Slashdot Mirror
The Science Credibility Bubble
eldavojohn writes "The real fallout of climategate may have nothing to do with the credibility of climate change. Daniel Henninger thinks it's a bigger problem for the scientific community as a whole and he calls out the real problem as seen through the eyes of a lay person in an opinion piece for the WSJ. Henninger muses, 'I don't think most scientists appreciate what has hit them,' and carries on in that vein, saying, 'This has harsh implications for the credibility of science generally. Hard science, alongside medicine, was one of the few things left accorded automatic stature and respect by most untrained lay persons. But the average person reading accounts of the East Anglia emails will conclude that hard science has become just another faction, as politicized and "messy" as, say, gender studies.' While nothing interesting was found by most scientific journals, he explains that the attacks against scientists in these leaked e-mails for proposing opposite views will recall the reader to the persecution of Galileo. In doing so, it will make the lay person unsure of the credibility of all sciences without fully seeing proof of it, but assuming that infighting exists in them all. Is this a serious risk? Will people even begin to doubt the most rigorous sciences like Mathematics and Physics?"
Otzi the Iceman says that a little global warming is welcome after 5000 years. It's almost as warm now, as when he was battling for his life.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96tzi_the_Iceman
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
The argument from incredulity is often applied to science by the layperson. You don't need an opponent or a debate to use a logical fallacy. The fact that the Kitzmiller vs. Dover case had to happen proves that people question science regardless of it's validity.
"A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything." ~Friedrich Nietzsche
Didn't we see the same bloviation from the mainstream media when cold fusion went from the energy source of the future to a byword for scientific fraud? It seems to me if the reputation of hard science could survive out and out fraud like that, it will probably survive the climate change "fraud".
Science is empirical, math is not. Scientific hypotheses are inductively tested, mathematical hypotheses are deductively proven. (And mathematical "induction" is still deductive in that the premises subsume the conclusion.)
Will people even begin to doubt the most rigorous sciences like Mathematics and Physics
I know I won't doubt them. Why? Math is so pure, and once you study it, you know its truths - and that the only falacies that exist in mathematics are human error.
And to steal from XKCD,
And Physics is just applied Mathematics. And Chemistry is just applied Physics. And Bio is just applied chemistry.
Sit someone down through a high school education and teach them the proper way to run experiments and the proper way to understand statistics, and you won't have any of that mess.
Science shouldn't be "accorded automatic stature and respect" any more than politics should. There's no reason to trust a scientist any more than you'd trust your barber.
The problem isn't that people aren't automatically believing science, it's almost the exact opposite: people are automatically doubting science. And that's quite another thing entirely.
When I was a kid, I used to genuinely believe that humans were on a path to greater wisdom, more profound discourse, and perfect knowledge.
Lately, I just see a bunch of power-hungry assholes doing their utmost to discredit intelligent thought and dumb-down the world around them, so they can continue on an unimpeded path toward greater assholism.
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
Einstein questioned "valid" laws of science and look what it got him.
L'esperienza de questa dolce vita (The experience of this sweet life) - Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy
Will people even begin to doubt the most rigorous sciences like Mathematics and Physics
The answer is no. The good thing about science is that it is open source. For mathematics, you can go through all of the proofs from your text books. For physics you would need a bit of gear to reproduce some of the experiments, but again, that is just a question of money and interest.
The basic point is that the scientific method don't expect you to accept anything without proof. If you can falsify any of the theories by experiment, people will pay attention to you, regardless of politics.
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
For whatever reason, a lot of people act as if scientists don't have their own preconceived notions on how things should be, or are predisposed to a certain political agenda. The tag line is that scientists are only interested in the truth, as if scientists as a class are immune to any sort of corruption, and that consensus on an issue is the same thing as fact. Forget the fact that there's an incentive to support certain findings because that will lead to greater funding...
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
The lay public has been mistrusting science for quite a while now. Witness the disbelief in findings regarding the lack of connection between autism and vaccines, brain cancer and cellphones and climate change.
/. all the time - cue all the rants about how nobody gets funding unless they parrot the party line about global warming and how doctors who support vaccinations are just puppets of Big Pharma.
We're already well into the era when people doubt the motives and findings of scientists. You can see it here on
Problem is, people really believe that they can become experts on extremely complicated topics and weigh the evidence for themselves. I'm not saying we need to have blind trust in authority, but sometimes you've got to recognize that someone who studied climatology for X years might actually know a thing or two that you can't pick up from reading a blog.
Who could have possibly predicted that accepting hundreds of billions of dollars from governments over the last couple of decades could have somehow politicized Science?
-Peter
If people are afraid to question what we now consider laws in physics, mathematics, etc, then there will never be breakthroughs in learning.
I mean, there are extremes, and people shouldn't be disbelieving scientists just because they're scientists, but at the same time, we shouldn't always take things at face value just because Bill Nye the Science Guy says so. There is a happy medium...
i've said it before, i'll keep saying it.
specialization is what kills trust. the more we specialize, the fewer true peers we have, and the truly brilliant breakthroughs are harder to understand, translate, and verify. this equals a system with inherently less trust.
Climategate has absolutely nothing to do with being a lay person and has everything to do with data being FALSIFIED as well as peer reviews being FALSIFIED in the name of climate change theory.
Also, during the melee of all the fraud going on, good scientists had their names and careers sabotaged by the perpetrators in the scientific community.
To detract from these facts is to contribute to the ongoing fraud that is climate change.
The problem with science is the same as the problem with congress: there is too much money involved.
Copyrighted journals, and patented research, squabbling and infighting for research grants... All of these thing have become the norm for too many scientists.
If you want mass perception of science to change, we are going to have to reorganize scientific institutions to reflect the ideals of truth and openness, that all science is supposed to espouse.
I work in a field closely associated with climatology (satellite remote sensing), and I work with climatologists. And I agree with the article on one point: We really do not understand how big a deal this 'climategate' is.
The worst bits in that email dump are petty squabbles between researchers and critics. That's standard -- often critics are dishonest people who are attacking the science in order to advance a political agenda, and that is very frustrating to someone who wants to do honest science. Yes, tempers flare in private emails. Scientists are human. If people are going to lose faith in science because scientists are human...then we as a race are doomed, in my opinion.
As for the results of the CSU climate research, they're not in any doubt. Every criticism of them has been answered, and there are other studies that agree with the CSU results. So attack the scientists for being human if you must, but the science is sound and must be heeded.
I really do not understand why this has blown up into such a conflagration. Anyone who gives up on science because of this trifling matter is welcome to go back to the dark ages and live their short, wholesome, science-free life.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
The scientific method says you follow the data wherever it leads you, not start out with a preconceived notion of what the results should be then throw out data that doesn't fit your preconceived notions and try to squelch any opposing opinions. I see this more as an object lesson in how NOT to do science. They obviously had an agenda, and they threw out raw data, keeping only their "massaged" data. All of which makes their conclusions suspect, even if they are correct. If you want to do good science that makes a difference, DON'T do shit that way! By doing so, they have hurt the very agenda they were trying to advance.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
This is just a sympathy troll seeking to get more publicity for the stolen emails. There is no damage to climate science or science here, just hooligan tactics in a coordinated propaganda effort that includes break-ins around the globe. Science can't be hurt by such racketeering since it does not seek to deceive, it is another game altogether.
You might want to read up on Pons and Fleischmann some more. It certainly was not "out and out fraud".
hahahahahahaha
"The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt."
- Bertrand Russel
As evidence of the validity of Russel's insight, consider the people who are cocksure enough to assume it is they who are the doubters. They will even quarrel amongst each other about which of them is the intelligent, when in reality they are all idiots.
So now we know the problem. What's the solution? Not much we can do about it. There's too much out there for a single person to know even of most fields taken singly. A specialist is much more likely to be able to dig deep enough to discover or invent.
Oh, I'm sorry. I guess that we can't really thank science for medicine, computers, airplanes, the food on our table. I guess that one murderous programmer working on an open source file system means all of Linux is shit, too. And you know what? I got taken for a ride buying speculative real estate in Florida. I guess this means that you can't make money in real estate, that the whole thing's a rotten idea. Incidentally, I threw out the bath water. Where'd the baby go?
I'll buy that argument once religious whackadoodles promise to renounce their faith because of televangelists and pedo-priests.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
The more science is viewed with skepticism the better the science will be in my opinion.
*Science* doesn't care how much political capitol you have, doesn't care what your personal beliefs are, and doesn't care if a new discovery shakes you to your core. It also doesn't care what the general public believes and it doesn't care if it's not popular.
Ultimately the truth will prevail - even it means turning over 100's of years of *scientific* research. At some point the clue hammer strikes and at that point there is not turning back.
The dangers of mixing money, power, and politics with science is that message is perverted, skewed, slanted, and sometimes a flat-out lie. The lies do nothing to further science - only to further funding for research in what may or may not be "the right road".
Remember what they said in "Men in Black" - "1500 years ago, everybody knew that the Earth was the centre of the universe. 500 years ago, everybody knew that the Earth was flat. And 15 minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you'll know... tomorrow."
"And in doing so will make the lay person unsure of the credibility of ALL sciences without fully seeing proof of it but assuming that infighting exists in them all. Is this a serious risk?"
No, having doubt and skepticism is called being scientific. I couldn't begin to count the number of times I've seen complaints that "lay" people aren't scientifically critical enough. Maybe if people actually questioned what "scientists" tell them, fewer would fall victim to the bottomless sea of unproven alternative medical treatments.
And infighting does exists in all sciences, at least if it's an active field.
Revolutionary idea is first rejected and ridiculed by the establishment for years or decades until there is finally enough evidence for it. then that idea becomes the establishment and the cycle repeats itself until the next revolutionary idea.
dinosaurs to birds, evolution and natural selection and a long list of others all started out fighting the establishment. a lot of our current views on dino's didn't get accepted until after Jurassic Park came out.
Doesn't science involve experimentation? I don't remember running any experiments in my University Mathematics courses.
Climate Science is a STUDY, much like Social Studies, Political "Science", and most (but not all) fields of Psychology. You cannot experiment on Climate on the timeframes or scales these "scientists" are suggesting. You cannot produce a hypothesis, alter variables, and confirm or deny your ideas.
... both points of view have been apparent for nearly a hundred years. Politicians and marketers just grab hold of whichever evidence they want to promote their own agenda. Sure it's possible, which is exactly why it's such a powerful weapon in the social manipulator's arsenal ... just like 9/11 denier's evidence is just plausible enough to make people believe it ... or how creationists can bend scientific discoveries just enough to gain a following.
Climate Studies, as it should be called, consists entirely of observation and computer modelling - a form of mathematics which is also not a science, but an art or "language".
In 1975, American Scientist, Nature, and New York Times were publishing story after story about the imminent New Ice Age that would plunge the world into subfreezing temperatures for the next 100 years. Suddenly, 20 years later and Global Warming is all we can talk about? I don't understand. No, I do understand
Sure we might be warming, just as much as we might have been cooling in the 70s. But what does it matter? We need renewable energy regardless of what the environment is doing.
As a Computer Scientist, I have experienced the ability to know something without being able to prove something it's called gut instinct. Sadly, gut instinct is not scientific or political, it's conjecture. If some of these scientist have a gut instinct then they should find a way to scientificly prove their theories. It's their duty as a scientist to accept that their theory could be incorrect.
I know I certainly and outraged and disgusted with scientists who let politics sway or intimidate them to toss out data that doesn't fit the conclusion to fit the theory. I'm horrified at the way those who disputed the norm have been treated, ignored and shunned. It's aweful. Sadly, those scientists who follow pure science will have to fight so much harder for credibility with the laymen, and this in my opinion is a sad time in history.
My next fear is how student in colleges will use this situation to manipulate the college system in the future, which will further degrade the comman person's trust in the scientific community. Sigh.
Life takes interesting turns, but the most interest is when you're off the beaten path.
"You've never worked in the real world... they expect RESULTS!" -- Dr. Peter Venkman
Therefore, the "tolerance stackup", a polite word for 'fudging data' will lean in the direction of the benefactor.
If this statement is not the truth, it is certainly the perception. Convince the masses that the scientists are not supporting the suppositions of the sponsors and maybe they will trust the science again. Start by convincing me.
Part of the problem is what we call science. We regularly equate well known laws of the physical universe with theories at various stages of testing. We regularly seek to prove positive ideas we believe are true but don't have facts for yet sometimes even disregarding negative results. We regularly act as though because we can make a correlation we have shown causation. And all of this we insist on calling science. Just like Christians who choose to throw out the peace and judge not portions of scripture in favor of the "shall nots" or vice-versa and just like democracies that decide when basic freedoms should be valid based on circumstance we do ourselves irreparable harm when we violate scientific protocols and principles because we "know something should be true" or we justify our conclusions with "the consequences are just too high not to go this way". We can't have it both ways and we need to be true to our fundamental principles if we're going to hold science up as a framework for understanding.
I think some of this is applicable to climategate but to be absolutely clear I'm not qualified to make a truly informed opinion on that subject as I haven't studied any global warming data unless you count watching the Al Gore movie. I think this is a much deeper problem that affects various areas of scientific inquiry and how we teach what science is to our next generations of scientists.
...generally involve the opinions of scientists. Scientists see some evidence, form an opinion about it (hypothesis), wait for more numbers, and then reform their opinion. Or the more corrupt ones tweak the numbers. Physics also works this way. The hard sciences are a sequence of increasingly accurate opinions.
Math is entirely different. When mathematicians form an opinion, they back it up with pure, unfiltered logic. They prove it with the axioms of that field or consequences of those axioms. The only place the opinion still matters are for things that are unproven.
Either which way, lay people shouldn't automatically believe or disbelieve anything. I should hope they weigh and ponder science and math the same way they (hopefully) weigh and ponder politics and religion.
Will people even begin to doubt the most rigorous sciences like Mathematics and Physics?
Some people already doubt science in general, to limit it to just math and physics belies the current trend of refusing to accept what science, in all its forms, tells us.
Men on the moon? Nope, can't be done because of . WTC towers collapsed because of structural damage compounded by extreme temperatures? Nope, it was a government plot because . Vaccines help prevent acquisition of serious diseases? Nope, doesn't work because . Evolution? It's impossible because .
There will always be those who will find any excuse to deny the scientific evidence. That doesn't mean one shouldn't question the evidence or how it's gathered. Rather, instead of saying, "See! They used the word 'hide' so they must be falsifying the data!", one should look at the entire context of quotes and information to see what is meant.
Science, in all its forms, is one of those areas where there will always be discussion about something, but once someone, or some group, comes up with an explanation, their data and processes can be checked by others to see if those people get the same results. If not, go back and see what the differences were. If still failure, back to square one.
I am reminded of the one CSI episode* where after doing all the evidence gathering, interviewing suspects and finally finding the body, the only conclusion was that the girl, upon trying to retrieve her waste can from a garbage bin, had been partially crushed between the bin and the wall when a vehicle came by and accidentally clipped the bin.
The parents were sure their daughter was murdered and planned on hiring their own investigator to find out who killed her. Grissom remarks, "Mrs. Rycoff there is no one guilty of this."
"Because you say so?"
"Because the evidence says so."
*The episode is called Chaos Theory and is one of my all-time favorite CSI shows. Right up there with Fur and Loathing (the plushy and furry convention episode).
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
I think this sums it up fairly well:
http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=886
Cycles, like biology, society, greed and humanity constantly oscillate over time. Right now we just see a lot of little/big ripples since time compression is happening. Eventually all living systems fail since nothing can sustain living in its own waste. Life itself has always been the answer. Science is just a group of lords, or witches claiming to be more than lazy self proclaimed discoverers of the obvious.
"The real fallout of climategate may have nothing to do with the credibility of climate change"
Any idea of who did the leaking and what their motivation was ?
Hundreds of billions??? You have the wrong side. 20 Billion dollars over 30 years for the entire world. Compared with 37Bn dollars given as subsidies to fossil fuel and nuclear power industry *EACH* *YEAR* by the *US* ALONE* and I think you find the finger points a different direction.
How many people would want a piece of THAT action?
Much more.
The process of science is: take a guess, show it right or wrong, and repeat.
In other words, if scientist are always correct, why don't we have a cure for cancer? Are they holding back?
Regards.
I would highly suggest watching this lecture by Dr. Richard Lindzen. He describes precisely how the field has become so politicized and corrupt.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sHg3ZztDAw
That would be a good thing, because "hard science" is not a single anthropomorphic entity but a collection of disparate opinions, equations, experiments and hypotheses. Ideal scientists are skeptics, willing to change their minds to follow the evidence, but actual scientists are flawed human beings subject to the same cognitive failures as you and I. The Feynman quote from this Megan McArdle column illustrates it well:
Since the goal of the scientific method is greater understanding, how is it a bad thing for the general public to have a greater understanding of it? Scientists are not high priests. When ordinary people set aside their blind "faith in science" in favor of a more realistic understanding of what it takes for a hypothesis to survive in the shark tank long enough to be called a theory, it's not a bad thing, it's a good thing.
This has always been a problem and there has probably never been a time when politics and/or religion did not have inappropriate influence over scientific research.
Some (lay) people see science as a religion in and of itself having its own agenda. This is a failure in the sense that since attempts to deal with understanding the most absolute reality possible and tries to be impartial to any particular point of view. (Let's not get into the politics within science itself, I know it exists, but let's stick with idealism for a moment while I make my point.) In politics and religion, there is a propensity to believe "if you're not with us, you are against us" sort of ideas and so when data that is unfavorable to their position emerges, they tend to respond to it as if it were an enemy rather than a new facet of reality. (Fighting an enemy is one thing. Fighting reality is another!)
All science is to be doubted and disputed. This is part of how things work. However, lay people see a doubting of science as a problem of trust or faith because they know of no other context in which to process falsified or incorrect scientific data. While it was a tremendous disservice to the whole scientific community to have "climategate" surface, it is not as big of a problem within the community as it is outside of the community.
It would be really nice if people were able to acquire the simple understanding of what science is and is not and how it should be treated. The public knows that the weatherman is not always accurate but must always be depended upon nevertheless. The public knows that the weatherman does not control the weather and only reports his observations and renders predictions based on those observations. The public, in general understands and appreciates this correctly and fully. What the public needs to do, then, is expand this understanding to ALL of science and not just meteorology.
What hit scientists is Rupert Murdoch's media machine, spewing out more anti-science garbage. Again, he has created the "news" by making such a big deal about this on Fox, then he has the WSJ comment about how important this "news" is. What hit scientists is willful ignorance, taken at face value by a public who forgets that the owner of these "news" organizations started out in the US running a supermarket tabloid, the "Star". He learned a lot about the public running that rag. It shows in his influence on the WSJ.
Join the IParty!
When there are people that espouse creationism, and that vaccines cause autism, it's obvious a lot of lay people didn't respect science before. How different can it be now?
Somewhere in hell, Jenny McCarthy, and William Dembski are going at it like rabbits. Their offspring will be the ultimate creature of evil.
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
I think it's the end of being able to promote scientific conclusions without allowing others to review/criticize the methods/data used to produce those conclusions. This is not a bad thing as society should never blindly trust someone just because they have attained a certain status. This is the way most good development teams work with peer reviews and such, why shouldn't the world work in the same way.
As long as the research and resulting published papers have no political value to politicians, the scientific community is very good at policing themselves. One only has to look at Cold Fusion, Physics and pretty much anything having to do with Mathematics.
Case in point is Wiles' proof of Fermat's Last Theorem. Almost immediately after the presentation of his proof, it was found that it had a major error that doomed the proof. But he immediately went back to work and finally presented a solid proof of the theorem.
Why didn't the UN and World Politicians push one side or the other? Because they have no fr$@#ng idea what it means and it was of no political value.
"The ability to tell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month and next year. And to have the ability afterwards to explain why it did not happen." Sir Winston Churchill on the traits of a good politician.
The Wall Street Journal is part of Rupert Murdoch media empire. That's a first point to note.
Secondly, with a title like 'Climategate: Science Is Dying", one can surmise that the object of this article is not an objective reflection over the topic, but just to lay a bit more confusion at the opening of the Copenhagen summit.
And if there is any analogy with Watergate, it is that both stories are about spies breaking in places.
It is true that science is under attack, like it has been in the past when scientists discoveries unsettled vested interests. We are more awed by science for the way it won over organized ignorance, not less.
The thing that really bugs me about all this is that I think we can all pretty much agree that humans have, do, and will affect the climate at least in some way. The problem is that politicians, media, researchers, and just about everyone else, for any of a number of reasons, have to come up with buzzwords to somehow differentiate themselves from the pack. In doing so, they sometimes choose the wrong words.
Take, for example, "global warming". It's kind hard for the lay person to accept "global warming" when we are having record cold spells. Sure, there may be scientific links between warming and regional cooling cycles, but to the lay person, it's about perception. Consider that back in the 70's, the buzz was "global cooling", yet we have experienced record regional heat waves.
This whole issue would probably not even be an issue if it had been simply called "global climate change" or "global climate change management".
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
That is the crux of this problem. There are thousands of "Climatologist" yet we cannot agree which one is right.
you used some of the same wording that many used to justify their connectedness. Its too complex for the average Joe to understand, let alone those loons on the .
What this event did was expose the truth that yes, some of those involved do operate from an agenda. Worse are those acting as if there is no issue at all which only furthers increases public distrust.
So again, who do we trust? I certainly know a few names I won't trust anymore.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
The East Anglia case should sound warning bells for what Murdoch and co have done to journalism - because it is not only science they lie about and misrepresent but politics, law, and religion. In their effort to get exciting stories, journalists are devaluing almost everything.
The trend is not new. I can't remember the author, but this is a well known verse:
You cannot hope to bribe or twist
Thank God, the British Journalist
But seeing what the chap will do
Unbribed, there's not much reason to.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
The EPA admitted "varying degrees of uncertainty across many of these scientific issues."
Scientific Community: There is a difficult-to-calculate chance that the Earth is undergoing warming caused by the actions of humans and that this will do irreparable damage to the planet.
The mathematical reaction is to (a) assess the "cost" of the potential damage (i.e. the risk) and (b) the likelihood of the occurrence actually happening. This is basic stuff. Wikipedia does a better job explaining it than I could. But suffice it to say, when the risk is "the planet" there is a very good reason to follow what TFA is calling "a precautionary approach" even when the likelihood of science being correct is quite low.
The thing that's happening here is that what's becoming more obvious to the general public is the sort of fuzziness of scientific truth. From the scientific perspective, this isn't exactly a huge revelation. You're always sort of struggling towards this "Truth" which is always going to be unreachable and the process of struggling is messy and politicized. Big deal. Happens in physics just as much as in climatology, just that the latter involves way more money and touches directly on areas of public policy.
But the problem is that the public still has this illusion, on some level or another, of what science is, reifying it as this pure pursuit of a knowledge that is, in the end, both perfectly attainable and absolute. When you acknowledge the fuzziness, they see that as an acknowledgement that the whole lot is fallible and sort of useless. It's the whole multiple definition of "theory" thing all over again. The public is a lot less comfortable with doubt, messy processes and fuzzy goals than are scientists.
words, words, words, lemur, words, words words
ORLY?
OK, I'll feed the troll. What's your "clear and unambiguous experimental and observational falsification" of Big Bang cosmology?
"The sum of all knowledge does not imply the knowledge of all sums" Kurt Gödel (paraphrased)
If people realize that there is a difference between a proven scientific fact, a nearly universally accepted scientific theory, a generally accepted scientific theory, a scientific theory which has the support of most scientists but is not yet generally accepted, a seriously considered plurality- or minority-accepted scientific theory, a crackpot/fringe theory that is not yet disproven, and a discredited/disproven theory, the world would be a better place.
People also need to know that some proven-wrong theories still have usefulness, like Newtons laws of physics.
Even the "flat earth" theory has some minor usefulness when designing maps for land areas less than a few dozen miles across. Discounting the curvature of the earth makes life easier with a very minor loss of precision. Even maps a few hundred miles across may have an acceptable loss of precision if drawn using flat-earth assumptions.
Of course, what people really need to understand is the difference between a scientific theory, which in principle can be tested, and a religious/philosophical/other-non-scientific theory which is not testable within this universe. Sure, "we'll know we are right when we die and go to the afterlife" is a valid test of a theory, but it's not a test that can be conducted in this universe, not even in principle.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I don't think it will hurt the layperson that much to gain a bit of doubt. This is a case where the worst case scenario IS the best case scenario.
What if we look as the net result not as a "weakening of scientific belief", but as an introduction of skepticism.
The problem isn't credibility but credulity; credibility builds based on performance, credulity assumes performance without examining further.
Hard science can and will weather doubts, because it is provable and above all practical. Theory science needs to be refined to the provable and practical; and it just might be forced to do so if the general public are no longer willing to "buy" based on the same sort of marketing that's been used for decades.
In an atmosphere of easy credulity everyone can simply pick a theory to support based on what they already believe, in this same atmosphere theories will flourish to match each preexisting belief. This is religious in nature and not scientific, and the net result is inaction; losing the factual and the achievable in a storm of multiple "what ifs".
Think about global warming, as a whole no one can honestly prove the tenets either for our against. So... SCRAP it, or stop trying to base decisions on the theory. Instead address the provable:
Does dumping X in water-sources cause Y damage?
Does B action cause smog?
Is C resource being used sustainably?
etc..
The earth/environment is a large adaptive system, If we address the provable negative effects our actions have then the system will be allowed to function as it always has.
Science develops from theory, but actions should be based on proven science; and the layperson should have a narrower understanding of what makes a "proven science".
p.s. Remember what the opposite of Layperson is anyway: "Clergy", and that is exactly the sort of relationship that most people have with science.
The best way to restore healthy debate on climate change science is to open source everything...the data, the source code for the computer models, and the methodology for how the data is collected: specific locations of data collection (is it a rural area, a parking lot in a city, on a school roof, in direct sunlight or in the shade), date and time of day (noon, midnight, 5pm), weather conditions at the time it is collected (sunny, raining, under a snow drift), age of the equipment (mercury thermometer installed in 1953 or digital sensor device). All of these factors would influence a simple temperature reading. Heck there are probably dozens of other factors that I am not considering.
Since our government is PAYING for so much of this research it should be no problem to PUBLISH all of these details and let everyone debate from a common framework. However, I believe our government has an agenda and therefore won't ever take such a logical approach.
While we are at it, let's do the same thing for how inflation, unemployment, public health statistics, education metrics, and poverty rates are calculated.
The WSJ article understates the problem. The Climategate emails reveal that the partisan scientists have undermined the peer review process itself. It can only be made right be re-peer-reviewing all climate papers re-submitted in the past 20 years. Some rejected should not have been and some accepted should not have been.
One can't help be reminded that while peer-review is the right hand, grant-review is the left. If the peer review is undermined then so isn't the awards of money.
Climate debate aside, we need to invent news ways to do review of papers and grants that is not totally dependent on self-policing of scientists. Any suggestions?
But it's not scientific and has no place in a science classroom.
The difference between a scientific theory and a non-scientific one is that in principle, a scientific theory can be tested without leaving this universe.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The linked original article is evidence. I want people who doubt science to never visit a doctor, never ride a car, never fly, they can't watch television, go to the movies, use their phone, use their cell phone. or better banned from using them. If you want to opine about creation, global warming, science or the use of religious texts to explain carbon dating then I want tests passed about how a cell phone works before you can use one. You have to explain Frequency Modulation before listening to stupid-increasing on-airheads, explain the inherited DNA of mitochondria before being allowed to visit a Doctor.
But this is distrust not skepticism. See Austerity Empowers' email below yours.
"The reason that climate change has been resisted and argued by so many, for so long, is exactly this. We do not trust the people interpreting this for us at the national level"
This isn't about skepticism it's about "I don't like the people saying this" or "I don't trust them" at best.
That isn't skepticism. This is "I've made up my mind and the messenger is unreliable so I won't bother looking for myself, I'll just say they're wrong".
Denial.
Distrust.
And believing the convenient over the inconvenient.
But people who would argue that there is 100% chance that the die reads 3 when it does and 0% when it doesn't are NOT wrong.
Probability exists in the realm of imperfect knowledge, that is, they couldn't tell you that it was 100% chance of being 3 until seeing it, thus to THEM the probability is 1/6. It is not necessarily true that things behave probabilistically, only that they do when we have imperfect knowledge (as we are restricted to with the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principal). It is possible that with perfect knowledge (which we cannot achieve) the universe would not behave probabilistically at all.
Remember all theories are wrong, but some are useful.
It's always the same story. Scientist are left alone to do their work until their findings have political repercusion.
If the truth doesn't suit the current political view it will get you burned.
And more I'm into GW the more I see it as religious fight.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
It's not just "stolen e-mails" (ooooh, felony!! Quick! Lock up the miscreants!! There's never an Inquisitor around when you need one...); these huckleberries actually cooked the code. The Warmers are fanatics, more narrow-minded than Creationists, more dangerous and better connected politically than the Scientologists, but fundamentally no different. It's the indulgence-granting, end-is-nighing, repent-or-burn Medieval Catholic Church all over again, except this time without the pleasant chanting and neat robes. And just like that Dark Age sect, the top-placed five percent know that the fix is in while the bottom 95 percent are motivated by faith, fear, and social vengeance.
Some people have been putting political opinion ahead of a belief and trust in science for a very long time now. It's been getting worse, but I don't see this particular stolen emails incident as particularly catalytic.
Kythe
to the realities of the common world, which sees science through the eyes of mostly...Hollywood.
There, hard scientists are working on ways to poison the planet or exploit its creatures and soft scientists are fighting the good fight for vegetarianism, ecological concern and life-extension.
To those people, climate science's shouting-down honest dissenters and faking or hiding data is just what they expect to see -- scientists falling to their own level.
