Man acts because he is dissatisfied. He can be hungry, tired, bored, curious, lacking companionship, longing for aesthetics or comfort, or aspiring to achievement or notoriety, amongst other things. There is no limit to his wants, as new ones appear as old ones get fulfilled.
His voluntary actions aim to resolve this dissatisfaction; this involves means such as his time, abilities, labor and physical resources. Those means are used in a certain way, which he thinks or believes will lead to the desired result. In that sense, he is rational.
By this definition of rationality, we cannot assume that he can anticipate the result perfectly, does not change his mind, or is logical by some objective criteria. The outcome of his action may turn out unexpectedly pleasing or disappointing, and he may find he was mistaken in some way.

Aside from the problem of unlimited wants and our cognitive limitations, man is confronted with the dilemma of limited resources. All of his goals cannot be achieved; he has to choose which ones to pursue and allocate resources correspondingly.
Each of the goals carry an expected satisfaction for the actor. This so-called psychic utility, or utility, cannot be seen or measured, but it allows the individual to rank his goals on a subjective and ever-changing scale. We can never observe the individual's preference scale directly, and therefore must abandon any notions of numerical measurement, cardinal comparison (this goal's utility is 2.5 time higher than that other goal's) or interpersonal comparison. That said, we can know the actor's highest preference at any instant, as it is revealed by his choosing which end to pursue first.

Because man values certain ends and pursuing an end involves means, he imputes use-value, or simply value, to the different means used in his action.
Value is subjective, as is differs in the eyes of different actors and is not objectively derived from the good itself. Value is marginal, as it applies to units of goods rather categories of goods. Just like preferences, value cannot be measured, but we can infer that they are ranked.
For example, a carpenter values a box of nails because of the goals the nails enable him to pursue (ie. building a house).
If a second box of nails would enable the carpenter to pursue a lower preference end (ie. building some furniture or a second house), then the carpenter imputes more value to the first box than to the second. Generally, the more units of a kind of good an individual possesses, the lower his marginal utility for additional units (Law of marginal utility).

In this initial post, we reviewed some key insights from the classical and Austrian schools: that the study of economics is primarily deductive and analytical; that utility and value are subjective, marginal, and not measurable; and that value is derived from usage, not from the good itself or how it was produced.
In the next post, we will continue to cover the basics of economics, and look at action in the setting of a group of individuals, with the appearance of indirect and direct exchange, and the emergence of exchange rates and prices.

Science is not a popularity contest, it is simply the rigorous search of knowledge. The validity of anthropomorphic global warming theory and its predictions has little to do with mediatic debate around tornadoes, cold winters, Himalayan glaciers or a shady researcher.
In that sense Al Gore (and others) have brought this upon the AGW community with his movie, An Inconvenient Truth, by using simplistic and shocking images (hockey stick, climate instability, polar bear, drowning cities). These talking points, like much politics certainly captured people's imagination and it encouraged them to trust superficial arguments. The result is a backlash as those claims are debunked.

Now, carbocentrists (a more suitable moniker for supporters of the AGW theory, coined by author Benoît Rittaud) rightly argue that climate science is subtle and complex and that those headline-grabbing arguments are not the real core of the theory.
Fair enough, so what is the real core?

Maybe the IPCC report is not that relevant at this point, because of several faulty claims and its lack of political independence, but it at least spells out the carbocentrist theory. From what I understand, its main argument goes like this:

1. climate models incorporate the state-of-art knowledge about physical phenomenon which underly climate,
2. the models have been tuned to real-world data and produce results consistent with the temperature average measured for the last x decades,
3. known factors which are explicitly not supported by the models are not expected to negate the results,
4. CO2 is deemed the most important factor because models fail to match historical data if CO2 is not included,
5. the models all tend to forecast a warming of the average temperature, across many runs with different CO2 emission scenarios.

I hope my summary is accurate. If it's not, I would love some carbocentrists lay the logic out properly.

Assuming the above reasoning, a number of questions I can think of would have to be addressed for it to be a strong argument:

* If our physical understanding and modeling is good, why do we need multiple models?
* How do we know that models are good at forecasting?
* How do we know that the forecasts from different runs are properly distributed in terms of probabilities?
* How much out-of-sample (ie. future data) do we need to collect to even consider invalidating a model (falsifiability)?
* Given enough out-of-sample data and the wide range of predictions offered by the models, what variation between measurements and predictions would it take to invalidate a model?
* How can we rely on "ab ignorantum" argumentation to claim that CO2 is the main factor? Ignorance of a better explanation is not conclusive proof.
* Is average temperature a good measure to build scientific knowledge?
* Given the non-linear and chaotic nature of weather, how can we exclude seemingly important factors?

Finally, I understand that politics cannot be completely taken out of the discussion, but we should do our best to separate the question of what we know and understand from what we should do about it. Policy decisions relate to primarily to politics and economics, and related to climate science only for understanding the expected effects on climate of the designed behavior change.

Impressive piece of tech.
Riffle through the book under a high-resolution camera to scan through a book at around 200 pages per minute. Reference illumination (infrared grid pattern) lets the software determine the curvature of the page in each frame, as it is being flipped, and flatten the page's image.