definitely one of those people who uses the same password for every account and his phone pin is the same as credit card pin...with the failed thinking is ok because the password is some obscure latin or greek so nobody could guess it...
If all his accounts including credit cards are on one PIN and he's forgotten it, is that why he had to go to Richard Sharp to get some money?
Got to wonder where the Johnson story will go next. Thoughts of his running in a near-future by-election are nuts IMO, but the story's clearly not at an end yet.
Who even uses a PIN or ATM anymore for transactions? Both are obsolete. Use Apple Pay on phone or watch.
Boris must be a complete idiot if he persists in using cards.
Well that is a genuinely stupid comment since if you use contactless with a card you have to put it in and use your pin after a certain number of transactions or if the value is over £100.
So the answer is practically everyone.
Not stupid at all. There's no limit on NFC transactions – Apple or Google etc.
Cards are almost a pointless as cash.
A total waste of space.
It’s fine 99% of the time. Perhaps even 99.99% of the time. Until you come down off a mountain walk, when you realise your phone is dead because it’s spent all day with the radio turned up trying to find a signal, and you need to get a taxi back to base several miles away, and end up with a long walk. Bonus points if you can’t buy water on the way.
I do a lot of hiking.
There's this amazing innovation called a battery pack. Weighs very little and will charge a phone three times over.
Which doesn't help if the taxi broke down or there's no signal or the walk took 2 hours longer than expected. Taxi out, walk back.
A phone and a battery pack weighs many times what a debit card
Nick Palmer - About 1 in 4 American homes still have land lines. They are more common among the elderly -- no surprise -- and in the Northeast.
(Full disclosure: I have one, and like it enough so that I may keep it. I have a better phone than any smart phone I have seen. And, at almost 80 years old, I like the idea of having a back-up, in case of an emergency.)
Probably 3/4 here in the UK.
How do the others in US get internet?!
Hmm - depends how you define this one, I've got a landline in theory off my FTTP but no actual phone connected.
This is true for about a quarter of landlines.
The average talk time on a landline is 35 minutes per week, which should tell you everything you need to know.
Nick Palmer - About 1 in 4 American homes still have land lines. They are more common among the elderly -- no surprise -- and in the Northeast.
(Full disclosure: I have one, and like it enough so that I may keep it. I have a better phone than any smart phone I have seen. And, at almost 80 years old, I like the idea of having a back-up, in case of an emergency.)
Probably 3/4 here in the UK.
How do the others in US get internet?!
Hmm - depends how you define this one, I've got a landline in theory off my FTTP but no actual phone connected.
Yeah, me too. I had to have the landline point but like thousands/millions(?) of others I have never once used it. I don't even know the number!
The frontline NATO states have no time for baldy Ben's talk of ingratitude.
Finnish foreign minister Elina Valtonen tells @felschwartz that “we in the west need to understand that obviously, this is not charity because Ukraine is fighting for us. They are fighting for our liberty and the European security architecture.” https://twitter.com/ChristopherJM/status/1679744886822649856
Hungary is in NATO. Speaking of liberty, is Kolomoisky at it? As for Zelensky, it's kind of unusual to demand to be allowed to join a club.
Anecdote: I went out for a meal last night. Ten of us. Time for my train. Dropped my cash on the table and left. Left it to everyone else to faff about with card machines, BACS transfers and whatever else they were up to to apportion the bill. Didn't miss my train!
Writing down you passcode, top level security.....the Chinese & Russians must piss themselves how moronic our officials are when it comes to basic op-sec.
All those claiming Boris Johnson to be a risk to national security wash your mouths out.
After 24 hours of waterboarding, the f***** wouldn't divulge his mobile phone PIN. Not least because he couldn't. Make him Foreign Secretary, and now!
Boris is definitely one of those people who uses the same password for every account and his phone pin is the same as credit card pin...with the failed thinking is ok because the password is some obscure latin or greek so nobody could guess it...
If all his accounts including credit cards are on one PIN and he's forgotten it, is that why he had to go to Richard Sharp to get some money?
Got to wonder where the Johnson story will go next. Thoughts of his running in a near-future by-election are nuts IMO, but the story's clearly not at an end yet.
Who even uses a PIN or ATM anymore for transactions? Both are obsolete. Use Apple Pay on phone or watch.
Boris must be a complete idiot if he persists in using cards.
Well that is a genuinely stupid comment since if you use contactless with a card you have to put it in and use your pin after a certain number of transactions or if the value is over £100.
So the answer is practically everyone.
Not stupid at all. There's no limit on NFC transactions – Apple or Google etc.
Cards are almost a pointless as cash.
A total waste of space.
It’s fine 99% of the time. Perhaps even 99.99% of the time. Until you come down off a mountain walk, when you realise your phone is dead because it’s spent all day with the radio turned up trying to find a signal, and you need to get a taxi back to base several miles away, and end up with a long walk. Bonus points if you can’t buy water on the way.
I do a lot of hiking.
There's this amazing innovation called a battery pack. Weighs very little and will charge a phone three times over.
Which doesn't help if the taxi broke down or there's no signal or the walk took 2 hours longer than expected. Taxi out, walk back.
Or kick the phone habit and cope with the genuine experience of being outdoors.
Writing down you passcode, top level security.....the Chinese & Russians must piss themselves how moronic our officials are when it comes to basic op-sec.
All those claiming Boris Johnson to be a risk to national security wash your mouths out.
After 24 hours of waterboarding, the f***** wouldn't divulge his mobile phone PIN. Not least because he couldn't. Make him Foreign Secretary, and now!
Boris is definitely one of those people who uses the same password for every account and his phone pin is the same as credit card pin...with the failed thinking is ok because the password is some obscure latin or greek so nobody could guess it...
If all his accounts including credit cards are on one PIN and he's forgotten it, is that why he had to go to Richard Sharp to get some money?
Got to wonder where the Johnson story will go next. Thoughts of his running in a near-future by-election are nuts IMO, but the story's clearly not at an end yet.
Who even uses a PIN or ATM anymore for transactions? Both are obsolete. Use Apple Pay on phone or watch.
Boris must be a complete idiot if he persists in using cards.
Well that is a genuinely stupid comment since if you use contactless with a card you have to put it in and use your pin after a certain number of transactions or if the value is over £100.
So the answer is practically everyone.
Not stupid at all. There's no limit on NFC transactions – Apple or Google etc.
Cards are almost a pointless as cash.
A total waste of space.
It’s fine 99% of the time. Perhaps even 99.99% of the time. Until you come down off a mountain walk, when you realise your phone is dead because it’s spent all day with the radio turned up trying to find a signal, and you need to get a taxi back to base several miles away, and end up with a long walk. Bonus points if you can’t buy water on the way.
I do a lot of hiking.
There's this amazing innovation called a battery pack. Weighs very little and will charge a phone three times over.
Which doesn't help if the taxi broke down or there's no signal or the walk took 2 hours longer than expected. Taxi out, walk back.
A phone and a battery pack weighs many times what a debit card
Nick Palmer - About 1 in 4 American homes still have land lines. They are more common among the elderly -- no surprise -- and in the Northeast.
(Full disclosure: I have one, and like it enough so that I may keep it. I have a better phone than any smart phone I have seen. And, at almost 80 years old, I like the idea of having a back-up, in case of an emergency.)
Probably 3/4 here in the UK.
How do the others in US get internet?!
Hmm - depends how you define this one, I've got a landline in theory off my FTTP but no actual phone connected.
This is true for about a quarter of landlines.
The average talk time on a landline is 35 minutes per week, which should tell you everything you need to know.
Results in Norfolk and Chippenham yesterday show a Conservative vote collapse to the Greens and Lib Dems respectively. The Greens have been doing will the last 8 weeks, I wonder whether they will do well enough at Selby next week, taking votes from Labour just enough to deprive Starmer of victory. They have a good base in Frome and could push Labour into fourth place at Somerton and Frome.
So. Is the BBC biased politically (forget Huw Edwards) or not and if it is, which way?
I saw an old mate of mine last night. To the left, shall we say, and he was fuming that eg The Today Programme might as well be an arm of government.
Whereas from my right-leaning, civilised, thoughtful perspective I think the BBC leans left.
I dislike the fact that they always have to so maniacally strive for "balance" and "inclusivity" but I understand it also.
As they say if we're both convinced of our view then perhaps it is therefore doing something right.
Although annoying both left and right does not mean that the BBC is balanced.
FWIW I think the BBC tries very hard to be balanced on most things (not all - there is now no hint of skepticism left when reporting climate science, for instance, when some of the more out there claims/predictions ought to be at best queried). It does, however, tend to skew urban, metropolitan. I don't think it has a clue about the countryside and rural affairs, as shown by Countryfile, which is a programme about the countryside made by city dwellers, for city dwellers.
Yes there's plenty wrong with it.
And as for climate, my point to my friend was that they would never dare have someone from "the other side" to argue a different position on climate change.
When they ever did get someone from ‘the other side’, it would be a flat Earth fanatic rather than another scientist.
That may have been only partly their fault. FEFs so not have careers which they would endanger by voicing private doubts.
Which is actually a large part of the problem, that all the scientific research funding is on one side.
The scientific research funding follows the scientific evidence.
The vested interest funding, well there's been plenty of that for climate 'sceptics'. And probably much more lucrative for those involved.
(I do find the idea of funding bias bizarre. It's in no government's interest to fund only one side of climate science, if there were really two sides. Climate science as it stands is a massive headache for governments - it means taxing/regulating things that people like, in really unpopular areas. There's a massive incentive for governments to fund any science that would question the IPCC conclusions - making it all go away would solve a whole load of political problems. Unfortunately, science doesn't work like that - you can't just get the answers you want because if you do other people are going to point out what you've done and it's easy* for other groups to check)
*in most areas. Far less so in my field of epidemiology where we cannot share or publish the patient-level data for others to verify, due to entirely legitimate data protection concerns. Other groups could request the same data, but I'm not sure you'd get that far on public interest grounds to simply verify pre-existing research. We need more like openSAFELY where anyone can run their own code to check conclusions. This would be possible if e.g. NHS Digital had a service to hold copies of supplied data and run, on demand (at low fee) code on it and provide the results (there would still be a need to ensure no sensitive disclosure in analysis results, which is probably why this hasn't happened).
"Points" from someone whose head is obviously completely up the system.
The points about funding are definetely valid, even if they don't resolve the 'groupthink amongst academics' problem.
Yep, there's definite scope for problems there. One thing becomes accepted and everyone else takes it as read. We've seen that often enough - but we've seen that often enough because eventually someone shows that's not how things work afterall.
Again, I'm long out of this field and wasn't that closely involved to start with, but I saw a lot of disagreement among climate scientists on how the feedbacks worked and interacted. Plenty of 'out there' ideas being presented where if thing A works differently to the general perception then thing B will happen and we can test that witthin 5-10 years etc. I think there are enough people with different backgrounds in different centres studying data from different sources with different designs to reduce the risk of too much groupthink here.