Which is pretty much what's been happening.
Hard science ignores that the quantum theory *disproves* the ancient Greek atomic theory while at the same time proving phenomenology, the competing theory, instead.
Now climate science has taken lessons from the Catholic Church in isolating and stifling dissenting views. THis did not AFAIK decrease the number of practicing Catholics; it just made them ignorant.
Science died some years ago but the corpse is only now beginning to stink.
Bring on the new Dark Ages.
...we can conclude that everyone who questions science is right and scientists are always wrong?
The Flat Earth Society will be very happy to hear this. So will the vast herds of quacks who pester scientists with ridiculous claims (and they are legion, I assure you).
Climategate only proves that the conservolibertarians are capable of manufacturing controversies out of nothing. There is no difference between "Climategate" and the "War on Christmas" or the supposed conspiracy run by "Darwinist evilutionists".
Doubt is good. Healthy skepticism is a sign of maturity and intellectual involvement.
Healthy skepticism is good when the skeptic understands the underlying ideas that go into the subject matter. If they don't understand the basics of, say, scientific theory, they aren't intellectually involved in the first place. That's a relevant issue with many lay people.
The whole point of science, to the lay mind, is to improve the human condition. Humans naturally seek to make their lives richer, and easier. By understanding nature, science has been the ticket for that and most people give scientists the pass because they've made the breakthroughs that have given us giant houses, giant cars, giant computers, giant meals and more so.
But...
Now the science message is that giant houses, cars, computers, meals and so on are all bad. Even if you ignore the environmental effects and supposed externalities the left bandies about, the fact is, all fossil fuels are running out. Even inexhaustable coal grades are not what they were. Look at German anthracite production figures.
Sol someone invents nuclear fusion and killer batteries, we're going to go through a period of real and increasing impoverishment as resources dwindle and government inhibitions on energy use and occasional resource wars increase. I mean, yeah, some could say that our lives would be "better" because we'd have fresher air and more birds, but, when you pay double for your utilities, have a smaller, less capable vehicle, and less of them, and live in a smaller house, and have less food and less things because energy and other resources are increasingly expensive, then, its difficult to measure an improvement in life in qualitative turns.
When you start saying, well, you'll be living more morally, by being more in accord with the environment, that's more of a religious thing, and the people are smart enough to sense that. So, sensing that this is becoming a religious time, and science can't deliver the consumer goods, they start buying ALL religious messages.
This is my sig.
It's amazing the poster can claim with a stright face "nothing interesting" was found, when the top Slashot post in the very article he links to has a very long debate covering the source code that was released.
One very "interesting" item from that is this code:
;
; Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!
;
yrloc=[1400,findgen(19)*5.+1904]
valadj=[0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,-0.1,-0.25,-0.3,0.,-0.1,0.3,0.8,1.2,1.7,2.5,2.6,2.6,$
2.6,2.6,2.6]*0.75 ; fudge factor
(...)
;
; APPLY ARTIFICIAL CORRECTION
;
yearlyadj=interpol(valadj,yrloc,x)
densall=densall+yearlyadj
Which to me, is pretty damning stuff. Yes if you look currently that recalculation is not used (in that module anyway) but that code should NEVER have been typed and is a giant red flag something weird is going on. Yes I mock up sample data in my own code, but never have I taken real data and applied varying magic constants across the dataset. At the very least you'd expect to see a source for these amazing numbers quoted in the code - the only information we have is that it is "a correction for the decline" which is the heart of what worries people about the emails too.
Furthermore, the use of this is commented out NOW. But when exactly was it commented out? What datasets were published when this code was running? You can't say "look it does nothing now" because at some time it was doing something. And that is the heart of the problem, without data or the code visible no-one can know. So all the output they have produced is simply not science, even if parts of it happen to be accurate - because we have no way to independently discern what is fact and what is manipulated speculation.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The problem is our soundbyte-driven media, public, and policy makers don't understand the different types of data presented in scientific papers and announcements.
There are directly observable data, there are interpolations, and there are extrapolations. All 3 are "science". All 3 do not have the same reliability.
Observable Data = SCIENCE!!
Interpolations = Science.
Unverifiable Extrapolations = "science?"
It isn't science!
The whole debate around global warming is politics. It actually has little to do with science. If it was pure science, then the CRU would be glad to share their data and let other people duplicate their results. But do we get this? NO, Instead we get:
“I took a decision not to release our [meteorological] station data, mainly because of McIntyre,”.- quote from Phil Jones in one of the leaked e-mails referring to Canadian Steve McIntyre. In another e-mail he actually says that he would delete the data if McIntyre requests it under FoI rather than hand it over. Does this sound like a scientist? (Steve McIntyre is the man who proved that the CRU code produces a hockey stick even when fed random data.)
In spite of the fact that other scientists using other data have come up with contradictory results, you routinely hear things like "the debate is over", "all scientists agree", etc, etc. Frankly, the debate hasn't even started yet!
The processes of science have changed in the last century, and not for the better.
Once upon a time, scientists wrote and freely published papers that contained sufficient information that anyone qualified in the relevant fields and with access to relevant equipment could test the hypothesis, reproduce the experiment, and vet the results. Science still had great trouble coming to terms with large changes, hence the saying – 'old scientists never change their mind, but they do die'.
Today the practice of science is driven largely by the highly politicized grant funding process, and most scientific papers are available only behind paywalls of increasing height. The peer review process has in most cases devolved to 'looking over' someones work rather than testing and reproducing it, and it is rare for an experiment that truly threatens the status quo to be funded.
Science needs to respond to sincere questions by making their data and models available for open scrutiny, not by circling their wagons and proclaiming to be the sole keepers of truth which the layperson and denier dare not challenge.
I should trust science because I can test their hypothesis myself, NOT because they tell me I must trust them. Otherwise what separates them from religion?
The public may have lost the skills to test most of the assertions of modern science, but the public can still recognize bombastic attitudes, and is properly skeptical when they recognize that data is being withheld. The words "trust me" still raise alarm, whether coming from someone in a business suit or lab coat...
Scientists are the same as they have always been. Science has always been politicized. It's just now, scientists are delivering a lot of bad news. Viruses are hard and not as likely to be cured. Serious cancer vaccines elude us. There is no magic energy bullet. We're using too much resources and probably screwing up the planet. That's all bad news, and scientists used to bring good news.
So, what do people do? They turn away from the guys that bring bad news and go for the guys that bring good news.
It's just human nature. Everything else is just an excuse.
This is my sig.
Some of us have noticed this about cosmology for a long, long time now. Global warming is just a trendier issue so it gets noticed first, that's all.
“Certain results of observational cosmology cast critical doubt on the foundations of standard cosmology but leave most cosmologists untroubled. Alternative cosmological models that differ from the Big Bang have been published and defended by heterodox scientists; however, most cosmologists do not heed these. This may be because standard theory is correct and all other ideas and criticisms are incorrect, but it is also to a great extent due to sociological phenomena such as the ‘snowball effect’ or ‘groupthink’. We might wonder whether cosmology, the study of the Universe as a whole, is a science like other branches of physics or just a dominant ideology.”
—Martin Lopez-Corredoira, astrophysicist.
http://www.holoscience.com/news.php?article=bqx15w21
Some of you more knee-jerk types would also benefit from this article because some of you use some really weak arguments.
It's what the V's wanted in the 1984 series. Maybe climate change is really an evil plot by alien lizards to steal our food and natural resources. Prettty soon, scientists will come up missing all around the globe.
If some one doubts the credibility of science, I would suggest to them, that they not use the products of science. I mean if they don't believe in the general accuracy of science, then they can do without things like modern medicine, cars, computers and modern agriculture etc etc. I mean if science is wrong to them, shouldn't they be living off the land?
As an aside, I blame the the flat earthers, the creationists for getting us into this position. Because of their 100% belief in their positions, in order to win arguements scientists had to go from:
Hey we *know* they're wrong, but here are some of our hypothesis that make more sense.
to
Hey we know they're wrong, but we've narrowed down what's right to these couple of theories.
to
Hey we know they're wrong, but we know that this theory is 100% right.
Now if that theory turns out to be wrong, or tweaked in anyway, it puts scientists in a real bad light.
It's more polarization. Just like politics has become steadily more polarized, science will as well, thanks to asshats that refuse to understand what it's really about.
Of course the journals found "nothing interesting. They have been part of the problem. Finding something "interesting" now (from their view) would reduce their already low credibility.
Let's not forget that "peer reviewed journals" have some serious problems. Like when Science and Nature were both not just willing but eager to print numerous papers by Hendrik Schön who, back in 2002, was the biggest scientific scammer of this century, and who was pumping out as much as 7 new papers a month... a quantity that is simply not credible, even to a layperson. He was even given an award by the Materials Research Society.
Can you say "incompetence and utter failure of the peer review system"? Sure. I knew you could.
And then there was Hwang Woo-Suk, remember? Who printed influential papers in Science in 2004 and 2005, regarding cloning and stem cells?
Well, scandals like this are nothing new, and the fact that papers have been printed in peer-reviewed journals is only very slight evidence in their favor. It hardly carries much weight.
http://denialdepot.blogspot.com/2009/12/smoking-gun.html
mt
I'm not sure what that gender studies remark was all about, but Henninger may have more allies among gender studies scholars than he thinks. They are extremely skeptical of scientists because they often reinforce myths about gender with poor methodology and sloppy interpretations. There is, of course, a faction in gender studies that rejects reproductive biology as a basis for sex, which is just bizarre. But if Henninger is beginning to doubt the credibility of today's scientists based on a perception of bias, he's only reaching a conclusion that those "messy" gender studies scholars have already figured out. (On an unrelated note, I would like to propose a corollary to Godwin's Law: as a discussion about science and politics grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Galileo and the Church approaches 1.)
See Halton Arp's observations of the redshifts and angular correlations of quasars. Since he started this work, it has been corroborated by a vast body of additional observations. A good overview is given in his book "Seeing Red".
The essence of it is this: according to the Big Bang model, red shift is cosmogenic, and quasars should be, on account of the vast distance implied by their red shift, distributed isotropically. Turns out that quasars are, in terms of angular separation, correlated with "foreground" galaxies to an extent that is so far away from any possible chance statistical fluctuation resulting from an intrinsically isotropic distribution that the quasars have to be causally correlated, and hence their redshift is not of cosmogenic origin.
A might be expected, he has been treated as a heretic, was denied further observation time, and now lives in effective exile.
All ideas proposed by some /.ers as beingt the reason the public doubt is now center stage.
Once again in history, the elitist reigns supreme and yesterday where it was the church, as pointed out ad nauseum by the atheist /.'er, today its the scientist working in concert with the politician aka- the lawyer.
One corrupts the other as it always has in a 2 way hand washing.
Science should always be questioned since the scientist is no more and no better than the avg person who spent more time rehearsing the rotely memorized and handed down information which to some degree and as proven by history, always amounts to some inclusion of dogma.
Yesterday it was the church of god, the cult of the pious
Today its the church of the elitist brainiac, the cult of the pompous, with no more sense than the next layperson and worst of all, less integrity. Power corrupts and ultimate power destroys.
And politics, well lets just examine what political belief system was the most fervent proponent of this Hoax, that would be the cult of LIBERALISM.
You remember that when the next populist libtard gets on his taxpayer funded soapbox and begins to preach of our evils while keeping one arm behind his back with his fingers crossed wink wink!
P.S. I TOLD YOU SO
That's not true, please check your sources again. Some pop sci pieces on the subject appeared, but no serious scientist ever claimed that a new Ice Age was imminent.
You can read about the history of the 1970s global cooling scare on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling
Here's Newsweek talking about its own coverage of the issue, and quoting William Connolley:
From http://www.newsweek.com/id/72481
And finally here's Connolley himself:
From http://www.wmconnolley.org.uk/sci/iceage
Galileo was not funded by the people who persecuted and censored him. He did science for the discovery. They persecuted him because his science damaged their religious belief, that a grey haired old man and his son lived above the clouds and we were their only responsibility. Thus we must be the center of the universe.
The is difference. Today's scientists are funded by groups or governments and feel they must satisfy "Dad" in order to keep suckling at the ripe green ($) breasts of Uncle Sam (or other funders).
No one does science for discovery anymore, they do it for money. -
Proof - commercials on the discovery channel, and the price of medicine.
"We wish to pursue the truth no matter where it leads. But to find the truth, we need imagination and skepticism both. We will not be afraid to speculate, but we will be careful to distinguish speculation from fact..." "If you are only skeptical, then no new ideas make it through to you On the other hand, if you are open to the point of gullibility and have not an ounce of skeptical sense in you, then you cannot distinguish the useful ideas from the worthless ones." Then again he spoke for rather than against global warming. But he makes a damn good point. Everyone is demanding that the world be gullible and people who (healthily) doubt things are apparently terrible individuals. This is not what science is about.
Then they realized that science is itself at odds with conservatism. Science is about discovering new things and proposing new ideas, whihc lead to new products and new social movements. Conservatism is about maintaining what works (even if they don't work well), while liberalism is about trying to fix things (even if they already work fine).
All that is fine. Just as liberalism has science, conservaitsm has religion (all about the old ideas - the newest of the big religions, Islam, is more than a milenium old). No big deal.
But then the GOP decided to go old school. They knew that attacking liberalism wasn't enough, they decided to attack the core problem - science - instead of the proposed new ideas.. So they went all out. First attack the proposed solutions. Then attack the claimed problems. Then attack the people doing it. Claim they are 'ivory tower intellectuals', not geniuses that are smarter and better educated. Claim they are engaged in evil 'cloning', without specigying what the evils are. Attack the Genetically modified food as unhealthy instead of saving lives with "golden rice".
As long as unethical people are in control of the conservative movement, science will have a bad name because they will try their best to give it one.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
The papers that Mann and Co wanted to "censor" really are complete garbage (I've personally read a couple of them).
But to understand *why* they are garbage, you need to have an undergraduate-level understanding of science and math (Earth science, some calculus, some statistics, etc.). The papers in question had *no* business being published in a professional journal. They wouldn't even make the grade as undergraduate term papers!
Here's a link to the first paper: http://www.int-res.com/articles/cr2003/23/c023p089.pdf
Anyone with an undergraduate-level "common-sense" understanding of Earth-science and statistics should be able to flag several major "show-stopper" problems with this paper's methodology.
Here's a link to the second paper: http://climatedebatedaily.com/southern_oscillation.pdf
This paper contains a blunder that someone who understands calculus at the freshman level should know better than to make. Hint: What does the time-derivative operation do to long-term trend information (i.e. the global-warming signal) in temperature data? Another hint (and this one's giving away the store): The time-derivative operation acts as a high-pass filter.
And here's an excerpt from the paper that should have any upper-division EE major howling with laughter:
To remove the noise, the absolute values were replaced with derivative values based on variations.
This is global-warming-denier science at its finest, folks: Using a derivative operation to remove noise!
The real scandal is that this paper actually made into the Journal of Geophysical Research!
Is it any wonder that Mann and Co. were pissed?
But how do you explain all this to your average Sarah Palin follower? That's the scientists' conundrum here.
People have been telling stories - meaning making shit up - since the advent of language. If I was a storyteller, I would say that happened 120,000 years ago on a grassy plane when when one guy hunting warned his buddy about a lion on his left. A scientist would give a huge range of years, large tracks of land, and a long list of other qualifiers to describe when storytelling began.
The modern scientific method began about 400 years ago. A historian of science could give important events and dates. Nature doesn't want to give up her answers. It takes training to learn how to question.
There are many profitable storytelling businesses: movies, music, and the news. News organizations tell stories. Some try to make sure the story is accurate, an art called editing. Some try to get lots of attention. That can be done using pretty woman or hyping conflict.
In science, you can tell someone they are wrong. You can write out the reason they are wrong. And that wrong person can continue to claim they are correct. I have done that with someone who claims to have shown Einstein's special theory of relativity is wrong, all it takes is a little algebra. He is paying Google to advertise his message to the world. I looked into his math. If you only have a little algebra, you would not recognize a linear system of equations. I wrote him, making an effort to explain the idea that Nature sometimes uses 4 equations in place of 1 for spacetime, and it is wrong to think one of those four should say exactly the same thing as the others. He did not accept this idea, and ads to Google's sales to this day. Accepting a critique is rare.
There will always be many places for storytellers to complain about the process and results of the scientific method. These conflict can get personal, they can get ugly. Storytellers can profit from that situation.
Doug Sweetser
Telling stories of new visual math at visualphysics.org
Working on new views of old physics at http://VisualPhysics.org
I can not believe that someone on this forum, FOR NERDS, would make such a huge mistake on the REAL stuff that matters.
"You've never worked in the real world... they expect RESULTS!" -- RAY STANTZ TO Dr. Peter Venkman
As a Slashdot reader, you should know better...You might as well have misquoted a Python line, sheesh
---"What did I say that sounded like 'Tell me about your day?'"---
Climategate only proves that the conservolibertarians are capable of manufacturing controversies out of nothing. There is no difference between "Climategate" and the "War on Christmas" or the supposed conspiracy run by "Darwinist evilutionists".
There is a difference, actually. There are a few (very few) respectable scientists who aren't convinced by the data, or at least argue that the results will be milder than the majority are predicting. They aren't big names, and they're not the ones going to the newspapers, but they're out there. I was in a class with one of them, although I can't remember his name, a few years ago. His take was essentially this:
1) We know the climate is changing,
2) We know humanity is releasing greenhouse gases,
3) We also know that the climate has cycled through hot and cold periods as far back as we can find data.
The three points are almost certainly connected, and we may or may not have a perfectly clear understanding of how. The important thing is that the greenhouse gases are mostly also bad for other reasons, so we ought to start limiting their production. Eventually we may be able to prove that they are or are not driving climate change.
People concerned about the policy proposals currently being put forward have focused way too much energy on questioning the scientific findings of current and recent warming. It's so unnecessary because scientists understand, and will readily admit, that there is much greater uncertainty when the models are run forward to predict future decades.
The models can be tuned and validated against historical data, then different forcings backed out to assign relative significance. This is where you get statements like (paraphrasing) "70% of recent warming has been due to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, with 90% confidence." Some estimate of confidence is possible because of the validation against historical empirical data and climate reconstructions. Independent lines of inquiry can reinforce each others' findings. This is solid science, and where the "climategate" PR stunt falls down. The e-mails provide good fodder for insinuation, but no answer to the quantitative agreement seen in independent lines of study.
But when we run the models forward, there is not yet any empirical confirmation. Distinct models, using distinct data sets, can be seen to agree to some degree--but how much of that reflects reality, and how much reflects common assumptions? Every forward-looking run must assume some set of future values for human activity and natural processes, including ones that are parameterized (like cloud formation) that might advance beyond currently validated bounds. The uncertainty grows when the models are asked to bring their predictions down to local conditions--the distinction between predicting global average climate, and predicting long-term local weather. Will Kansas get hotter or colder, wetter or drier? There is quite a bit of uncertainty in such predictions--again, as working scientists clearly understand.
Layering on the biological response to these uncertain predictions creates even more uncertain predictions. One recent study at Woods Hole seemed to indicate that some animals might respond to ocean acidification by growing thicker shells. I'm not taking that one study as gospel, but it is worth considering that we do not fully understand biological systems and how they will respond to changing climate conditions.
Finally we get to the societal and economic layer, which sits, at least partially, atop uncertain biological predictions. Global warming may causes shifts in where certain crops can be grown--these changes will exact a cost on human society. Will they also confer a benefit? It's not scientific heresy to think that changes to climate can produce benefits as well as costs--although perhaps not to the same subset of the population. We may have to invest substantially in new areas and ways of farming, in new transportation routes. It's not inconceivable that the end result could be greater efficiencies and healthier produce. And of course there is also substantial error (to say the least) in multi-decade economic models.
The greatest threat is probably sea level rise. Wealthy nations might make the decision to invest in mitigation, rather than prevention. It is possible to raise or move cities, and to build barriers to keep out the sea. Such decisions are policy, but must be informed by the best scientific understanding we have--but that understanding must include understanding of uncertainty.
But instead what we see is a concentrated dose of PR and ignorance, attempting to raise doubts about scientifc conclusions about climate change that are well-supported (like whether human emissions can change the climate). You see people trying to simultaneously point out problematic sitings of temperature stations, and demonize working scientists for adjusting temperature data to minimize the error due to such siting. You see people repeatedly gesturing toward the sun, when numerous direct measurements indicate flat or declining insolation over the recent decades. They come off looking stupid, and smart people dismiss them.
It's a shame because lost in the battle ove
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
You're assuming that everyone who has an opinion about this will actually be informed, will take the time to look through those proofs, reproduce those experiments, etc.
Read this.
In particular, look at that graph. Are you frightened yet?
Evolution is one of the crowing triumphs of modern science. It has more evidence than any other theory I know of, from many branches of science -- the "tree of life" is repeated, exactly, in genetics, in the fossil record, in the geologic record, everywhere we care to look for it. It informs pretty much all of modern medicine and biology, and it is a humbling look at our origins and our true status with respect to other life on the planet. It is beautiful, important, and solidly supported by fact.
Even the Catholic Church has officially embraced evolution, and the big bang theory, as truth.
And a third of Americans reject evolution outright. These aren't people who just aren't sure -- they say it is definitely false.
Want to guess why?
Because they feel it threatens their religion. Because if evolution is true, the Earth (and certainly the Universe) cannot be six thousand years old, and they must accept that they are descended from apes -- or that, by any honest classification, humans are still a species of ape. Because they cannot accept the fact that at least some part of that religion is a fairy tale, or at least a metaphor.
The problem is, in order to reject evolution, they find they have to doubt just about every legitimate scientist who has an opinion on the subject, and keep themselves willfully ignorant. Furthermore, in order to believe the earth is six thousand years old, they pretty nearly have to stick their fingers in their ear and go "la la la la" in order to avoid pretty much every branch of science that has anything to say about the subject.
That is, if they are right, even the most basic grade-school cosmology must be wrong -- there are objects more than six thousand light years away from us. Geology must also be wrong -- not merely carbon-dating (which is already quite rigorous), but the kind of time scales modern geology suggests. And of course, modern medicine must be wrong -- our understanding of things like antibiotics relies on evolution to work.
And yet, they will feel qualified to address these issues, to challenge real scientists with such arguments as, "That's microevolution. Show me one 'kind' turning into another, and I'll believe it." When this fails to get them anywhere, they again close their eyes, ears, and minds, and ultimately turn to the very simplistic, reassuring, and ultimately wrong words of Ken Ham: "Who should you believe -- God or the scientists?"
The problem here is not just the validity of evolution. It is that in order to believe what the creationist wants to believe, they have to reject huge chunks of modern science. In order to continue to be relevant, they have consistently attempted to get their strange ideas taught in school -- not just as a philosophy, or a class in its own right, but as part of science.
And it's not just america -- 22% of Canadians are creationists. Something like a third of Americans are.
So, the short answer is, yes, laypeople absolutely will doubt whatever they feel they have a problem with. If they doubt evolution, cosmology, Einsteinian relativity, geology, archeology, paleontology, etc, just so they can believe a certain way, it's certainly not a stretch that they would doubt anything that conflicts with their actual (polluting, wasteful) lifestyle.
And unfortunately, even when 99.9% of scientists agree on something, it doesn't help if they can't convince the public -- because laypeople are also voters.
We need another Carl Sagan.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Why would you expect that? Just because you've never written code that way doesn't mean nobody does. I have. It didn't matter because it was private and nobody was going to see it, so as long as the author knew what was going on, who cares?
The documentation of what's been done is in the publications, not the notes or the source code.
Real skepticism provides criteria by which it can be satisfied. Unchanging skepticism in the face of evidence is not scientific.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/12/understanding_climategates_hid.html
Owned.
" Hard science, alongside medicine, was one of the few things left accorded automatic stature and respect by most untrained lay persons. " That statement is completely wrong. If it was true there would not have been a problem in the first place. Science deniers have long been in a very very strong minority. This is why we have failed to get global warming, or stem cell research properly funded. These idots have been standing in the way for decades this is why this world is on the brink of colapse.
Einstein was completely unknown and did not even have a doctorate when he published his 1905 papers on special relativity, brownian motion, and the photoelectric effect.
And it was many years before his theories were generally accepted, especially by some of the older physicists.
It's difficult to overcome scientific dogma at any time. To get his doctorate, Einstein had to write an unimportant, very forgettable paper which didn't challenge any of his professors' preconceptions.
The real problem, in my opinion, is the idea (under development for decades) that the correct way to govern is to ask the experts in their field what we should do. So we turn to the climate scientists and ask not just "is the Earth warming?" but "what should we do to stop it?" We turn to social scientists and ask not just "does television affect test scores" but "what sort of television should we regulate?" We turn to other scientists and ask not just "what is going on" but "how should we fix it?"
When we hand any group of people that sort of power, of course people who are attracted to power are drawn to that field. Not only do we get cranks who claim to be scientists attempting to drive the conversation (such as those so-called "researchers" who periodically pop up and tell us pornography leads to rape), but we also subvert the real Ph.D.s.
Science should be in the realm of explaining what is going on. But deciding what we should do about it belongs strictly to the realm of politicians. Scientists may be asked for their input ("will policy A or policy B be better?"), but they should not be creating, driving, or steering policy.
In the case of Global Warming, the real problem (in my mind) was that these guys were also neck-deep in the UN's IPCC process, which is drafting treaty proposals on the economic changes that the world should make to fight global warming. By being neck deep in the politics, and by believing truly that we must act now to combat global warming, the incentive became about the power and honor of belonging to the IPCC and to help drive policy--not to get the best data possible from multiple disciplines and share that data with other scientists who were experts in those disciplines. The incentives, in other words, was to prove certainty about Global Warming to help drive IPCC policy, not to distribute data and allow uncertainty to creep into the proxy climate studies--such as tree ring studies, which are inherently messy and uncertain.
I suspect that trust in science has been eroding for as long as we've been asking scientists to play politics. This isn't the start of the avalanche; it's just a major slide in a problem going on for a very long time. And it will continue to get worse so long as the airwaves are populated by charlatans pretending to be scientists attempting to drive policy (like the anti-porn, anti-second-hand-smoking, pro-organic farming, anti-pesticides guys who, after affecting change, are proven after the fact to be fakes), and so long as politicians, attempting to keep votes without having to put his neck on the line, continues to subcontract his job out to untouchable "experts" which he can blame for any failures. (Well, I was told...--don't blame me.)
Peer review (as in what happens before a paper's published) can't detect outright fraud like Schon unless the fraudster is incompetent. The only way you can reliably detect fraud is for other people to try to independently reproduce the result, although in Schon's case some mistakes he made gave the game away before this was done.
Where is the nsfw tag?
But how do you explain all this to your average Sarah Palin follower? That's the scientists' conundrum here.
An effective way to start is to not insult them. Maybe rather than thinking that a college level education is what is needed, why don't you try and describe it in a manner that anybody at an 8th grade level could grasp? You might get a more welcome and understanding response than by being an elitist prick.
Change this later.
So the first thing is that Galileo was a proponent of the earth moving but he didn't actually have any evidence. The evidence he did have (phases of Venus, moons of Jupiter, the moon's surface.) the church actually agreed with his findings since they had their own astronomers that confirmed this. (The church eventually went with the Tychonic system for what it's worth.) One theory is he only really got in trouble because he called his college drinking buddy stupid when he had his back up to this point. (So the pope figured he'd let him sweat for being a jerk.) Another version is that the pope was under alot of political pressure at the time(about heresy) and Galileo was being a loud mouth dick about everything so the pope needed to have him quiet it down. (I mean seriously, Galileo was playing a political game around 1600AD and doing it clumsily. What did anybody think was going to happen?)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Its happening here and now :
http://us.cnn.com/video/?/video/tech/2009/12/08/rivers.thailand.rising.sea.cnn
i want to kick every fucking moron who doubts climate change in the face. in addition, i want to kick every fucking snake in fox news in the face two times over.
i wonder which tune those bastards who are muddying the waters about the climate change due to their personal gains or fears of minor tax increases would be singing, if the sinking church was their community's and sinking home was theirs, just like in the video.
Read radical news here
The mistake here is that the practice of science is assumed to be somehow always pure, perfect, and pristine. But anyone who is intimately familiar with the history of science knows that all areas of research and investigation have been replete with errors, controversy, and even outright fraud. A simple perusal of the past scientific literature will reveal many attempts to promote ideas and concepts that seem bizarre and even foolish by current standards.
Science is a human activity and it will always be tainted by human foibles. But science does differ from other wanton human pursuits in the fact that it enforces the scientific method. This aspect insures that science will eventually purge the falsehoods and misdirections that swirl within it at any given time.
into the "brights", who have been educated (and taken their education to heart) enough,
or are just intelligent enough, to understand on a first-principles basis why you should
in general believe the (long term unfalsified) results of science, and why you should
occasionally disbelieve particular isolated results that may have human interests behind
them,
and those who are easily swayed (on a question that requires science to explain it)
by a persuasive and publicised "just so" story.
What percentage of people do you think come down on either side of that divide?
Debate amongst yourselves. I'm off to do some science ;-)
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Why would you expect that? Just because you've never written code
So because you can't find anything wrong with my analysis so resort to the tool of the weak-minded - Ad-Hominem attacks.
Yes, I am aware that sentence has a certain built-in irony. But why not fight fire with fire? Why is it not OK to qustion your credibility even as you question mine?
As I said, I might well mock up data but never, ever would I write code that massaged existing real data like that. There is never a reason to do so. And also, as I said, you DON'T KNOW if that code is only private or was used in real output. Because they never released data and code you cannot know, and so even if you don't agree with my conclusion you simply have to admit that is not how science is done, or should be done.
