Eli, why do you even bother spending time writing such a blatant and pathetic LIE? Do you have the insane idea that if I don’t respond, you will have “won?”

As I have already pointed out, you have NOT answered my questions. I asked you to label the following statement as “true” or “false,” and to say why:

“Surface air temperature alone is inadequate to monitor trends of surface heating and cooling. The SI units for temperature are degrees Kelvin (or Celsius), and the SI units for heat are Joules. The surface air temperature can go up while the enthalpy goes down or remains the same. The surface air temperature can go down while the enthalpy goes up or remains the same. The surface air temperature can remain the same while the enthalpy goes down or up.”

So the ANSWER is either “true” or “false,” and an explanation of why.

I’ll give you a little help…the correct answer starts with “t…”. See Roger Pielke Sr.’s blog for further explanation:

http://climatesci.atmos.colostate.edu/2005/07/18/what-does-moist-enthalpy-tell-us/

And I also asked you to say by what percentage the enthalpy of a given mass of air changes if…

1) It goes from 20 degrees Celsius and 50 percent relative humidity to 30 degrees Celsius and:

a) 10 percent relative humidity, or
b) 30 percent relative humidity.

2) It goes from 20 degrees Celsius and 30 percent relative humidity to 15 degrees Celsius and:

a) 80 percent relative humidity, or
b) 60 percent relative humidity.

3) It stays at 20 degrees Celsius, but the relative humidity changes from 40 percent to:

a) 20 percent, or
b) 70 percent.”

You clearly have not answered those questions, either. The answers are PERCENTAGES.

I would ask that you stop lying…but I’m getting more and more certain that asking you to stop lying is a waste of time. That’s apparently beyond your capabilities.

Just like understanding the relationship between (dry bulb) temperature and enthalpy is apparently beyond your capabilities.

I don’t see this as the same issue. The study you reference is a simple question about which party has more members in Congress. It’s a simple test of knowledge. It stands to reason that staunch members of either party know the answer to that question to a greater extent than people who don’t care which party has more members in Congress.

The brain scan study was different. It wasn’t a test of simple knowledge, but a test of reasoning. From the article on the study:

“The brain imaging revealed a consistent pattern. Both Republicans and Democrats consistently denied obvious contradictions for their own candidate but detected contradictions in the opposing candidate.”

So I’d like to see some “controls” in the form of people who: 1) opposed both candidates, 2) vote about equally for either party, and 3) don’t care about politics at all.

The brain scan study seems to be drawing the conclusion that, when people are staunch supporters of one party, they shut down their brain reasoning centers. But in order for that conclusion to be valid (that the reasoning centers get *shut down*), there needs to be some “control” group that is shown to have reasoning centers still functioning.

P.S. Eli Rabett, I suggest you accept my offers here:

http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/moveabletype/mt-comments.cgi?entry_id=680

I will take your failure to accept my offers in the same manner I took Tim Lambert’s failure to accept my offer. I will conclude that you and Tim Lambert are dishonest, rather than merely ignorant.

Partisans (republican and democrats do about equally well, e.g. ~ 38% don’t know the answer to the question), but the so called moderates have a much worse idea about reality.

It’s interesting…this study doesn’t not seem to have had any “controls.”

It would have been interesting if they’d included:

1) People who vote approximately equally for Democrats and Republicans (assuming such people actually exist),

2) People who are staunchly against both parties (staunch third party voters),

3) People who are politically completely disinterested (apolitical non-voters).

Maybe **no one** uses reason.

???

I don’t know Milloy, but looks like to me from his site that he is interesting in cherry-picking science to advance a pretty explicit ideological agenda.

I have indeed _contrasted_ him with Andy Revkin, who I do know and respect, in a comment on Real Climate (you are doing your Googling, I see) a while back to underscore the difference between opinion and news in journalism. To suggest as you have that I think that the two of them are comparable, is not really correct is it? It is in fact the exact opposite of my point, no? (Readers can judge for themselves in the comments at the following link:)

http://www.realclimate.org/wp-comments-popup.php?p=229&c=1

But it is not the first time we have had this sort of discussion:

http://pubs.acs.org/subscribe/journals/esthag-w/2005/oct/policy/pt_curry_letter.html

How about this: since you are a jounralist if you’d like like to ask me some direct questions, interview style, I’d be happy to try to answer them and we can post them on our blog. I am sure that it would be a more effective means of at getting what you are after than a back-and-forth over snide comments on a weblog.

Thanks!

George Lakoff in his book “Moral Politics” makes exactly the same point. He make a pretty good attempt at addressing why “conservatives” and “liberals” think the way they do, and addressing how they could talk to each other. It is interesting that he started the study because he as a cognitive scientist had no idea what conservatives issues had in common (anti-abortion, low taxes, small government, pro-military, etc.) and then he realized that he had no idea what his own liberal beliefs had in common.

And Roger, I hope you realize the irony in your final sentence.

I think you’re wrong to simply dismiss this as an obvious truth that no one would deny. It’s instead an essential factor that must be accomodated in the search for effective policy solutions to the sort of problems that are regularly discussed here.

For example, the central argument in “The Republican War on Science,” which frequently plays out here, is that if we could only get those pesky Milloy-style “junk science” R’s to simple recognize the Real Science, then we could move forward with policy solutions. But that doesn’t happen, everyone gets real frustrated, and yells at one another.

It’s obvious that to actually solve policy dilemmas, rather than spend our time in the visceral pleasure of yelling at one another, we need to find policy solutions that are robust to the central truths that this study helps illustrate. So yeah, I guess it may be obvious, but that doesn’t mean we are acting accordingly.