I may be wrong, of course and maybe there are more people training in 'climate science' at a lower level and being taught 'truths'. The nice thing 15 years ago, which may or may not still be the case, was that climate research was brining together people from a lot of disparate disciplines with different ideas and, in most cases, not a great deal of formal training in any accepted truth of the field. The main danger was that most people on the modelling side were working on a limited number of base models, so a fundamental error in one base model could lead to errors in many people's research. But, if so, there would be a whole lot of research that quickly diverged from new observations, unless you were really unlucky. There are also, of course, a lot of people not working on models at all, but working on comparing model predictions, forwards or backwards with observations on the ground and finding better ways of doing those observations.
My concern with it all is that right now, dissent is not allowed. We are at a stage whereby no one would put their heads above the parapet. Well that means that the overwhelming majority - thousands upon thousands - of climate scientists agree hence it is settled. But without going all Galileo about it is that we are in a period of absolute orthodoxy whereby dissenting views are simply not entertained.
No one disputes that the temperatures are rising but it is modelling that is telling us what happens next. Is it like cigarettes where a link has been shown to exist? Not being a climate scientist I have no idea.
I just feel uncomfortable that there is no Jeremy Paxman ("why is this lying bastard lying to me") to question it all. Are all those on here, for example, comfortable not wanting to question what is, in the end, a prediction based upon modelling and hence originates in the human mind.
This is a fantasy put around by right-wing commentators. As you say, no one disputes that temperatures are rising: the evidence there is unavoidable. That this is largely caused by human activity producing greenhouse gases is also very clear. But what happens next, however, is very much discussed and argued over. There is plenty of dissent. How different factors interact, how we should model future change, what’s the best approach to deal with the problem, all extensively debated.
However, the point is that temperatures are already up a worrying amount, so when that’s your starting point, whether things will get much worse or just slightly worse doesn’t change that they are already bad.
"The fantasy put about..."
LOL & QED
The world has warmed previously when presumably it wasn't on account of human activity. It is warming again now and that is coinciding with us pumping huge amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. And it may well be that the current warming is due to us. But we don't know how much, nor exactly what effect it is having in total when other factors are taken into account.
For example, does warming lead to more evaporation and more cloud cover, reflecting more incident energy from the sun back into space? Does warming kill vegetation and increase desertification, which is also a better reflector of incident energy back into space than plants are?
We don't know the future, we model it. And we model it extremely diligently. But it is only a model and any model is only as good as its inputs. If I model a balance sheet for example I know that I can fiddle faddle, say, working capital requirements and associated fundraising requirements. All my own work.
And the thing which you are illustrating is how sad it is that today we all are supposed to accept the orthodoxy with dissenters chastised and ridiculed. We have of course been here before in history but let's not over-dramatise things, right, I mean we are only talking about extinction of the human race. Something that you, by your actions, btw, aren't all *that* bothered about.
All scientists can ever do is make predictions and see how well they turn out.
The predictions of the 1990 models didn't play out perfectly (+0.4 degrees compared with +0.55 degrees) but they are not far off. Close enough to be able to say that the big picture story is right and everything else is sorting out details.
How right do the scientists have to be for how long?
Yep good question. I don't know. In climate/geological terms of course 30 years is tiny but let's say that there was "natural" warming. (And cooling, such as the planet has seen for the past XXXXXXX years). What if the scientists are imposing their models on an existing trajectory ie making observations not predictions.
The key here is rate of change. Natural heating and cooling occurs in geological timescales*, while recent warming has occurred measurably over a matter of a few decades.
The fact half the C02 ever released into the atmosphere by mankind has been since I graduated Medical School, and 85% since WW2 ended may be the reason.
* barring massive volcanic eruption or asteroid impact.
Not true. And this is one of the annoying 'facts' that has crept into the argument. Rates of change now are no different to those in the past. It is only in recent years we have come to realise that entry and exit from glaciations and other less extreme warming and cooling events can occur in decades rather than centuries. The ending of the Younger Dryas involved a 9 degree increase in temperature in just over a decade.
A 9 degree increase in certain locations, such as Greenland. The change in the global average temperature was, of course, far less than this.
Nope. Globally it is calculated at around 7 degrees so very much the same ball park.
Citation needed.
Richard is probably correct, but recent research seems to suggest that the global timing was phased over a century or so.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2007869117 ...Particularly, a growing number of high-resolution speleothem records from the AM region exhibit a more gradual onset and termination of millennial-scale events, including the YD. In this regard, they are to some extent more similar to the gradual shifts of the Antarctic, rather than the abrupt changes characteristic of Greenland climate...
So. Is the BBC biased politically (forget Huw Edwards) or not and if it is, which way?
I saw an old mate of mine last night. To the left, shall we say, and he was fuming that eg The Today Programme might as well be an arm of government.
Whereas from my right-leaning, civilised, thoughtful perspective I think the BBC leans left.
I dislike the fact that they always have to so maniacally strive for "balance" and "inclusivity" but I understand it also.
As they say if we're both convinced of our view then perhaps it is therefore doing something right.
Although annoying both left and right does not mean that the BBC is balanced.
FWIW I think the BBC tries very hard to be balanced on most things (not all - there is now no hint of skepticism left when reporting climate science, for instance, when some of the more out there claims/predictions ought to be at best queried). It does, however, tend to skew urban, metropolitan. I don't think it has a clue about the countryside and rural affairs, as shown by Countryfile, which is a programme about the countryside made by city dwellers, for city dwellers.
Yes there's plenty wrong with it.
And as for climate, my point to my friend was that they would never dare have someone from "the other side" to argue a different position on climate change.
When they ever did get someone from ‘the other side’, it would be a flat Earth fanatic rather than another scientist.
That may have been only partly their fault. FEFs so not have careers which they would endanger by voicing private doubts.
Which is actually a large part of the problem, that all the scientific research funding is on one side.
The scientific research funding follows the scientific evidence.
The vested interest funding, well there's been plenty of that for climate 'sceptics'. And probably much more lucrative for those involved.
(I do find the idea of funding bias bizarre. It's in no government's interest to fund only one side of climate science, if there were really two sides. Climate science as it stands is a massive headache for governments - it means taxing/regulating things that people like, in really unpopular areas. There's a massive incentive for governments to fund any science that would question the IPCC conclusions - making it all go away would solve a whole load of political problems. Unfortunately, science doesn't work like that - you can't just get the answers you want because if you do other people are going to point out what you've done and it's easy* for other groups to check)
*in most areas. Far less so in my field of epidemiology where we cannot share or publish the patient-level data for others to verify, due to entirely legitimate data protection concerns. Other groups could request the same data, but I'm not sure you'd get that far on public interest grounds to simply verify pre-existing research. We need more like openSAFELY where anyone can run their own code to check conclusions. This would be possible if e.g. NHS Digital had a service to hold copies of supplied data and run, on demand (at low fee) code on it and provide the results (there would still be a need to ensure no sensitive disclosure in analysis results, which is probably why this hasn't happened).
"Points" from someone whose head is obviously completely up the system.
The points about funding are definetely valid, even if they don't resolve the 'groupthink amongst academics' problem.
Yep, there's definite scope for problems there. One thing becomes accepted and everyone else takes it as read. We've seen that often enough - but we've seen that often enough because eventually someone shows that's not how things work afterall.
Again, I'm long out of this field and wasn't that closely involved to start with, but I saw a lot of disagreement among climate scientists on how the feedbacks worked and interacted. Plenty of 'out there' ideas being presented where if thing A works differently to the general perception then thing B will happen and we can test that witthin 5-10 years etc. I think there are enough people with different backgrounds in different centres studying data from different sources with different designs to reduce the risk of too much groupthink here.
I may be wrong, of course and maybe there are more people training in 'climate science' at a lower level and being taught 'truths'. The nice thing 15 years ago, which may or may not still be the case, was that climate research was brining together people from a lot of disparate disciplines with different ideas and, in most cases, not a great deal of formal training in any accepted truth of the field. The main danger was that most people on the modelling side were working on a limited number of base models, so a fundamental error in one base model could lead to errors in many people's research. But, if so, there would be a whole lot of research that quickly diverged from new observations, unless you were really unlucky. There are also, of course, a lot of people not working on models at all, but working on comparing model predictions, forwards or backwards with observations on the ground and finding better ways of doing those observations.
My concern with it all is that right now, dissent is not allowed. We are at a stage whereby no one would put their heads above the parapet. Well that means that the overwhelming majority - thousands upon thousands - of climate scientists agree hence it is settled. But without going all Galileo about it is that we are in a period of absolute orthodoxy whereby dissenting views are simply not entertained.
No one disputes that the temperatures are rising but it is modelling that is telling us what happens next. Is it like cigarettes where a link has been shown to exist? Not being a climate scientist I have no idea.
I just feel uncomfortable that there is no Jeremy Paxman ("why is this lying bastard lying to me") to question it all. Are all those on here, for example, comfortable not wanting to question what is, in the end, a prediction based upon modelling and hence originates in the human mind.
This is a fantasy put around by right-wing commentators. As you say, no one disputes that temperatures are rising: the evidence there is unavoidable. That this is largely caused by human activity producing greenhouse gases is also very clear. But what happens next, however, is very much discussed and argued over. There is plenty of dissent. How different factors interact, how we should model future change, what’s the best approach to deal with the problem, all extensively debated.
However, the point is that temperatures are already up a worrying amount, so when that’s your starting point, whether things will get much worse or just slightly worse doesn’t change that they are already bad.
"The fantasy put about..."
LOL & QED
The world has warmed previously when presumably it wasn't on account of human activity. It is warming again now and that is coinciding with us pumping huge amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. And it may well be that the current warming is due to us. But we don't know how much, nor exactly what effect it is having in total when other factors are taken into account.
For example, does warming lead to more evaporation and more cloud cover, reflecting more incident energy from the sun back into space? Does warming kill vegetation and increase desertification, which is also a better reflector of incident energy back into space than plants are?
We don't know the future, we model it. And we model it extremely diligently. But it is only a model and any model is only as good as its inputs. If I model a balance sheet for example I know that I can fiddle faddle, say, working capital requirements and associated fundraising requirements. All my own work.
And the thing which you are illustrating is how sad it is that today we all are supposed to accept the orthodoxy with dissenters chastised and ridiculed. We have of course been here before in history but let's not over-dramatise things, right, I mean we are only talking about extinction of the human race. Something that you, by your actions, btw, aren't all *that* bothered about.
All scientists can ever do is make predictions and see how well they turn out.
The predictions of the 1990 models didn't play out perfectly (+0.4 degrees compared with +0.55 degrees) but they are not far off. Close enough to be able to say that the big picture story is right and everything else is sorting out details.
How right do the scientists have to be for how long?
Yep good question. I don't know. In climate/geological terms of course 30 years is tiny but let's say that there was "natural" warming. (And cooling, such as the planet has seen for the past XXXXXXX years). What if the scientists are imposing their models on an existing trajectory ie making observations not predictions.
The key here is rate of change. Natural heating and cooling occurs in geological timescales*, while recent warming has occurred measurably over a matter of a few decades.
The fact half the C02 ever released into the atmosphere by mankind has been since I graduated Medical School, and 85% since WW2 ended may be the reason.
* barring massive volcanic eruption or asteroid impact.
