"Gary Johnson and Bill Weld don’t want to build an expensive and useless wall. The only thing a big wall will do is increase the size of the ladders, the depth of the tunnels, and the width of the divisions between us."

Next.

I find it absurd to call someone a "sociopath" based on *any* position on climate change; the science is very, very far from being "settled," and intelligent and educated people can be found on all sides of the debate. (Google "Petition Project," for example.) Judging from the Wikipedia link, Johnson seems to take a middle-of-the-road position on the issue, which I suppose shouldn't be surprising, and certainly isn't unreasonable.

Well, it's nice that you're voting your conscience. Gary Johnson will not win, of course, because no third-party candidate can win. So your vote will amount to nothing. But vote your conscience.

You could always "pair" your protest vote with someone from the other side of the Dem/Rep divide: http://balancedrebellion.com/home/

She lives in California Patrick. If California doesn't go to Hillary and by a significant margin I would be flabbergasted.

In California, the combined Johnson and Trump votes would not come close to equalling the Hillary votes. So, a vote for Johnson as a protest vote is not wasted. Hillary will still get all of California's electoral votes.

That winner take all practice is part of the problem. If you win a state, you get all of its electoral votes. This is true in something like 48 out of the 50 states. New Mexico is one state that allots it electors by district.

That means the states that are solid locks for either party get taken for granted. When's the last time the Democrats actually needed to do anything for California to get its votes?

Or the Republicans for that matter? Californians will never vote for them, so why bother? Now, if the parties had to compete district by district for votes, each party would actually have to pay attention to each state's concerns. No longer could the Democrats continue to treat California like an ATM.

Part of the problem is in the individual state parties. Republicans were in danger of treating Texas that way, but the Texas Democratic Party actually has some ability to organize and constitute a threat. The California Republicans are hopeless.

I don't weigh in on climate change because, as Brad N notes, the science is quite complex and it's beyond my reach. And I read science for a living -- but behavioral science. I don't have a background in physics or climatology. (Amazing, how, say, the lady in the French group I used to go to who arranges flowers for a living understands the science well enough to make pronouncements about it.)

PS I voted for Gary Johnson in the last election, too.

He has all of the charisma of a wet piece of paper towel, unfortunately.

He has all of the charisma of a wet piece of paper towel, unfortunately.

Amy Alkon at September 5, 2016 9:03 AM

Which is five times more than Hillary.

The climate science used by the IPCC and such really isn't that complex. You have some polynomial curve fit extrapolation and some rather dubious atmospheric models. It is quite clear the whole movement intellectually comes from meteorology. Getting actual good results is much more complex. Quite frankly I'm suspicious that irrigation and cement production have a bigger impact than CO2 production. But you won't convince the weather wonks of that.

Politically it has it's origins in Communism/Marxism. It's all about central planning and control. As an engineer I find their only solutions quite offensive. When you get a cavity it may be a good idea to stop eating sweets but we don't stop there. You drill and fill the cavity. Telling people to stop doing things is a poor answer. If we want the globe to be at a certain temperature it is well within our current capabilities to geoengineer it. And quite cheaply too.

I am a lifelong Republican (over 50 years) and I will be voting for Johnson. This will be the first time I will ever vote for the presidential candidate of any party other than the GOP.

I disagree with Johnson on many things, but I do not fear a Johnson presidency. I fear a Trump presidency; he is an existential threat to the country. I also fear a Clinton presidency, although less so. And the more I think about it, I come to the conclusion that having a Libertarian president and a Republican Congress would be pretty good for the Republic.

People say Johnson cannot be elected. Sure he can be elected. He won't win 270 electoral votes, but if he wins a few states and throws the election into the House of Representatives, he stands a very good chance of being elected.

I have had people tell me I am a traitor to my party for not supporting its nominee, but I ask them, was de Gaulle the traitor, or was Petain the traitor?

