Lacking All Conviction: exploring the future from the center

The following was written as a response to the blogger who writes at www.adividedworld.com. Please see the comment section of the following page for the background to this post. http://www.adividedworld.com/scientific-issues/clouds-and-global-warming/ Hello again Charles. I have been thinking about the things we disagree on over the past few months, and trying to figure out a way to respond to one of them without putting the rest of my life on hold. You've altered the way I think about climate change on an emotional or intuitive level, if not a logical one. I have long been aware of the lack of predictive validity of climate simulations, an ambiguity that naturally accompanies any simulation of sufficient complexity. Call it chaos theory or simply bad science, the result is that the margins of error in the field are unfortunately huge. I had previously been unmoved on an emotional level by any non-AGW theory due to their seeming to me to be reactions against pro-AGW theor...

Background:              TLDR: The official poverty measure is confusing as hell Upon Googling "Bernie Sanders", an interesting combination of words appeared: "Forbes.com" "Policies for Bernie Sanders" The article  was a rather facile examination of the relative merits of conditional vs. non-conditional cash transfers, as in food stamps vs. cash benefits. There are better articles about this subject such as this one in the Economist and this one on a Norwegian website. But what immediately caught my eye, and what takes up the bulk of the article, is a claim that the author, Tim Worstall, makes about the childhood poverty rate, namely that it is only 2-3%. Of all the metrics that you could use to argue that poverty in America isn't as bad as some people say it is, the childhood poverty rate is probably the least likely to convince someone who has access to the official statistics. I confronted Tim about his lack of citations in the c...