Not true. And this is one of the annoying 'facts' that has crept into the argument. Rates of change now are no different to those in the past. It is only in recent years we have come to realise that entry and exit from glaciations and other less extreme warming and cooling events can occur in decades rather than centuries. The ending of the Younger Dryas involved a 9 degree increase in temperature in just over a decade.
Was that local or global ?
If the AMOC were to shut down, we'd probably see a drop of similar proportions in Europe, on a similarly rapid timescale.
Yes, that's a good point. There is a danger that the current anthropogenically driven warming could be interrupted by further Younger Dryas type events as ocean currents shift in response to e.g. meltwater pulses. While our hunter-gather ancestors wouldn't have been too bothered by them, such events could devastate our modern, settled societies.
I'll hazard a guess that anabobadingdong is not a fan of paper rail tickets either.
Again, a moronic idea. Why would you want to carry around a stupid piece of paper that is liable to get lost when you can just scan a QR code on your watch?
So. Is the BBC biased politically (forget Huw Edwards) or not and if it is, which way?
I saw an old mate of mine last night. To the left, shall we say, and he was fuming that eg The Today Programme might as well be an arm of government.
Whereas from my right-leaning, civilised, thoughtful perspective I think the BBC leans left.
I dislike the fact that they always have to so maniacally strive for "balance" and "inclusivity" but I understand it also.
As they say if we're both convinced of our view then perhaps it is therefore doing something right.
Although annoying both left and right does not mean that the BBC is balanced.
FWIW I think the BBC tries very hard to be balanced on most things (not all - there is now no hint of skepticism left when reporting climate science, for instance, when some of the more out there claims/predictions ought to be at best queried). It does, however, tend to skew urban, metropolitan. I don't think it has a clue about the countryside and rural affairs, as shown by Countryfile, which is a programme about the countryside made by city dwellers, for city dwellers.
Yes there's plenty wrong with it.
And as for climate, my point to my friend was that they would never dare have someone from "the other side" to argue a different position on climate change.
When they ever did get someone from ‘the other side’, it would be a flat Earth fanatic rather than another scientist.
That may have been only partly their fault. FEFs so not have careers which they would endanger by voicing private doubts.
Which is actually a large part of the problem, that all the scientific research funding is on one side.
The scientific research funding follows the scientific evidence.
The vested interest funding, well there's been plenty of that for climate 'sceptics'. And probably much more lucrative for those involved.
(I do find the idea of funding bias bizarre. It's in no government's interest to fund only one side of climate science, if there were really two sides. Climate science as it stands is a massive headache for governments - it means taxing/regulating things that people like, in really unpopular areas. There's a massive incentive for governments to fund any science that would question the IPCC conclusions - making it all go away would solve a whole load of political problems. Unfortunately, science doesn't work like that - you can't just get the answers you want because if you do other people are going to point out what you've done and it's easy* for other groups to check)
*in most areas. Far less so in my field of epidemiology where we cannot share or publish the patient-level data for others to verify, due to entirely legitimate data protection concerns. Other groups could request the same data, but I'm not sure you'd get that far on public interest grounds to simply verify pre-existing research. We need more like openSAFELY where anyone can run their own code to check conclusions. This would be possible if e.g. NHS Digital had a service to hold copies of supplied data and run, on demand (at low fee) code on it and provide the results (there would still be a need to ensure no sensitive disclosure in analysis results, which is probably why this hasn't happened).
"Points" from someone whose head is obviously completely up the system.
The points about funding are definetely valid, even if they don't resolve the 'groupthink amongst academics' problem.
Yep, there's definite scope for problems there. One thing becomes accepted and everyone else takes it as read. We've seen that often enough - but we've seen that often enough because eventually someone shows that's not how things work afterall.
Again, I'm long out of this field and wasn't that closely involved to start with, but I saw a lot of disagreement among climate scientists on how the feedbacks worked and interacted. Plenty of 'out there' ideas being presented where if thing A works differently to the general perception then thing B will happen and we can test that witthin 5-10 years etc. I think there are enough people with different backgrounds in different centres studying data from different sources with different designs to reduce the risk of too much groupthink here.
I may be wrong, of course and maybe there are more people training in 'climate science' at a lower level and being taught 'truths'. The nice thing 15 years ago, which may or may not still be the case, was that climate research was brining together people from a lot of disparate disciplines with different ideas and, in most cases, not a great deal of formal training in any accepted truth of the field. The main danger was that most people on the modelling side were working on a limited number of base models, so a fundamental error in one base model could lead to errors in many people's research. But, if so, there would be a whole lot of research that quickly diverged from new observations, unless you were really unlucky. There are also, of course, a lot of people not working on models at all, but working on comparing model predictions, forwards or backwards with observations on the ground and finding better ways of doing those observations.
My concern with it all is that right now, dissent is not allowed. We are at a stage whereby no one would put their heads above the parapet. Well that means that the overwhelming majority - thousands upon thousands - of climate scientists agree hence it is settled. But without going all Galileo about it is that we are in a period of absolute orthodoxy whereby dissenting views are simply not entertained.
No one disputes that the temperatures are rising but it is modelling that is telling us what happens next. Is it like cigarettes where a link has been shown to exist? Not being a climate scientist I have no idea.
I just feel uncomfortable that there is no Jeremy Paxman ("why is this lying bastard lying to me") to question it all. Are all those on here, for example, comfortable not wanting to question what is, in the end, a prediction based upon modelling and hence originates in the human mind.
This is a fantasy put around by right-wing commentators. As you say, no one disputes that temperatures are rising: the evidence there is unavoidable. That this is largely caused by human activity producing greenhouse gases is also very clear. But what happens next, however, is very much discussed and argued over. There is plenty of dissent. How different factors interact, how we should model future change, what’s the best approach to deal with the problem, all extensively debated.
However, the point is that temperatures are already up a worrying amount, so when that’s your starting point, whether things will get much worse or just slightly worse doesn’t change that they are already bad.
"The fantasy put about..."
LOL & QED
The world has warmed previously when presumably it wasn't on account of human activity. It is warming again now and that is coinciding with us pumping huge amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. And it may well be that the current warming is due to us. But we don't know how much, nor exactly what effect it is having in total when other factors are taken into account.
For example, does warming lead to more evaporation and more cloud cover, reflecting more incident energy from the sun back into space? Does warming kill vegetation and increase desertification, which is also a better reflector of incident energy back into space than plants are?
We don't know the future, we model it. And we model it extremely diligently. But it is only a model and any model is only as good as its inputs. If I model a balance sheet for example I know that I can fiddle faddle, say, working capital requirements and associated fundraising requirements. All my own work.
And the thing which you are illustrating is how sad it is that today we all are supposed to accept the orthodoxy with dissenters chastised and ridiculed. We have of course been here before in history but let's not over-dramatise things, right, I mean we are only talking about extinction of the human race. Something that you, by your actions, btw, aren't all *that* bothered about.
All scientists can ever do is make predictions and see how well they turn out.
The predictions of the 1990 models didn't play out perfectly (+0.4 degrees compared with +0.55 degrees) but they are not far off. Close enough to be able to say that the big picture story is right and everything else is sorting out details.
How right do the scientists have to be for how long?
Yep good question. I don't know. In climate/geological terms of course 30 years is tiny but let's say that there was "natural" warming. (And cooling, such as the planet has seen for the past XXXXXXX years). What if the scientists are imposing their models on an existing trajectory ie making observations not predictions.
The key here is rate of change. Natural heating and cooling occurs in geological timescales*, while recent warming has occurred measurably over a matter of a few decades.
The fact half the C02 ever released into the atmosphere by mankind has been since I graduated Medical School, and 85% since WW2 ended may be the reason.
* barring massive volcanic eruption or asteroid impact.
Not true. And this is one of the annoying 'facts' that has crept into the argument. Rates of change now are no different to those in the past. It is only in recent years we have come to realise that entry and exit from glaciations and other less extreme warming and cooling events can occur in decades rather than centuries. The ending of the Younger Dryas involved a 9 degree increase in temperature in just over a decade.
Writing down you passcode, top level security.....the Chinese & Russians must piss themselves how moronic our officials are when it comes to basic op-sec.
All those claiming Boris Johnson to be a risk to national security wash your mouths out.
After 24 hours of waterboarding, the f***** wouldn't divulge his mobile phone PIN. Not least because he couldn't. Make him Foreign Secretary, and now!
Boris is definitely one of those people who uses the same password for every account and his phone pin is the same as credit card pin...with the failed thinking is ok because the password is some obscure latin or greek so nobody could guess it...
If all his accounts including credit cards are on one PIN and he's forgotten it, is that why he had to go to Richard Sharp to get some money?
Got to wonder where the Johnson story will go next. Thoughts of his running in a near-future by-election are nuts IMO, but the story's clearly not at an end yet.
Who even uses a PIN or ATM anymore for transactions? Both are obsolete. Use Apple Pay on phone or watch.
Boris must be a complete idiot if he persists in using cards.
Well that is a genuinely stupid comment since if you use contactless with a card you have to put it in and use your pin after a certain number of transactions or if the value is over £100.
So the answer is practically everyone.
Not stupid at all. There's no limit on NFC transactions – Apple or Google etc.
Cards are almost a pointless as cash.
A total waste of space.
It’s fine 99% of the time. Perhaps even 99.99% of the time. Until you come down off a mountain walk, when you realise your phone is dead because it’s spent all day with the radio turned up trying to find a signal, and you need to get a taxi back to base several miles away, and end up with a long walk. Bonus points if you can’t buy water on the way.
I do a lot of hiking.
There's this amazing innovation called a battery pack. Weighs very little and will charge a phone three times over.
Which doesn't help if the taxi broke down or there's no signal or the walk took 2 hours longer than expected. Taxi out, walk back.
A phone and a battery pack weighs many times what a debit card
Nick Palmer - About 1 in 4 American homes still have land lines. They are more common among the elderly -- no surprise -- and in the Northeast.
(Full disclosure: I have one, and like it enough so that I may keep it. I have a better phone than any smart phone I have seen. And, at almost 80 years old, I like the idea of having a back-up, in case of an emergency.)
Probably 3/4 here in the UK.
How do the others in US get internet?!
Hmm - depends how you define this one, I've got a landline in theory off my FTTP but no actual phone connected.
This is true for about a quarter of landlines.
The average talk time on a landline is 35 minutes per week, which should tell you everything you need to know.
The scam calls we get are mainly on our landline. Although, to be fair, we have had a few on our iPhones recently.
Iphone uses will always be a scammer target as they have already shown they have more money than sense
How on earth can the scammer tell whether you're iphone or android ?
You can buy lists of IPhone numbers, just like you can buy lists of any set of characteristics
How exactly are you going to call the cab if your phone is dead?
End points of hikes don't usually end in the middle of nowhere, they are normally in a village....you goto the nearest pub and ask them to call you a taxi....only I will have a pint while I wait because I can pay for it because I have money and a card....you will just have to sit there wishing you could have a beer assuming the pub will even call you a taxi if you aren't a customer of course
I'll hazard a guess that anabobadingdong is not a fan of paper rail tickets either.