Adding to Conan's comments: In California, a vote for Trump is a vote for Clinton.

Amy, I'm sure the science of climate change is not beyond your *reach*. It may exceed your current grasp, because you've made the rational decision not to invest the effort to learn the physics and math when there are much better uses of your time.

A few years ago, I put in the effort to follow the debates, and I blogged about it a few times. And now I've stopped doing that, because there really isn't anything new, and my attention has shifted to more productive activities.

"I disagree with Johnson on many things, but I do not fear a Johnson presidency. I fear a Trump presidency; he is an existential threat to the country. I also fear a Clinton presidency, although less so."

Why? The Presidency is a weak office when it is held in check by the Consitution and the other two branches of governnment.

Have you not been paying attention for the last eight years as Obama and the democratic party trashed both the rule of law ahd the budget process?

Fifty years of claiming to be a republican but not understanding this basic bit of civics makes me think you are either sadly naive or a troll.

"People say Johnson cannot be elected. Sure he can be elected. He won't win 270 electoral votes, but if he wins a few states and throws the election into the House of Representatives, he stands a very good chance of being elected."

Your dining room table has a better chance of reaching critical mass.

"I have had people tell me I am a traitor to my party for not supporting its nominee, but I ask them, was de Gaulle the traitor, or was Petain the traitor?

Foaming Solvent at September 5, 2016 9:05 PM"

de Gaulle put his life on the line and had some skin in the game. You don't. You are just virtue signaling with a rather poor historical analogy.

You aren't deGaulle. You're a *Useful Idiot* for The Democratic party.

Regarding global warming, I've done a fair amount of study into it. There is very little reliable data. The only data I trust is the satellite global troposphere data published by the University of Alabama-Huntsville; they are the only ones using satellite infrared data instead of unreliable ground-based thermometers. What their data has shown is that there has been no trend since the late 1990s. There is a fair amount of year-to-year variation (which is kind of intriguing in itself). Further, a few years ago, I did a comparison of the UAH data with solar flux measurements (which measure the total amount of solar energy reached Earth, and can only be done from space). Unfortunately, we only have reliable solar flux data going back to 1980, but if you take the plot of the data we have, and compare that to the UAH temperature data, it matches almost perfectly. (There is an anomalous period in the mid-1990s where the global temperature data rose while solar output remained flat, but the two things re-converged in the late '90s.)

Further, I have realized, looking into it, that very little of the research has been performed with any degree of scientific rigor, and it appears on many fronts that the researchers settled on their preferred conclusion first and then mined data to support their narrative, rather than letting the data lead wherever it leads. I find the following thing to be telling:

* Global warming theories are usually worded in such a way that they are not falsifiable. Every single weather event or trend anywhere "proves" the existence of global warming, and there is no possible behavior that, if observed, would disprove it. Even global cooling proves global warming! It's a self-licking ice cream cone that starts off by discarding the null hypothesis. (For instance, every year we see alarmist articles about "disappearance" of Artic ice during July and August. It's summer, duh.)

* Michael Mann's "hockey stick" defies common sense in two respects. First of all, it denies the existence of warmer and colder periods in the past for which we have pretty good evidence, such as the Medieval Warm Period. Second, it presents a picture of Earth's climate and ecology as being negatively stable, like a coin standing on edge; one push knocks it over and there is no going back. We know this isn't true because the Earth has survived cataclysmic events, such as meteor strikes, in the past and the planet doesn't have a runaway climate now. (If it did, I wouldn't be here to write this, and you wouldn't be here to read it.)

* If you take the models published by Hanson, East Anglia, et al, and you put in data from circa 1990 and run them forward, they consistently fail to predict the conditions that exist right now. Without fail, they predict that the Earth should be much warmer than it is now. According to Hansen's early 1990s models, Manhattan is supposed to be under water now. As far as I know, he's still using basically that same model.