Saying something is so without giving people the raw data and algorithms to explain why is meaningless. You might doubt I write code because you have your Blinders of Ignorance on, but it's pretty obvious I know what I'm talking about here.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Yep. Here's an independent analysis of the raw data. It's a long read, but the conclusion of the (apparently non-political) author is:
they are indisputable evidence that the “homogenized” data has been changed to fit someone’s preconceptions about whether the earth is warming.
and after slogging my way through the data, I agree. When scientists are more worried about grants and political clout than facts, they are not to be trusted.
wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/08/the-smoking-gun-at-darwin-zero/
I still cannot find the droids I am looking for...
The more variables there are to a field, the easier it is to use Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt to discredit it because with enough variables, the pool of problem variables increases. Evolution, economics, and psychology are like this, not just long-term climate analysis.
For a example, there may be 10,000 facts that support evolution and 100 that don't. Naysayers emphasize those 100 and the audience doesn't have the skills or patience to look into the other 9,900. Thus, they take the shortcut and listen to who they want to listen to. (Illustrative numbers only)
Table-ized A.I.
Carbon credits and cap and trade and so on are a scheme to take trillions with a T dollars from one set of pockets and transfer it to other pockets, with a big fat wall street skim in the middle. The pro AGW folks like to say the "deniers" are in the pockets of big oil and big coal. Well, those folks can be said to be in the pockets of big wall street, the enrons and goldman sachs type boys. There are also numerous overlapping political power considerations in this debate now.
Of course there's corruption, and it already started where cap and trade is established. There's no way when discussing such *vast* mind boggling sums to even assume that there is not, that would be terribly naive and flies in the face of proven past human history. When you have that much money and power involved....
The question is, how far does the rot go and who is involved? How much have predictive models been tweaked to give a biased in advance outcome? How many dissenting voices have been ignored or shouted down? Who really is getting funded by whom, who is pushing x agenda or y agenda for financial gain and political power accumulation, hidden behind their particular set of tame scientists or orgs?
These are legitimate questions, and there is no "denying" the data of this ginormous middleman trader's skimming market they are pushing hand in hand with this "climate science consensus", there is no airgap here, those two things are rigidly locked together.
Heck, here's another, the other big "emergency" science debate, where there is "consensus" allegedly and all sorts of huge sums needed to be spent and people scared, etc. Swine flu pandemic vaccinegate maybe?
If there's big money and big power involved, corruption happens. It just does, always has. Scientists, academicians, "esteemed" journals..doesn't matter, they are all human, so we should never completely blindly trust them, or any other big business or big government, to be non corrupt.
I think you are all wrong. The "average Joe" doesn't know enough about science or the scientific method to have an informed opinion on the matter one way or another. That does leave room for an uninformed opinion however.
These emails are damning to the scientists involved. They clearly show a disregard for scientific method. The AGW proponents declare them a tempest in a teapot. AGW deniers, say "See, I told you all along". In both cases, the opinion stems more from political bias than an understanding of the science.
The average Joe does not see the big picture because they don't understand that science does not "prove" anything, but can only generate a stack of empirical evidence in favor of a theory. And, all it takes is a single experiment to knock all or part of that stack over.
In my opinion, the larger picture is not a condemnation of all scientists, but of the media. As of yesterday, searching for the word "climategate" on CNN's website produces no hits. Even typing in "East Anglia" only throws up a bunch of links - most of which talk have nothing to do with this scandal.
If you get all your news from CNN, or the "big 3", you might not even be aware of this story, since they won't report it (although I bet you know the current tally of how many mistresses Tiger Woods had).
Fox might be biased, but at least their viewers are aware of the story.
To me, the "big picture" story should be called "mediagate".
Education? Hah! Grandparent is obviously referring to Einstein's distinguished position as a patent clerk as his qualification to question known physics you ignorant clod!
Math is important to scientists, but math is not a science. You can tell this easily enough from the observation that math does not use the scientific method to pursue its goals.
Guns don't kill people -- people kill people.
But the guns seem to help a bit. (apologies to Eddie Izzard)
I can link too:
http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/12/climategate_was_data_faked.php
My link is better than yours! It does not rely on group think and manipulated data! Thhpt!
If they so drastically manipulated data from Australia, what else have they done... this is why access to raw data is so vital, and why things that are based on raw data we cannot see simply cannot be trusted (especially given the penchant from the emails we have seen to shut out people going off-message).
Thanks for giving me an opportunity to shed even more light on the disturbing revelations from the data and code (which matter far more than the emails).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Comment removed based on user account deletion
And the fact that he was submitting as many as 7 papers a month was not a red flag? Give me a break. Few competent scientists put out that many papers in a year!
The FACT is that his papers were accepted uncritically. He made mistakes even in his earlier papers, but people simply did not bother to make an effort to find them.
If you are denying that peer review in recent years has had serious problems, then you are not as familiar with the subject as you seem to think. Regardless of a few possible misunderstandings like "hide the decline", there is a lot more in those emails, including discussion on collaborating to coerce the peer review system to support only their point ov view. That is not exactly a minor charge in itself. Even if their science turns out to be responsible (something which has been looking increasingly unlikely), the behavior of the CRU staff and cronies has been reprehensible.
This is the standard argument for the climate change deniers. "The scientists made it all up to get more funding!". What a ludicrous conspiracy theory. Did all the climate scientists get into a room about twenty years ago to come up with an elaborate plan to take over all leading peer reviewed journals? Generate an enormous body of published and according to XxtraLarGe biased work just so that they can now reap the benefit of more funding? What an incredible energy it must take to coordinate so many people to contribute to one gigantic fraud. And all of this to get some more grant money? This is supposed to be incentive enough for such an elaborate hoax? It is not as if that grant money goes into the bank accounts of the scientists. It has to be spend on further research or things like additional hardware for climate simulations. There is a huge question mark there:
Climate Change Hoax
?
Profit!
Just doesn't compute.
This makes people who believe in the faking of the moon landing look outright sane.
The difference is that in astronomy you have enough data points that you can do research to confirm or deny you hypothesis. Edwin Hubble didn't use one Cepheid variable star to prove his "standard candle" theory, nor did he use just a few galaxies to prove his expansion theory. His theories are still being tested today because there's sufficient data points out there to continue testing, and as we refine the instruments and methodologies for these studies (e.g. using solar-orbiting satellites to increase the base for the angular parallax of a star or cluster to make the "standard candle" more accurate), we continue to test, prove and refine the theories in question.
In AGW, we have ONE data point, our environment. Statistically, our measurements of the environment are pretty close to useless because of the lack of testing sites, lack of access to a lot of global locations, lack of understanding about deep-sea currents, and lack of rigor in the testing methodologies over the last couple of hundred years (they are at discussing utilizing observations from sea fairing captains back to the 1600's, I'm wondering just how accurate the instruments where then, given we're talking about variances of 1/10 of a degree).
All in all, the AGW thing reminds me more of the saccharin scare in the 80's than anything else. One place published a set of data, everybody else used that data either to tune their experiments or as the entire basis for their "studies" and nobody questioned the METHOD of the original study. As with cold fusion, saccharin was cleared after somebody tried to repeat the original study, but unfortunately (and this is bared out in the emails) the AGW folks don't share methods and data with people who haven't proven their "loyalty". THIS is why lay people don't trust the folks involved, they clearly have an agenda that supersedes their scientific rigor and it has cost us hundreds of trillions of dollars with very little to show for it.
All that said, renewable energy is a laudable goal and research into that area must continue, but the best way to manage resources is through governed self-interest, which is coincidentally the basis for capitalism. If you come up with a way to get 85% efficiency from a solar panel, you'll get all the money you need to make it happen and bring it to market without one single dime of government money being involved beyond basic research. Instead governments around the world are taking on the role of venture capitalists, investing in "ideas" with very little solid science behind them and subsidizing technologies that are not up to the demand (e.g. 19% efficient solar cells, "bio fuels" that take more energy to produce than they provide, etc.). To the lay person, this simply doesn't make any since, and it shouldn't make since to anybody, unless they are investing in the companies providing these duds (like Mr. Gore).
Finally, to anybody who knows even a little about the scientific method, the argument that a "consensus of scientists agree" on the subject of Global Warming just doesn't hold water. A consensus of scholars agreed that the Earth was the center of the universe including the greatest philosopher in history (Aristotle), despite Ptolomy presenting sound evidence to the contrary. It took 2000 years and a brave Catholic priest (Copernicus) to present indisputable evidence to the contrary and even then, it was another 450 years or so before his boss, the Pope agreed with him. CONSENSUS IS NOT SCIENCE!
"I don't think software should necessarily be free
Like geology or evolution.
I've long felt that 'Science' has not gotten the scrutiny and skepticism from society that other facts of life do. (Much like religion in the past, which contributed to some of the widely publicized recent sex scandals).
Before you jump all over me for being a knuckle-dragging Arkansan, listen to how I came to this conclusion. I recently graduated with a degree in the sciences from a fairly prestigious university. While I was there, I worked as an undergraduate research assistant in several of our labs.
I quickly came to the conclusion that people would do ANYTHING to further their own agenda (whether it was grants, ideology, whatever). I saw people fabricate data, intentionally misinterpret data, unintentionally misinterpret data, use poor technique and then claim valid results, etc. If the advisor said he wanted results, results he was going to get.
This experience rid me of my rose-colored glasses when it came to science. I realized that scientists are just like anyone else. They have their own goals and, if necessary, will lie, cheat, and steal to reach them.
Exactly the point! For some reason, scratching almost any "environmental activist" one can find a worn-out Che Guevara T-shirt underneath. Why is it? Are the liberals noticeably more green-conscientious? No, they aren't...
It must be, then, that a substantial body of the Illiberal crowd sees "global warming" as a pre-text for destroying (or, at least, shackling) Capitalism. Indeed, regardless of whether the Global Warming (renamed recently to a less odious "Climate Change") is a) a threat and b) a man-made phenomenon, it is useful just because it can be used to hurt Capitalism...
This is well-illustrated by the modern version of Pascal's Wager. To restate Pascal's conclusion: even though the existence of Anthropogenic Global Warming cannot be determined through reason, a Progressive should wager as though AGW exists, because living life accordingly has everything to gain, and nothing to lose.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Galileo, Newton, Einstein, Watson and Crick, Feynman, Heisenberg, etc.
Did they become famous by the degree with which they adhered to the leading theories of their day? Not exactly.
Scientists achieve professional success by achieving important results--showing the shortcomings of the current theory, and (importantly) proving that their approach is more correct.
The idea that all scientists march in lock step in order to maintain funding is a myth. For one thing, it begs the question because the "current theory" must have diverged from prior theory at some point in time. If all scientists march in lock step, how was that possible?
For another thing it disregards the lessons of scientific history--he who proves everyone else wrong, wins. Of course each scientist has their own failings, biases, and preconceived notions. But the point is that he (or she) has to prove it, objectively, to other scientists. Merely pointing out that a scientist is capable of failure is not counterproof to their scientific findings. Einstein was ultimately wrong about quantum mechanics because he wished to believe in a deterministic universe. That does not take away from the many areas in which he was proved correct.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Then why intelligent design? Why the existing climate controversy?
I think the Wall Street Journal has a higher opinion of yesterday's average person than was warranted. People haven't automatically listened to well educated people that study things for their entire lives for several decades now.
The ability to google compelling-sounding things has turned us into a nation of people who think they're experts at everything.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
eldavojohn writes: "While nothing interesting was found by most scientific journals..."
As evidence he provides a reference to: the statement by a single journal. Surely that is not "most journals", is it? Where is the evidence that most journals have even commented on the story, much less rendered a verdict as to its seriousness?
To be fair, the statement might well be true, in the sense that "most scientific journals" have not issued any statement on the matter. And even if they did so, in the short period of time that has transpired, it could only represent the views of the editors, not the body of researchers that contributes to it.
So what we have here seems to be the gross magnification of one statement to reflect a broad consensus.
It is incontrovertibly true, we are in a warm period and have been for 11,000 years, since the last ice age. There have been a few cold snaps like the late 1770's and a few warm periods such as when the Vikings inhabited Greenland. There is no doubt most glaciers are melting. Clearly, climate changes both warming and cooling have happened in the past without human causes and have been reversed without human action.
The only real scientific debate is:
1.. has this current warming period been triggered or amplified by human use of fossil fuels, and
2.. can any possible change in human behavior significantly lesson or reverse this warming.
It is not certain humans caused the current warming trends. Given the many fluctuations of the past and the inherently noisy data no one should be absolutely sure of this either way.
More importantly, It is very doubtful any reasonable change in governmental policy can reduce the warming that will occur over the next several decades. The reason we can not take decisive action is that there are just too many of us. China is now producing more green house gas than the U.S. It can not refuse to modernize the living standards of the 75% of its people who now live in poverty. So China has refused to even accept the goal of reduced emissions. Thus, even if the U.S. were to eliminate all greenhouse gasses the world level will continue to rise.
It is not politically correct to point this out but we should probably not have more than about a billion people living on the earth but we have almost seven billion. That number is seriously damaging the planet in many ways even if we did not cause global warming. Unless we get our population under control, we will see the whole planet go the way of Easter Island.
None of this however justifies climatologist refusing to open their data and models to full examination by their critics which is the basis of the scientific method. None of it justifies cherry picking and distorting data and findings in published reports. None of it justifies trying to restrict alternate views from the peer review journals.
Also, that wasn't Venkman -- it was Ray.
A measure of doubt in science is justified because much of science has devolved into religion (theories elevated to dogma). As these things come out in the open, people will be utterly amazed at just how much science is bunk. I can say this with confidence because I know of many clear and unambiguous experimental and observational falsifications of sacred theories and models. The Big Bang cosmology, for example.
Do elaborate, please. Because it looks like you either just set up a big straw man or assumed a lot of "facts" not in evidence.
I'm hoping you'll elaborate your points on which theories that have been elevated to dogma, and evidence you have found that disprove said theories
Just how much science is bunk, anyway? Please feel free to specify percentages of science or give examples. How do you define the threshold of "most" science? What exactly is in the set of ideas you're labeling "science"?
Since you "know of many clear and unambiguous experimental and observational falsifications of sacred theories and models", please list them or provide links.
Because this looks like an ordinary sh*t -and-run to me.
Yes, but peer review is more a basic sanity check than a comprehensive, in-depth investigation. That part comes when people read the published paper and find things to criticise. The downside to inadequate pre-publication review is that the journal credibility is lower and people waste time reading poor papers.
It's amazing the poster can claim with a stright [sic] face "nothing interesting" was found ...
Why don't you read what I wrote?
While nothing interesting was found by most scientific journals
And I linked to one of many journals that--shock of all shocks--didn't publish anything regarding the leak. I didn't say anything about what you, me, Slashdot or blogs found in those leaks. Instead I tried to relay that the general consensus seemed to be, from what I read, that there was nothing to get excited about. The journals might be wrong but I was just trying to tell you what I noticed from them after the leak.
You did a really good job of quoting me out of context. You did an even better job of quoting source code out of context. I'm also pretty certain you probably got that from another site.
Which to me, is pretty damning stuff.
What can I say? We're all entitled to our own opinions. Write a paper on this and submit it to the journal of Nature. See what happens.
Furthermore, the use of this is commented out NOW.
It's pretty damning but it's commented out. If you read the comments of the Slashdot article I linked, you'll see that this source code isn't automatically accepted as the word of god and is actually under heavy debate. But why bother? You've clearly already judged me as having some political agenda by submitting stories to Slashdot. I probably can already be identified as a liberal since I'm posting here, right?
So all the output they have produced is simply not science
I'm supposed to believe you but I'm not supposed to believe the scientific journal of Nature? When digesting second or third hand information, I'll go with the latter, thank you.
My work here is dung.
Dear dudes smarter then me I am a " lay person " and yes I now think of the scientific community in the same light as a lawyer or politicians. climategate the H1N1 people taking money from the drug co all show that when money and power are taken you will do anything to keep it and get more and more
Skepticism is not the enemy but the essence of science.
OK, why don't *you* give it a shot?
Please explain the misapplication of the derivative operation in a manner that an 8th-grader could grasp.
And better yet, why don't you actually try to *convince* some people who reject climate science with this explanation?
Get back to me with your results.
> Which to me, is pretty damning stuff.
I presume this means that you don't validate your code by seeing what happens if you throw varying or just plain WRONG data at it?
How else do you make sure that your code doesn't just happen to work for the data you're immediately using, and will fail when different (but equally valid) data is thrown at it? Or that it will fail in a predictable way when just plain invalid data is thrown at it?
You're either not a coder or not someone who has to test their own code.
Climatology is a mixed bag: part chemistry, part model-building and, now, part politics. Watts, Mann et al. are engaged in the latter two. They build questionable mathematical models from cherry-picked data to push a political agenda. The problem with model-building is that it does not result in a p-value for a controlled experiment with reproducible data which tests a defeasible hypothesis, i.e. it is not science. The molecular effect of CO2 on the atmosphere is confirmed science. The buffering effect of oceanic CO2 is unconfirmed science. The effect of industrialization on past temperature is 50% science. A 10-year prediction of global warming is 10% science. A 100-year prediction of global warming is 100% fantasy. The damage of climategate is not that it calls into question science as a whole, but that it is confused with science in the first place.
Other research centers also collect similar data, and some have open-sourced their algorithms.
And yes, their conclusions are similar to those of the CRU. That's what the GP means by saying that criticisms have been answered.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
0.999...=1 is Math fact.
IIRC, Plato's argument against democracy in favor of an intellectual meritocracy was that the ignorant have as much decision-making power as the informed.
Kinda seductive in this age of Flygate.
I repeat: 7 papers a month fails said sanity check. And the fact that his data points fit the theoretical curves far too closely should have failed even a cursory sanity check. Any scientist knows that just doesn't happen, especially more than once.
I wish. What I see instead is a large number of credulous liberals who believe whatever certain pundits tell them is the best way to screw with society.
There, fixed that for you.
Did you perhaps mean to include a part where he said: "substantially changing the content of the atmosphere has no predictable effects, and here is why...."
If an 8th grader could grasp it it wouldn't take years of education and research expereience to do. Or to quote Feynman, "Listen, buddy, if I could tell you in a minute what I did, it wouldn't be worth the Nobel Prize". Any explanation on that level can be countered by someone with an equally plausible sounding but wrong explanation on a similar level.
Actually doing a full, detailed assessment of the validity of evidence would take an experienced scientist from a different field a *long* time to read through all the relevant publications, learn the material and arrive at his own conclusion.
I've read many comments here that we should be skeptical of scientific results in particular because there is the incentive to fudge/alter results due to funding concerns. However, what I found extremely interesting and disturbing is that these people conveniently ignored the other half of the money issue. Just as the GOP is blocking Healthcare reform by focusing on the projected costs while completely ignoring the monetary benefits that will be derived there from (simple example: sick people are more productive at work - since they are spending their time working instead of being sick/dead. This leads to an increase in domestic production - GDP - as well bringing in more income tax revenue.) In this case we have tremendous monetary pressure from multiple international industry conglomerates to stifle the policy changes that are needed to deal with climate change. The pressure to affect policy and scientific outcomes in form of cold hard cash is very real from both sides. You can't call foul on one without acknowledging the effects of the other.
Furthermore, even if the science isn't perfect, and we can't conclude that we (humans) are primarily responsible for the climate shift, the fact remains that it is STILL OUR PROBLEM. It doesn't actually MATTER why the changes are happening, the fact is that they are, and we are directly impacted by them. Therefore, it should follow that we should do everything in our power to slow or reverse these changes, even if it wasn't our fault to begin with. The fact that people refuse to realize this reminds me of the frog phenomena, where a frog placed in a pot of cool water will sit unperturbed as the water reaches boiling, and will die in the same manner. Maybe the heating water around you won't kill you, but there is a chance it will. You don't always get into a car accident, but you still want to wear seat belts, don't you? I just can't understand why people treat the world they live in any differently.
"The views expressed here are mine and do not reflect the official opinion of my employer or the organization through which the Internet was accessed."
Daniel Henninger is wrong. How he's drawing this conclusion is a little far-fetched. No one is going to stop believing in science as this has no implication to regular scientists who believe in causation science versus the correlation science of climatologists. I cannot say the same for climatologists however. Their methodologies, data, and science, at least how they're going about it, is not following proper research methodologies.
As an amateur scientist of the sky (Astronomer), science at its core is transparent, open, and full of debate and honest and thoughtful challenges with peers. Climatology is anything but open, no debate with its peers, and hateful accusations of mistrust and full of secrets. If I have a theory about a pulsar and why it varies a particular way, I'll throw it out there to my peers to break apart and destroy my theory - that's how we're suppose to do it. You announce a study result (about a possible causation) and HOPE someone proves you wrong. We then get more 'Ah Ha!' moments when someone else studies the theory and then using their own experiences and knowledge, may be able to modify my theory about that same pulsar because perhaps they were doing similar research and then collaborate to come up with a new theory that we all then try to destroy and disprove. That is how science works!
Climatologists may be right, but their science methodologies are not 'best practice' leaving a lot of us to wonder how they're coming up with their results - which they keep to themselves.
How unscientific indeed.
Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things. - Peter F. Drucker
Exactly the point! For some reason, scratching almost any "environmental activist" one can find a worn-out Che Guevara T-shirt underneath. Why is it? Are the liberals noticeably more green-conscientious? No, they aren't...
It must be, then, that a substantial body of the Illiberal crowd sees "global warming" as a pre-text for destroying (or, at least, shackling) Capitalism. Indeed, regardless of whether the Global Warming (renamed recently to a less odious "Climate Change") is a) a threat and b) a man-made phenomenon, it is useful just because it can be used to hurt Capitalism...
Your argument is that environmentalists are dirty socialist hippies, therefore environmentalists want to destroy capitalism. Talk about taking absurdist A=A arguments far too far...
There are plenty of serious capitalists on board with environmentalism, who correctly believe that AGW is a fact, and wish to do something about it. It is inherently a collective action problem, just like any other (law contract and property law, for instance). This has implications.
Simply blindly asserting that only dirty fucking hippies who idolize socialist killers does not make it so, any more than attempting to shackle AGW to a silly thought experiment (while slyly imputing a religious belief to the hippies) reduces risk mitigation analysis in the face of uncertainty to a blind leap of faith.
Not only is your factometer hopelessly crushed by the weight of your ideology, but also our logic and rhetorical skills suck.
I forget what 8 was for.
but assuming that infighting exists in them all.
duh... That's a pretty good assumption. If there wasn't a disagreement then there really isn't anything to investigate is there?
I *WANT* everybody to be skeptical and question the result. Assume that there was some bias and look for it. Point out the assumptions and the weaknesses. Figure out what the non-scientific agendas are. All of us should be doing that before we react to "data".
It's the lack of this kind of critical thinking (both from the lay-person and from the scientists themselves) that has gotten us into these messes in the first place.
I will never live for sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.
And I linked to one of many journals that--shock of all shocks--didn't publish anything regarding the leak. I didn't say anything about what you, me, Slashdot or blogs found in those leaks. Instead I tried to relay that the general consensus seemed to be, from what I read, that there was nothing to get excited about. The journals might be wrong but I was just trying to tell you what I noticed from them after the leak.
They might be right and they might be wrong, but it should also be pointed out that these journals are caught up in the middle of it all.
These journals are telling the world that the manipulation of their peer review process is nothing to get excited about.
"His name was James Damore."
Post anyone's private emails or transcripts of their back room dealings (e.g. politicians) and you'll get a different perception about what goes on. The emails were private for a reason. This situation would be no different if leaks happened in any other field or industry. Stop singling out scientists.
What, never?
COBE.
But yes, 7 papers a month is... excessive.
Although scientists do have an obligation to communicate scientific results and issues clearly to the public, the public needs to have basic scientific literacy to follow; it's something both sides need to invest work in. But people want to use all the nifty things that science produces, but they don't actually want to bother to actually learn to understand how science works. That's a serious problem for the world, because people with no understanding of science end up needing to make policy decisions--sometimes life-and-death decisions for millions of people--involving scientific questions.
We really should let people only use the level of technology that they actually understand; for most people on this earth, including the majority of Americans and Europeans, that means basically living like the Amish.
but in that politics has corrupted scientists and scientific reports in the same way politics has corrupted religion and churches.
Both science and religion were once pure and not corrupted by politics, but both the left and right corrupted both science and religion.
Science was the last thing untouched by politics, if there was one thing people could trust it was science. But now with the political corruption from the right and the left, who can trust science anymore?
Even though there are logical fallacies, cherry picked numbers, political corruption, climate change can still be true, but just flawed. But we'll never know that until an unbiased and random sample (not cherry picked) third party neutral tests are done with a scientific model that works and is understood and a proper hypothesis that can be proven true or false and is thus falsifiable.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
You have to hand it to the oil, gas, and military industries: they are doing a great PR job. After 9/11, energy independence and energy conservation should be a no brainer to even the most die-hard conservative, even if they aren't concerned about dwindling oil resources, pollution, efficiency, and climate change.
Instead, these industries have managed to shift the debate in such a way that the entire question has become the link between CO2 emissions and anthropogenic global warming. These industries have firmly planted the idea in people's minds that if we can't prove anthropogenic global warming, we can just keep going as if nothing had happened.
Wake up, people. Anthropogenic global warming, hockey stick curves, and all that is totally irrelevant. The US needs to become energy independent and Europe needs to figure out how to meet its own energy needs, so that we can get out of the social and religious cesspool call the "Middle East". We need to reduce the burning of fossil fuels because those fuels are far more valuable as raw materials for future generations and because there is only a limited supply of them. The fact that there is a reasonable chance that continuing along the current path may also lead to global climate catastrophe might be considered by some to be cause for alarm, but it doesn't even matter compared to those other certainties.
That isn't where the intelligent hang out. Look at McIntyre, for example: complained he never had Briffa's data and makes a MASSIVE song and dance about it. Then we find out he's had the data for years and does he apologize?
No.
Raw observational data series must adjusted when instrumentation changes. The step change shown at your link is obviously an artifact. Removing such artifacts (in whichever direction) is a big part of the problem of getting a temperature record from imperfect surface observations. This just shows people doing their jobs.
McArdle knows nothing about these matters and doesn't seem to have consulted anyone who does. Have you?
Normally I don't respond to people who use "Thhpt!" in their argumentation. Do you think that helps?
mt
So the lists of sceptics who are non-climate scientists are irrelevant, while the Met Office list of names of non-climate workers is relevant?
You'd think this attack was completely deserved, wouldn't you?
We, chemical scum view the world through a narrow slit in our burka. We see a tiny tiny part of the spectrum of the electromagnetic radiation and we see sizes within a few orders of magnitude of our body sizes. Noone has ever seen an oxygen atom with their own eyes that resulted in any conscious recognition, without a scientific equipment to facilitate the viewing. The evidence for oxygen, or the evidence against aether is no less direct than the evidence for global warming and AGW and the theory that explains it, the evidence for oxygen is just more accessible, easier to understand and has more showy demonstrations. The case for oxygen also doesn't have people receiving large amounts of money to deny the evidence no matter what.
You will never be able to predict weather over long timescales (more than a few weeks). Weather is not climate. When you're doing physics, you're not calculating the trajectory, energy content of atoms that compose a gas in a volume of space, instead you're dealing with statistical averaging and assumptions about the closed system, in terms of pressure, volume and temperature.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
My little post has caused you to explode and turn to shouting (I even had to change the subject-line for you). That an opponent is reduced to an ad-hominem attack is — by itself — a confirmation, that my "skills" and logic are just fine.
Thank you very much for the encouragement. Stay calm next time.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Not to mention that every scandal is referred to as gate. "Filegate", "Climategate", "Bloodgate", "Billygate", "Hookergate", etc.
Maybe we can combine these silly hackneyed sound bite artifices, such as the "Mediagate Bubble"!
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
As far as medicine goes, I'd say the scientific community has done a pretty good job of challenging their own credibility by exploiting use conflicts of interest with pharmaceuticals. Look no further than doctors signing their names at the bottom of industry ghost written research.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/sep/18/doctors-ghost-writing-pharmaceutical-research
Large-scale sciences like climatology and astronomy suffer from an inability to isolate variables or to yield "reproducible results."
Yes, and in my view this places them in a very different category than experimental sciences, which involve the scientific method, and which tend to yield results that are not only reproducible (and therefore independently verifiable), but useful as well.
Observational "science" is inherently subject to bias, for at least the reason that selective "observation" can result in just about any conclusion one desires. It is very much like those who selectively read religious texts to try to find justification for things they want to find, as opposed to what is really there. And frankly I do not see how this sort of "science" contributes anything to society comparable to what the hard, experimental sciences produce on a routine basis. That is not to say that it doesn't have value; observation is necessary in order to form testable theories that eventually form the basis for experimental science. But it isn't the same thing, and it doesn't produce results that can be treated as established and dogmatic facts.
I tend to concur that people are not losing their faith in science . . . they are losing faith in quasi-scientific dogma and insisting that the scientific process be followed rigorously, or else that any "conclusions" derived from be treated with the skepticism that they rightfully deserve since, without that process having been followed rigorously, those conclusions are speculative and unproven (and perhaps unprovable) in nature.
Nonaggression works!
One problem with Global Warming is that it does not fit the standard definition of science, which requires a testable hypothesis. We only have one planet, and most climate science is done with computer models, not in reality.
1. Mathematics is NOT a science, it is applied logic, and related strongly to philosphy, eg the so called Axiom of Choice, "Given a non empty set, it is possible to pick a representitive member" is known to be (a) nesessary axiom for a large part of accepted Modern Mathematics, but is known to be independant, and there is another, less useful, Mathematics where it is false.