Again, a moronic idea. Why would you want to carry around a stupid piece of paper that is liable to get lost when you can just scan a QR code on your watch?
I once saw a man who thought the same as you did.
It was on a train from Shrewsbury to Cardiff.
The reason I found he'd got the ticket on his phone is that he'd dropped it and it had broken.
So he couldn't show a ticket.
He was then charged the full fare and a penalty fare.
Which he couldn't pay either as he always paid by phone so he had no cards or cash.
Which meant that at Church Stratton where the guard put him off the train he presumably found himself in something of a difficulty.
For that reason when travelling by train or plane by all means have your ticket on a phone, but a wise person has a paper copy too.
Writing down you passcode, top level security.....the Chinese & Russians must piss themselves how moronic our officials are when it comes to basic op-sec.
All those claiming Boris Johnson to be a risk to national security wash your mouths out.
After 24 hours of waterboarding, the f***** wouldn't divulge his mobile phone PIN. Not least because he couldn't. Make him Foreign Secretary, and now!
Boris is definitely one of those people who uses the same password for every account and his phone pin is the same as credit card pin...with the failed thinking is ok because the password is some obscure latin or greek so nobody could guess it...
If all his accounts including credit cards are on one PIN and he's forgotten it, is that why he had to go to Richard Sharp to get some money?
Got to wonder where the Johnson story will go next. Thoughts of his running in a near-future by-election are nuts IMO, but the story's clearly not at an end yet.
Who even uses a PIN or ATM anymore for transactions? Both are obsolete. Use Apple Pay on phone or watch.
Boris must be a complete idiot if he persists in using cards.
Well that is a genuinely stupid comment since if you use contactless with a card you have to put it in and use your pin after a certain number of transactions or if the value is over £100.
So the answer is practically everyone.
Not stupid at all. There's no limit on NFC transactions – Apple or Google etc.
Cards are almost a pointless as cash.
A total waste of space.
It’s fine 99% of the time. Perhaps even 99.99% of the time. Until you come down off a mountain walk, when you realise your phone is dead because it’s spent all day with the radio turned up trying to find a signal, and you need to get a taxi back to base several miles away, and end up with a long walk. Bonus points if you can’t buy water on the way.
I do a lot of hiking.
There's this amazing innovation called a battery pack. Weighs very little and will charge a phone three times over.
Which doesn't help if the taxi broke down or there's no signal or the walk took 2 hours longer than expected. Taxi out, walk back.
A phone and a battery pack weighs many times what a debit card
Nick Palmer - About 1 in 4 American homes still have land lines. They are more common among the elderly -- no surprise -- and in the Northeast.
(Full disclosure: I have one, and like it enough so that I may keep it. I have a better phone than any smart phone I have seen. And, at almost 80 years old, I like the idea of having a back-up, in case of an emergency.)
Probably 3/4 here in the UK.
How do the others in US get internet?!
Hmm - depends how you define this one, I've got a landline in theory off my FTTP but no actual phone connected.
This is true for about a quarter of landlines.
The average talk time on a landline is 35 minutes per week, which should tell you everything you need to know.
The scam calls we get are mainly on our landline. Although, to be fair, we have had a few on our iPhones recently.
Iphone uses will always be a scammer target as they have already shown they have more money than sense
How on earth can the scammer tell whether you're iphone or android ?
You can buy lists of IPhone numbers, just like you can buy lists of any set of characteristics
How exactly are you going to call the cab if your phone is dead?
End points of hikes don't usually end in the middle of nowhere, they are normally in a village....you goto the nearest pub and ask them to call you a taxi....only I will have a pint while I wait because I can pay for it because I have money and a card....you will just have to sit there wishing you could have a beer assuming the pub will even call you a taxi if you aren't a customer of course
You do realise you can charge your phone in virtually all pubs?
I do LOTS of back country hiking. Your ludicrous scenarios to prove a silly point are somewhat undermined by the fact I haven't needed cash for TEN YEARS.
Anecdote: I went out for a meal last night. Ten of us. Time for my train. Dropped my cash on the table and left. Left it to everyone else to faff about with card machines, BACS transfers and whatever else they were up to to apportion the bill. Didn't miss my train!
You could just as easily transferred your share while on the train. Duh!
Anecdote: I went out for a meal last night. Ten of us. Time for my train. Dropped my cash on the table and left. Left it to everyone else to faff about with card machines, BACS transfers and whatever else they were up to to apportion the bill. Didn't miss my train!
You could just as easily transferred your share while on the train. Duh!
If he had signal. That's not a given on a lot of railway lines.
So. Is the BBC biased politically (forget Huw Edwards) or not and if it is, which way?
I saw an old mate of mine last night. To the left, shall we say, and he was fuming that eg The Today Programme might as well be an arm of government.
Whereas from my right-leaning, civilised, thoughtful perspective I think the BBC leans left.
I dislike the fact that they always have to so maniacally strive for "balance" and "inclusivity" but I understand it also.
As they say if we're both convinced of our view then perhaps it is therefore doing something right.
Although annoying both left and right does not mean that the BBC is balanced.
FWIW I think the BBC tries very hard to be balanced on most things (not all - there is now no hint of skepticism left when reporting climate science, for instance, when some of the more out there claims/predictions ought to be at best queried). It does, however, tend to skew urban, metropolitan. I don't think it has a clue about the countryside and rural affairs, as shown by Countryfile, which is a programme about the countryside made by city dwellers, for city dwellers.
Yes there's plenty wrong with it.
And as for climate, my point to my friend was that they would never dare have someone from "the other side" to argue a different position on climate change.
When they ever did get someone from ‘the other side’, it would be a flat Earth fanatic rather than another scientist.
That may have been only partly their fault. FEFs so not have careers which they would endanger by voicing private doubts.
Which is actually a large part of the problem, that all the scientific research funding is on one side.
The scientific research funding follows the scientific evidence.
The vested interest funding, well there's been plenty of that for climate 'sceptics'. And probably much more lucrative for those involved.
(I do find the idea of funding bias bizarre. It's in no government's interest to fund only one side of climate science, if there were really two sides. Climate science as it stands is a massive headache for governments - it means taxing/regulating things that people like, in really unpopular areas. There's a massive incentive for governments to fund any science that would question the IPCC conclusions - making it all go away would solve a whole load of political problems. Unfortunately, science doesn't work like that - you can't just get the answers you want because if you do other people are going to point out what you've done and it's easy* for other groups to check)
*in most areas. Far less so in my field of epidemiology where we cannot share or publish the patient-level data for others to verify, due to entirely legitimate data protection concerns. Other groups could request the same data, but I'm not sure you'd get that far on public interest grounds to simply verify pre-existing research. We need more like openSAFELY where anyone can run their own code to check conclusions. This would be possible if e.g. NHS Digital had a service to hold copies of supplied data and run, on demand (at low fee) code on it and provide the results (there would still be a need to ensure no sensitive disclosure in analysis results, which is probably why this hasn't happened).
"Points" from someone whose head is obviously completely up the system.
The points about funding are definetely valid, even if they don't resolve the 'groupthink amongst academics' problem.
Yep, there's definite scope for problems there. One thing becomes accepted and everyone else takes it as read. We've seen that often enough - but we've seen that often enough because eventually someone shows that's not how things work afterall.
Again, I'm long out of this field and wasn't that closely involved to start with, but I saw a lot of disagreement among climate scientists on how the feedbacks worked and interacted. Plenty of 'out there' ideas being presented where if thing A works differently to the general perception then thing B will happen and we can test that witthin 5-10 years etc. I think there are enough people with different backgrounds in different centres studying data from different sources with different designs to reduce the risk of too much groupthink here.
I may be wrong, of course and maybe there are more people training in 'climate science' at a lower level and being taught 'truths'. The nice thing 15 years ago, which may or may not still be the case, was that climate research was brining together people from a lot of disparate disciplines with different ideas and, in most cases, not a great deal of formal training in any accepted truth of the field. The main danger was that most people on the modelling side were working on a limited number of base models, so a fundamental error in one base model could lead to errors in many people's research. But, if so, there would be a whole lot of research that quickly diverged from new observations, unless you were really unlucky. There are also, of course, a lot of people not working on models at all, but working on comparing model predictions, forwards or backwards with observations on the ground and finding better ways of doing those observations.
My concern with it all is that right now, dissent is not allowed. We are at a stage whereby no one would put their heads above the parapet. Well that means that the overwhelming majority - thousands upon thousands - of climate scientists agree hence it is settled. But without going all Galileo about it is that we are in a period of absolute orthodoxy whereby dissenting views are simply not entertained.
No one disputes that the temperatures are rising but it is modelling that is telling us what happens next. Is it like cigarettes where a link has been shown to exist? Not being a climate scientist I have no idea.
I just feel uncomfortable that there is no Jeremy Paxman ("why is this lying bastard lying to me") to question it all. Are all those on here, for example, comfortable not wanting to question what is, in the end, a prediction based upon modelling and hence originates in the human mind.
This is a fantasy put around by right-wing commentators. As you say, no one disputes that temperatures are rising: the evidence there is unavoidable. That this is largely caused by human activity producing greenhouse gases is also very clear. But what happens next, however, is very much discussed and argued over. There is plenty of dissent. How different factors interact, how we should model future change, what’s the best approach to deal with the problem, all extensively debated.
However, the point is that temperatures are already up a worrying amount, so when that’s your starting point, whether things will get much worse or just slightly worse doesn’t change that they are already bad.
"The fantasy put about..."
LOL & QED
The world has warmed previously when presumably it wasn't on account of human activity. It is warming again now and that is coinciding with us pumping huge amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. And it may well be that the current warming is due to us. But we don't know how much, nor exactly what effect it is having in total when other factors are taken into account.
For example, does warming lead to more evaporation and more cloud cover, reflecting more incident energy from the sun back into space? Does warming kill vegetation and increase desertification, which is also a better reflector of incident energy back into space than plants are?
We don't know the future, we model it. And we model it extremely diligently. But it is only a model and any model is only as good as its inputs. If I model a balance sheet for example I know that I can fiddle faddle, say, working capital requirements and associated fundraising requirements. All my own work.
And the thing which you are illustrating is how sad it is that today we all are supposed to accept the orthodoxy with dissenters chastised and ridiculed. We have of course been here before in history but let's not over-dramatise things, right, I mean we are only talking about extinction of the human race. Something that you, by your actions, btw, aren't all *that* bothered about.
All scientists can ever do is make predictions and see how well they turn out.
The predictions of the 1990 models didn't play out perfectly (+0.4 degrees compared with +0.55 degrees) but they are not far off. Close enough to be able to say that the big picture story is right and everything else is sorting out details.
How right do the scientists have to be for how long?
Yep good question. I don't know. In climate/geological terms of course 30 years is tiny but let's say that there was "natural" warming. (And cooling, such as the planet has seen for the past XXXXXXX years). What if the scientists are imposing their models on an existing trajectory ie making observations not predictions.
The key here is rate of change. Natural heating and cooling occurs in geological timescales*, while recent warming has occurred measurably over a matter of a few decades.
The fact half the C02 ever released into the atmosphere by mankind has been since I graduated Medical School, and 85% since WW2 ended may be the reason.