* If you want to get Mann's or East Anglia's raw data to do your own studies with, you can't. They will only give you their "adjusted" data, for which the exact nature of the adjustments has not been published, but other observers running statistical analysis on them have noted how the adjustments have had the effect of increasing average temperatures for a particular data point over time in a very steady and predictable manner that is atypical of our observations of how climate actually behaves. Mann has successfully fought off Freedom of Information Act attempts to obtain his data, even though the production of said data has been taxpayer funded.

* We know from the East Anglia emails that there is a lot of fudging in their data, and that their researchers had no qualms about altering data to suit their preferred narrative.

* Back in the 1970s, there was a lot of concern about "global cooling", supposedly being caused by dust in the atmosphere. As in the case of global warming, it was held that this was due entirely to human activity, and that the solution was the exact same thing recommended as the solution for global warming now: authoritarian government, elimination of freedoms, and a drastic reduction in the standard of living for most of the human race. In the mid-1970s, researchers confidently predicted that the human race would be wiped out by 1990 unless draconian government action was taken immediately.

On the "hockey stick", it is a polynomial extrapolation. All such models have a "hockey stick". It is inherent to the mathematics. Both ends (positive and negative) eventually go to either positive or negative infinity. Such models typically have an exponentially decreasing accuracy as you predict past the last data point. The reality is most phenomenon don't follow a polynomial function. A decent scientist or engineer would recognize Mann's model is only reasonably accurate for maybe 5-10 years. (And probably not even that due to all the fudging.) At 100 years and further it's likelihood of accuracy should be sub 1%.

Mind, I'm not complaining about polynomial extrapolation in general. It is quite easy and cheap to use. It has it's uses. But recognizing the limits of your tools is important. I use a lot of polynomial interpolation in my everyday work. It is vastly more accurate than extrapolation. But I am still using a polynomial to model a non-polynomial reality. Sometimes the math doesn't match reality. But cost vs. accuracy is a reasonable trade off.

Most scientists and engineers should recognize the limits of Mann's work. Which is why he won't release raw data and his methodology. Man does have an effect on his environment. He does have an effect on a global scale. But most of the work done in the climate science field is politic and not science. Not even a soft science.

Ben, that's a good summary. And I'll put some more emphasis on the extrapolation thing. There's a difference between interpolation, where you're working within known observed bounds, and extrapolation, where you're going beyond the data you have. As you say, extrapolation of any function of any degree above linear gets you into trouble pretty quickly. We observe that Mann's model fails when it is extrapolated to the past (it denies the existence of past events that we are pretty sure did happen).

There's a psychological technique used by end-of-the-world proselytizers of all sorts. It has to do with where you set the date: you don't want it to make it tomorrow because when tomorrow has come and gone and the world didn't end, you look like a fool. But you also don't want to make it so far away that nobody feels any sense of urgency. (We have high confidence that our Sun will go nova in about 4 million years, destroying our solar system. I don't see anyone worried about it yet.) You have to make the deadline close enough to get people alarmed. But you also need to make it far enough away so that as the trends you predicted fail to develop, you can move the deadline and everyone will have forgotten (hopefully) about your previous prediction. This way you can string along the gullible indefinitely, gaining fame, fortune and power in the process. The bracket for this seems to be in the 10-30 year range, and that's where these disaster predictions from the global warming alarmists inevitably are placed.

Even with interpolation I run into problems. Sometimes a sensor element is mechanically loose. So when a tool is rotated you get a sharp discontinuity when it moves. The polynomial can't fix that even though I'm interpolating. As I said, you have to know the limits of your techniques.

And yep, most popular climate science is more applied psychology than attempted science. You just slap a few numbers and equation to hide the politics. There isn't any actual math or physics involved.

Another good fake science area is all this FMRI business. There is math and equations and lots of big clanky hardware with magnets. But once you boil it all down and remove the redundant terms from the equations you are left with 1=1. Nothing of significance is tested or proven.