2. The basis of Scientific Method is well known, and used to be taught in schools, so I know that I basically understood it before 10 years old: (a) it isn't true cos you want it to be, (b) you need to observe, to the best of your ability, WHAT IS, (c) theories are only useful if (1) they predict the observed results, (2) their predictions do not include results that are observed but the theory predicts differently, (3) calculation is possible, (4) the theory is as simple as possible (see Einstein) and elegant. Put succintly: Hypothesis, Predict, Confirm, Use.
[There are good books, References in (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_mathematics), and (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method)} and it is really very simple common sense stuff.
Consequences:
1. You can't keep your data, or methods to yourself, unless you want to be laughed at.
2. The purpose of publication is so OTHERS can reproduce your work, and 'peer-review' isnt a blessing, it is to make sure that your paper is honest, clear, and permits reproduction, and contains enough theory and data to confirm/deny.
3. peer-review has nothing to do with confirmation or support or correctness.
4. Support comes fom independant peers who reproduce your results within experimental error or devise new tests which your theory passes.
Application:
1. Fudging your results is NOT acceptable. (see Climategate IDL code, fudging the tree ring, thermometer data).
2. peer-review rigging is dishonest, but widely used in the academic word to secure promotion. See Publication and Citation in academic advancement
this means that the habit of 'peer-review rigging' was well established before Climategate. See e-mails
3. There is NO empirical evidence, that has been independantly verified. Prof "Phil" Jones saying "I wont release my data to my oponents" simply says he is a politician, NOT a Scientist, and there is a difference.
4. There has been a temprature decline for 11 straight years. CRUs data does not allow for the Medieval Warm period, well supported by historical and agricultural evidence even though not everone had a thermometer or recorded temperature;
5. At the slightes dissent the IPCC and Gore are on CNN telling the world that the data was stolen, and dosn't matter anyway, BS.
6. Phil Jones has 'stepped-aside' as director CRU and both CRU,UEA are investigation
7. The UK Met Office will, soon, have to release the extrordinarly bad observed data to satisfy FOI requests for raw data, said to be deleted (from all round the world?), at which point the whole gig is up.
NO ONE, except Greens and the hopelessly compromised can Believe in this any more, all the follow through is POLS and MEDIA eg CNN in Europe, who are the new deniers.
Finally, I would point out that these Climate Chimps, and their models, mostly with the UK MET, used to get all weather forcasts wrong, famously failed to predict the 1987 Hurricane in SE England "Rescue workers faced an unprecedented number of call-outs as winds hit 94 mph (151 km/h) in the capital and over 110 mph (177 km/h) in the Channel Islands." which cause a Margret Thatcher investigation, and indirectly, the formation of the UEA CRU to house the 'ejected'.
As I have already said, (moderated TROLL over a day or so) this SCAM is out/over and US/EU tax payers will refuse to pay. This Climate Ponzi sceme dosnt have a snowball's chance in hell of traction , and once someone in the US starts subpoena Dr. Mann's work and NASA' nonsense there will be NO VOTES.
The Bush administration pushed scientists into being quiet or not reporting scientific conclusions. That does represent a real loss in credibility to the scientific community as many scientists complied with the Bush party line.
The other part of the problem is that people are tricked into disbelief in science when they are manipulated by phonies who try to generate a position for themselves by claiming that science is challenging traditional beliefs that are outside of scientific research. For example Darwinism does not imply that atheism is a correct belief system. But many back woods preachers rant that Darwinism and atheism are one and the same thing. Somehow it escapes these peoples' grasp that God could use evolution in creating the world as we know it.
It would help if skeptics actually scrutinised the theory in a scientific way -- instead of making up conspiracy theories, and attacking the motives of those involved. The fact that no-one has been able to dismiss AGW in a proper scientific debate is what is important to me.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
why is it such a big deal to acknowledge that science is like every other academic discipline in many respects. people argue - some concepts endure, others fall out of favor quickly. science has no special claim to an "accurate representation of reality" - can physics account for gender dynamics in a particular country? why does no one abstain from the pissing contest between the humanities and the sciences?
Unfortunately, it seem to me that the history of Science is that of denial of discovery/fact by vested interests until such times as it can no longer be ignored. Closed minds in science are only too common. I've known one leading academic, who shall remain nameless, whose position, when analysed, was - I don't believe it therefore it is not true. That was despite the hard evidence being highly visible on a table.
It's not just the emails. There are now other programmers looking the computer code that was released with the emails, and they are finding all kinds of shenanigans and hacks to hide declining temperatures. Sorry. Code doesn't lie. Even the comments in the code are full of admissions that they are lying and cheating to hide the real temperature records.
The Internet has given everyone just enough information for them to think that they're as expert in whatever field as anyone else and the forum to broadcast their opinion. A Stanford researcher not too long ago discovered that ignorant people have no idea that they are ignorant and this plays well on the Internet. With no real ability to discern pseudo science from actual science, your average Joe Schmoe still feels perfectly qualified to commend on anything that he's read on a blog or watched on the History channel.
Welcome to the 21st Century... everything is politics.
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
Measure liberals by any standard, you will see, if you do not deny the truth, that liberals do not understand. Liberals have lower life span, higher rates of disease, suicide, depression & insanity.
Daily Bible readers have longer, happier lives, less diseases & more adult offspring.
You do not even have to read CDC reports to know this is true. People living per Bible have no STDs, do no drugs or witchcraft and have high purpose in life. Liberals believe they are useless accidents of chaos gone wrong, suicide is right & are likely to engage in any thing that moves sex & STDs.
Even among the "hard" sciences, there is a incredible tendency among scientist to view their fields as infallible, or at least lack an appreciation of how science hangs together with everything else. Really how many science departments at University mandate Philosophy of Science courses or even any basic history of science courses as a core part of the requirement to graduate their programs?
Even more interesting however is scientist of any given generation will look down on the scientist that came before (or failed to come before), and also view other competing fields as less than their own.
In some sense, I would say the average layman has a healthier scepticism and objectivity than often professional scientist do when it comes to their own fields place in the World. They are basically too close to the subject.
Living in Chile
As I scientist myself I can't understand how anybody calling themselves a scientist can refuse to provide raw data and methodology used to obtain any derived results. Those that did that are totally discredited IMHO. I mean c'mon - you just can't do that. Playing w/peer review on the other hand, tell me something new...
Exactly!
Scientist X: No, no, no! Your theory is all wrong, there are only 95.3 Jigga-watts in a Mega-Joule of Amptonium!
Scientist Y: Preposterous, my paper PROVES that there are indeed 98.6 Jigga-watts in a Mega-Joule of Amptonium!
Joe Sixpack: What the hell is a Jigga-watt!?!?
What majority? The vast "majority of scientists" that is always quoted are the SOCIAL scientists.
Most couldn't calculate a linear regression to save their lives.
The so-called hard science folks know (as most hard science folks know) that water vapor is the primary determinant of IR absorption reflection and then methane and a distant distant place (1-2% if that) comes from CO2.
CO2 (all you goose-stomping morons out there who want to "limit" my emission -- you and what army?) is PLANT FOOD. Methane is naturally produced all over the planet and the SEA FLOOR. Water vapor -- good luck with that on a planet that is mostly covered with water! NONE of these are bad and have been in our environment since the beginning of life on Earth.
Oh, and it's legion the number of hard scientists that scream from the rooftops that this isn't an issue. Do the google searches.
no paywalls on journals: put it all on an open peer reviewed internet site. allow anyone to comment (who is a serious scientist)
all internal communications, specifically related to the subject matter, placed on an open log
nothing is lost by doing this, nothing can be feared to be revealed. there's nothing to hide
the issue with hard science versus the soft sciences, or, in this case, versus political partisan hack jobs, is that hard science can withstand rigorous analysis. because such rigorous second guessing is the very essence of what science is: its nothing more than the accumulation of the most likely explanations for what we see in our natural world... until anomalous data comes along that requires a new explanation, which is what makes challenging and exciting
fanatical transparency is not a problem at all for what science is supposed to be. therefore, hard science is in a position to be the most trusted set of institutions in all of modern society, were it to actually submit itself to this regime
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
is starting to get his money's worth out of his recent purchase of the Wall Street Journal.
To remove the noise, the absolute values were replaced with derivative values based on variations.
This is global-warming-denier science at its finest, folks: Using a derivative operation to remove noise!
The real scandal is that this paper actually made into the Journal of Geophysical Research!
Is it any wonder that Mann and Co. were pissed?
But how do you explain all this to your average Sarah Palin follower? That's the scientists' conundrum here.
Removing noise doesn't sound right, but differencing time series is a legitimate technique for processing time series in order to remove autocorrelation so that the resulting time series is stationary (has statistical properties that are constant in time). Notice that at that point they are working with 12-month running mean data, so have effectively integrated their time series to remove some of the noise.
even though the existence of Anthropogenic Global Warming cannot be determined through reason
It can.
You, of course, don't believe me. Fine.
If you were reasonable, you'd would offer an objective criteria from which to assuage your skepticism. Try it, and see what happens. Really.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Damnit, never have mod points when you need them. This needs to be modded up to +10 informative and be required reading for all the idiots who except the current concepts on climatology and global warming as gospel. The reality is we, including the climatologist, don't really know because the science isn't advance enough.
Which is a little bit scary, when you consider the potential problems if global warming is real and we realize that too late! So I certainly think it is worth understanding better.
This is the critical part. Efforts should be spent on understanding it better rather than on trying to reverse something we have an incomplete understanding of. The fact of the matter is, that the lack of full understanding could (I dare say is likely to) result in our efforts to correct the situation to actually make it worse and/or introduce worse problems.
Who is John Galt?
Very insightful. From a layperson's perspective (of which I am a layperson on the topic of global warming, having done very little direct research), the arguments on either side of the global warming debate are not terribly convincing, with extremists on both sides exhibiting the same religious fervor of any Spanish Inquisitor. Well, okay, neither side has had me arrested or tortured for leaving my computers on at home all day - yet.
This makes Climategate relevant because it shows that there are scientists who seem to be actively involved in the distribution of information that is of dubious turstworthyness. It only makes the AGW's case weaker that various universities and government organizations have refused - in part or in whole - to submit to the FOIA requests that have been made to examine their datasets firsthand. If they're confident in their conclusions, then they've already won the race. There should be no more competition to this science, except for being the first person to say "It's wrong in this particular way, and here's a more accurate model.
It would suck if AGW is real and we're on a collision course for a runaway greenhouse effect. Using a car analogy (as this is Slashdot), doing nothing about that would be like slamming the gas pedal of our Ferrari while traveling 100MPH towards a reinforced bunker wall. That said, it would also suck if the truth is that we're doomed anyways because our Ferrari is actually an 18-wheeler with an oversized load heading downhill at a 70 percent grade, and hitting the brakes is only going to slow our impact from 100MPH to 99.5. With systems the scale of Planet Earth, the semi is easier to picture without concrete, reproducible evidence, or at the very least an extremely thorough analysis of all the data we can gather on the subject. Or maybe there isn't a wall at all, and instead of persecuting Galileo, we're simply hesitant to return to the good old days when witch doctors and fortune tellers were the lead counsels to kings and businessmen. Of course the skeptic wants evidence that's convincing, if not irrefutable.
Waht seems to be going on right now is that we are breaking into two distinct groups of people, those who want to do something about how we treat the planet, and those who do not. The among the one's who do want to do something about it, there are those who want to tax westernized nations until their economies match the pace of the rest of the "developing" (ie 3rd world economies) world. Unfortunately they are compelled by greed for the power to flip the off-switch on the general public, while they and their friends enjoy the utmost comfort, and opulence our modern society can provide. They hate hard science because it doesn't scare the public enough, so they fudge the numbers the scientists give them.
Then there are those who make their opulence and comfort from doing things the way we have been doing them since the beginning of the industrial revolution. They have no desire to change (except to make more money for the same or less), and see no reason they should be forced to.. They see no wrong in drilling every oil deposit, falling every tree, raping the bounty of the seas, and building on anything flat enough to support a human structure. they think they can do this in perpetuity without ill effect, and hate hard science because it tells them that they can't.
Then there is the general public, left without the knowledge of science, they are taught to hate science because they don't understand it, and are being lied to by people whose interests conflict with the data given.
-Oz
Another way to look at it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVC0FcSRxL8
I fail to see how. Even Physics proposes models and then tests them experimentally - you have to interpret the results to see whether they match the model's predictions, and you can compromise scientific integrity by redefining models or ignoring experimental data.
In Mathematics, you make the model, prove it, and you're done.
In the words of xkcd: "e^i*Pi + 1 = 0 - politicize that, bitches."
Nice article highlighting the fragility of reputation. The author goes on to screw it up by saying:
"The Obama administration's new head of policy at EPA, Lisa Heinzerling, is an advocate of turning precaution into standard policy."
Government should absolutely prepare for events that _might_ happen (that's what the DoD is all about). Ex-VP Cheney pushed "The One Percent Doctrine," for threats to the US, but somehow only wanted it to apply to military threats. More at: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/09/opinion/09friedman.html
McArdle knows nothing about these matters and doesn't seem to have consulted anyone who does. Have you?
Yes, I relied on the very careful analysis of Willis Eschenbach, who actually wrote the article that McArdle is linking to. Since you couldn't even be bothered to follow the link to the full analysis (which DOES address the concern you raise) what is your point?
I like to rely on sources that publish the entirety of the data they use along with the steps they take in analysis.
At the heart of things some people disagree with his proposed adjustments. But the fact is all of those station datas were adjusted in ways we have no clear explanation of beyond "trust us". That again, is not science.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Mathematics-->physics-->physical chemistry-- >inorganic chemistry-->organic chemistry --> biochemistry--> biology-->........
My thinking is that climatology is deep into the soft side and it isn't fair to throw all the other disciplines under the same blanket.
love is just extroverted narcissism
Everyone should blindly trust the scientists. After all, their prior prophecies of the world imminently dying from the ozone layer, HIV, global freezing, overpopulation, bird flu, swine flu, and so forth have all been correct. Also we should blindly listen to environmentalists, like when they stopped the spraying of DDT and killed over 10 million Africans via an immediate malaria epidemic.
The entire foundation of science is under assault when any portion of it is politicized. We need loud and unanimous condemnation of the CRU, an immediate suspension of all global-warming related grants, a moratorium on GW policies, a re-review of all GW peer-reviewed papers and an end to politicization of science. Only then can credibility begin to occur.
The "greenhouse gas theory" came into being when the Mauna Loa observations began to show the increase in the atmospheric co2 concentration and the climate was generally on a warming cycle. Some minds quickly put those two things together to link cause (co2) with effect (warming) and claimed that co2 was blocking the radiation of heat into space. Then the race was on to "prove" the theory...a race which continues to this day. Core samples of arctic ice were taken to establish temperature records and tiny bubbles of air in the core samples were analyzed to confirm some sort of 'historical' record of carbon dioxide concentration. That alone should give one pause as the the permeability of ice to carbon dioxide would make the concentration of co2 in those ice-entrapped bubbles meaningless after a short amount of time, never mind a thousands-of-years time span. Implicit in this investigation pathway is the assumption that modern atmospheric co2 concentrations are a function of fossil fuel combustion and photosynthesis, completely ignoring the effect of huge bodies of a liquid substance we call 'water' on the planet in which atmospheric carbon dioxide readily dissolves and then precipitates with calcium to form calcium carbonate, a substance present in large quantities around the globe. Calcium carbonate in the ocean is itself in equilibrium with calcium oxide which comprises between 6 and 10 weight percent of the oceanic and continental crust of the earth, moderated by ocean temperatures which vary depending on both solar electromagnetic and magnetic input. There is already more than sufficient carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to block all of the ir radiation that carbon dioxide is capable of blocking...so the entire global warming theory is a three-legged stool (constant solar input, co2 thermal barrier depends on increasing co2 concentration, planetary temperatures increasing) resting comfortably on two shaky legs. That's why the IPCC is racing to push governments into prompt action...before the decline in global temperatures and solar output begins to shake the confidence of the followers of the global warming religion and cause a loss in their numbers.
"While nothing interesting was found by most scientific journals"
That's like asking the fox whether he's been keeping the henhouse secure.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I'm a scientist, and my father was before me. Between the two of us, we've encounted an innumerable number of total boobs who call themselves "scientists."
We scientists like to go on and on about how stupid lay people are regarding science. And it's true. They are stupid about science.
But scientsts are people too and just as often just as stupid about science. You see, we're humans, we make mistakes, and we're motivated by our political views and our desire to further our careers. There really is no such thing as an objective scientist, and the main thing that keeps the whole community in line is peer review, and that works because every scientists wants to bury his competitors. Other scientists compete for grant money, and your main weapons are getting on review committees and poking holes in other people's articles. The articles that get published are the ones that are better science but also the ones that offend the politics and agendas of the fewest reviewers. Scientists also want to more favorably review their friends' works, and even in double-blind reviews, they figure who is who.
The ideal scientist tries to disprove his own work. The real scientist does just enough of this to try to ensure his work gets published. Hell, we even use the review process to vet our work just as much as we try to do it ourselves. When submitting a journal paper, the main question isn't "is this good science, novel and interesting" but "have I worded it cleverly enough to trick the reviewers into thinking it doesn't offend their biases." In the world of "science", the primary motivating factors are publishing, publishing, and publishing. Oh, and money -- to fund the research you need to do in order to publish.
Conferences REALLY show you what it's all about. Yes, there are very interesting presentation sessions. We people who enjoy science go to these and learn something. But what's really telling is what happens BETWEEN sessions. Do scientists go to lunch and talk about science? A little. But mostly, the socializing is all about getting noticed and meeting the big-wigs in your field. Oh, and grant money. Most of us struggle to get the once-in-a-lifetime NSF grant, while the REALLY big guys have money coming out their ears. If they like you, they'll recommend you and give you some of their cast-offs.
Don't kid yourselves, people. This isn't some utopia of god-like minds creating the future here. Most scientists are just average people who just happened to end up in that career and are clever enough to climb the right ladders and end up in the good-old-boys-club.
Am I surprised at all that the global warming people look really bad right now? No. Not at all. They weren't careful enough, made very human mistakes, and didn't do transparent-enough science.
Frankly, the scientific community NEEDS this kind of bubble-burst. For far too long, scientists (and physicians too) have enjoyed the same status that the priesthood once had, and we've come to rest on our laurels. For too long, we've expected laypeople to just "believe our conclusions, because it's too complicated for you to understand it," which is the exact same thing that caused the Catholic church to fall from the power they once had. Scientists, like priests, are our mediators between us and God, except this time, God is an equally nebulous thing called "Science".
Just like the priests used to perform sermons in Latin long past the point where anyone understood, scientists obfuscate their knowledge in jargon that few even in their own fields understand. (Some reviewers are even intimitidated into giving a good review by thinking they're not smart enough to get what you wrote.) Yes, there is most certainly a time and a place for using semantically dense terminology, equations, and the like. But scientists also have a duty to their paritioners to teach the science that they have discovered. There are a few scientists out there who take it upon themselves to help laypeople to understand, by writing
If an 8th grader could grasp it it wouldn't take years of education and research expereience to do. Or to quote Feynman, "Listen, buddy, if I could tell you in a minute what I did, it wouldn't be worth the Nobel Prize". Any explanation on that level can be countered by someone with an equally plausible sounding but wrong explanation on a similar level.
Actually doing a full, detailed assessment of the validity of evidence would take an experienced scientist from a different field a *long* time to read through all the relevant publications, learn the material and arrive at his own conclusion.
Your quote by Feynman is limited by time, not understanding. I think a great example of what I mean would be Hawkings "The Universe in a Nutshell". Its a full book that describes in fairly simple terms, and with pretty pictures, how stuff works. You need very little previous knowledge to gain from it, and since its written with the layperson in mind, its enjoyable. The only problem is that so far as I can see, climate science as a whole has decided to use an emotional "protect our home" approach to marketing, rather than giving people easier access to the data, which from the things I've seen, is kinda undersold as obviously magically correct. Thats why people are so untrusting of AGW. We've learned as a society, with good reason, to not trust an appeal to emotion.
Change this later.
It's what people do on Slashdot when they want to avoid confronting an argument and rely on poisoning the well instead.
I challenge anyone to get 6 out of 2+2, and the last person that challenged physics by jumping off a building never published beyond an obituary... I think we should be just fine there. - Dan.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
As I scientist myself I can't understand how anybody calling themselves a scientist can refuse to provide raw data and methodology used to obtain any derived results. Those that did that are totally discredited IMHO. I mean c'mon - you just can't do that. Playing w/peer review on the other hand, tell me something new...
I love hearing the "CO2 is plant food claim", how retarded can you get. Ironic that such idiots flock to slashdot.
Here's the American Meteorological Society's take: http://www.ametsoc.org/policy/2007climatechange.html
where are your legions? Oh that's right, they're working at exxon.
As you ask so kindly, I will.
Most of astrophysics and climate science, about half of physics, and a small part of chemistry is bunk. Biology is not so much bunk as well as very incomplete.
How do you define the threshold of "most" science?
Science is being practiced within the interpretative context of accepted theories. When such a theory has been falsified, the whole edifice of scientific endeavor built on top of it should be discarded. I am basically looking at what fraction of a particular scientific field is built on top of falsified theory and thereby judge whether it is somewhat or mostly bunk.
In principle, I view science as the collection of knowledge derived using the scientific method. Science in the Popperian sense, that is. However, in my post I was referring to science as the practice that has emerged: a sadly human endeavor influenced by agendas, funding, strife, and belief that even so poses as the ultimate authority on truth because of its supposed founding in the scientific method.
For a falsification of Big Bang cosmology, see Halton Arp's work. For one of the many different falsifications of relativity theory, see Dayton Miller's work, a good overview of which can be found here http://www.orgonelab.org/miller.htm For a falsification of the fossil oil genesis theory, look no further than the many deep oil wells the Russians have taken into production. To read up on the proper theory, see here. The list goes on...
I'm not sure how you managed to lump libertarians in with the religious right, but good job, I guess.
Learn about Photography Basics.
This piece seems to have about the same grip on facts as most WSJ opinion pieces. Gallup polls over something like the last 25 years have found consistently about 45% of the US public believes in young earth creationism (specifically, that "God created man pretty much in his present form at one time within the last 10,000 years.") Hard science is quite evidently not something that most untrained lay persons, at least int the US, accord "automatic stature and respect".
AFAICT, the "average person" hasn't been much influenced by the attempt to gin up a scandal over so-called "climategate". OTOH, in fact, there are quite a few groups pushing political agendas and calling it science, and the "average person" would be well served to be aware of that and engage in critical evaluation, rather than unquestioning acceptance, of things that are sold as science.
Insofar as their results causes problems for political, theological, or other beliefs that they hold, people already flat-out deny (not merely "doubt") the most rigorous science. (And Mathematics isn't a science, in the empirical sense.)
Really, Henningers article mostly isn't about the so-called "climategate" issue as it is about trying to argue (without quite saying) that public policy decisions must always be based on scientific certainty, that you can never take action on a sign of a problem without absolute, incontrovertible proof, denigrating as improper and "postmodern" the precautionary principle, the public policy (not even notionally scientific -- it addresses "should" not "is" issues) principle that where there is a plausible risk of extreme and irreversible harm of a particular policy action or inaction, the contrary course should be taken barring equally or more significant risks. (Interestingly, Henninger was also a big defender of the Iraq war and most of the Bush Administration's expansions of executive power and intrusions into civil liberties justified as necessary to mitigate the risk of potential future terrorism, whose notional justification was the same essential principle; critics generally didn't question the principle, but instead the plausibility of the risk justifying certain actions, whether the action plausibly mitigated the risk in others, and whether there were equally or more significant harms imposed by the mitigation than justified by the risk sought to be mitigated.)
This is a myth that is being propounded for political purposes. In reality, climate research is one of the most open areas of scientific study. I don't know of any other field in which so much of the raw data and even the analysis software has been made publicly available. A huge amount of data and computer code, including a great deal of raw climate data is available online. There is some data that is owned by various national meteorological services and not publicly available, but even this is routinely provided to qualified researchers. The conclusions of CRU (the owner of the stolen files) have been replicated by multiple independent research groups that have carried out their own independent analyses of the same data.
That's pretty much covered in the last paragraph: "The three points are almost certainly connected, and we may or may not have a perfectly clear understanding of how." The fact is, we can't run experiments on the entire atmosphere. We can model it, we can make predictions, and we can come up with some reasonable guesses, but we may figure out later we were wrong. His point was that we don't know for certain that human activity is the sole cause of climate change, but it doesn't matter -- pumping toxins into the air is still a dangerous thing to do, and we should stop. If that happens to keep the climate at a temperature that benefits us, and we can prove it, then that will answer the question of which models were correct.
Doubt is good. Healthy skepticism is a sign of maturity and intellectual involvement.
Problem is that most skeptics will not put their money where their mouth is -- and actually participate in the scientific debate. Instead, we get a bunch of unsubstantiated and contradictory theories appearing on websites. Theories that have already been discredited, and circular references that often lead no where.
I believe in AGW, because I have spent the time to assess the evidence, and I have some understanding of scientific philosophy. If someone wants to turn me into a skeptic, then they will have to make an evidence based argument. No such argument exists, and I have looked long and hard. I have also challenged numerous skeptics to produce one. However, once the argument has been discredited, they all start talking about conspiracies. Somehow, I'm unreasonable because I cannot see this obvious "truth". And then there is the projections -- like calling science a religion. Am I of the church of science because I refuse to accept a conspiracy theory at face value, but rather, will only accept evidence based arguments about the issues?
Skeptics presumably talk about "healthy skepticism", because of the way it makes them feel. They are not talking about any intellectual application of healthy skepticism.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
the basic conclusions are very similar, save for extreme circumstances. {Newtonian Mechanics} works fine at human-experienced scales, speeds and distances.
It's fun you mention Einstein's and Darwin's theory in the same post, because they share some other characteristics :
They are hard to prove experimentally in a lab (due to energy, mass or time constrains), and we have to rely on observing-the-universe-as-a-lab to find the necessary data to prove/disprove them.
Although some human-made experiments can be designed to test some manifestation of Einstein's theories, like the distortion of time and GPS sattelites, we just don't have the technology yet to create some high energy or high mass effects like gravitational lenses and have to rely on observing them in the universe around instead of experimentally recreating them.
Same happens with Evolution : some kind of speciation has been reproduced in laboratory, or has been man-caused in industrial countries. Nonetheless we can't currently "evolve an eye in a lab"(due to obvious problems of time scale and necessary space). For lots of larger-scale models, instead, we have to rely on what we learn from our planet trough fossils records. (Fossil and planet Earth are to evolution, what telescopes and the universe is to extreme-range physics).
Curiously though, Creationist are only complaining that "Evolution can't be tested" and are only pushing for Intelligent Design. None of them is pushing for Intelligent Falling although the same argument could be used for Physics~ And although IF is similarly valid (read: silly) as ID~
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
"Intrinsic" redshift? That goes against everything we know about physics. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, not a series of slightly weird coincidences.
To quote the great wiki in the sky:
Arp originally proposed his theories in the 1960s, however, telescopes and astronomical instrumentation have advanced greatly; the Hubble Space Telescope was launched, multiple 8-10 meter telescopes (such as those at Keck Observatory) have become operational, and detectors such as CCDs are now more widely employed. These new telescopes and new instrumentation have been utilized to examine QSOs further.
QSOs are now generally accepted to be very distant galaxies with high redshifts. Moreover, many imaging surveys, most notably the Hubble Deep Field, have found many high-redshift objects that are not QSOs but that appear to be normal galaxies like those found nearby.
Moreover, the spectra of the high-redshift galaxies, as seen from X-ray to radio wavelengths, match the spectra of nearby galaxies (particularly galaxies with high levels of star formation activity but also galaxies with normal or extinguished star formation activity) when corrected for redshift effects.
With the first link, the chain is forged.
Nobody with half a brain will debate the accuracy of mathematics... it is "the mother of all sciences" after all. Frankly, as a mathematician, I have long held that the other sciences are far too subjective and short-sighted to really be capable of producing rock-solid results. They find correlations and then usually attempt to use some sort of mathematical relation to explain these correlations. When they find a good fit, they declare triumphantly - "See - this is the way the world works!" when in fact all they have done is fit a rigid model around a particular amorphous blob of creation... a model which tends to be error prone the more it is relied upon. Why do you think physicists have error terms in all of their calculations?
Mathematics is the highest form of abstract thought and does not suffer from the petty squabbling of other sciences. In mathematics, it is possible to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt to any half-witted fool that you're theory is correct. That's not to say that mathematicians don't argue - but their arguments do not effect the quality of their work (it's usually over who deserves the bigger ego to be frank).
And I linked to one of many journals that--shock of all shocks--didn't publish anything regarding the leak.
"AND". But what goes on the first side of that And? Why it's the Slashdot article that hosts the debate I mentioned. The way you worded your sentence in context with the fact the whole link went to Slashdot implied that Slashdot found nothing odd either. If you really wanted to say "While nothing interesting was found by most scientific journals" talking only about journals, that sentence (or fragments therein) should have linked to the journals, not to the Slashdot discussion.
As for the journals... the same journals that are accused of shutting out scientists who dissented from the global line also prefer to ignore proof they shut out scientists. Really? That's the proof you have that nothing is amiss?
You did a really good job of quoting me out of context. You did an even better job of quoting source code out of context. I'm also pretty certain you probably got that from another site.
You did a great job misunderstanding the context you provided.
And then you further compound your misunderstanding by not even reading the context I provided.
I am a coder and looked through the samples myself (as well as the full modules the samples were taken from). Note that the code snippet linked to in the article I posted would seem to indicate it is being used when *I* in fact pointed out the code to use the adjusted data was commented out, so I'm just just cutting and pasting here or even using this information out of context. I'm applying a field I know very well (coding) to the data at hand that has been released and trying to give teh fullest context, while explaining how it's still an issue even if the use is commented out.