* barring massive volcanic eruption or asteroid impact.
Not true. And this is one of the annoying 'facts' that has crept into the argument. Rates of change now are no different to those in the past. It is only in recent years we have come to realise that entry and exit from glaciations and other less extreme warming and cooling events can occur in decades rather than centuries. The ending of the Younger Dryas involved a 9 degree increase in temperature in just over a decade.
Was that local or global ?
If the AMOC were to shut down, we'd probably see a drop of similar proportions in Europe, on a similarly rapid timescale.
Yes, that's a good point. There is a danger that the current anthropogenically driven warming could be interrupted by further Younger Dryas type events as ocean currents shift in response to e.g. meltwater pulses. While our hunter-gather ancestors wouldn't have been too bothered by them, such events could devastate our modern, settled societies.
It's complicated. Of course the melting of the then huge icecaps would tend to lead to abrupt climate events. As the data we have is largely inferred, and even with the best evidence there's uncertainty of a few decades on precise local timings, it's much more uncertain modelling it than is the case with today's climate - where we have data points across the globe on an hourly basis.
I'll hazard a guess that anabobadingdong is not a fan of paper rail tickets either.
Again, a moronic idea. Why would you want to carry around a stupid piece of paper that is liable to get lost when you can just scan a QR code on your watch?
I once saw a man who thought the same as you did.
It was on a train from Shrewsbury to Cardiff.
The reason I found he'd got the ticket on his phone is that he'd dropped it and it had broken.
So he couldn't show a ticket.
He was then charged the full fare and a penalty fare.
Which he couldn't pay either as he always paid by phone so he had no cards or cash.
Which meant that at Church Stratton where the guard put him off the train he presumably found himself in something of a difficulty.
For that reason when travelling by train or plane by all means have your ticket on a phone, but a wise person has a paper copy too.
Do they now? Another daft fable. How many Londoners travel cashless every day, do you think?
You can hazard a wild guess to the nearest million.
Writing down you passcode, top level security.....the Chinese & Russians must piss themselves how moronic our officials are when it comes to basic op-sec.
All those claiming Boris Johnson to be a risk to national security wash your mouths out.
After 24 hours of waterboarding, the f***** wouldn't divulge his mobile phone PIN. Not least because he couldn't. Make him Foreign Secretary, and now!
Boris is definitely one of those people who uses the same password for every account and his phone pin is the same as credit card pin...with the failed thinking is ok because the password is some obscure latin or greek so nobody could guess it...
If all his accounts including credit cards are on one PIN and he's forgotten it, is that why he had to go to Richard Sharp to get some money?
Got to wonder where the Johnson story will go next. Thoughts of his running in a near-future by-election are nuts IMO, but the story's clearly not at an end yet.
Who even uses a PIN or ATM anymore for transactions? Both are obsolete. Use Apple Pay on phone or watch.
Boris must be a complete idiot if he persists in using cards.
ATM machines (just for @Selebian) I agree, but PINs I have all over the place.
I took an ATM card with me on my cycling trip, just in case. I have just employed a gardener and didn't know how he wanted to be paid so I used the card to get some cash, in case that was what he wanted (he doesn't). The card is a year out of date so it was lucky he was happy with a bank transfer and that I didn't need it on my trip.
Talking about cash (and @Anabobazina TRIGGER WARNING) I hadn't realised that HMG had had to change their bill to provide a little more protection for cash users.
"Previously the Bill did not specify whether withdrawal and deposit facilities should be free, or whether consumers might have to pay a charge.
But through a late amendment to the Bill, called for by Which?, it will now ensure that people across the country can withdraw and deposit cash for free.
This means the FCA will have greater power over major banks and building societies to ensure reasonable free access to cash is preserved for those who need it."
Do we have a view on cheques? I very rarely receive them, but have recently received quite a few (HMRC, TV licence, British Gas, Virgin, etc) in the settling my fathers estate. Don't know why that should be different to normal particularly as some organisations who had to pay me were happy with me providing my bank details. Very odd.
It makes financial sense. They expect x% of the cheques not to be paid in. This is especially so when a person has moved house, is dealing with a lot of paperwork when handling an estate, or perhaps they're going through a divorce, or a parent has moved to a care home, etc. etc. - i.e. they've got a lot of unusual stuff going on. At such times a cheque is more likely to be mislaid or not to reach them. Using cheques makes money.
So. Is the BBC biased politically (forget Huw Edwards) or not and if it is, which way?
I saw an old mate of mine last night. To the left, shall we say, and he was fuming that eg The Today Programme might as well be an arm of government.
Whereas from my right-leaning, civilised, thoughtful perspective I think the BBC leans left.
I dislike the fact that they always have to so maniacally strive for "balance" and "inclusivity" but I understand it also.
As they say if we're both convinced of our view then perhaps it is therefore doing something right.
Although annoying both left and right does not mean that the BBC is balanced.
FWIW I think the BBC tries very hard to be balanced on most things (not all - there is now no hint of skepticism left when reporting climate science, for instance, when some of the more out there claims/predictions ought to be at best queried). It does, however, tend to skew urban, metropolitan. I don't think it has a clue about the countryside and rural affairs, as shown by Countryfile, which is a programme about the countryside made by city dwellers, for city dwellers.
Yes there's plenty wrong with it.
And as for climate, my point to my friend was that they would never dare have someone from "the other side" to argue a different position on climate change.
When they ever did get someone from ‘the other side’, it would be a flat Earth fanatic rather than another scientist.
That may have been only partly their fault. FEFs so not have careers which they would endanger by voicing private doubts.
Which is actually a large part of the problem, that all the scientific research funding is on one side.
The scientific research funding follows the scientific evidence.
The vested interest funding, well there's been plenty of that for climate 'sceptics'. And probably much more lucrative for those involved.
(I do find the idea of funding bias bizarre. It's in no government's interest to fund only one side of climate science, if there were really two sides. Climate science as it stands is a massive headache for governments - it means taxing/regulating things that people like, in really unpopular areas. There's a massive incentive for governments to fund any science that would question the IPCC conclusions - making it all go away would solve a whole load of political problems. Unfortunately, science doesn't work like that - you can't just get the answers you want because if you do other people are going to point out what you've done and it's easy* for other groups to check)
*in most areas. Far less so in my field of epidemiology where we cannot share or publish the patient-level data for others to verify, due to entirely legitimate data protection concerns. Other groups could request the same data, but I'm not sure you'd get that far on public interest grounds to simply verify pre-existing research. We need more like openSAFELY where anyone can run their own code to check conclusions. This would be possible if e.g. NHS Digital had a service to hold copies of supplied data and run, on demand (at low fee) code on it and provide the results (there would still be a need to ensure no sensitive disclosure in analysis results, which is probably why this hasn't happened).
"Points" from someone whose head is obviously completely up the system.
The points about funding are definetely valid, even if they don't resolve the 'groupthink amongst academics' problem.
Yep, there's definite scope for problems there. One thing becomes accepted and everyone else takes it as read. We've seen that often enough - but we've seen that often enough because eventually someone shows that's not how things work afterall.
Again, I'm long out of this field and wasn't that closely involved to start with, but I saw a lot of disagreement among climate scientists on how the feedbacks worked and interacted. Plenty of 'out there' ideas being presented where if thing A works differently to the general perception then thing B will happen and we can test that witthin 5-10 years etc. I think there are enough people with different backgrounds in different centres studying data from different sources with different designs to reduce the risk of too much groupthink here.
I may be wrong, of course and maybe there are more people training in 'climate science' at a lower level and being taught 'truths'. The nice thing 15 years ago, which may or may not still be the case, was that climate research was brining together people from a lot of disparate disciplines with different ideas and, in most cases, not a great deal of formal training in any accepted truth of the field. The main danger was that most people on the modelling side were working on a limited number of base models, so a fundamental error in one base model could lead to errors in many people's research. But, if so, there would be a whole lot of research that quickly diverged from new observations, unless you were really unlucky. There are also, of course, a lot of people not working on models at all, but working on comparing model predictions, forwards or backwards with observations on the ground and finding better ways of doing those observations.
My concern with it all is that right now, dissent is not allowed. We are at a stage whereby no one would put their heads above the parapet. Well that means that the overwhelming majority - thousands upon thousands - of climate scientists agree hence it is settled. But without going all Galileo about it is that we are in a period of absolute orthodoxy whereby dissenting views are simply not entertained.
No one disputes that the temperatures are rising but it is modelling that is telling us what happens next. Is it like cigarettes where a link has been shown to exist? Not being a climate scientist I have no idea.
I just feel uncomfortable that there is no Jeremy Paxman ("why is this lying bastard lying to me") to question it all. Are all those on here, for example, comfortable not wanting to question what is, in the end, a prediction based upon modelling and hence originates in the human mind.
This is a fantasy put around by right-wing commentators. As you say, no one disputes that temperatures are rising: the evidence there is unavoidable. That this is largely caused by human activity producing greenhouse gases is also very clear. But what happens next, however, is very much discussed and argued over. There is plenty of dissent. How different factors interact, how we should model future change, what’s the best approach to deal with the problem, all extensively debated.
However, the point is that temperatures are already up a worrying amount, so when that’s your starting point, whether things will get much worse or just slightly worse doesn’t change that they are already bad.
"The fantasy put about..."
LOL & QED
The world has warmed previously when presumably it wasn't on account of human activity. It is warming again now and that is coinciding with us pumping huge amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. And it may well be that the current warming is due to us. But we don't know how much, nor exactly what effect it is having in total when other factors are taken into account.
For example, does warming lead to more evaporation and more cloud cover, reflecting more incident energy from the sun back into space? Does warming kill vegetation and increase desertification, which is also a better reflector of incident energy back into space than plants are?
We don't know the future, we model it. And we model it extremely diligently. But it is only a model and any model is only as good as its inputs. If I model a balance sheet for example I know that I can fiddle faddle, say, working capital requirements and associated fundraising requirements. All my own work.
And the thing which you are illustrating is how sad it is that today we all are supposed to accept the orthodoxy with dissenters chastised and ridiculed. We have of course been here before in history but let's not over-dramatise things, right, I mean we are only talking about extinction of the human race. Something that you, by your actions, btw, aren't all *that* bothered about.
All scientists can ever do is make predictions and see how well they turn out.
The predictions of the 1990 models didn't play out perfectly (+0.4 degrees compared with +0.55 degrees) but they are not far off. Close enough to be able to say that the big picture story is right and everything else is sorting out details.
How right do the scientists have to be for how long?
Yep good question. I don't know. In climate/geological terms of course 30 years is tiny but let's say that there was "natural" warming. (And cooling, such as the planet has seen for the past XXXXXXX years). What if the scientists are imposing their models on an existing trajectory ie making observations not predictions.
So you’re saying we should base policy on the off chance that the preponderance of highly trained professionals might be wrong? Do you extend this attitude to other areas?
“Chemotherapy’s a bitch and hella inconvenient, I really like my hair, so I won’t do it on the off chance the doctor has misdiagnosed this fucking huge lump that’s suddenly appeared”
Not an amazing analogy, given that the choice to have chemo is by no means straightforward, and it often results in death.
Writing down you passcode, top level security.....the Chinese & Russians must piss themselves how moronic our officials are when it comes to basic op-sec.
All those claiming Boris Johnson to be a risk to national security wash your mouths out.
After 24 hours of waterboarding, the f***** wouldn't divulge his mobile phone PIN. Not least because he couldn't. Make him Foreign Secretary, and now!
Boris is definitely one of those people who uses the same password for every account and his phone pin is the same as credit card pin...with the failed thinking is ok because the password is some obscure latin or greek so nobody could guess it...
If all his accounts including credit cards are on one PIN and he's forgotten it, is that why he had to go to Richard Sharp to get some money?
Got to wonder where the Johnson story will go next. Thoughts of his running in a near-future by-election are nuts IMO, but the story's clearly not at an end yet.
Who even uses a PIN or ATM anymore for transactions? Both are obsolete. Use Apple Pay on phone or watch.
Boris must be a complete idiot if he persists in using cards.
Well that is a genuinely stupid comment since if you use contactless with a card you have to put it in and use your pin after a certain number of transactions or if the value is over £100.
So the answer is practically everyone.
Not stupid at all. There's no limit on NFC transactions – Apple or Google etc.
Cards are almost a pointless as cash.
A total waste of space.
It’s fine 99% of the time. Perhaps even 99.99% of the time. Until you come down off a mountain walk, when you realise your phone is dead because it’s spent all day with the radio turned up trying to find a signal, and you need to get a taxi back to base several miles away, and end up with a long walk. Bonus points if you can’t buy water on the way.
I do a lot of hiking.
There's this amazing innovation called a battery pack. Weighs very little and will charge a phone three times over.
Which doesn't help if the taxi broke down or there's no signal or the walk took 2 hours longer than expected. Taxi out, walk back.
A phone and a battery pack weighs many times what a debit card
Nick Palmer - About 1 in 4 American homes still have land lines. They are more common among the elderly -- no surprise -- and in the Northeast.
(Full disclosure: I have one, and like it enough so that I may keep it. I have a better phone than any smart phone I have seen. And, at almost 80 years old, I like the idea of having a back-up, in case of an emergency.)
Probably 3/4 here in the UK.
How do the others in US get internet?!
Hmm - depends how you define this one, I've got a landline in theory off my FTTP but no actual phone connected.
This is true for about a quarter of landlines.
The average talk time on a landline is 35 minutes per week, which should tell you everything you need to know.
The scam calls we get are mainly on our landline. Although, to be fair, we have had a few on our iPhones recently.
Iphone uses will always be a scammer target as they have already shown they have more money than sense
How on earth can the scammer tell whether you're iphone or android ?
You can buy lists of IPhone numbers, just like you can buy lists of any set of characteristics
How exactly are you going to call the cab if your phone is dead?
End points of hikes don't usually end in the middle of nowhere, they are normally in a village....you goto the nearest pub and ask them to call you a taxi....only I will have a pint while I wait because I can pay for it because I have money and a card....you will just have to sit there wishing you could have a beer assuming the pub will even call you a taxi if you aren't a customer of course
In any proper mountain country you are ruling out at least 97% of possible routes if you eliminate those without a village at at least one terminus. Probably works in the Chilterns.
Writing down you passcode, top level security.....the Chinese & Russians must piss themselves how moronic our officials are when it comes to basic op-sec.
All those claiming Boris Johnson to be a risk to national security wash your mouths out.
After 24 hours of waterboarding, the f***** wouldn't divulge his mobile phone PIN. Not least because he couldn't. Make him Foreign Secretary, and now!
Boris is definitely one of those people who uses the same password for every account and his phone pin is the same as credit card pin...with the failed thinking is ok because the password is some obscure latin or greek so nobody could guess it...
If all his accounts including credit cards are on one PIN and he's forgotten it, is that why he had to go to Richard Sharp to get some money?
Got to wonder where the Johnson story will go next. Thoughts of his running in a near-future by-election are nuts IMO, but the story's clearly not at an end yet.
Who even uses a PIN or ATM anymore for transactions? Both are obsolete. Use Apple Pay on phone or watch.
Boris must be a complete idiot if he persists in using cards.
ATM machines (just for @Selebian) I agree, but PINs I have all over the place.
I took an ATM card with me on my cycling trip, just in case. I have just employed a gardener and didn't know how he wanted to be paid so I used the card to get some cash, in case that was what he wanted (he doesn't). The card is a year out of date so it was lucky he was happy with a bank transfer and that I didn't need it on my trip.
Talking about cash (and @Anabobazina TRIGGER WARNING) I hadn't realised that HMG had had to change their bill to provide a little more protection for cash users.
"Previously the Bill did not specify whether withdrawal and deposit facilities should be free, or whether consumers might have to pay a charge.
But through a late amendment to the Bill, called for by Which?, it will now ensure that people across the country can withdraw and deposit cash for free.
This means the FCA will have greater power over major banks and building societies to ensure reasonable free access to cash is preserved for those who need it."
Good, I don't want to be charged when I have to trudge to the bank to deposit cash for those rude idiots who insist on transferring money they owe to me in stupid paper tokens.
That seems an odd thing to say. The only times I get given cash are on the vanishingly rare occasions I pay with it and get change. If you are not a retailer, your problem with sums of cash large enough to require banking is not going to be trudging, it's going to be the plod (money-laundering division). If you are a retailer, you are surely at liberty to stipulate card-only?
I think we urgently need a French-style law requiring businesses to accept cash, whether they like the idea or not.
Writing down you passcode, top level security.....the Chinese & Russians must piss themselves how moronic our officials are when it comes to basic op-sec.
All those claiming Boris Johnson to be a risk to national security wash your mouths out.
After 24 hours of waterboarding, the f***** wouldn't divulge his mobile phone PIN. Not least because he couldn't. Make him Foreign Secretary, and now!
Boris is definitely one of those people who uses the same password for every account and his phone pin is the same as credit card pin...with the failed thinking is ok because the password is some obscure latin or greek so nobody could guess it...
If all his accounts including credit cards are on one PIN and he's forgotten it, is that why he had to go to Richard Sharp to get some money?
Got to wonder where the Johnson story will go next. Thoughts of his running in a near-future by-election are nuts IMO, but the story's clearly not at an end yet.
Who even uses a PIN or ATM anymore for transactions? Both are obsolete. Use Apple Pay on phone or watch.
Boris must be a complete idiot if he persists in using cards.
ATM machines (just for @Selebian) I agree, but PINs I have all over the place.
I took an ATM card with me on my cycling trip, just in case. I have just employed a gardener and didn't know how he wanted to be paid so I used the card to get some cash, in case that was what he wanted (he doesn't). The card is a year out of date so it was lucky he was happy with a bank transfer and that I didn't need it on my trip.
Talking about cash (and @Anabobazina TRIGGER WARNING) I hadn't realised that HMG had had to change their bill to provide a little more protection for cash users.
"Previously the Bill did not specify whether withdrawal and deposit facilities should be free, or whether consumers might have to pay a charge.
But through a late amendment to the Bill, called for by Which?, it will now ensure that people across the country can withdraw and deposit cash for free.
This means the FCA will have greater power over major banks and building societies to ensure reasonable free access to cash is preserved for those who need it."
Do we have a view on cheques? I very rarely receive them, but have recently received quite a few (HMRC, TV licence, British Gas, Virgin, etc) in the settling my fathers estate. Don't know why that should be different to normal particularly as some organisations who had to pay me were happy with me providing my bank details. Very odd.
It makes financial sense. They expect x% of the cheques not to be paid in. This is especially so when a person has moved house, is dealing with a lot of paperwork when handling an estate, or perhaps they're going through a divorce, or a parent has moved to a care home, etc. etc. - i.e. they've got a lot of unusual stuff going on. At such times a cheque is more likely to be mislaid or not to reach them. Using cheques makes money.
In other words, it's a con. As with many non-digital payments.
Writing down you passcode, top level security.....the Chinese & Russians must piss themselves how moronic our officials are when it comes to basic op-sec.
All those claiming Boris Johnson to be a risk to national security wash your mouths out.
After 24 hours of waterboarding, the f***** wouldn't divulge his mobile phone PIN. Not least because he couldn't. Make him Foreign Secretary, and now!
Boris is definitely one of those people who uses the same password for every account and his phone pin is the same as credit card pin...with the failed thinking is ok because the password is some obscure latin or greek so nobody could guess it...
If all his accounts including credit cards are on one PIN and he's forgotten it, is that why he had to go to Richard Sharp to get some money?
Got to wonder where the Johnson story will go next. Thoughts of his running in a near-future by-election are nuts IMO, but the story's clearly not at an end yet.
Who even uses a PIN or ATM anymore for transactions? Both are obsolete. Use Apple Pay on phone or watch.
Boris must be a complete idiot if he persists in using cards.
Well that is a genuinely stupid comment since if you use contactless with a card you have to put it in and use your pin after a certain number of transactions or if the value is over £100.
So the answer is practically everyone.
Not stupid at all. There's no limit on NFC transactions – Apple or Google etc.
Cards are almost a pointless as cash.
A total waste of space.
It’s fine 99% of the time. Perhaps even 99.99% of the time. Until you come down off a mountain walk, when you realise your phone is dead because it’s spent all day with the radio turned up trying to find a signal, and you need to get a taxi back to base several miles away, and end up with a long walk. Bonus points if you can’t buy water on the way.
I do a lot of hiking.
There's this amazing innovation called a battery pack. Weighs very little and will charge a phone three times over.
Which doesn't help if the taxi broke down or there's no signal or the walk took 2 hours longer than expected. Taxi out, walk back.
A phone and a battery pack weighs many times what a debit card
Nick Palmer - About 1 in 4 American homes still have land lines. They are more common among the elderly -- no surprise -- and in the Northeast.
(Full disclosure: I have one, and like it enough so that I may keep it. I have a better phone than any smart phone I have seen. And, at almost 80 years old, I like the idea of having a back-up, in case of an emergency.)
Probably 3/4 here in the UK.
How do the others in US get internet?!
Hmm - depends how you define this one, I've got a landline in theory off my FTTP but no actual phone connected.
This is true for about a quarter of landlines.
The average talk time on a landline is 35 minutes per week, which should tell you everything you need to know.
The scam calls we get are mainly on our landline. Although, to be fair, we have had a few on our iPhones recently.
Iphone uses will always be a scammer target as they have already shown they have more money than sense
How on earth can the scammer tell whether you're iphone or android ?
You can buy lists of IPhone numbers, just like you can buy lists of any set of characteristics
How exactly are you going to call the cab if your phone is dead?
End points of hikes don't usually end in the middle of nowhere, they are normally in a village....you goto the nearest pub and ask them to call you a taxi....only I will have a pint while I wait because I can pay for it because I have money and a card....you will just have to sit there wishing you could have a beer assuming the pub will even call you a taxi if you aren't a customer of course
You do realise you can charge your phone in virtually all pubs?
I do LOTS of back country hiking. Your ludicrous scenarios to prove a silly point are somewhat undermined by the fact I haven't needed cash for TEN YEARS.