I actually never even saw the prior Slashdot article before your link, or I certainly would have commented in it.
It's pretty damning but it's commented out. If you read the comments of the Slashdot article I linked, you'll see that this source code isn't automatically accepted as the word of god and is actually under heavy debate.
For someone accusing me of not reading you seem to have a rather fixed preconception of what I said that is at odds with what I wrote, since it fact it was I who pointed out the use of the adjustments were commented out.
I still can't get past people acting like the very presence of the code, along with the complete unknown around when the code was actually commented out (it's not like we have a full CVS repository unfortunately but given the wild nature of the code I doubt they even use one) is not nearly as bad as if the code was really used. As I keep explaining, there is simply no reason in real coding for code like that, that modifies real data instead of just mocking test data, to be used.
I have not fully read through the linked Slashdot discussion, but I saw nothing there upmodded to prominence which convinced me my take on this was not valid.
I'm supposed to believe you but I'm not supposed to believe the scientific journal of Nature?
Why yes actually, because I based my analysis on information (code) that we can all clearly see, while Nature is basing information on data partly obscured. That is why I am prone to trust many bloggers more now than most media because blogger can more fully disclose sources of data, and are also much more prone to post corrections when wrong.
Also I have no vested in interest in being wrong or right, whereas Nature could have its reputation compromised if it turns out to be wrong, so of course they will tend to fight anything that says they are.
And as I said even if what they say is correct it does not matter if external entities cannot verify.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
No, one picture certainly does NOT tell it all. I noticed you conveniently avoided linking to the explanation, http://lwf.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/ushcn/ushcn.html
In a nutshell, the difference is due to bias corrections accounting for changing time of observation, thermometer type, station moves, etc. The specific adjustments are shown in http://lwf.ncdc.noaa.gov/img/climate/research/ushcn/ts.ushcn_anom25_diffs_pg.gif and the corresponding algorithms are described in the webpage above. There are published papers for these adjustment procedures, and you can go read them (and by "read them" I mean the slogging through the methods section, not skimming the abstract) if you like, but somehow I doubt you will.
Corrections to raw data are made all the time. Yes, you can introduce more error during this process than you remove. Depending on what specifically you are doing and how you're doing it, there may be statistical means of checking for that.
It's people like you who make me, as a scientist, cringe, because I have to consider every possible way any figure or text I create could be taken out of context. People seem to have this expectation that science should be easy, and that if something requires background to understand, we're being deceptive. No, we're not. Science is hard work, and if you're going to criticize intelligently, you have to understand the methods.
PEOPLE!!!
Don't you realize this has nothing to do with science? This has everything to do about FRAUD. Simple as that. It just so happens that the fraud was perpetrated by scientists.
Most of the noise made by the science denying lobby about the "stolen emails" is completely irrelevant to the real scientific questions. The purpose of the noise generated by the pseudo-skeptics has little to do with actual scientific arguments and everything to do with undermining trust in the public for the field of science. The arguments about "tricks" used to "mask" declines are based on quotes out of context, as explained here. Basically, tree ring temperature proxies started diverging from instrumental temperatures in the early 1960's, with the tree ring proxy data showing declining temperatures in spite of the fact that the temperatures as measured by thermometers was rising.
The simple fact is that the public's trust in scientists has absolutely nothing to do with the actual validity of the science. Nothing. However, the efforts at "vandalism" of the body of public knowledge perpetrated by the oil lobby will likely do long term damage to the scientific institutions that our society has long relied on and benefited from over the past decades.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
Hardly. This looks to me like the kind of sensitivity analysis that any good laboratory does frequently.
"I think that the decline in this data might be an artifact"
"Well, how much do we need to worry about it? How big an impact is it having on conclusions?"
"OK, I'll take a guess at how much it is in error, apply a correction, and see how much it changes the output."
Such code is never meant for publication, but just to help scientists understand their data and as a guide for future research. It is typical that a big all-caps warning "APPLY ARTIFICIAL CORRECTION" comment is included, so that nobody will get confused and accidentally include this "what-if" analysis in a publication. And indeed, nobody has been able to identify any actual publication in which there are undocumented "ARTIFICIAL CORRECTIONs"
Since when is Mathematics a science?
"The processes of science have changed in the last century, and not for the better."
Careful with your generalizations. Most of science actually works this way, whenever possible, and when it's not possible (for example, building two LHCs), you do the next best thing (have two competing teams building two competing detectors).
Astronomical datasets are famously open, to the point where Joe Average can generally get access to them by typing an address into his web browser. Other fields are similar. I have been asked by reviewers on more than one occasion to include some extra detail in a paper so that an experiment can be more easily replicated.
Don't conflate highly politicized areas like climate science with the greater body of science. I have rarely ever heard of someone claiming their data was "secret" or their algorithms were "proprietary" outside of climate science.
We need to get some broad based support,
to capture the public’s imagination
So we have to offer up scary scenarios,
make simplified, dramatic statements
and make little mention of any doubts
Each of us has to decide what the right balance
is between being effective and being honest.
- Prof. Stephen Schneider,
Stanford Professor of Climatology,
lead author of many IPCC reports
--
We’ve got to ride this global warming issue.
Even if the theory of global warming is wrong,
we will be doing the right thing in terms of
economic and environmental policy.
- Timothy Wirth,
President of the UN Foundation
--
No matter if the science of global warming is all phony
climate change provides the greatest opportunity to
bring about justice and equality in the world.
- Christine Stewart,
former Canadian Minister of the Environment
--
The data doesn’t matter. We’re not basing our recommendations
on the data. We’re basing them on the climate models.
- Prof. Chris Folland,
Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
But your average person doesn't care enough to study it in enough detail to really grasp it. Simplified explanations are fine, and rather easier to grasp than for climate science than for quantum electrodynamics. The trouble is that the FUD brigade can throw enough misinformation around that people don't know what to believe, and they're not qualified or inclined to study it in depth for themselves. Neither am I, and I care about the issue more than the average person and at least have a scientific background. So most people go off trust, and casting doubt on that is a very effective tactic, and I think that's what we're seeing here.
I don't think that scientists have pushed the emotional angle. I don't remember seeing any anyway, though I'd welcome being corrected. That's mostly the preserve of the environmental groups.
Attempts to dilute the loss of credibility of UEA's CRU, its affiliates, and its legacy of climate research by claiming that all science is now suspect will get nowhere. Hard science isn't going to take a hit for the 45 year old UAE public university and its climate [pdf] marketing wing. The leaks merely confirm that climate science is a highly politicized, well funded arena of tightly controlled and carefully massaged "truth." A lot of us already knew this.
While it's always in fashion to assert that the public is too ignorant and distracted to make subtle distinctions, the reality is people know climate science is compromised by politics and instinctively discount its claims. Daily press releases from the UN et al. claiming the leak has no significance isn't going to fix this, either.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
The link I provided didn't seem to show up. Here it is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P70SlEqX7oY&feature=player_embedded
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
But in doing so, they've removed the global-warming signal (the long-term trend)!
Interesting thing about the NASA Data. Check this graph from NASA
This shows that virtually all of the warming seems to come from their "corrections".
Seems this would have a difficult time passing the smell test.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
There is no doubt the climate change debate has a high political load, irrespective of its scientific basis (or lack thereof). Other than that, one of the things lay people should know about science is that it works with abstract models. Mathematics is the "mother" of all sciences in that it generates the most general models, and all other sciences try to generate models for real life phenomena. These models change as human knowledge advances; the process involves expression of contradictory points of view and vigorous debate among scientists. Unfortunately, this process is largely unknown to the lay people in some of the more developed countries where even evolution remains a controversial concept.
Actually I just wanted to point out that you can show some very direct evidence of global warming in the melting of the ice caps, glaciers and snow covered mountains which we have ice volume evidence for decades. There is a clear reduction in many key areas, and this can be proven with the simplest camera and your eyes, not esoteric data. Denialists see this and still deny, which makes their stance more religious than rational.
"Men willingly believe what they wish." - Julius Caesar
Nothing will change.
People that don't believe in science will feel vindicated. People that do believe in science will continue to do so. 99.9% of the population just doesn't care and will never hear about the 'controversy'.
This is just another Chicken Little running around screaming that the sky is falling.
The problem as I see it is that you can't do science concerning near term climate change on the climate data as it presently exists until *after* it's far too late for proactive change. I figure that's a done deal. Crisis: noun, the point in a debate when action becomes possible. See also: New New Orleans.
A few hundreds years of global satellite climate data would be a good starting point for establishing some baselines solid enough to predict short term climate change in the decade time frame.
Science isn't a magic hat. It's a convergence process. Not always guaranteed to converge in the short duration that everyone is hot and bothered about the magic answer. Science, in the lofty view, does not cater to funding cycles.
I think the trap that climate scientists have fallen into is the belief that (probable) urgency supplants honesty. The honest message is that by the standards of hard science, a firm predictive baseline takes centuries to collect and synthesize.
The reasoning becomes "if we tell an honest story, no one will do anything, so let's tell a story more conducive to what needs to be done". Taking paternal responsibility for the inaction of crowds is far, far away from science as hard boiled authority, even if the crowd seems to favour paleolithic regression, and elects a speech impaired albino chimp as president.
Science: people are pretty stupid when preoccupied with their narrow self interests and will sit around doing nothing until it's too late, or almost too late.
Not science: we should do something about it.
... but Scientism does.
Scientism is what Chris Mooney advocates ("Unscientific America"). He thinks that scientists and their supporters "must work to influence public opinion, and anticipate and thwart the skeptics." Ironically, this isn't was science demands; it is what True Believers demand. Under this system, scientists assume the roles vacated by discredited religionists under a new modern secular mass movement, replacing old ideas with a new metaphysics of value which is always completely unscientific (by definition) in order to craft a worldview as a viable context for meaningful and moral human action. This is ostensibly done with "science" as its foundation and framework, which is of course nonsense.
Science doesn't say anything about value. It can quantify physical and empirical properties of things, but it can't give direction on what those properties should mean to humanity or politics or religion or economy. We have to infer those connections from another value context, which is intuitive to humans but never scientific. There are no scientific tests for human rights, for acquaintance, for aesthetics, for morality, for being, or for value. It is impossible to prove that these things exist in an empirical domain; they rely ultimately upon a conviction.
People don't operate under the rules of science which level all measurable things in a sort of objective equality. Humans naturally stratify things into value groups, and that is what has ultimately brought about "Climategate." It isn't good enough merely to do science for the sake of finding things out; it has to mean something. It has to be important. When it comes to praxis, there is also a moral dimension because application always involves human action. None of those are scientific phenomena, but they begin to lead scientists in different circles more familiar to those who seek religion. We soon find that there are scientists who see data where there are none to be seen; scientists who desperately need to advocate a cause. Scientism gets in the way of science, really. It's just another religion.
None of us possess all of the objective facts. We don't do primary research of a generalized nature (few of us do any at all); we increasingly specialize. This requires a great deal of faith in other specialists who claim to have the first-hand knowledge that we lack. In this regard, we are something like those who once waited for Moses to come down from the mountain. While the true prophet of religion is measured on a scale that weighs the purity of his causes, the true scientist is identified by his lack of any cause at all. True scientists are the ones who don't evangelize--they don't have a reason to influence public opinion or to thwart skeptics. When scientists forsake science to become activists, like Chris Mooney thinks they should, that is when things like "Climategate" happen.
I'm... I'm sorry... I was in a hurry. I fully accept responsibility, but I ask Lord Taco to have mercy on me. PLEASE do not revoke my Slashdot ID. I'll do anything! I'll watch the ENTIRE Star Wars Christmas Special AND the Muppet Show featuring Mark Hamill and Chewbacca.
I swear, IT won't happen again. IT is the last time IT shall happen.
Please explain the misapplication of the derivative operation in a manner that an 8th-grader could grasp.
The reason why you have trouble with this is because you don't know what it actually means. If you did, you could explain it in simpler terms. Einstein and Hawking took no pride in being able to speak above everyone or attempt to use unneccessarily big words in attempting to communicate a complex idea (ping pong, mirrors, and tiny rocketships were all it took to describe the special theory of relativity). Their works are respected and accepted due to their ability to dumb things down. They were able to do that because they understood the concepts they were attempting to broadcast to their audiences.
Perhaps you could explain it as "People who think that daddy's car is going to kill the planet do so because the CO2 released in the 1960's caused the temperature to increase in the 1940's. If they can convince enough people that they're right, they can make so much money that they can all buy their own soccer teams."
I am the richest astronaut ever to win the superbowl.
But you can't show them global warming, at least not yet. You can only argue for its existence by indirect evidence, making predictions about the future that sometimes fail to be true--which sounds suspiciously like religion. Until you can predict the weather with the same reasonably unerring accuracy with which we predict projectile trajectories, the science isn't good enough. Which is a little bit scary, when you consider the potential problems if global warming is real and we realize that too late! So I certainly think it is worth understanding better. But you can't call it a "done deal" when stuff like "Climategate" would appear to suggest otherwise.
Yes, this.
Unfortunately, the soft-science guys want the same political clout that the hard-science guys get, so they're not in the least bit likely to agree with you. Therefore I doubt you'll ever see that maturity you're hoping for, and in the end this will probably erode faith in the hard-sciences as well.
The problem is that it is not Michael Mann et al's exclusive job to determine the quality of the papers being submitted. I imagine that there were some pretty respected "scientists" back in Galileo's day that were "sure" he was wrong and they were right. That is still not a justification to suppress his work.
At the end of the day, the publication of garbage papers helps bring the truth to light. If they want to truly discredit charlatans and prevent the publication of "garbage papers" they should require that the papers include the entire methodology or at least the entire data set used to support the conclusion being submitted.
The bottom line is that if your theory won't stand up to scrutiny, the problem is not with the critics.
The bubble is there, but it didn't start with the emails from the British Climate Change scientists.
In the U.S. the extreme fundamentalist Christians opening up natural history museums claiming that the Earth is only 5000 years old and that people coexisted with dinosaurs preceded the email leaks.
Then there is the example of otherwise intelligent and educated parents being anti-vaccine despite NIH (as well as other ) studies showing that vaccines are safe, are not linked to autism etc.
My personal opinion is that poor science education, especially education in the scientific method, education in how to think and encouragement to be *thinkers* - not memorizes is at the root of it.
Regardless, it did not start with the Climate Scientist scandal.
An earlier poster likened the global warming discussion to the discussion over relativity. However, Einstein managed to explain known anomalies, like the precession of the orbit of Mercury, which were not explained by Newtonian mechanics. With regard to global warming, it is common knowledge that there was a warm period in the Viking era, when grapes grew in Labrador (i.e. warmer than now). There was also a cooling period a few hundred years back when the Thames (the river that flows through London) froze over in winter. Somehow, these two anomalies have got lost, rather than being explained. So yes, I think it is questionable if global warming is real. It could be, but somebody needs to put these anomalies in context.
Even if global warming is real, despite recent cooling, somebody needs to explain how it is anthropogenic. The levels of CO2 are rising, true, and most likely due to people, but coincidence does not prove causation. CO2 only contributes about 5% of the greenhouse effect. Most of the rest is water vapor. I have not heard that we are also increasing the amount of water vapor generated at the levels necessary to explain the supposed rate of warming, nor, instead, how the water vapor quantity is driven by CO2.
Maybe somebody has explained these and I have not seen it. If so, would somebody please post a link to them?
They're talking about spending trillions on this at the big conference this week.
Now, what happens when those trillions are extracted from the existing economic structure (taxes, etc.)?
Those trillions don't get spent in the channels they would have been spent; purchases go down, employment goes down, etc. Instead, the trillions go to new channels; this is disruptive, and in all the areas where the money has been subtracted, the disruption is harmful.
Or, worse, we borrow those trillions, and because of interest, we have exactly the same problem later, only more expensive and consequently more extensive.
That's how people get hurt. Because we're not talking about something that is insignificant, economically speaking.
I'm not saying we shouldn't shift to nukes, solar, etc... I'm just saying there is a cost, and if the shift is done without following the usual paths, that is, if it is forced by law, that cost will be imposed and sudden, rather than a market function, ramping up naturally and slowly making inroads as most technologies do (and as, for instance, solar has been doing for a while now.)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
name them.
the only fact you've omitted is that the specific science in the film supported the thesis it was based around.
Good people go to bed earlier.
As an engineer, calling climate studies a "hard science" seems like a stretch to me. It does generally follow a mathematical-model-based scientific method, but those models are extremely complicated/poor compared to the models of basic physics. There is a big distinction within "hard science" that needs to be made.
No, you have it very wrong, and the GP was absolutely correct. We have theories of nature that predict the existence of oxygen, and how it should behave. If someone doubts these theories, we can invent thousands of predictions and experiments to show how the real world conforms to our understanding. These are direct tests, even if oxygen itself is not directly observable.
Give me a direct test for the existence of anthropogenic global warming.
So you say that CO2 is plant food, much like shit. So the more plant food the better so logically we should not be treating our sewage as it is good for plants.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Those arguing that science (and evolution and/or cosmological science particularly) demands atheism are not limited to backwoods preachers, or even the pro-religion side of the issue more generally. Consider, e.g., Richard Dawkins.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
True, but there is a need for good scientific communication. Yes, you can't construct an air tight argument in eighth grader terminology, but you SHOULD be able to communicate the basics of your work to an eighth grader.
The GP is absolutely correct - the best way to have someone not trust you, and generally not trust your field, is to tell them that you can't even start to explain your point because they don't have the necessary background/experience/education/IQ.
In my experience that mistrust is well placed: if someone can't explain at least the basics of their point simply, there is an excellent chance that they don't really understand it themselves. There's a famous scientist (I want to say Pauli, but I'm not sure) who said essentially the same thing. Einstein himself wrote one of the clearest, simplest descriptions of relativity, for the layman, and Feynman was famous for his ability to communicate complicated scientific concepts simply and clearly.
Out of nothing? Have you seen the source code? Not to mention the fact that they deleted data, which you don't fucking do. Now, in the e-mails themselves, there's nothing conclusive, but there doesn't have to be. The hints that are there, combined with the source code of their models, and the fact that they 'lost' their data, means that you can't in good conscience rely upon any study of theirs in which they did not release all the data at the time of the study.
Combined with the fact that NASA and the NOAA continue to refuse to release their algorithms for the adjustment of their data and you no longer have any reliable tweaked data source. Just the completely raw numbers. Whatever the state of climate change actually is, whether the earth's warming or cooling and whether CO2 is the primary driver, is irrelevant, because the vast, vast majority of research on the subject just became invalid unless it purely used the raw data. Which most of them didn't.
I'm leery of the pervasive suggestion that observational inference is not "as valid" as empiricism. Inference has its roots in Bayesian theory, which is really good at coming up with hard degrees of certainty based on collected data. The idea is that if a model still holds after removing independent random data points, you've effectively tested it. In a very real sense, properly done inference is empiricism.
While not all kinds of observational inference lend themselves to a strictly quantitative framework, the concepts are the same and just as valid.
I don't think the question is will science suffer, this garbage falls into the pile of "stuff" where the average person says: "Hey, look it's politically motivated..." and tunes out. Especially in the U.S. It seems almost anyone in a political office will grab at almost anything to scare people into supporting them. Consequently, IMO, anything coming out of a politically supported enviroment in the US, has slightly less credibility than the cartoon lineup for that day's TV viewing.
The whole human caused global warming hypothesis is a scam. Global warming has occurred on planet Earth before human beings even existed. Global warming
is occurring on other planets in our solar system - and guess what? Nobody's driving hummers on Mars. Any real scientists knows this. That isn't to say we shouldn't
control pollution, but the Al Gore idiots of the planet need to shut up.
A theory should remain a theory until it can stand up ... to the scrutiny of skepticism ...
No, a theory should remain a theory forever -- otherwise theory becomes dogma.
Some theories are more reliable and better established than others. But all knowledge is waiting to be disproved -- at least, that's what I remember of Karl Popper's falsifiability.
Theories should, of course, be subjected to the scrutiny of skepticism, and replaced, where possible, with better theories.
-kgj
All this "climategate" bullshit is is really just the same-old-same-old quote mining from the "conservative"/neocon fundy anti-Science crowd and hyped up by their mouthpieces like Fox News.
To see the real absurdity of it all, watch this :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P70SlEqX7oY
jdb2
The whole point of science is that no belief is required. Science is a method, a process by which we hope to learn something about reality. Nobody has to resort to believing anything, just look at the data. People can and will sometimes disagree about the correct interpretation of the data, but that's very different from "believing". As stated several times above by others, the real problem here is people who know little about the scientific process being very loud about their uninformed opinions.
TFA said (as essentially its main point):
Actually, this is one of the most basic principles of how civil engineers build bridges. It's called "margin of safety." You don't build to the worst you can prove will happen. You build to the worst that you can't prove will not happen.
One thing I do agree with the TFA is that the public doesn't understand how science works (obviously neither does the author) and that is creating a huge public relations crisis. Science needs some articulate advocates who are actual real scientists (or at least deeply understand what science is), not the politicians (Gore) and editorialists (Henninger) who seem to be framing the discussion now.
The role of CO2 in warming the earth was first worked out by Arrhenius in the 1900's. A nice summary of the development of scientific thought regarding CO2 and climate modeling can be found here
Comment removed based on user account deletion
They brought this upon themselves, and by extension ALL the rest of us who consider ourselves "naturalists" in the literal sense of that word. They were in fact performing BAD science. Science is about the process, the Method, and a big part of that is the acknowledgement that nothing is truly a Law written into stone. Dogmatism and religiosity have NO place in science, and yet that is exactly what this ClimateGate displays for the whole world to see: dogmatism in the scientific process. It demonstrates exactly what happens when stupid human beings form emotional attachments to ideas and then either (a) can't let go of them when they're disproven or (b) react badly when those ideas are challenged.
Both (a) and (b) are utterly destructive to the scientific process.
Has everyone forgotten that there were stubborn "believers" who clung to the validity of Piltdown Man even after the hoax was revealed? That lesson should have been driven home in every science class in the world in the many decades since. It hasn't. There are still too many believers in science, who form unproductive emotional attachments to theories and then proceed to ruin the process for everyone, scientist and layperson alike.
Religiosity, faith, and dogmatism have no place in science. If we don't have a very public referendum about ClimateGate and openly discuss the fact that those involved DID screw up, and how and why they screwed-up, we'll be missing yet another opportunity to teach this lesson again.
I can see your point, and certainly think that providing an overview of the subject for the layman is useful. However, the trouble is that while it may be be possible to provide a simple version of the argument, your opponent can also provide a simple and, on the surface, plausible argument as to why you're wrong. How then does the non-expert tell which one is right? The argument would rapidly and inevitably descend into more technical detail until the layman was lost. Either that or it would turn towards a slanging match, in which case the person better skilled at that kind of argment would "win". That tends not to be the scientist though, as they're not used to that kind of thing.
Special relativity is something of a special case in that it can be described in straightforward terms and without any advanced maths. I guess I've seen too many simplified and appealing descriptions of things which are so far gone from the detailed description that the whole point is lost.
Ahem. I thought it was already shown that vegetation - including trees - is growing faster due to the increase in atmospheric CO2. That means you can't really use tree rings to gauge temperature change when by definition the thing you think is changing the temperature is also know to effect tree growth and hence the rings.
But in doing so, they've removed the global-warming signal (the long-term trend)!
In time series analysis all trends and other nonstationarities in the series must be either explained or removed by preprocessing before regression can be attempted. Because they don't have anything that would explain the warming trend they filter it out then obtain a good model for the rest of the variation of global temperature by correlating it with the ENSO phenomenon with lag 7. Of course the slight warming trend is still there. This just means it's not explained by El Nino. I don't really see how this contradicts any climate change science.
Here is a link to an article "Five GraphsThat Will Change Your Mind" by David Brooks.
Brooks is a theoretical physicist who is not a protagonist in the (pro or con) Global Warming gaggle.
The East Antarctic ice sheet disagrees with you.
Why the hell does is seem that I always run out of points just before reading something like this?
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
If an 8th grader could grasp it it wouldn't take years of education and research expereience to do. Or to quote Feynman, "Listen, buddy, if I could tell you in a minute what I did, it wouldn't be worth the Nobel Prize". Any explanation on that level can be countered by someone with an equally plausible sounding but wrong explanation on a similar level.
Actually doing a full, detailed assessment of the validity of evidence would take an experienced scientist from a different field a *long* time to read through all the relevant publications, learn the material and arrive at his own conclusion.
Climate science is not nearly as hard as modern physics. A mining engineer with a BA in math can poke holes in climate science papers. It seems to me many of their problems arise from bad use of statistics and mathematics, which are not fields where climatologists are experts.
As long as there are humans involved it is valid to be skeptical regarding power, authority, motivation and credibility.
Additionally, scientific theories that were once accepted fall or are significantly revised all the time. One doesn't need to be informed to have a valid skepticism. Consider all the chemicals that harm us that we were previously told were safe.
The objectivity of Science is based on the process, not on the virtues of individual scientists. Certainly not on their politeness in (supposedly) private communication. There are, no doubt, some scientific skeptics about various aspects of climate change. This controversy shows them getting published rather than otherwise. You don't actually hear that much about these people in the media. What you hear over and over in the media are purveyors of "antiknowledge". This is a public relations technique of misleading the public about scientific or factual knowledge inconvenient to the purveyor. A prominent feature are "talking points" that sound convincing to those who haven't studied the field but are easily seen to be wrong or misconceived by anyone who is informed about the subject. (Look at "scientific creationism"). The originators of this stuff are con artists. Of course, many people who pass this stuff on are victims of the swindle rather than swindlers. Scientists SHOULD be angry at swindlers, and so should you.
"Some information I receive from large group of people may not be unbiased. Without doing the work to verify it, I can't be sure I should trust it. How will I know if I can trust it?"
And the obvious answer is ... Do your homework. Peer review and serious journalists exist to help you. That does not mean they are going to be perfect. The more effort you put into finding the truth, the more likely you will get a true answer. No amount of work will get you 100% certainty, and if you make no effort to find the truth you should expect to be wrong most of the time. This should not be news to anyone who lives in the real world. Having read too many opinion pieces in the WSJ, I suspect it is news to the author of this piece.
I wish people would stop whining that understanding complex issues is hard. If you think knowing the truth about something is important, then put effort into finding it. If not, admit that you are uninformed.
It's absurd that one can be considered "educated" in the western world without having a basic understanding of century old (or older) scientific principles (evolution, relativity, calculus...). It is not "too hard" to learn these things. If you have a college degree, you should be as familiar with basic science as you are with writing essays.
If the average lay person has as much understanding of modern science as they do something like modern economics (we all know China holds our debt, and why), then an attitude of skepticism toward scientists is actually desirable. Without that basic understanding, how are we to communicate?! How do you express something like climate change to a populace which doesn't know 19th century thermodynamics? On what basis can they trust or criticize you? I don't trust people saying things that sound like nonsense. A sometimes "nonsense" people turn out to actually be lawyers, but not knowing their basic terminology I can't tell the difference between a charlatan and the real thing, so I can't really trust any of them. I imagine that's how most people see scientists.
All we're left with is politics and sound bytes, which does not lead to a helpful discussion.
And what about the fact that the Antarctic Ice is gaining more mass than it's losing each year?
Money carries an agenda. Scientists who work for sponsors, including foundations, oil companies or even governments AND who disagree with the predispositions of the above are soon out of money, out of work, out of science.
Besides NASA climatologists getting shut up during the Bush administration, you mean?
You show an unsurprising lack of knowledge about how actual professional science is conducted. Any scientist who could put forth convincing evidence to counter any prevailing theory will get their grant money. Someone who can prove that the globe isn't warming, or that it's not human released CO2 that's doing it, is in for a lot of research cash.
It should also be noted that the whole "global warming hypothesis" doesn't just come out of someone's ass-- it's based on observation first. The globe is warming, and scientists went looking for a good explanation for the observed phenomena. Human activity is the one that best fits the available data.
... MTBE's in California were sold to us by the environmentalists. It was supposed to be safer than leaded fuels. It cost billions of dollars and taxes to change of the refinery and distribution industries. Then, shortly after legislated implementation, we discovered MTBE's were WORSE than lead.
The same "worse situation" has been demonstrated with ethanol blended fuels but the environmentalists are still pushing it on us.
Does one have to be informed at this point to be skeptical of environmental science after these examples AND knowledge that the scientific community is actively deleting information and consciously manipulating information to achieve a perceived desirable end?
Am I correct in understanding that there is concern over he concept of questioning science or math? Shouldn't we be doing just that? Isn't questioning these things a good thing? Couldn't it (wouldn't it) lead to greater interest and understanding? Isn't that the nature of science? It's more than just saying maybe they are right. Doesn't it include saying maybe they are wrong?
It seems like hubris to think the unwashed masses should just accept these things because it is beyond them to undertsand. Perhap I just don't understand.
It is a bigger problem with something that is as politicized as global warming, but explaining to the layman is still important, for the layman but even more importantly for the scientist.
General relativity, or even special relativity is NOT easy to explain without math. Many people have tried, and screwed it up royally. There's the famous quote (from a newspaper article) that only three people in the world understand Einstein's theories. You think describing special relativity is simple because someone took the time to come up with examples and metaphors that we still repeat today.
Climate change is different. The basics can be explained simply. A greenhouse is a simple example that everyone is familiar with (thus, "the greenhouse effect"). The problem is, climate is a big, complicated system and nobody really understands how it works. That lack of understanding manifests as an inability to explain the situation simply. That lack of understanding is evident to the public.