As so now you are carrying a phone, a battery pack, a charger and you think that is less onerous than a couple of £20 pound notes. Its a view I guess. In reality sooner or later your cashlessness is going to bite you in the butt and we are all going to laugh our heads off. I suspect you are just trying to grab onto supposed youth by being all down with technology yet don't really understand the downsides of that technology.
Writing down you passcode, top level security.....the Chinese & Russians must piss themselves how moronic our officials are when it comes to basic op-sec.
All those claiming Boris Johnson to be a risk to national security wash your mouths out.
After 24 hours of waterboarding, the f***** wouldn't divulge his mobile phone PIN. Not least because he couldn't. Make him Foreign Secretary, and now!
Boris is definitely one of those people who uses the same password for every account and his phone pin is the same as credit card pin...with the failed thinking is ok because the password is some obscure latin or greek so nobody could guess it...
If all his accounts including credit cards are on one PIN and he's forgotten it, is that why he had to go to Richard Sharp to get some money?
Got to wonder where the Johnson story will go next. Thoughts of his running in a near-future by-election are nuts IMO, but the story's clearly not at an end yet.
Who even uses a PIN or ATM anymore for transactions? Both are obsolete. Use Apple Pay on phone or watch.
Boris must be a complete idiot if he persists in using cards.
Well that is a genuinely stupid comment since if you use contactless with a card you have to put it in and use your pin after a certain number of transactions or if the value is over £100.
So the answer is practically everyone.
Not stupid at all. There's no limit on NFC transactions – Apple or Google etc.
Cards are almost a pointless as cash.
A total waste of space.
It’s fine 99% of the time. Perhaps even 99.99% of the time. Until you come down off a mountain walk, when you realise your phone is dead because it’s spent all day with the radio turned up trying to find a signal, and you need to get a taxi back to base several miles away, and end up with a long walk. Bonus points if you can’t buy water on the way.
I do a lot of hiking.
There's this amazing innovation called a battery pack. Weighs very little and will charge a phone three times over.
Which doesn't help if the taxi broke down or there's no signal or the walk took 2 hours longer than expected. Taxi out, walk back.
A phone and a battery pack weighs many times what a debit card
Nick Palmer - About 1 in 4 American homes still have land lines. They are more common among the elderly -- no surprise -- and in the Northeast.
(Full disclosure: I have one, and like it enough so that I may keep it. I have a better phone than any smart phone I have seen. And, at almost 80 years old, I like the idea of having a back-up, in case of an emergency.)
Probably 3/4 here in the UK.
How do the others in US get internet?!
Hmm - depends how you define this one, I've got a landline in theory off my FTTP but no actual phone connected.
This is true for about a quarter of landlines.
The average talk time on a landline is 35 minutes per week, which should tell you everything you need to know.
I'll hazard a guess that anabobadingdong is not a fan of paper rail tickets either.
Again, a moronic idea. Why would you want to carry around a stupid piece of paper that is liable to get lost when you can just scan a QR code on your watch?
I'm out of data until midnight tonight. I could pay the f****** at EE for more data to pay for goods electronically, or I could just use the cards in my wallet for free.
Writing down you passcode, top level security.....the Chinese & Russians must piss themselves how moronic our officials are when it comes to basic op-sec.
All those claiming Boris Johnson to be a risk to national security wash your mouths out.
After 24 hours of waterboarding, the f***** wouldn't divulge his mobile phone PIN. Not least because he couldn't. Make him Foreign Secretary, and now!
Boris is definitely one of those people who uses the same password for every account and his phone pin is the same as credit card pin...with the failed thinking is ok because the password is some obscure latin or greek so nobody could guess it...
If all his accounts including credit cards are on one PIN and he's forgotten it, is that why he had to go to Richard Sharp to get some money?
Got to wonder where the Johnson story will go next. Thoughts of his running in a near-future by-election are nuts IMO, but the story's clearly not at an end yet.
Who even uses a PIN or ATM anymore for transactions? Both are obsolete. Use Apple Pay on phone or watch.
Boris must be a complete idiot if he persists in using cards.
ATM machines (just for @Selebian) I agree, but PINs I have all over the place.
I took an ATM card with me on my cycling trip, just in case. I have just employed a gardener and didn't know how he wanted to be paid so I used the card to get some cash, in case that was what he wanted (he doesn't). The card is a year out of date so it was lucky he was happy with a bank transfer and that I didn't need it on my trip.
Talking about cash (and @Anabobazina TRIGGER WARNING) I hadn't realised that HMG had had to change their bill to provide a little more protection for cash users.
"Previously the Bill did not specify whether withdrawal and deposit facilities should be free, or whether consumers might have to pay a charge.
But through a late amendment to the Bill, called for by Which?, it will now ensure that people across the country can withdraw and deposit cash for free.
This means the FCA will have greater power over major banks and building societies to ensure reasonable free access to cash is preserved for those who need it."
Good, I don't want to be charged when I have to trudge to the bank to deposit cash for those rude idiots who insist on transferring money they owe to me in stupid paper tokens.
That seems an odd thing to say. The only times I get given cash are on the vanishingly rare occasions I pay with it and get change. If you are not a retailer, your problem with sums of cash large enough to require banking is not going to be trudging, it's going to be the plod (money-laundering division). If you are a retailer, you are surely at liberty to stipulate card-only?
I think we urgently need a French-style law requiring businesses to accept cash, whether they like the idea or not.
Your nasty authoritarian side is showing gain.
Indeed.
The only banners on here are the cash-fetishists who are seeking to ban businesses from cashless operation. Very, very weird.
So. Is the BBC biased politically (forget Huw Edwards) or not and if it is, which way?
I saw an old mate of mine last night. To the left, shall we say, and he was fuming that eg The Today Programme might as well be an arm of government.
Whereas from my right-leaning, civilised, thoughtful perspective I think the BBC leans left.
I dislike the fact that they always have to so maniacally strive for "balance" and "inclusivity" but I understand it also.
As they say if we're both convinced of our view then perhaps it is therefore doing something right.
Although annoying both left and right does not mean that the BBC is balanced.
FWIW I think the BBC tries very hard to be balanced on most things (not all - there is now no hint of skepticism left when reporting climate science, for instance, when some of the more out there claims/predictions ought to be at best queried). It does, however, tend to skew urban, metropolitan. I don't think it has a clue about the countryside and rural affairs, as shown by Countryfile, which is a programme about the countryside made by city dwellers, for city dwellers.
Yes there's plenty wrong with it.
And as for climate, my point to my friend was that they would never dare have someone from "the other side" to argue a different position on climate change.
When they ever did get someone from ‘the other side’, it would be a flat Earth fanatic rather than another scientist.
That may have been only partly their fault. FEFs so not have careers which they would endanger by voicing private doubts.
Which is actually a large part of the problem, that all the scientific research funding is on one side.
The scientific research funding follows the scientific evidence.
The vested interest funding, well there's been plenty of that for climate 'sceptics'. And probably much more lucrative for those involved.
(I do find the idea of funding bias bizarre. It's in no government's interest to fund only one side of climate science, if there were really two sides. Climate science as it stands is a massive headache for governments - it means taxing/regulating things that people like, in really unpopular areas. There's a massive incentive for governments to fund any science that would question the IPCC conclusions - making it all go away would solve a whole load of political problems. Unfortunately, science doesn't work like that - you can't just get the answers you want because if you do other people are going to point out what you've done and it's easy* for other groups to check)
*in most areas. Far less so in my field of epidemiology where we cannot share or publish the patient-level data for others to verify, due to entirely legitimate data protection concerns. Other groups could request the same data, but I'm not sure you'd get that far on public interest grounds to simply verify pre-existing research. We need more like openSAFELY where anyone can run their own code to check conclusions. This would be possible if e.g. NHS Digital had a service to hold copies of supplied data and run, on demand (at low fee) code on it and provide the results (there would still be a need to ensure no sensitive disclosure in analysis results, which is probably why this hasn't happened).
"Points" from someone whose head is obviously completely up the system.
The points about funding are definetely valid, even if they don't resolve the 'groupthink amongst academics' problem.
Yep, there's definite scope for problems there. One thing becomes accepted and everyone else takes it as read. We've seen that often enough - but we've seen that often enough because eventually someone shows that's not how things work afterall.
Again, I'm long out of this field and wasn't that closely involved to start with, but I saw a lot of disagreement among climate scientists on how the feedbacks worked and interacted. Plenty of 'out there' ideas being presented where if thing A works differently to the general perception then thing B will happen and we can test that witthin 5-10 years etc. I think there are enough people with different backgrounds in different centres studying data from different sources with different designs to reduce the risk of too much groupthink here.
I may be wrong, of course and maybe there are more people training in 'climate science' at a lower level and being taught 'truths'. The nice thing 15 years ago, which may or may not still be the case, was that climate research was brining together people from a lot of disparate disciplines with different ideas and, in most cases, not a great deal of formal training in any accepted truth of the field. The main danger was that most people on the modelling side were working on a limited number of base models, so a fundamental error in one base model could lead to errors in many people's research. But, if so, there would be a whole lot of research that quickly diverged from new observations, unless you were really unlucky. There are also, of course, a lot of people not working on models at all, but working on comparing model predictions, forwards or backwards with observations on the ground and finding better ways of doing those observations.
My concern with it all is that right now, dissent is not allowed. We are at a stage whereby no one would put their heads above the parapet. Well that means that the overwhelming majority - thousands upon thousands - of climate scientists agree hence it is settled. But without going all Galileo about it is that we are in a period of absolute orthodoxy whereby dissenting views are simply not entertained.
No one disputes that the temperatures are rising but it is modelling that is telling us what happens next. Is it like cigarettes where a link has been shown to exist? Not being a climate scientist I have no idea.
I just feel uncomfortable that there is no Jeremy Paxman ("why is this lying bastard lying to me") to question it all. Are all those on here, for example, comfortable not wanting to question what is, in the end, a prediction based upon modelling and hence originates in the human mind.
This is a fantasy put around by right-wing commentators. As you say, no one disputes that temperatures are rising: the evidence there is unavoidable. That this is largely caused by human activity producing greenhouse gases is also very clear. But what happens next, however, is very much discussed and argued over. There is plenty of dissent. How different factors interact, how we should model future change, what’s the best approach to deal with the problem, all extensively debated.
However, the point is that temperatures are already up a worrying amount, so when that’s your starting point, whether things will get much worse or just slightly worse doesn’t change that they are already bad.
"The fantasy put about..."
LOL & QED
The world has warmed previously when presumably it wasn't on account of human activity. It is warming again now and that is coinciding with us pumping huge amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. And it may well be that the current warming is due to us. But we don't know how much, nor exactly what effect it is having in total when other factors are taken into account.
For example, does warming lead to more evaporation and more cloud cover, reflecting more incident energy from the sun back into space? Does warming kill vegetation and increase desertification, which is also a better reflector of incident energy back into space than plants are?
We don't know the future, we model it. And we model it extremely diligently. But it is only a model and any model is only as good as its inputs. If I model a balance sheet for example I know that I can fiddle faddle, say, working capital requirements and associated fundraising requirements. All my own work.