Yes, there is a lot of anti-global warming FUD that gets thrown around. However, climatologists and others have made the mistake of descending to the level of the global warming deniers: they mention how it's a very complicated system, just trust us, we understand it, they make emotional appeals, they use scare tactics, and they generally pretend to have a greater level of understanding than they actually do. This isn't all the climatologists' doing, but they are where things start.
When both sides are using the same unscientific approach to communication what is the public supposed to think? The logical conclusion is that both sides are on roughly equal ground.
I suspect a far better approach would be to communicate clearly, explain the things we are sure about, freely recognize those we are less sure about, and quit trying to scare the public into action. Let the whackos and industry shills reveal themselves as such and quit trying to out whacko and out shill them.
While we are at it, let's do the same thing for how inflation, unemployment, public health statistics, education metrics, and poverty rates are calculated.
Inflation is measured by the CPI, aka the consumer price index. There is also the PPI, the producers price index. There are half a dozen other indexes that attempt to measure inflation. All of them are published and available to anyone who wants to review the details.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes unemployment data. Again, it's available to anyone who wants to read and inspect it. Same for education metrics and poverty. Every metric collected is published and reviewable by the public, however, you could easily argue we are not collecting the right metrics and data. To me, that is a fair point but it does not address the openness of the data.
In other words, the data for these items you laid out is available, well studied, and well debated. Climate change is nowhere near as "open" as these other subjects you mention.
"A Stanford researcher not too long ago discovered that ignorant people have no idea that they are ignorant."
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
I think scientists today have been reduced to dishonesty, "sexing up" their results, knowing the answer before they do the experiment etc.,
because of the insanely competitive and ruthless battle for funding grants. That is what is distorting the practice of science today.
We as a society need to look at how we support science and scientists, and improve it, if we want improved science coming out of it.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
When the plebes suck down bullshit excuses for war, scream that they want their gods mixed in with science, and show themselves to be unable to even balance a check book...
It's always been that the intellectual has been only tollerated by the superstitious American public. Now the sky-worshippers are stepping up the hate and blaming it on the 'elites' who's hard gave these "don't need no science" slobs the lifestyles they so covet.
Blar.
People talk, and behave, 90% on their perception of their interests (mixed with vague hunches of what is the case), and 10% based on anything
that if examined could be called "knowledge".
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
What is it about the intellectual elitists here and there that they cannot for the life of me use the logic and reason they claim is what seperates modern humanity from the ancient barbarian???
-the earth, by scientific ESTIMATES is 4.5 billion years old
-the earth, by scientific ESTIMATES has been through 6 ice ages
-the earth, by scientific ESTIMATES has been much warmer in its history than during the short period of human existence we are now the product of meaning a natural CYCLE of warming and cooling is a state of NORMALCY that has occurred for the billions of years pre modern humanity
-the earth, by scientific ESTIMATES has a climate that was/is subject to other natural forces both terrestrial and astronomical that can be verified to be occurring on other neighboring bodies in the solar system, indicating a solar influence shared by all bodies in this solar system
-the earth, by the scientific ESTIMATES has warmed recently but since they deleted that data they have abandonded science for geopolitical posturing, the warming which MAY have occured pre 1998 of which has been on a cooling trend since could have been the foundation for REAL Climate Science but that was all literally, thrown away.
Notice a trend here????????
But in their quest for power, rooted in political ideology designed to punish the productive, reign in the free and create more income stream for their follies, they have reignited the Randian discussion soon to go global. This happened before although Atlas had not shrugged yet....
Message to the elite- fuck off or revist 1792!!!!!!!!!!!!
science is not science today. It's science exploitation.
I was once a scientist back in the early 90's and at the university on scholarship, but my adviser was lame (ignorant), my professors hated the way I did things and my learning method (I was unorthodox), didn't publish much (but had cool ideas/experiments), and I wasn't in the nerdy "click"/social circle of grad-students and cross-university professors. Basically I didn't fit into the "mold" of what I concluded as science exploitation (publishing, patenting, finding funding, winning prizes, networking with peers, taking "over the world" with my ideas). I just wanted to do basic science: like the way Newton did.
So I left, went into industry, made a name for myself and lost a lot of what I learned (QED, NMR, Space Physics). And I'm much happier now.
You are now going to drink an HIV & DDT cocktail !!
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
If the average blue-collar idiot is so smart, why do they so embrace religion which is circular logic and conflict of interest at its very core?
They take a poor analogy and run with it, and when the extrapolated analogy does not match the science, these retards start screaming.
Blar.
When methodology that could be compared to this is used in other fields of science, like geology, it is almost never questioned. When a soil core from Manhattan Island shows layers of sand deposited by beach over-topping during hurricanes, no one says "That's not proof that hurricanes could hit New York - all it proves is that sand was deposited here in the past". No one says "This is just an invented result by those looking to make money out of building tidal barrages". The whole idea of a "religion of science" is ridiculous. There is good science, and pseudo science. There are incompetent or corrupt or biased people in every profession and every field, suggesting that scientists are like gods is bordering on trolling.
1. "Trick" is frequently used in scientific context to mean "clever method" or "correction".
"Trick" is used to mean "clever method" in many contexts because that's one of the common definitions of the word!
I mean, do all these people who are hanging on this word as proof that AGW is all a deliberate lie also think that the Late Show with David Lettermen used to feature a segment involving dumb pets engaging in acts of deceit?! "Boopsi isn't really doing backflips! It's a sham; they tell you right in the name!" Sadly this kind of argumentation, where you take a word with several meanings and then pretend it has only one possible meaning, is quite common around here.
I think another post said it well: In ten years of emails, I'd expect a lot more incriminating evidence than a few trite phrases if this was all a global conspiracy. Hell, I do not think AGW is some kind of lie or conspiracy, yet I was still expecting to see more juicy and scandalous bits. After all, Stephen J Gould found substantial evidence of errors in studies consistently favoring the biases of the researchers even in cases where he had no doubt that the research was conducted with all earnestness and sincerity -- even in his own research! Add in the fact of human nature that not all scientists are sincere, and I was honestly quite credulous when people were initially saying there were "bombshells" in the leaked emails.
Instead, this "ooh he said 'tricked' and 'hid'! I knew it!" nonsense is just pathetic. Seriously, I expected more.
The enemies of Democracy are
If even half the time, effort and money that has gone into trying to convince everyone that the world will end unless we drink the global warming koolaid, we could be well on the way to having the majority or our energy being generated from nuclear sources.
Nuclear energy makes more sense than any other option by far. It is proven, it is safe, and the technology has just scratched the surface when it comes to issues of cost, efficiency and safety. In other words, it will only become cheaper, safer, and more efficient.
Until that decision is made, all this amounts to is pissing into the wind.
There is an emerging offshoot of evolutionary theory and the mathematics of game theory
that will soon be saying a lot about "values", "morality" etc.
I will admit that the research and theories in this area are preliminary, but the direction it will go is pretty clear.
Much of morality will be explained as special cases of the survival benefits of co-operation, where that
co-operation is enabled via the trust and reciprocity that is engendered by following the golden rule "Do unto others..."
Co-operation, in many situations, creates an increased probability of survival per unit of energy expended by
the members of a co-operating group, compared to if they competed alone. Therefore co-operation is a thermodynamically
optimal solution to many problems confronted by autonomous, planning agents such as ourselves.
Regarding values: Many of our values e.g.
1. protect the young,
2. admire the beautiful,
3. "be kind to strangers",
4. "value the natural eco-systems"
can be interpreted as:
1. "help the species survive"
2. "admire the central/average form of your organism, and/or the efficient (for some reproductive purpose or moving purpose etc.), or simply,
admire complex and purposeful shapes, such as ourselves.
3. See "golden rule" and thermodynamic efficiency of cooperative survival strategies.
4. A complex, bio-diverse eco-system exhibiting a variety of complex, adaptive forms and functions, is a thing that can generate
many benefits for us, and a thing that is much like ourselves in its creative quest for persistence of form, so just for that reason alone,
may be valued and thought beautiful.
Sorry to make it all so plain and lacking in mystery. There is plenty of mystery still in the details, but the shape of these explanatory
sociobiological theories / emergent system game theory explanations is pretty clear and compelling.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Global warming MAY be happening (but probably hasn't for a decade now..),
If you don't think climate scientists are credible, why should we believe your sweeping and unqualified statements any more?
Because you talk about how you hate communism and associate this with climate change?
Because you have a low uid?
Moron
Newtonian Mechanics are valid, just not as accurate as Relativity.
Newtonian Mechanics are a valid approximation in certain circumstances to the underlying fundamental physics that, as far as we know, is relativistic. Relativity is not "just more accurate" it is, as far as we know, a fundamental description of reality. It might be that there is an even more accurate model of reality of which relativity is an approximation, but we do not know that for certain.
All true, but note that it did not prevent him from researching, getting published, and being recognized as the interesting physicist he was. The system worked. Those of you who are assisting in tearing down the system in your "useful idiot" mouthing of "Four legs good, two legs bad" will make sure that it never works again.
That is all.
A simple book I read in university. It was pretty straight forward. Anyone who calls themselves a "Scientist" should ascribe to it. Those that don't should be called something else.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method
QUOTE:
"Among other facets shared by the various fields of inquiry is the conviction that the process be objective to reduce biased interpretations of the results. Another basic expectation is to document, archive and share all data and methodology so they are available for careful scrutiny by other scientists, thereby allowing other researchers the opportunity to verify results by attempting to reproduce them. This practice, called full disclosure, also allows statistical measures of the reliability of these data to be established."
Crazy stuff eh?
LOL I can't find the exact book I read in university (it was a rather old one in the library), but I did find this one. Someone should seriously buy those jerks this for a Christmas gift:
http://www.amazon.com/How-Think-Like-Scientist-Scientific/dp/0690045654/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1260478099&sr=1-3
The original poster is already too confused to be able to do much with science if he puts Mathematics into that category.
What we consider math is a group of widely divergent philosophies sharing certain basic symbols for their expression. Of course, science is also in a similar state but it usualy has the additional characteristic of being applied to a physical universe in order to classify data.
Even though the application of math in science does allow for usable approximations of physical universe phenomenon, it has no direct relation to the physical universe itself.
Even that doesn't make him a denier (in no pejorative sense, mind) of anthropogenic climate change- it just makes him unsure. (which is what a good scientist should be, without another, better theory to support).
"It is possible to commit no errors and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life." -Peak Performance
I have been to Antarctica and I have seen the effects of global warming. The glacier in the bay where Shakeleton left his men is a good 100 yard further from the sea than it was in his time. We made it far enough south in a non-icebreaker to see Emperor penguins. That shouldn't be happening. Believe me it's real.
-
there is no absolute certainity in Knowledge! As Newtons ironclad laws of motions where shattered into fragments by the theory of relativity, so any other knowledge can only be trusted if we test it over and over.
We can only say: this seems to be true because no one could show a case where it was wrong.
Netwons physic was not falsified by Einstein, but left in a frame of validity of v much less than c.
The scientific principle say: any hypothesis must take into account know facts and predict the outcome/results, best of a future observable event, by experiment or natural incident.
it must be open published, and everybody ( capable to understand it ) should be able to repeat the experiment/observation.
Therefore religion is not within the scientific realm.
And climate change has one scientific problem: any human experimenter nowadays can not repeat any experiment done with our earth as a failure will forbid future experiments caused by lack of scientists to do them!
You are talking about the one lady, his wife, right?
He doesn't have much in the way of 'issues' with the rest of the women, just sex.
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
You can show people global warming. They did it on mythbusters. The greenhouse with more CO2 was hotter.
What newtonian mechanics, or relativity, or quantum mechanics say about the world are miles apart. Maybe the math gives you similar results for a wide range of problems, but the implications of each theory are very different. Newton describes a very different world than Einstein, or Heisenberg. There is no "refinement" - we are talking about vastly different paradigms.
46 & 2
Incredulity is the healthy default stance. Credibility must be earned, and in science it is by making predictions based on a theory that turn out to be correct time and again. Climate science, which is about long term trends is too young a field to have earned much of this kind of credibility.
Some examples where scientific communities have deluded themselves by failing to apply the scientific method are:
I'm sure there are many more. Both these disciplines have earned more credibility than they deserved years ago by adhering better to the scientific method of late and producing theories that better fit observations. An example of a scientific discipline that has failed to do this is phrenology. Another is numerology. Another is astrology. Because of persistent failure to follow the scientific method, and failure to make useful and accurate predictions about the real world, these disciplines have been demoted to pseudoscience. Although if you consider the state of the art in phrenology to be: Bumps on the head don't predict a damn thing, and the state of the art in Numerology to be numerical patterns have no magical powers, and the state of the art in Astrology to be, the movements of the planets and the positions of the constellations have no apparent effect on much of anything, then maybe these disciplines too can be considered science. Climate Science will earn credibility as a science to the extent that it adheres to the scientific method. Doing so will enable it to make better and better predictions about the climate which will be born out in time. Succumbing to the temptation to stray from the scientific method will fail to produce useful results.
Climate scientists know high CO2 levels are associated with hot climates and they want to know whether human generated CO2 causes climate change. Let's leave this for a minute and consider another similar problem.
Knowing that Cigarrete Smoking is associated with Lung Cancer, consider the problem of investigating whether or not Cigarette Smoking CAUSES Lung Cancer in Humans. The obvious way is to imprison 60 random people, forcing 30 of them to smoke, and keeping cigarrettes away from the other 30, and then look at lung cancer rates after 20 years.
This in unethical. Instead scientists do the next best thing which is to experiment on a model - the mouse. They imprison 60 mice, and force 30 of them to smoke and supply the others with smoke free air. Then they look at lung cancer rates in the mice. Are mice people? No. Mice might react differently to cigarrette smoke than people. However the experiment rules out the possibility that there is a gene in mice that both causes lung cancer and the propensity to smoke. Assuming people react similarly to the model, then this has some hard to quantify bearing on whether Cigarrette Smoking causes Lung Cancer in humans. It's important to note that the mice are just regular mice. Nowadays mice for experiments are commonly genetically engineered so there is the possibility that the scientists themselves might use mouse models 'designed' to behave as expected. This would be a fallacy because it would support whatever hypothesis the scientists were testing.
Like the medical researchers, Climate Scientists are unable to perform the experiment they want to perform, namely pollute 30 earths with CO2, and leave 30 pristine, and then see what happens to the climate. They must instead perform the experiment on models of the climate. These models are mathematical and/or computer models. The problem is that the models are designed and built by the very scientists that are using them to test their theories such as the theory that CO2 emmitted by people causes global warming.
Climate scientists construct their models s
...
You:> Hey Connolly, some guy says you were totally wrong, you were claiming global cooling was rampant and we were headed for an Ice Age.
Connolly:> Did not.
You:> Hey Newsweek, did you run a bunch of articles that were embarrassingly wrong?
Newsweek:> Nope.
No brain, no pain.
This piece, and many of the opinions here just show the astounding levels of ignorance there are out there. The "climategate" email fiasco has resulted in 1 email (from nearly 20 years ago) being brought to light where scientists were engaged in frank discussion of problems they'd had with their data. Did they follow the scientific method and the standards of rigor properly? No, it doesn't seem so. Despite this, the science has marched on and the cause and impacts of human caused climate change have been independently studied and verified by groups of scientists the world over. The result, mostly propagated by the right, has been to throw out climate science entirely and this piece and many posters now want to throw out science all together? Part of the beauty of science is that it can studied, researched, and developed independently, yielding consistent results. Many groups of American and Russian physicists had found that after the fall of communism they'd reached the same results, for example. Theorists will work to propose new models and understanding about details of nature that wasn't known or well understood before, and then experimentalists will go out and try to confirm the theory, both verifying it and keeping it in check. When either group has reached a result, they'll publish in a peer-reviewed journal where the work can be independently verified and then built on by anybody who has the knowledge, motivation, and insight to do so. At it's very core, science is an attempt by us to describe the universe and everything in it from a rational perspective. The rationalist holds true that the criterion of truth is not sensory, but intellectual and deductive. It comes as no surprise but in fact a heartbreaking dissapointment to me that in the current climate of irrationality in the United States, and to a lesser extent Canada, you have this sort of stance taken against the intellectual and deductive search for truth.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Correction: The case for oxygen also doesn't have people receiving large amounts of money to confirm or deny the evidence no matter what. If you believe the money is only going to people who don't believe in global warming, I have a bridge to sell you. Even the big oil companies now are playing the global warming card. They play both sides of the political spectrum, and always will. They know global warming can give them huge subsidies to develop alternative energy sources (with much of the money going to the pockets of the company). They also know that the government's response to global warming will likely be largely written by the big energy companies. This will enable them to limit exploration (who wants to do that anyhow, it's expensive and doesn't have immediate payouts) while creating artificial shortages in the market. This will result in higher prices for all of us, while the big energy companies get even larger profits, as they aren't paying to extract that expensive oil anymore. Of course distortions will exist overseas from governments not employing these measures, but largely, the big oil companies are likely to make a killing through the global warming issue. The real people who would suffer are the average joes (who now pay more for energy), companies in other fields (who pay more for energy), and in particular new people or businesses that would have come up to challenge the mega corporations dominance. You can be assured that the mega corporations will be able to release carbon at or near the levels they always have, however a new competitor will have a much harder time getting the permits to do this, and may not have the money to do it. Sounds like business as usual with mega corporations stepping in to stop competition wherever it can. Phil
There is a difference between what that the bigCs claim or predict and what you are predicting.
Yes, I'd bet with you on all of your predictions, but try this:
Will it rain more or less in England this year than last?
Will it be colder in Moscow this Feb than last Feb.?
Will Ca. have more or less fires this summer than last?
We can extend that to more rain in the next 5 years than the last 5? etc.
The problem is, the bigCs can't even get that right, and when they do notice that they haven't got it right, they try to hide it.
Honest, climate change happens. It has been observed in every form of historical record that we can access and interpret. What's missing from the historical record is "why?".
Today, many bigCs have come out and said "Man is why" and Man we have to change it. Let's assume that they do have it right(and are not hiding the fact that they have it wrong) and temps will climb over the next few centuries. Many, including myself have asked "Who says this climate change is bad?" Man is a tropical creature. It is getting warmer, why not welcome it?
Many bigCs and the politicians that back them demand that exorbitant amounts of resources be spent in an effort to try and combat climate change. Why? What exactly is to be gained from all of this expense? At the moment we cannot even combat a tornado(all we can do is try and duck) and they propose that we take on Nature on a planetary scale?!??! It's ridiculous.
Face it, the climate will change whether we want it to or not. It's natural. Live with it.
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
Comment removed based on user account deletion
There are three groups of people:
Those who understand global warming, understand what the East Anglia scientists were doing, realize it was stupid, but also understand that underlying climate science hasn't changed and won't change their opinions;
Those who have always denied global warming, haven't looked at what actually happened, and won't change their opinions; and
Those who pay no attention to any of it (the laymen), who won't change their opinions.
Thing is, the laymen aren't paying any attention, so it doesn't really matter.
Why?
It's like saying: Chewbacca is a wookie, Wookies live on Endor, so therefore your Monkey was your Uncle.
...
I am perfectly qualified, and so is anyone else who is able to think critically, admittedly a shrinking demographic.
You are qualified, as in you have skills which would allow you in the course of time to be able to render a meaningful analysis of the data. But it would be more accurate to say that, due to critical thinking ability, you could become qualified, once you've studied all the relevant fields to a sufficient degree.
Or do you think you can judge the correctness of a statistical analysis without knowing statistics, the relationship between heat and energy without knowing physics, the context of historical data without knowing natural history, the implications of trends without knowing climatology, or even the validity and precision of raw data without understanding the techniques used to acquire it -- and still claim to be a critical thinker?
Or to use a more pure example -- do you think critical thinking alone will allow you to determine the correctness of a mathematical proof, without knowledge or understanding the theorems used in each step?
Critical thinking requires knowledge, it cannot replace it. And just as you wish to use critical thinking to determine whether someone else's conclusions are correct, you should apply critical thinking to yourself and determine if you are equipped to make such a judgment. And if you are honest, then you will come to the conclusion that there are cases where you are not -- at least not without learning more.
The enemies of Democracy are
Well yes in general. But string theory? Really? It has a long way to go in terms of undoubtable expiremental results before it's taken to be as axiomatic as Newton's laws and Maxwell's Equations.
Except that since Arp and Tifft were able to produce a testable set of hypotheses, and technology advanced to allow for some of that testing, any redshift quantization theory has been strictly bound to a very small fraction of H_0.
In particular, SDSS, 2dF and the recent deep field images recently released show no redshift periodicity strongly predicted by Arp et al's intrinsic redshift cosmologies, and furthermore the deep images show normal spiral and elliptical galaxies at high redshifts with the full spectrum compression fully in line with H_0 as the measure of the metric expansion of space.
SDSS quasar IV (2007) essentially eliminates the Arp cosmology. There is substantial lab HEP evidence an Arp cosmology would have to incorporate too (high Lorentz factor spectrum compression, for instance, with respect to his proposed QSO ejecta models).
It is possible that Arp could formulate a new cosmology that can account for the high redshift full-spectrum normal galaxies, and there are plenty of uncertainties still (metallicities in high-z normal galaxies, for instance).
Finally, it's hard to call a working scientist a pariah; he still circulates interesting preprints (recent ones with the Burbidges have been widely read) although he appears to enjoy continuing to focus on a hypothesis which looks increasingly dead. His peculiar galaxies *are* interesting, but they are not good evidence against the concordance cosmology.
So? That Arp has not been able to come up with an alternate cosmology that has stood up against falsification does not mean that his observations have not falsified the Big Bang cosmology. You seem to imply that someone falsifying a theory has to have a viable alternative theory. The scientific method requires no such thing
For those of you who don't know, all the clocks in GPS satalites must be re-set daily in order for the positions to be accurate, because they run several seconds slower than the exact same clock on earth runs due to the fact that they are travelling faster in orbit than we are just spinning on the surface of the earth. For those of you unaware of how GPS works, it operates on timing the signals recieved from the GPS device to calculate distance, and 3 satalites with distances can then triangulate location. Accurate clocks are extremely important.
Hmm... so if the speed of these satellites is causing their clocks to run at a different rate relative to ground-based clocks, why do they need to re-set them daily (which means that the error would be high the longer they go since the last reset)? Why not recalibrate the clocks to run at different rates to compensate for this difference, so that at any time, they're very nearly in sync (and the last bit of error can be corrected with periodic resets)?
The lay person is to be thought of as useless whenever they question authority apparently. Unless of course you are Al Gore, then you can say the center of the earth is millions of degrees and it is fine as long as you are agreeing with the agenda of those is authority.
In doing so, it will make the lay person unsure of the credibility of all sciences without fully seeing proof of it
I always thought believing something without seeing proof was religion, not science.
This is *EXACTLY* what people need to hear, I couldn't agree more.
:)
Theories can be simplified down for "public understanding", but you lose information by doing so. It is good PR but not ultimately convincing to skeptics because of all the details that have been left out. They then dismiss science as preaching from above.
If everyone could understand all of modern science, what's so special about scientists?
Saying that though, all specialized fields of study encounter this issue, the average art critic moans about the lack of public appreciation of art, but if everyone appreciated art we wouldn't need art critics
I'd tell a UDP joke, but you may not get it. I'd tell a TCP joke, but I'd have to keep repeating it until you got it.
This started when media outlets devided the 'fair and balanced' means everyones opinion is as good as facts, and that a crazy person should be given as much, or more, air time then rational thinking people.
For example - Look how much air time Jenny Mcarthy gets for anti vaccine even thought she has no evidence at all, routinly spouts non-sense, and clearly has no idea of chemistry.
Oprah constantly pushs bull crap and anti-science shit on her show. That's what has caused people to view science in the same vain as crazy crap.
Oprah is the most dangerous woman to ever live. What she does literally kills children.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
How the hell was this modded insightful? Eighth grade understanding of the subject is superficial, and people will recognize that, and critics will simply trot out problems with the simplified version, making it look like you were lying.
Which is exactly what happens.
Science != Technology. It's an easy mistake to make.
Most techological improvements today don't have much to do with science. A scientific experiment is used to prove or disprove a theory, a technological advancement may apply many scientific theories, but there isn't much science about it.
Quick example: theory, it's possible to get a man on the moon (or making the TV thinner, or having trains go over 40MPH). Just by doing this it isn't science, there is nothing theoretically gained about this techological advancement, and if we failed at achieving some level of technology, it doesn't prove that anything was amiss in the theory (on the contrary, it usually proves that there's something not advanced enough about the technology).
On the flip side, sometimes techology doesn't even rely on science for advances. Fixed-wing airplanes and other similar aerodynamic structures are a good example. Technological advances occured for many years in airfoil design w/o much benefit from correct scientific theories about lift (for example the oft-reported equal-transit time bernoulli principle explanation about airfoils that pollutes so-called high-school and college science books). In many ways the techological advances inspired some number of scientific-style experiments, but the theory generally took a back-seat to experiemental results (e.g., if it worked, go with it, no need to explain why or develop "control-groups").
To use your example of thin tvs, the technology behind them is very primitive. For example, an LCD tv isn't much different than a multi-colored stained glass window in a church except that instead of the sun-shining behind it, it has a self contained light (florescent) bulb with lots of little electronically controlled shutters. Using LCD for a light shutter was envisioned way back in the early 60's and eventually productized in the 70's with digital watches. Of course getting the technology together so things are small took twenty more years. It's not even clear that this is the best technology for thin TVs(digital-micro-mirror or many little light sources like oled), but it is currently the most cost effective for manufacturing. At least the colored OLED techology needs some more high powered science behind it (e.g. band-gap analysis of semiconductors) than the current LCD technology.
Perhaps the confusion that most people have is that when you "debate" technology (e.g., is OLED better than LCD), it sounds like a scientific-style debate comparing competing theories. Is the OLED "brighter" or the LCD "less power-hungry and last longer" or the CRT "better color". We have a theory, we run an experiment and produce a winner and it's reproducable. But in reality, this isn't a scientific-style debate. It is a comparison in time of multiple technological tracks with lots of subjective input.
Contrast this to a scientific debate tomorrow between, Newtonian Physics, General Relativity and String Theory. If you take the current snapshot in time (e.g., need to "buy" a theory before christmas), I would guess you would declare General Relativity the winner, go buy that and declare that any one that bought any competing theory as a fool because of the clear current advantages of the GR theory over ST and NP. Of course that's not how to compare scientific theories, but that's the way we compare technology.
Science has to withstand the test of time and be predictive. Technology is a whisp in time. Many people in the current AGW debate are treating the data points, experiments, and theories like technology rather than science, yet applying the science label to it hoping to gain a positive association with science, but if you look underneath (as these recent emails illustrate), it's less about science than it is science in sheeps clothing.
Perhaps Feynman said it best in his classic speech "cargo-cult-science"
Umm, you might want to rethink that last one.
The difference between spam and poop is that you don't have to dig through septic tanks looking for real food. -- Me
Spot on
Which is why I said...
Humans deplete O2 and increase CO2. Just by living. Many nonhuman factors contribute to atmospheric CO2 as well. When speaking of "global warming," people mean more than just the "greenhouse effect" demonstrated by that experiment. They usually mean anthrocentric global warming and they usually mean "sufficient additional CO2 to tip our climate irretrievably out-of-balance."
However, just by living, humans don't increase the total amount of carbon in their environment. When we exhale CO2 the carbon comes from something we ingested, either something that was directly pulling CO2 out of the air/water or something that feed on something else directly pulling carbon from the air/water. Short of digging-up carbon that has been sequestered for millions of years, the only way humans can appreciably increase the overall percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere and oceans is to destroy the majority of organisms that photosynthesize or otherwise chemically uses CO2. That would take far more than the sum deforestation that human beings have caused thus far, it would also mean destroying the majority of everything from pond-scum to cacti, including grasses, crops, and decorative plants!
If you counter that volcanic activity can release carbon, I wouldn't argue with you. However, I will point out that there are hundreds of active volcanoes vs. hundreds of millions of vehicles powered by CO2 and thousands power plants that burn of fossil-fuels. I'll grant that one volcano releases more CO2 per year than a single car, and probably more than one modern coal-fire power plant. Yet I doubt that the difference is on the order of 10^6, and that's what it would take for volcanic CO2 emissions to be at parity to those from human sources!
Just because scientists may or may not have deduced that we are contributing to global warming doesn't mean that the politicians really running the world will give a shit either way.
When it is profitable to pillage the earth, it will happen no matter what the scientists say.
Tragedy of the Commons.
I guess this is where we should rope in the historians, sociologists, cultural studies professors and philosophers to do some meta-observations of the scientific community?
Only how much do we trust THEM?
The turtles have to stop somewhere.
Oh, and there also isn't such a thing as single monolithic SCIENCE!. There's Springer and Elsevier and various other "journal" companies with their abusive copyright policies, and then there's the editors of journals and the arXiv, who determine what can and can't be published, and then there's the quasi-professional pop-sci magazines like Scientific American and New Scientist, who determine what the broader scientific community should celebrate and what they should laugh at, and then there's big US federal money pools like NSF and DOE and DOD who determine what the big grants are, and then there's various universities, and then there's privately funded corporate labs (though probably not so many now as before WW2)... and they don't necessarily all agree.
(Book plug: "Tudedo Park" - http://www.amazon.com/Tuxedo-Park-Street-Science-Changed/dp/0684872889/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1260490378&sr=8-1 - which talks about how privately funded SCIENCE! helped win WW2)
I think the first step is to admit that there isn't one SCIENCE! anymore but multiple competing sciences. One would think that interdisciplinary conferences would help, but a lot of those seem to be spamferences and frauds, so...
It's all a big mess really.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
They've also refused to disclose their raw data, or even a list of what data they used.
Let's pick on GISTEMP since they've open-sourced their analysis code. From their site:
The current analysis uses surface air temperatures measurements from the following data sets: the unadjusted data of the Global Historical Climatology Network (Peterson and Vose, 1997 and 1998), United States Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) data, and SCAR (Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research) data from Antarctic stations.
Links to these data sources are provided in the documentation of their freely available analysis software:
Basic data set: GHCN - ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ghcn/v2
v2.mean.Z (data file)
v2.temperature.inv.Z (station information file)
For US: USHCN - ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ushcn/v2/monthly
9641C_200907_F52.avg.gz
ushcn-v2-stations.txt
For Antarctica: SCAR - http://www.antarctica.ac.uk/met/READER/surface/stationpt.html
http://www.antarctica.ac.uk/met/READER/temperature.html
http://www.antarctica.ac.uk/met/READER/aws/awspt.html
For Hohenpeissenberg - http://members.lycos.nl/ErrenWijlens/co2/t_hohenpeissenberg_200306.txt
complete record for this rural station
(thanks to Hans Erren who reported it to GISS on July 16, 2003)
They've gone as far as ignoring FOIA requests to the point where NASA will soon be facing litigation.
The FOIA requests do not request data or data sources. CEI is asking for documentation, such as memos or e-mail, of discussions related to several topics including RealClimate.org and the error McIntyre discovered. Read it in their own words.
They can open-source all the algorithms they want, but without showing their data, it's completely useless.
Now that you have the data as well, we look forward to your analysis.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
It is no surprise to see the the climate scientists found in the task of ignoring some data, picking data, and even making up some data, and then trying to discredit anyone who disagrees. Such actions are common in the current culture. If you have followed any of the evolution theories over the years you find the exact same actions being performed. When the actual empirical data is reviewed you find that much data had been ignored, some data is actually imaginary, and then they will attack anyone who disagrees. Much if not all the so called evolutionary science in text books today, and on TV has already been dis-proven by true science, but it is taboo to say such a thing in public. Big bang theories and age of the earth calculations have been debunked yet are still taught as fact. Yes most of it is political positioning. Just like the climate hoax used to get money and force political and economic decisions, so has the evolution hoax been used to force political, economic, and cultural decisions and shape a culture. Anyone who disagrees must be a disruptive person or a person that is crazy. How dare anyone disagree with the scientific community.Those that disagree loose jobs, loose money, get blackballed, called names and made out to be dumb and stupid. Others viewing shake in fear. And they become the biggest bullies of all. Yet the scientific community has become their own worse enemy. They trade status, money, power, and unquestioned authority for the truth. At what point does the abundance of non-truth become brain washing? When you have a culture that believes a lie, and punishes anyone that disagrees you have successfully brainwashed a country, nation, or world. Scary isn't it.
Bullshit to you - Its only revisionist if you fail to note I am talking about California - not the entire USA.
California required the use of oxygenates in its clean-air gasoline program in 1992 (and eliminations of lead additives). MTBE is an Ether which have been found to be cleaner than Alcohol additives. ethanol produces 54% more CO2 as global warming pollutant than gasoline. I clearly remember MTBEs sold to Californian voters as the solution to clean air emissions. www.arb.ca.gov/
"The California Air Resources Board predicted that the addition of oxygenates to fuels would reduce ozone precursors by 15%, reduce benzene emissions by 50% and reduce CO emissions by 11%; these reductions are equivalent to removing emissions from 3.5 million vehicles."
http://mtbe.ucdavis.edu/page2.html
This whole Greed thing is getting out of hand and it will be the end of us all.
The climate gate issue is incredibly damning.
There they all are in Copenhagen, just pretending like nothing happened.
Everyone first has to realize that these people working on "Climate Change" in Copenhagen do not care about people, plants, polar bears or anything else for that matter except control and the unlimited supply of money an entire world economy enslaved under a carbon credit ponzy scheme.
That is what they really want.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
only good will come of this. The great thing about science is... that it doesn't matter what you or I believe. It just is. And if the explanation accurately predicts what we saw, see or will see or if one can repeat tests to verify the claim... then all philosophical opinions are irrelivant.
Besides, what these scientists appeared to be doing (hiding their publicly funded data->process->results) has nothing to do with them being scientists. It has to do with them acting in an unethical manner. All scientific claims should be viewed with an air of skepticism... especially when money is at stake. So a little mis-trust is a good thing.
Also, if the end result is that more scientists will need to reveal more about their data/process before publishing results... that is also a good thing.
We just came through the era of lies. Hiding, manipulating, cherry picking truths in order to further a cause. Thank god some of these people are being outed. And if the result is a little distrust and forced transparency... Thank god too.
But really, if AGW is real and really as bad as they imply it will be. Why are they concerned about hoarding their data? If they were doing what it appears (withholding the data)... then they deserve every bit of punishment the public can unleash upon them. How dare someone hold the data hostage from a world of scientists who could help to refine their methods and more quickly validate/invalidate the claims of their results. If this is the case, these scientists are probably the most selfish self-centered workers in the world right now. Let their stoning begin. And higher some "open-sourcer's" to fill their shoes with a little humility. After all, isn't it THE WHOLE WORLD they are talking about over there?
You mean the ice sheet that has been both increasing and decreasing in the last two decades. (mostly increasing). If you are trying to use that as proof of global warming, then you are really misinformed.
Does this also count, if the "skeptics" do not use science to make their case, are given media exposure much greater than their viewpoint is worth, and has funding that far exceeds the research funding of the real scientists?
Rigorous as they are, scientists can also be awfully arrogant. Sometimes the skeptics and the unwashed public turn out to have been right after all despite decades of being dismissed by scientists. There is any number of examples like this. Examples of people in the scientific community whose work cannot be second guessed, even by other scientists, because they "have a huge reputation" and are "big names in the field".
[disclaimer, I've worked 15 years in climate research, acquiring hard data].
You mean you're one of those lying liars, right? So why should we believe anything you say...?
Unfortunately at this point of time claiming to be a scientist is not an appeal to authority. That's what this whole discussion is all about--not whether or not man-made (influenced?) climate change exists, not if you're educated on the subject, but whether or not lay people will accept your results as being unbiased and worthy of import. The question is whether or not science as a whole is now perceived to be worthless by the average person, man on the street.
Hint: The answer is yes. To the average person science is now just another avenue for politics and hence breaks down along party lines. It has become dogma. Noise.
By self-identifying as a scientist you are not stating you are knowledgeable about the subject and thus worth listening to, your opinion backed by research "proving" it to be true. All you've done is declare yourself a politician. A liar.
--bornagainpenguin
Have a Virgin Mobile USA smartphone? Give VMRoms.com a try!
An effective way to start is to not insult them. Maybe rather than thinking that a college level education is what is needed, why don't you try and describe it in a manner that anybody at an 8th grade level could grasp? You might get a more welcome and understanding response than by being an elitist prick.
Because we don't ask eight-graders to travel to Greenland and drill ice cores for their science class labs?
We all know that 2+2=5.
I'm in my right mind and I have the answer to everything!
George Monbiot has an incredible editorial on this:
Pretending the climate email leak isn't a crisis won't make it go away
Basically, if scientist want their ideas to be respected in the public, they have to learn the art of PR. We're in the information age now; there's no way around it and no more hiding.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
are as familiar with basic science as they are with writing essays. And they are equally good at both.
Yes, their writing really is that bad. Arguably worse.
I think the problem is that it is a fundamentally difficult issue. Climate models are far from perfect, There is a huge amount of raw data, but few long term consistent data sets. The public wants a clear statement: "water world" or "no problem" when the best science can provide is approximate probabilities for various outcomes.
Adding to the problem is the tremendous scale of the costs and consequences. Trillions of dollars depend on the results of the science (either way). This provides a lot of economic bias to spin the results one way or the other.
One could argue that the potential costs of global warming are so large that we should take action even if we are not sure there is a problem. One could argue that the costs of fighting global warming are so large that we should not take action until we have clear proof. Often people's opinions of these depend on whether they gain or lose from the costs.
I think that all we can do is make an attempt to not politicise the science, and listen to the scientist's conclusions. Having non-scientists state opinions about the data and analysis just adds to the confusion. Science is HARD - not really a good place for non-experts. (would you want a non-expert performing heart surgery or flying an airliner?). If you decide you can't trust the scientists - I think you are just screwed - who could you trust instead?
At some point you've got to call out a liar - that's how this "denier" stuff started, and since it's running in the USA you know that somebody had to pull a Godwin sooner or later.
Since it became a political and even philosophical issue there has been a lot of efforts to promote various fantasies in clear defiance of even obvious reality. Unfortunately it's all being played out as emotional manupulation and both sides have joined that game.
The "debate" is really to tell lies that deny reality against an alarming series of events that became clear in the 1980s. Reality is going to win every time, and in a couple of decades the deniers will be saying "why didn't you tell us you bastards".
Start recording temperatures in 1850, and in 1950 look at the trend. Do the same from 1950 onwards. Notice that CO2 increases IR absorption and is increasing in the atmosphere. Create a GCM and run it with and without the anthropogenic forcing. Notice which one fits the data. Download the program and the data from http://edgcm.columbia.edu/ and run it at home if you want to check. Oh, don't believe that data? Use this, or this new one. Want to check the GCM? run against paloclimate proxies, or write from first principles and do it on paper like Arrhenius did.
Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.-- Frontinus, 1st cent. AD
Interesting how eager people are to believe Eschenbach without any "auditing".
Anyway, check this comment and this comment in the McArdle thread before jumping to conclusions.
"the homogenization process is a fully automatic statistical treatment for 7000 stations - it has no biases for higher or lower temperatures. The homogenization is based on the records of the nearest 5 stations, which can have a higher or lower temperature so treatment is not biased. Darwin 0 has a higher adjustment due to higher temperature records in the neighboring stations. In the cases where the "neighbors" of the 7000 stations have lower temperatures, there is an automatic downwards adjustment.
"In fact, handpicking adjustments for individual stations, which is what Eschenbach suggests for Darwin 0 in 1941, would be a method far more prone to temptations to bias the result desired."
mt
And NIST certified calibrated dataloggers that could record the temperature within .00013C twice each minute all during the day - generating a swamp of data. You could take all of that data and capture a close approximation (within .001C) of the actual mean temperature for each location during a day.
Or you could skip that because it's hard. You could throw out everything except the high and low, average those, and call that the average temperature for that point during the day, and pretend that it's accurate within the limits of your instrument.
Which of those methods do you suppose these "scientists" used?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
"Back off man. I'm a Scientist"
I was observing for Mother Earth News. It turns out that the trees reached a consensus - climate scientists kept boring holes in them and cutting them down to see their rings, so the trees agreed to randomize their ring thickness to get the scientists to stop. Sadly, it didn't work so the trees will probably revert to their old behaviour at their next meeting in 21,046 (Trees have an exceedingly sparse conference schedule, as they are all busy and slow moving).
Help stamp out iliturcy.
To remove the noise, the absolute values were replaced with derivative values based on variations.
This is global-warming-denier science at its finest, folks: Using a derivative operation to remove noise!
It would have helped if you'd read the entire paragraph. They were clearly using the more general meaning of derivative that they were working with values derived using some function from the original data, rather than the original data itself. That function was a time-difference of moving 12-month averages. There is a derivative involved, but it's disingenuous to claim that the function they chose wouldn't reduce noise.
The question is, does the band-pass filter improve or hinder understanding of the data; are the conclusions reached overly influenced by artifacts from the algorithm, or are they merely clarified by it. Sifting through data for meaning is hard. You can't just pick one word out of context and say "oh well, that proves the whole thing is garbage."
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
I guess the real point here is that data can be manipulated to influence people in certain ways - by design.
Data that is not publicly available - as all research results should be - so that they can be examined for authenticity and possible fraud should be questioned closely.
Imagine some one comes up with data to support their claim that X is bigger than Y. He defines X and shows how he measures X without bias. He defines Y and
shows how he measures Y without bias. He has a value or mean value for X and he can then show the values for Y or mean of Y.
He now has to define what he means by bigger. At many of these stages there is room for errors. There are reasons why experiments need to be repeated by someone
other than the original scientist.
What has happened with climate is that egos or politics (the fight for monetary support to continue research) comes into play. Once this happens people say that they
could get someone demoted/unregistered/fired/discharged or that they can conveniently loose data. They can cook the data and only release so called "qualified" data.
What should happen is that the RAW data and the equipment used to collect it should be available for scrutiny. Then any procedures used to "Quality Assure (QA)" the
data should be described and relavent adjustments made and the new set of data should be defined as QA'd data rather than RAW data. After that, any calculations and
co-relations should be described and the resulting conclusions (made subjectively by the scientists involved) should be made available.
If someone makes a claim about the data by doing something with the data and showing a hockey-stick graph that proves climate temperatures have risen then they
should be able to with-stand any other claim made by referring to the same data. Someone who uses addition of variances (where the variance is always positive) should
technically show that this is the correct procedure for analyzing this type of data. The hockey-stick graph can be shown to always exist in any set of data that is fairly long
and based on addition of variances. What else do you get when you keep adding positive numbers ??? You always get a graph that climbs and gets steeper.
Assuming you read a lot about climate then perhaps you have already encountered the issue of cause and effect. Positive and Negative Correlations show that the two
variables (X and Y) in question have some underlying connection. X could be related by a linear relationship to variable A. Y could be related by a inverse linear relationship
to variable A as well. They both depend upon A, hence they themselves are related to one another. Other relationships are possible. This is not cause and effect.
Egos and politics are a problem sometimes. Lets get beyond this. We deserve to have all the data available that is possible. OK. so the temperatures at the current poles
are more variable that the more modest variations in the temperate areas or the equators. The Poles also have a time issue with long days and long nights that span more
than 24 hours. Some suburban areas are hot spots and some are cold spots due to the distribution of climate affecting factors (trees, buildings, manufacturing facilities etc)
and the temperature readings from these spots need to be looked at closely. You can not interpolate temperature readings across geographic areas when there are significant
factors that vary. If you choose to measure the height above sea level and you ignore a measurement taken on a mountain between the two points of interpolation then
you can expect someone to question your methods. If you also choose to hide your mountain data from everyone so that you can make points ??? then that is wrong.
Before you give a climate-change denialist his two cents, first ask to see a full core dump of all their e-mail correspondence for the last 10 years, not just the stuff they want you to see. First ask them to show all of it.
Until then, no point arguing with them as clearly they lack any credibility at all.
that you are amongst the slowest and have yet to catch on.
Don't worry, things will heat up and you will get your chance to figure it out.
Perhaps the scientists don' t understand it as well as they think they do.
"If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself."
— Albert Einstein
First you have to be smart enough to read a thermometer. Second you have to be smart enough to plot data points on an abscissa and an ordinate. Third you have to be smart enough to notice that when you do this for temperatures through all recorded history that the last few decades are very much an anomaly and that literally "all of a sudden" world temperatures are getting very much warmer.
You then have to be smart enough to ask yourself why that should be the case. Let us all hope that its manmade, because if its not and if its out of our control, then hold on to your backside, because all the things you took for granted are about to undergo a very dramatic metamorphosis.
The science fields, including medicine, have been rife with fraud for quite some time.
"Liberals are trying to take over the world through fascism. Global Warming
increases taxes and gives the government increased control over our lives."
This statement reveals the essence of the contemporary "conservative" position
on science and climate change. It reveals that ideological "conservatives" have
no real explanation for the obviously rapid global planetary warming that it
occurring, except to instead engage in a a desperate and intellectually
dishonest effort to rationalize the indefensible. The essence of the
"conservative" "solution" to global warming is to instead advocate the mass murder
of hundred of millions. Are we to presume such a "conservative" solution is
justifiable, because those first to be affected are likley to be poor or live on
oceanic islands, on low-lying flood plains, or in regions of aridity where
agriculture is already extremely difficult, or where cold temperatures are
essential to the maintenace of ecosystems that maintain the economies of the
high arctic.
Since when does advocating mass murder become a justifiable argument for
anything?
One has to wonder, just how hot it must get and how many and who will die as the
the "conservative" altenative solution to global warming is implemented, before
conservative ideology will come to recongize these costs of global climate
change denial?
The comment also reveals the incredible paranoia of the right, who are eager to
excercise any contrivance to manufacture fake and political convenient outrage
that demands virtue on the part of liberals, but absolute absolution of any
responsiblity by conservatives (a theme familiar for those with any knowledge of
the American predicament in Iraq and Afghanistan or the degregulation of the
capital market that has led serious collapse of the global economy), as if others
should pay for their privilged status and continued righteousness.
If the author had any real knowledge of fascism or liberalism, he or she would
recognize that the two concepts are fundamentally contradictory, but no matter,
the argument is really all about the now standard trick of appealing to any kind of
jingoism that prompts relexive responsees, fear, loathing, distrust and
confusion so that policies can continue to permit conservative righteousness in
defense of the current inequities to march onward unperturbed, without thought
of its consequences for others, and certainly without the need to reflect on the
costs and burdens that so many must bear so that the self-appointed righteous
are permitted to continue to indulge, regardless of how irrational their
argumentation.
You say "The real lesson of Galileo wasn't that science will persecute those it
feels are heretics." You suggest that we should rewrite history to imply that it
was Galileo's fault that he was persecuted by the Catholic Church for his
heresy. Even the Pope no longer holds such a trogloditic view of history, but
then without appeals to illogic, just where will the "conservative" defence of
its own abhorrent argumentation be?
Ironically, the paranoia that permeates the comment reveals that even its author
recognizes that the days of appealing to irrationality to justify further
self-indulgent self-righteousness are surely numbered. Is it any wonder that the
billionaires, who have profited from economies that are based on pumping CO2
into the atmosphere, are so eager to fund the irrationalists in defense of the
status-quo? They speak of costs and loss of control, but their primary fear is
their loss of beneifts from their exhaulted positions of self-righteousness and
profits, as if the undiscussed costs to others in both lives and futures are
insignificant in comparison.
The author says "The problem with climate change science at this point isn't the
science it's that the solutions go against conservative values." Well rest
assured the science is real and your paranoia is well-found
I suggest you fill a room with 100% CO2. Then stand in it for an hour.
Before the hour is up, I will bet any amount of money you care to wager that you will be quick to abandon the experiment and change your mind.
Scientific proof of the fallacy of your argument that even you wouldn't deny.
Go ahead prove me wrong.
1465 messages later and still no mention of peak oil... answer: yes, we are doomed.
Just a reminder that the burden is on the alarmists to prove that: climate change is occurring AND that it is anthropogenic AND that the change is economically significant AND that it's harmful AND that it can be altered through human behaviour AND the socialist plan they're pushing would be effective AND that their plan will do more good than harm AND that their plan is the best of all alternatives, including the free market / property rights based ideas on how to attribute liability for externalities like pollution. They can't even prove their first point without a massive amount of government bullying and deceit!
Virtually all of the data used in the global warming debate were either gathered, revised, or summarised by government institutions. A very large fraction of the data came from the former Eastern Block countries, where data fudging and other corruption were completely routine. Much of the data was gathered using different instruments with different levels of accuracy, and with the margin of error often being greater than the temperature rise being claimed. Things like increasing urbanisation surrounding weather stations were never accounted for. Methods of obtaining ancient temperature readings (ice core samples, tree rings, etc) are also limited in their precision, especially when you consider that arguments are being made on matters of a fraction of one degree. Temperature effects of not-yet-understood natural cycles (terrestrial as well as cosmic) were completely written out of the realm of possibility. Etc, etc, etc...
History is filled with examples of the "best minds" of every society being waaay off on very important things, and using state / church violence to enforce their folly on others. Scientists are not immune to groupthink - especially when their institutions are funded and regulated by a single self-serving power monopoly, and especially when the difference between being labelled a "genius" / "hero" or a "quack" / "killer" depends on following the party line. Being a climatologist and not pushing global warming means voting against your own job security and your self-esteem, as well as those of your colleagues, who would ostracise you, knowing that if the sky wasn't falling they'd be stuck teaching 7th grade science instead!
Certainly a good perspective and common sense, but both are in short supply these days. Add common courtesy to that list.
If you spend much time reading the threads here about things like reducing consumption, riding a bike, using a smaller car or driving less, etc., you quickly see that the majority attitude is "fuck it, why should -I- make a sacrifice?", or "that just -won't- work for me, I'm special", "It's my -right- to do whatever -I- want, it's my money".
Empathy, perspective, and common sense are pretty much dead, AFAICT.
I hate the Chicken Little stuff too, it's insulting. But appealing to common sense doesn't work. In our current (dare I say post-9/11) frame of mind, Chicken Little rules.
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
How is the average person with their 8th-grade education supposed to differentiate between the writings of Hawkings and an alternative, wholly-false but well-written writing? Heck, I could write a nice-sounding, utterly-bogus paper on how the universe was driven by Brownian motion ratchet-engines (apologies to Douglas Adams). It wouldn't fool someone that knew better, but then, that wouldn't really be my audience, would it?
Reasonable people make decisions about things they are not experts in by judging the credibility of the source. Hawkings is a world-renowned physicist; I am a dipshit 3.x GPA college student studying poli-sci. Hence, it's better to trust Hawkings on physics than it is to trust me. Could Hawkings be wrong? Heck yeah, he most certainly IS wrong (or incompletely correct) on some point or another, but from what I can tell, his theories are in line with the best information we have available. They've deconstructed, revised, and replaced some fair measure of Einstein's work as of now, but even so, it was good enough to help usher in the atomic era and to foster a whole host of new discoveries in the 20th century. It was "good stuff."
Climate science is reliant upon big-time number crunching and a MASSIVE data-collection effort. I'm lucky to wrap my head around the statistical methods that go into undergrad-level economics and sociology, and I'm decently educated for a non-scientist. I know that the math underpinning climatological global-scale modeling is solidly beyond me. Personally, what doesn't seem SO far over my head (and indeed, more suited to my own targeted expertise) is the fact that there's more quick money and power to be generated by bashing climate science than by defending it. Green tech profits are peanuts compared to the revenue cuts that the old guard industries and commodities markets suffer under serious green regulation. Right now, my ~75% faith in climatology's prognostications is based primarily upon my faith in the scientific review process, followed at a distance by my best guesses at "who profits most" in this debate. That said, a serious discovery of collusion arising from "climategate" could push me under 50%. That does NOT include editorial emesis from television news networks or general-issue newspapers. While their social-issues reporting may occasionally be relevant, I'm wholly disinterested in their science reporting. If an investigation by the best agents available turns nothing of import up in this "climategate" scandal, then in my mind, the issue is resolved until better science comes down the pipeline. AGW aside, it is inescapable that humans can and have had serious effects on our global ecology; to wit, rapid desertification is a human-driven phenomenon, and we're seeing it in Africa and China just as the Americans saw it in the early 20th century. Kill the native flora, over-strain the soil with poor agricultural practices, and watch the sand spread. It's not at all beyond my ken to think that we could ruin our atmosphere just as we have previously despoiled our land and our waterways.
The loser here, however climategate turns out, is science. There's a very good reason we keep our thinkers in ivory towers; they're easy prey for the barbarians at the gates. Socially, they're less hardy than the preachers, businessfolk, and politicians of the "real world." Our scientists have to be free to work on and to explore unpopular ideas, and they need respite from the lunatic, quarterly-outlook realm of social and bureaucratic politics. We give scientists money and political protection because they give us nice things, but it is also inherent in their nature to serve as the first line of defense against the unforeseen consequences of technology. We don't get to say, "just give us the good news;" it is incumbent upon us to remain for the diagnosis.
I love science, I gobble news about it, I probably understand more of it than most.
That being said, what makes you assume that it is _not_ driven by a need for grants, thus subject to politics and a need for publication, thus subject to infighting and a need for clear-cut results, thus subject to cheating? Being close friends with several PhDs and university professors, I can't imagine what this assumption is being based on.
I love science, I gobble news about it, I probably understand more of it than most, but I know that scientists are human.
Pretty much no chance that this post will be seen by anybody but here goes.
About half the posters seem to be blaming the "lay person" for their lack of knowledge and understanding and the other half pointing out some of the real problems that this incident has exposed and how science/scientists need to improve. Seems to me, the first half is people who are more redditors than old-school slashdotters. Reddit seems to be very much made up of typical college nerds full of themselves and protecting their imagined "science" castle from outsiders. Most science discussions on that site seem to end up with people claiming their own opinions have higher validity due to their occupation/work and asking the doubters to do 4-8 years of physics etc and only then to get back to the discussion. To me, slashdotters always seem to have had a more worldly/techy/skeptical outlook which would welcome questions and ask for data first.
So, it seems like more redditors have now found slashdot, leading to a general decline in quality of comments here. Pretty depressing seeing this happen :(
Q: Can we see the data?
A: No, we deleted some of it after concluding that it wasn't good enough to use. You can go to the station logs and get it if you want. Knock yourself out.
Q: Can we see the algorithms?
A: Sure. They are in the methods section of the dozens of papers published in the peer reviewed literature dealing with this area. We have links to these papers on our website.
Regards
Luke
I hardly find it surprising that Monbiot has spotted a "crisis" but I will give him credit for putting across a more reasoned case than the WSJ article linked in the summary.
From the WSJ link - "The EPA admitted "varying degrees of uncertainty across many of these scientific issues." Again, this puts hard science in the new position of saying, close enough is good enough. One hopes civil engineers never build bridges under this theory."
That quote, if not the whole article, makes exactly the same absurd argument that Asminov dissmissed so eloquently in his essay The Relativity of wrong.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Until you can predict the weather with the same reasonably unerring accuracy with which we predict projectile trajectories, the science isn't good enough. Which is a little bit scary, when you consider the potential problems if global warming is real and we realize that too late!
There are also some rather big risks if it isn't "real" either in the sense that the planet isn't going to keep warming or that human activity is not a major factor in how the temperature of the Earth varies. The risks involve trashing the already weakened economies of the "developed" world and polluting the environment with an attitude of "if it dosn't emit carbon dioxide from fossil fuels then it must be ok". Even if carbon dioxide from fossil fuels is a problem, it's only one of a huge number of things humans can do to damage the environment. A mistake we need to avoid making again is banning X, then replacing it with Y. Only to discover that Y is a worst problem, including for reqasons such as needing to use it in vastly greater quantities.
Give me a direct test for the existence of anthropogenic global warming.
Evidence from ice cores appears to show that atmospheric carbon dioxide follows changes in temperature by several hundred years. The warmer the temperature the more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. If atmospheric carbon dioxide caused warming then positive feedback would lead to ever increasing temperatures. This, rather obviously, hasn't happened. The obvious conclusion is that on a planetary scale there is negative feedback to keep the temperature fairly stable.
When you try to look at temperature and atmospheric carbon dioxide over a longer time period no obvious corallation can be found.
Start recording temperatures in 1850, and in 1950 look at the trend. Do the same from 1950 onwards. Notice that CO2 increases IR absorption and is increasing in the atmosphere. Create a GCM and run it with and without the anthropogenic forcing.
You'd also need data for carbon dixoide concentration in the atmosphere and carbon dixoide due to human activities.
Download the program and the data from http://edgcm.columbia.edu/ and run it at home if you want to check.
Where's the source code for this?
Oh, don't believe that data? Use this, or this new one.
I see only temperature data here. Where is the corresponding carbon dixoide data.
This is the critical part. Efforts should be spent on understanding it better rather than on trying to reverse something we have an incomplete understanding of.
As well as an incomplete understanding of what it is we are trying to change. e.g. reduce the proportion of carbon dioxide in the air, reduce the global temperature, something else. Such fundermental questions like "How warm should the Earth be right now?" tend to be brushed aside.
The reasoning becomes "if we tell an honest story, no one will do anything, so let's tell a story more conducive to what needs to be done". Taking paternal responsibility for the inaction of crowds is far, far away from science as hard boiled authority,
It has more in common with politics, religion, even "conspiracy nuts". How long does it take before what matters most is "getting the message out"? Regardless of what is truth and what is fiction. In addition a meme of "this must be done urgently", isn't going to be conducive to critical examination of a) what is the most effective approach. Decisions made in haste often turn out to be poor ones. b) if there actually is a crisis in the first place. Even if there is panicing about it rarely helps.
I have been to Antarctica and I have seen the effects of global warming. The glacier in the bay where Shakeleton left his men is a good 100 yard further from the sea than it was in his time.
At best all this demonstrates is that this glacier is a little further away from the sea than it was almost a century ago. What is this as a proportion of the total length of the glacier?
We made it far enough south in a non-icebreaker to see Emperor penguins.
Whilst this might be an indicator that the Earth has become warmer it dosn't tell you anything about why? That the temperature of the Earth has varied over time is not news at all.
That shouldn't be happening.
How do you know that this shouldn't be happening? How do you find out what the "correct" global temperature is? What would you expect to observe in the mid 17th century or the mid 10th century?
They usually mean anthrocentric global warming and they usually mean "sufficient additional CO2 to tip our climate irretrievably out-of-balance."
Has this every actually happened?
See Halton Arp's observations of the redshifts and angular correlations of quasars. Since he started this work, it has been corroborated by a vast body of additional observations. A good overview is given in his book [amazon.com] "Seeing Red".
And an even greater body of evidence against or possibly for? The point is that science which is contentious is at the limit of our understanding. To say that Dr Halton Arp's observations falsify the big bang is almost absurd. That is because there are many lines of evidence for the big bang. Yet despite this it is still not certain and maybe a better theory will come about.
In discussions like this, a considered opinion would present both sides, weigh the evidence and possibly come down on the side which seems most likely. In the debates on the Internet and in the media we get one side and then the other simply shouting the other is wrong.
The most dangerous drug
I need a wearable butt kicking machine powered by my own footsteps that will kick my butt continually. I should wear one today as penance for not reading comments before replying to them.
...