And the thing which you are illustrating is how sad it is that today we all are supposed to accept the orthodoxy with dissenters chastised and ridiculed. We have of course been here before in history but let's not over-dramatise things, right, I mean we are only talking about extinction of the human race. Something that you, by your actions, btw, aren't all *that* bothered about.
All scientists can ever do is make predictions and see how well they turn out.
The predictions of the 1990 models didn't play out perfectly (+0.4 degrees compared with +0.55 degrees) but they are not far off. Close enough to be able to say that the big picture story is right and everything else is sorting out details.
How right do the scientists have to be for how long?
Yep good question. I don't know. In climate/geological terms of course 30 years is tiny but let's say that there was "natural" warming. (And cooling, such as the planet has seen for the past XXXXXXX years). What if the scientists are imposing their models on an existing trajectory ie making observations not predictions.
The key here is rate of change. Natural heating and cooling occurs in geological timescales*, while recent warming has occurred measurably over a matter of a few decades.
The fact half the C02 ever released into the atmosphere by mankind has been since I graduated Medical School, and 85% since WW2 ended may be the reason.
* barring massive volcanic eruption or asteroid impact.
Not true. And this is one of the annoying 'facts' that has crept into the argument. Rates of change now are no different to those in the past. It is only in recent years we have come to realise that entry and exit from glaciations and other less extreme warming and cooling events can occur in decades rather than centuries. The ending of the Younger Dryas involved a 9 degree increase in temperature in just over a decade.
A 9 degree increase in certain locations, such as Greenland. The change in the global average temperature was, of course, far less than this.
Nope. Globally it is calculated at around 7 degrees so very much the same ball park.
Citation needed.
Go read about Speleothem records around the world and also the basic science of Terminations. The end of the Younger Dryas is by no means unique and very rapid changes are now recognised as being the norm rather than the exception in the climate record.
I'll hazard a guess that anabobadingdong is not a fan of paper rail tickets either.
Again, a moronic idea. Why would you want to carry around a stupid piece of paper that is liable to get lost when you can just scan a QR code on your watch?
I once saw a man who thought the same as you did.
It was on a train from Shrewsbury to Cardiff.
The reason I found he'd got the ticket on his phone is that he'd dropped it and it had broken.
So he couldn't show a ticket.
He was then charged the full fare and a penalty fare.
Which he couldn't pay either as he always paid by phone so he had no cards or cash.
Which meant that at Church Stratton where the guard put him off the train he presumably found himself in something of a difficulty.
For that reason when travelling by train or plane by all means have your ticket on a phone, but a wise person has a paper copy too.
Do they now? Another daft fable. How many Londoners travel cashless every day, do you think?
You can hazard a wild guess to the nearest million.
That happened. So you can withdraw that remark about it being a fable.
And I'm not talking about London, in case you hadn't noticed. If Londoners travelling short distances don't take sensible precautions that's their problem, and I can imagine when you're only a couple of miles it isn't as important. Outside London, where you may be travelling several hundred miles, it's a bit different. London is not typical even if Londoners think the world revolves around them.
But if you keep your plane ticket on a phone when travelling, and fail to keep a paper copy, then you're a complete fool.
Heh, I see climate change discussion still ongoing
On a completely unrelated note, I've just come across a rather lovely instrumental cover of Hallelujah, which reminds me of my childhood dissapointment at being denied a violin and violin lessons (I was offered a classical guitar, plus lessons - like my brother - which I declined). I later became reasonably adept at keyboard (and ok-ish at piano, although I've never owned a piano) but my violinist dream remains frustrated. Maybe some day...
Comments
You can't be fannying around with cheques or Apple Pay.
Do you work for the Sun by any chance?
*Grabs tinfoil hat and ducks*
(On a serious note, @Peck , we really don't go down this route. It just agitates him.)
That said, if its apple pay it's probably catering to a market more than averagely keen to part with its money ;-)
My point was, that it is very easy to say - “technology x is easy, anyone who says they can’t is a moron or a liar”
Setting up contactless payment on a mobile is Deep Tech to a huge chunk of the population.
Most people don’t try stuff - they never explore the settings to tune the colour presentation on their TV etc.
I don't trust FaceID because I've got several cousins who look very like me and it works interchangeably on our devices as a result. It's not that I distrust *them* it just makes me feel nervous about how secure it is. If my phone was FaceID I'd keep the passcode only.
*actually, the M&S, if not quite Waitrose, option, on your actual West Central Scottish downtown.
Some of don't want to submit to intrusive surveillance, not because we are doing anything wrong but because its no one elses business. The same reason most of us close the curtains at night.
(Full disclosure: I have one, and like it enough so that I may keep it. I have a better phone than any smart phone I have seen. And, at almost 80 years old, I like the idea of having a back-up, in case of an emergency.)
I get the feeling that executry accounts are not as common as they were, partly for that reason, but there were enough payments specifically for that account for me to be very glad a coiuple of years back that I'd done a separate account which allowed payments in in the names of the executors and/or the deceased's estate.
I hope the house sale goes OK now - am slightly behind the times with how it is going?
They gave up when they didn't like the results.
Which they suppressed.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-climate-change-almost-40-years-ago/
The claim that the system is all unfairly skewed one way is utter horseshit.
Debit cards will be with us for ages; relying on phone technology relies on 100% of the population having it, remembering to bring it and several stages of reliability. We are years off that.
Cash is great. I know places that only take cash. Children, small gifts, tips are all things where cash is good. In my small northern town I much prefer cash for smaller transactions in small shops, which I do all the time. And it can't fail technically. I think it will still be around in 20 years time, though I am sure in London it will be archaic.
This reminds me of the relentless search for esoteric sets of circumstance that would cause people to be starved to death by the ULEZ.
The fact half the C02 ever released into the atmosphere by mankind has been since I graduated Medical School, and 85% since WW2 ended may be the reason.
* barring massive volcanic eruption or asteroid impact.
How do the others in US get internet?!
Finnish foreign minister Elina Valtonen tells
@felschwartz that “we in the west need to understand that obviously, this is not charity because Ukraine is fighting for us. They are fighting for our liberty and the European security architecture.”
https://twitter.com/ChristopherJM/status/1679744886822649856
(All three are available to me. Fiber is probably the best, technically, but the company offering it has so annoyed me that I am -- perhaps temporarily -- using a smart phone as a "hot spot", instead.)
From talking to the installers of my fibre connection, nearly no new customers are bothering with the landline additional option.
“Chemotherapy’s a bitch and hella inconvenient, I really like my hair, so I won’t do it on the off chance the doctor has misdiagnosed this fucking huge lump that’s suddenly appeared”
The average talk time on a landline is 35 minutes per week, which should tell you everything you need to know.
https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/bills/article-9495695/Number-homes-landline-fallen-4m-20-years.html
As I have said in the past, my interest in arguing this is rather limited because I actually like what we are doing in terms of changing our energy production for reasons entirely unconnected with any climate effects. We should not be burning hydrocarbons (though we should still be drilling for them for other uses). So it is rather churlish of me to argue against something I am generally quite happy with. But once in a while it is nice to set the record straight on the underlying science (such as rates of change) particularly when being stated as fact by people who don't actually know what they are talking about.
If the AMOC were to shut down, we'd probably see a drop of similar proportions in Europe, on a similarly rapid timescale.
There's this amazing innovation called a battery pack. Weighs very little and will charge a phone three times over.
Anyway, the usual use of the landline in our house is to phone one of the mobiles when we can't find it.
1. I don't think my suggestion of monitoring MPs is that difficult. Don't House of Lords already do it (signing in)? Simply clock in and out at Westminster. At a surgery, your assistant can surely verify you were there (And your constituents you had a meeting with). And the village fete event will be all over the "Little Snoozing Gazette". I'm not suggesting timesheets and clock cards. Just a general verifiable number of days when you were; at Westminster; at your surgery; being seen out and about.
I mean, front and centre of my MP's page: https://peterdowd.com/
I recognise half those locations on his pictures.
2. Now, I realise an issue might be with Sinn Fein, but you know what, if they can't get their 100 days (or whatever) then yes I do think a by-election might be the best way forward. If the people of the constituent are happy with an absent MP, they'll keep voting for them for each of the four intervening years between a GE.
3. And if they don't do any work, and their constituents aren't happy with that, then they ARE kicked out. Who wants an MP who, on 7th May 2010 announced, 'bugger you all. I'm off to my house to write a book and never see anyone again' (Brown) and then be lumbered with that situation for five years.
What a daft idea.
Retailers don't need to accept ANY payment: cash, card, Apple Pay, Google Pay, groats, heads of cattle, gifts or sexual favours. They can point blank refuse to sell you a can of lemonade even if you offer them a wad of fresh twenties.
The idea they should be forced to accept an anachronistic form of payment because AndyJS, the bloke on the internet, would like them to is for the birds.
Ain't. Gonna. Happen.
Or the uproar over the move to digital telly.
Speaking of liberty, is Kolomoisky at it?
As for Zelensky, it's kind of unusual to demand to be allowed to join a club.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2007869117
...Particularly, a growing number of high-resolution speleothem records from the AM region exhibit a more gradual onset and termination of millennial-scale events, including the YD. In this regard, they are to some extent more similar to the gradual shifts of the Antarctic, rather than the abrupt changes characteristic of Greenland climate...
I haven't used cash for 10 years and have never needed it.
Funny old world.
It was on a train from Shrewsbury to Cardiff.
The reason I found he'd got the ticket on his phone is that he'd dropped it and it had broken.
So he couldn't show a ticket.
He was then charged the full fare and a penalty fare.
Which he couldn't pay either as he always paid by phone so he had no cards or cash.
Which meant that at Church Stratton where the guard put him off the train he presumably found himself in something of a difficulty.
For that reason when travelling by train or plane by all means have your ticket on a phone, but a wise person has a paper copy too.
I do LOTS of back country hiking. Your ludicrous scenarios to prove a silly point are somewhat undermined by the fact I haven't needed cash for TEN YEARS.
Of course the melting of the then huge icecaps would tend to lead to abrupt climate events.
As the data we have is largely inferred, and even with the best evidence there's uncertainty of a few decades on precise local timings, it's much more uncertain modelling it than is the case with today's climate - where we have data points across the globe on an hourly basis.
You can hazard a wild guess to the nearest million.
It is so old, it used to belong to Cellnet.
The only banners on here are the cash-fetishists who are seeking to ban businesses from cashless operation. Very, very weird.
And I'm not talking about London, in case you hadn't noticed. If Londoners travelling short distances don't take sensible precautions that's their problem, and I can imagine when you're only a couple of miles it isn't as important. Outside London, where you may be travelling several hundred miles, it's a bit different. London is not typical even if Londoners think the world revolves around them.
But if you keep your plane ticket on a phone when travelling, and fail to keep a paper copy, then you're a complete fool.
On a completely unrelated note, I've just come across a rather lovely instrumental cover of Hallelujah, which reminds me of my childhood dissapointment at being denied a violin and violin lessons (I was offered a classical guitar, plus lessons - like my brother - which I declined). I later became reasonably adept at keyboard (and ok-ish at piano, although I've never owned a piano) but my violinist dream remains frustrated. Maybe some day...