Our schools don't really teach science. They give lip service to the 'scientific method' and it's application in experimental sciences. (It's really hard to do experiments in geology, stellar evolution, cosmology, meteorology.)
Most of the science is presented as tablets presented from on high. (This is how you do stoichiometry problems...This is Charles law, Boyles law...)
We need to teach people:
1. Science is a process. Not a result.
2. If we teach science well, we teach people to doubt, to question, to be critical in their evaluation of facts, and authorities. Coupled with the ability to think numerically -- to estimate problems with 10-20% errors, this is a valuable life skill.
3. Science is a process done by human beings. Scientists have their foibles, biases, prejudices just like the rest of us.
My fantasy science class is to walk in on the first day, and talk about "Earth, air, fire, and water" and teach it as fact.
Then the next day, come in and contradict myself.
***
Show a picture of the night sky. Show a sequence. Point out the wanderers. Get the kids to figure out how to keep track. Get them to figure out how to keep track without using paper. Show the weird motions. Teach about the celestial crystal sphere. That the heavens are perfect, and the circle is the only perfect shape, therefore, planets must move in circular motion. Epicycles, Eccentrics, the whole Ptolomeic structure of the universe.
Flash forward to the Kepler and Copernicus crowd.
Have detour to Galileo. Consternation from extra things -- moons of Jupiter. Venus with phases. Mountains on the moon. Sunspots.
***
Throughout the course start out with folk wisdom -- common sense, go through the Aristotealian view, then more modern views. In all cases present each layer as fact. Stress that 'current view is that..." when we get to modern times.
Talk about proof, and the nature of proof.
Talk about "What would you consider to be evidence" for odd ball things such as UFO's re-incarnation, Mu and Atlantis, astrology, sasquatch,
Third Career: Tree Farmer Second Career: Computer Geek First Career: Teacher, Outdoor Instructor, Photographer.
Yes, but his observations have not falsified the Big Bang cosmology. In fact, his observations led to a closer study of high-z objects, which appear to be normal galaxies with a redshift across the full spectrum. The discovery of the Lyman-alpha forest also conclusively eliminates his observations as a challenge to the treatment of observations of the Hubble flow being almost certainly the consequence of the metric expansion of space (it is a very parsimonious explanation for the redshift, and has far fewer free parameters than any intrinsic redshift approach could possibly have -- fewer free parameters is almost always better).
A theory which is correct in a useful limit is never "falsified" anyway per se. It may be superseded -- if the newer theory is comparably easy or easier to work with -- or supplemented (if not; for example, GR supplements Newtonian Mechanics in the limit of nonnegligible spacetime curvature, as SR supplements it in the limit of high non-accelerating velocities -- as both GR and SR so are much harder to work with, where the results are effectively the same, NM is likely to be preferred as a toolset for modelling).
Effective theories are more useful in practice than correct ones. Finding out where incorrectness makes a difference is good science, but is not really "falsification" and it is often not even useful. Arp's anomalous objects are interesting, and if it can be demonstrated that they are inconsistent with concordance cosmology (THIS HAS NOT HAPPENED) then that establishes a limit on its effectiveness. It will still be useful for the same reasons that it is useful now. Finally, that it is not "right" will disturb practically no-one, since pretty much nobody believes that LCDM is not an effective physical theory rather than a complete one. (Anyone who does, does not understand the gauge theory underlying it, to say the least).
Finally, in the absence of an improved theory (or even practical and demonstrable bounds on the existing effective theory), finding anomalies that seem to conflict with the theory is frankly not too interesting.
"QM is wrong", "GR is wrong", "BB is wrong", etc are all probably truisms, and merit a big "so what?" since they are sufficiently right to do practical stuff. With respect to the big bang, in practice, for example, a number of working physical cosmologists (e.g. Sean Carroll) tend to talk about the early universe as simply a much denser and hotter state at an effective boundary condition beyond which we cannot (yet) probe. They almost certainly think that cosmic inflation happened and that there was an even hotter and denser configuration before that that closely resembles the traditional big bang, but will also admit that existing work that early in the universe is highly speculative for now.
Speculation is great; that's what theoretical physicists do. Normally when your speculative idea is effectively (even if incompletely) precluded, you give up and move on to another speculative idea.
Climategate is also interesting from the standpoint that those who are the loudest advocates of AGW - Gavin Schmidt, Pachauri, Gore etc.. have no training in climatology. Gavin Schmidt's PhD is in Mathematics, Pachauri is a railyway engineer (don't know how he became the head of the IPCC), about Gore - need I say anything?
At the same time, scientists with climate research expertise and PhDs in climatology are asked to shut up if their views don't match that of the AGW crowd. Example: Roy Spencer, John Christy, Richard Lindzen ..
Also, IPCC has made huge blunders - for example, BBC has just published an article that the IPCC got the dates wrong for the disappearance of the Himalayan glaciers by 300 years!! IPCC's non-existent peer review process didn't catch the error for 2 years.. and now the latest note that IPCC has been referencing papers which haven't even been peer reviewed!!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8387737.stm
To all those who claim that there can't possibly be any sort of a conspiracy, consider that the Copenhagen summit came up with no agreements primarily because of yet another leaked document which indicated that the rich nations were secretly conspiring and writing up a draft on a policy document on carbon emission limits which went completely against the poorer nations and without following any due process.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/dec/08/copenhagen-climate-summit-disarray-danish-text/
"The glacier is melting" is not conclusive proof of anthrocentric global warming, to say nothing of irreversible or disastrous climate change.
Yes, "is the climate changing" is met with "it doesn't matter, since it can't be caused by humans." It's the non sequitur straw man question begging rhetoric that avoids so many of the questions it's absurd anyone pays it lip service.
1) even the Libertarians agree that you don't have the right to hold my mouth open and shit in it (well, unless I want you to). Yet "pro-liberty" people assert they get to pump anything they want into the air and that's their freedom of pollution (a God given right, obviously), but anyone that wants the air in their lungs to not have someone else's waste in it are the liberal pinko commies that hate freedom. I've still never figured that out. Regardless of Global Warming, it seems the pro-freedom should be anti-pollution.
2) if the climate is changing, but the change isn't being done by humans, could the humans stop the change? Of course, a separate question would be whether they should. But no one anywhere is studying what humans could do about it (the studies are about removing themselves from the equation, not actually influencing the climate).
3) it seems that actually predicting the changes from a 3 C change in global average temperature is impossible. No one seems to agree on what would happen, and every prediction that is wrong is quickly adjusted retroactively to be the opposite. So, what's going to happen?
I couldn't care less whether the humans are causing the change (if any), but is there a change, and if so, what are the results if we do nothing, and if we don't like the results, what can we do about it? But those questions aren't getting asked because the evil people like yourself that answer "it looks like there's change" with "but we didn't do it" as if that matters for anything other than working to paralyze everyone for what could do massive harm to the world. If, in 50 years, there is a problem that is found, I hope you see yourself as a personal cause by working to prevent people from looking for the answers. But then, that would be too much to ask from a sociopath that is more interested in blame than discovery. Blame is irrelevant. Defining the problem (if any) and fixing it is what needs to be done, and useless people like you actively work to prevent the problem from even being defined.
Learn to love Alaska
There is significant uncertainty in all of these areas. And based on all that uncertainty, it is impossible to draw hard conclusions about which way this plays out.
Or do you rely, to make your rhetorical points, on a less exact definition of "significant" than is required of a scientist, to use the same word about a research subject? Scientists really are held by their profession to higher standards than the carbon industry spokespersons who are the scientists' opponents in the public "debate" about climate and related policy. Policy itself is a proper subject of debate, but science is not, and yet here we are, debating the facts themselves, not only the policies we should adopt to deal with the facts. Coal and petroleum corporations have countered the best science with scientifically unsupported, factually incorrect talking points, and for decades they have been very successful in that little game. And now, data thieves' motives are being assumed as pure as the driven snow and their "findings" taken at face value, parroted without analysis by the leading "news" sources, who have made no effort to ascertain who the data thieves are, what their motives were, and which petroleum and coal corporations paid them to do their heist (obvious motive, basic journalistic integrity requires trying to find the answer to such an obvious question), before treating the thieves with ultimate credulity, and in the process baselessly impugning the life's work of dozens of scientists directly, and thousands more implicitly.
My thesis is that such corporatist "success" (cheating, really, which is a very different thing from bona fide success, thus the "sarcastic quote marks") is directly the result of the professional constraint by which scientists are not permitted to just say a thing is "significant," but must quantify any significance we assert, at the risk of our careers. Scientists work by the most exacting rules of any profession in the world, while corporate-sponsored opponents play around, virtually no-holds-barred. Your comment about a "foregone conclusion" is particularly ironic in this context, because everybody knows that the most profitable spin is always the foregone conclusion for which any corporation will pay. If something similar is true of even one climate scientist whose work has helped prove The Carbon Dioxide Greenhouse Effect, the burden of proof has yet to be met. Even once. That is significant, statistically! Zero out of all climate scientists have been proven corrupt. Saying mean things about others and being frustrated when one's hypothesis is found to need further refinement is not scientific malpractice, it's just human, and that's the worst that the stolen University of East Anglia files show.
So before I refute, with scientific research results in the public domain, each of your five assertions of global uncertainty ("nobody knows" as opposed to you don't know) about specific relevant facts of global warming and related policy, I am just asking you to quantify how much uncertainty you assert that there is in the leading science. Alternatively, you could admit that your own uncertainty is specific to you and at least to some degree commensurate to your personal ignorance of the relevant facts, and therefore not necessarily indicative of what full-time professional climatologists do or don't know and with what certainty it is known, and can be known to diligent voters. I don't ask you to agree immediately that everything predicted by current coupled ocean-atmospheric global circulation models is a 100% accurate forecast, only to recognize that what you don't know is not neces
"I can't imagine how things could get any worse!" (some guy) "That could just be failure of imaginatioÂn on your p
Have you found that any of the data you need are not public domain?
"I can't imagine how things could get any worse!" (some guy) "That could just be failure of imaginatioÂn on your p
Both irrationally try to thrust their morals on others and force them to comply through law, claiming that they aren't infringing on anyone's rights, since everyone should want that anyway. The Libertarians are pro-pollution (which is someone else shitting in my lungs and all over my land) while claiming they are for personal responsibility and having someone else's right to extend their fist end at my nose (but the pollution gets to pass my nose and get in my lungs?). And the Libertarians give lip service to things like the right to travel, then say they will privatize all roads and sidewalks (sidewalks!) and have no accommodation for travel when there are no open roads. The conversations I've had with Libertarians seem to understand that wealth correlates to services, not income (someone that makes millions and spends it all on cocaine doesn't need the fire department, nor the FDIC, but the wealthy need the FTC, FDIC, and such to maintain and grow their wealth), but everything they propose for taxes aim more for income (or expenditures) than wealth. Not that it's easy to tax wealth, but it seems silly to agree that it's the important stat and then ignore it when it comes time to pay for the services.
And the Religious Right, rather than pushing their politics as morals, like the Libertarians, push their morals as politics. Same thing to an outsider. Either way, someone else made arbitrary decisions about what they like, claim it's a moral imperative, and push it on me without opening themselves up for a real debate. Their minds are made up, closed, sealed, and the key is somewhere in the Laurentian Abyss.
Learn to love Alaska
My wife works in Mollecular Biology and has told me dozens of stories about PHD's fudging their results so that they can maintain their grants.
No, your imaginary wife has told you "dozens of stories about PHD's (sic) fudging their results so that they can maintain their grants." It's Ph.D. or PhD if you prefer to omit the dots. PHD is just plain wrong, and you're a liar.
Over 95% of the CRU climate data set concerning land surface temperatures has been accessible to climate researchers, sceptics and the public for several years the University of East Anglia has confirmed.
"It is well known within the scientific community and particularly those who are sceptical of climate change that over 95% of the raw station data has been accessible through the Global Historical Climatology Network for several years. We are quite clearly not hiding information which seems to be the speculation on some blogs and by some media commentators," commented the University's Pro-Vice-Chancellor, Research Enterprise and Engagement Professor Trevor Davies.
The University will make all the data accessible as soon as they are released from a range of non-publication agreements. Publication will be carried out in collaboration with the Met Office Hadley Centre.
The procedure for releasing these data, which are mainly owned by National Meteorological Services (NMSs) around the globe, is by direct contact between the permanent representatives of NMSs (in the UK the Met Office).
"We are grateful for the necessary support of the Met Office in requesting the permissions for releasing the information but understand that responses may take several months and that some countries may refuse permission due to the economic value of the data," continued Professor Davies.
The remaining data, to be published when permissions are given, generally cover areas of the world where there are fewer data collection stations.
"CRU's full data will be published in the interests of research transparency when we have the necessary agreements. It is worth reiterating that our conclusions correlate well to those of other scientists based on the separate data sets held by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS)," concluded Professor Davies.
We all know that if any of the petroleum-owned deniers could disprove a word of that, they would cite it explicitly and disprove as much as they could. Considering the combined financial resources of Exxon/Mobil, Texaco/Chevron and Koch Industries, everybody with a brain knows that the scientists are telling the truth and have been all along, and the data thieves are liars as well as thieves.
Is anybody here surprised that the thieves turned out to be dishonest?
"I can't imagine how things could get any worse!" (some guy) "That could just be failure of imaginatioÂn on your p
It looks to me that slashdot has been infested with a bunch of English Lit grads that have the debate exercises figured out quite well. They're quite skillful but inherently dishonest.
despite the 'evidence' they purport for the bullshit about those ice age disinformation being there for over 200 years or more, up to the point that climate change has been brought up there has been NO theory or anything regarding such climate changes in conjunction with ice ages.
AND the ice age bullshit itself came after the private interests tried to muddy the waters with solar activity bait, which failed because the sun was in the most still decade ever recorded in history.
RIGHT after their initial shit has been debunked, the ice age bullshit has come up. to fool idiots like you.
anyone with 2 brain cells would think ... if there was any cycle it HAD to have kept running affecting all the globe in 10-30 k cycles regularly. whereas the data there does not point to anything like that.
use your brains. there is NO cycle. just like there was no 'peak solar activity'. when this ice age cycle shit is soundly debunked, suddenly a new 'theory' funded by a private university or a think thank which is backed by private interests is going to pop up, to fool idiots like you and muddy the waters.
Read radical news here
I concur that theories and models of nature, even though falsified, can still be useful approximate descriptions. However when you have to apply patches and band-aids to keep a model viable, as has happened to the BB model with silly things like "inflation", it is time to either discard the model as having been falsified, or to take a close look at the basic assumptions, postulates, and theories underlying the model.
Arp's work shows that there must exist other causes for redshift than expansion/distance. This means that all of the interpretations of observations that include the automatic redshift->distance assumption have to be revisited. Also, it means that big chunks of basic physics underlying cosmology are missing: how can you claim to have any kind of theoretical certainty if you do not know what is causing these strange red shifts?
Arp's observations should have been the killing blow for an already shaky edifice. In addition, it should have caused serious soul-searching in theoretical physics.
God, Feynman was a badass!
"I can't imagine how things could get any worse!" (some guy) "That could just be failure of imaginatioÂn on your p
Nature says the stolen data show no wrongdoing, as reported on /. already, and even the scandal-whore Associated Press now admits that there's nothing to the hype tooted by Rupert Murdoch's British property, The Times, to which I will not link, but which ran idiotic headlines like "The great climate change science scandal" immediately after learning that some data had been stolen, and which immediately concluded the end of the theory of anthropogenic global warming before anybody could have read even a significant fraction of the stolen material to make any remotely intelligent assessment of its general nature, much less its significance to the decades of research it supposedly undermined. Now, we know that the most "improper" behavior found was saying rude things about people they dislike. Yeah, act shocked and offended at that. Whatever.
Rupert Murdoch's minions have zero credibility to anybody with a brain. All of his properties, including the Wall Street Journal, are not to be trusted about anything, ever again. It's all just bird cage liner.
"I can't imagine how things could get any worse!" (some guy) "That could just be failure of imaginatioÂn on your p
Then on supply of a list of 450 with a pretty unambiguous title describing the contents of the list,
The list is not what is says it is. It includes 80 odd papers from non-peer reviewed trade journals. It is padded with papers which are pro-AGW. It includes old papers about technical issues which have since been clarified.
There *is* a way to convince me.
Provide a scientific argument against AGW.
There is no way to convince you. In fact, pointing out the astroturf nature of the list has done nothing to shake your faith.
I suspect that YOU FIND IT TOO THREATENING to investigate the list further.
No skeptic can *explain* to me why AGW isn't happening. That's because their arguments are devoid of content. JUST LIKE THE "LIST" OF 450.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
You seem to want to hold on to "falsification" as if physics is purely Popperian. It isn't. What's important is being able to determine that a theory is physical within a useful limit.
The physicality of a theory is something that experimentalists study. They firstly look for a physical theory whose validity has been demonstrated only within a particular limit, or whose invalidity has been demonstrated only within a particular limit, and then construct an experiment that will test the boundaries of the limit. In practice, not only do experimentalists seek to find "holes" in theory that is very sound within well-established limits, they also seek to close any wrongly-identified holes which have been found by previous experiment.
This is very important: an experiment or observation on its own may well raise an important question about the validity of a well-established theory in the limit under study in the experiment (optimistically, it might even raise a question about the *generality* of a given theory), but that question will remain open until a barrage of other, different, experiments done by other experimentalists are in close enough agreement that it is difficult to avoid a consensus that there is, in fact, a "hole" in the theory.
That is: when scientist A finds anomalous results, it is expected -- and good science -- for scientists B, C, and D to find evidence for or against the anomalous results. Likewise, theorists will also try to explain the anomalous results as either a failing in the theory in a limit in which it was believed to be valid, or a failing in the experiment, or some combination, or something even more speculative (a complete failing of a theory tends to be extremely optimistic). They then would have to recruit experimentalists to help gather evidence for or against their theoretical arguments, which otherwise are practically worthless.
In short: science is in part about persuasion, and the highest quality of evidence is (almost always) the most persuasive argument available.
"Silly" is something you should justify if you expect to be taken seriously. Name-calling is the least persuasive argument available.
Most working cosmologists -- theoretical or observational -- are persuaded that there was some form of rapid metric expansion of space in the early part of the universe. Alternatively, there were open questions in the Big Bang hypothesis that were discovered through theoretical and observational "attacks" on the early boundary knowledge gap, and through the observation of the Hubble flow, and so forth, that are mainly resolved quite well by the introduction of a theoretical artifact like (Guth's) Cosmic Inflation. The observable side-effects required of an inflationary theory was studied ("attacked", even) by many working scientists, and indeed it is one of the more closely scruitinized parts of the concordance cosmology, and there have been several competing models for inflation which have been advanced and determined to be unsupported by (or even contradicted by) evidence. There are several others which are still alive and waiting for more observational evidence.
Several non-inflationary approaches to things like the horizon and flatness problems have been advanced too, and some of them resolve one or two of these problems satisfactorily but do not at all resolve the other problems, or are otherwise contradicted by observation of the sky or terrestrial laboratory experiment. This is quite common in advanced theoretical physics, particularly at the largest and smallest spatial scales.
Sure, if scientists B, C, and D are as impartial as you imply. However, in practice when sacred dogma is being challenged by anomalous observations or experiments done by scientist A, well-funded scientists B, C, and D pop up to produce "evidence" to cast doubt on the anomalous finding. And for good measure, scientist A is subjected to character assessination. See for example what happened to Rusi Taleyarkhan. http://www.newenergytimes.com/v2/bubblegate/BubblegatePortal.shtml
You have too rosy a view of scientific practice. Scientific practice is also about perception, and the highest level of funding tends to determine what people can be made to believe. See for example how the anthropogenic global warming theory was pushed.
The scientific method is what grounds science in reality. The further scientific practice deviates from a pure exercise of the scientific method, the less faith one should put in the truthfulness of the models and theories produced thereby,
"Silly" is something you should justify if you expect to be taken seriously. Name-calling is the least persuasive argument available.
It is silly on multiple levels. For one, it is a complex addition to the BB model with weak theoretical and observational grounding. On the scale of the universe, quantum theory has not been tested experimentally. Applying it to the universe as a whole is therefore quite a leap of faith. Moreover, there is a lot of theoretical leeway in which you can. Also, it has not been possible to marry quantum theory to general relativity. This makes it likely that at least one of the two is wrong. So applying both at the same time is excessively risky.
You know that reading this sentence strictly, an obvious answer is "relative motion introduces a Doppler shift", right?
Looking at Arp's observations, the interpretation that high-redshift objects are being ejected from "foreground" galaxies seems inescapable. For a Doppler shift to explain that, the objects would always have to be ejected away from our line of sight at fair fraction of the speed of light. Utterly implausible. The redshift must have a different origin.
You seem to imply that when a majority of observations js in accordance with a theory, this somehow outweighs a minority of observations that are at odds with it. The scientific method is not about majority voting.
I understand that people like to have a viable alternative theory. However, I hope yo will agree that even without providing an alternative theory, it is perfectly valid to engage in falsification.
"Verification" rather than "falsification" seems to be a better choice of words, however they are complementary.
Lorentz-factor doppler shifting has been verified to a high degree of precision locally. You are correct that we do not have an independent test for non-local physics of ANY sort, however we also lack any independent test for non-local intelligence so in effect arguing that local physics is only valid locally directly corresponds with solipsism. If you believe in solipsism, you have a very strange hobby arguing here with lines of text that arise in your head.
Yes, that was a reductio ad absurdum argument, but it conforms with any argument along the lines of, "because we cannot properly test that physics is identical at great distances we must assume that it is not".
The allocation of resources is, at least with the political systems enjoyed by most rich countries.
The verification of advanced physical theories is not cheap.
Why are there so many high-redshift objects in the background that do not seem to be ejecting yet higher-redshifted objects?
Why are there no high-blueshift objects in the foreground being ejected on opposite vectors or with different mass-energy states?
Why when we study more and more recent data do we get so little additional evidence in favour of intrinsic redshift / qso-as-more-local-ejecta hypotheses, while we get a lot more evidence in favour of the Hubble flow?
That is the root of the problem: we have better observations now; in fact amateur astronomers have much better observational instruments available to them than were available to working scientists in the 1960s. The data available through larger scale collaborations -- orbital and terrestrial -- are much better still. The implications of Arp's intrinsic-redshift hypothesis should be seen as detail and depth of field are increased, just as the implications of the weak-energy or inertial metric expansion of space theory should be seen as detail and depth of field are increased. Some of the strongest expectations of intrinsic-redshift hypotheses have been precluded, and there is as yet some question about inertial expansion vs some mechanism like quintessence, both of which have further implications which would be observable with greater detail and depth of field.
Arp's hypothesis is less verified (or, if you want, more falsified) than a range of competing metric expansion theories with respect to apparent redshift. Otherwise, where are the associations between quasars and radio galaxies at various solid-angle scales? Also, how does an intrinsic-redshift scale explain same-redshift arms around QSOs that are now seen not to be "naked"?
Moreover, as the acquisition of full spectra and the computation of spectral redshift becomes cheaper, the photometric reshift technique will (a) become much better verified [so far the association has held up very well] and (b) may wind up being used in preference if it is sufficiently cheap and (as suggested in some gf theories) sufficiently indicative of the galaxy type. So far all full spectral studies have supported metric expansion theories and not ejecta or periodicity theories. Moreover, advances in spectral redshift analysis on galaxy-scale objects will allow for even closer study of the handful of anomalous Arp objects, much as better optical and near-optical data capture and analysis caused *Arp* to move objects out of his anomaly tables to his interesti
I was not trying to argue precisely that. Instead, I was trying to indicate that applying a theory in a domain that is very different from the domain where the theory has been matched to nature is highly unlikely to yield truthful predictions. The reason for that is that physical theories are approximate descriptions of nature. As the experimental domain in which a theory is verified is extended, and supposing it does not get falsified in the mean time, this approximate description is elaborated and refined.
Take quantum theory. Early on, it was a description of electronic energy levels in atoms. Then the electron-spin was discovered, experimentally. This caused the theory to be elaborated with an additional spin term for the wavefunction. The underlying particle model (the electron postulated to be a point particle) was not changed (which is rather silly because a point cannot rotate). Instead the spin was declared to be "intrinsic". In short, quantum theory is a dubious patchwork that sort of works in the domain where it has been matched to experiment because it has been modified to accord with experiment. Applying such a theory to a wholly different domain (the dynamics of the universe as a whole instead of the dynamics of a tiny speck of matter) and expecting it to produce accurate predictions is silly.
High-energy physics and cutting-edge astrophysical observations definitely are not cheap. However that is intrinsic to the experimental tools used in those pursuits. Many relatively cheap table-top experiments have been done to check advanced physical theories. Take, for example, experiments in the field of quantum optics.
Because there is a distance->redshift relationship as well. Why? Maybe the universe is really expanding. Maybe one of the "tired light" hypotheses matches reality.
That would be expected if whatever is causing these non-distance-related shifts is the Doppler effect. As I argued before, that is highly unlikely because the shifts are all to the red. Moreover, as the angular distance between the "parent galaxy" and the redshifted object increases, the redshift tends to decrease: it seems that the redshift decreases as the object ages.
Obviously, some new physics is required to model this aspect of nature as the current theoretical framework in no way allows for such redshifts and galaxy spawning dynamics. It also implies that the current theoretical framework is woefully incomplete to an extent that I consider tantamount to falsification.
In any case, to really understand why the collection of epicycles that is modern cosmology is being kept alive and patched up, instead of revised from the ground up, you have to look at what is important. Cosmology as such is not important on a human scale. However, cosmology is founded on physics, and physics is very important to everyday human endeavors. The BB model is the poster-child application of GR: it is in defense of GR that the BB cosmology is being kept alive. If one of the many falsifications of GR is ever going to be acknowledged instead of censored, the BB model will finally go where it belongs: in the trashcan together with GR. And then we will finally be able to have some proper physics instead of the current farce.
The extensions that have become part of quantum theory were the surviving conclusions from hypotheses advanced as "resolving power" improved. Sometimes the hypotheses were advanced to explain anomalous results seen in experiment -- most of those tended to fail as the implications of them were subjected to direct test. Sometimes the hypotheses were made in advance of an experiment, and typically were among tens or hundreds of competing hypotheses put to the test in a large collaborative laboratory setting. Most conflict with one another, most -- possibly all -- will conflict with actual results.
Hypotheses which do not match evidence can be subjected to "lather, rinse, repeat", or fine-tuning, which will in turn have testable implications beyond the scope of the specific experimental evidence that they did not match. Often (not just sometimes), fine-tuning causes conflicts with evidence gained from earlier experiments, and are usually dropped as non-viable.
This is perfectly normal. The various competing cosmologies that are still being worked on are proceeding down the same path: maybe advance hypotheses ahead of a known future experiment, maybe tune hypotheses in light of a recently learned-of past experiment, look for implications that distinguish the previous hypothesis (and even its competitors) for the new one, and hope that future experiments will provide evidence in favour of the new hypothesis.
What is hugely important here is that a hypothesis that is retuned to match new experimental data MUST still match data from older experiments (or explain why repeating those experiments would result in new data!).
So, certainly large parts of quantum theory have been extended -- even re-tuned to match unexpected evidence found by experiment. However, all of those re-tunings must accord with data from repeated experiments that the un-extended theory also matched.
Where two competing theories produce identical results, both are equally valid, but people will consider one or the other to be easier to work with, or have greater explanatory power. That tends to be a matter more of personal taste and ease of collaboration than of science.
Where two competing theories produce almost completely identical results, finding where they differ allows for experiments to be suggested that may distinguish which one is more accurate in the limit in which they disagree. It is still likely that people will make a personal choice of convenience about which to use in the limit in which they are in full agreement, or at least where the disagreement is reasonably small. Lots of people still use classical mechanics, for example, even with large objects, because the disagreement between Newtonian and relativistic mechanics is small in the classical limit. Lots of people take advantage of the correspondence limit of QM too, and continue to use classical mechanics for very small systems with sufficient accuracy to be productive.
"Epicycles" is not really a swear word; it's just that most people consider that where an epicycle-based model for finding the near-term positions of planets in the sky has less explanatory power than current celestial mechanical models. Both models will be wrong in the event of unforeseen orbital changes originating with, for example, perturbations in the asteroid belt. Both can be adjusted. Celestial mechanics' explanation for the adjustment has somewhat greater power, even if both can be adjusted equally, and -- importantly -- even if it may be easier to adjust the epicycle model.
In short, "epicycles" suggests that changes to the free variables of a model, or extensions of a model driven by new data, lack explanatory power. That is not really true in QM, and in fact you point this out yourself:
One can indeed derive very general results based on the underlying symmetry of particles. This says little about the general applicability of the aspects of quantum theory not based on symmetry argumentation: it is possible to conceive competing theories that encompass the same symmetries. Quantum theory may fall prey to falsification (once that is actually allowed), group theory is not going away.
Not really, given that experimental results at odds with the predictions of both theories are being censored away.
all those 'theories' about recurring ice age climate changes have come up RIGHT after the 'theory' about solar flares causing global warming went to wastebin due to the sun going to its most silent period ever known.
if there were such recurring ice ages and climate changes that closely coincided with the situation in our hands, such theories and information should have been already known beforehand and discussed way before the climate change debate started.
yet, it was such that first the solar flare excuse came first, then the ice age excuse. both were generally mainly from the individual 'research' organizations who worked for the high payer anyway. especially from america. not europe. way too much coincidence and discrepancy to make the recurring ice age bullshit which was somehow not 'recurring' just 20 years ago to be taken seriously.
Read radical news here
Wait, what?
So, you would rather stick to computer stuff? I think you're welcome to do that.
What I don't get is, why troll the rest of us who might want to know or god forbid have an opinion about something else than what's the best programming language.