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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?"
The climategate scientists didn't seem to be very open with their sources. Deleting their original source data sounds pretty suspicious to me - not the sort of thing that gets done accidentally.
That's exactly the point SHOW YOUR WORK OR YOU DON'T GET CREDIT. If global warming was as infallible as Algore leads people to think then opening up the data and the algorithms to analyze the data would only bolster his case, yet time after time data is withheld and algorithms and code are not released. When things are hidden people become suspicious of what is really going on, in this case some funny business was going on and the only way to clean up their image would be to completely open the books.
Knowledge = Power
P= W/t
t=Money
Money = Work/Knowledge so the less you know the more you make
"humans" is shorter still, and doesn't miss the rest of the power-hungry assholes.
Sorry, but you'll have to go some to prove that there is another American political party of any consequence that has done anywhere near as much work as the Republicans when it comes to fostering the populist anti-intellectual movement. Go ahead. Try. We'll wait.
[crickets...]
two words - Sarah Palin.
how exactly is she *qualified* in *any* respect to comment on this? her basic statement was rather instructive I thought.
Because of some possible (and if so quite serious) data shenanigans, Obama should boycott the talks entirely to send a message. i.e. Quit.
Rather than go and use the world stage to call serious attention to the shenanigans and work towards improving the process and scientific data.
Instructive, very instructive.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
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.
And thus we get the Sarah Palins of this world. People like her because is as ignorant and stupid and vacuous as they are.
It takes a long time to achieve expertise on any topic. Most people are lazy, ignorant, and stupid and don't want to put in the years of schooling and thought required to understand a topic. It's much easier to stand in the back of the room, and yell "Bullshit!" than it is to actually mount a reasonable argument.
The problem we seem to have now is that we have a lot of people in the back of the room. And never, ever forget that we have a lot of powerful and rich people, who, for the sake of getting richer and more powerful, don't want science to succeed, so they foster the growth of the crowd in the back of the room. And we have a whole slew of radio personalities who have found a gravy train encouraging those in the back of the room.
"If I can't understand it, it must be wrong" is not a scientific theory, but it seems to be the prevailing one.
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.
They've also refused to disclose their raw data, or even a list of what data they used. They've gone as far as ignoring FOIA requests to the point where NASA will soon be facing litigation. They can open-source all the algorithms they want, but without showing their data, it's completely useless.
So no, the criticisms have only been answered for those who are not serious in hearing the real answers.
>>You believe the theory that has observations to prove it works. Not the scientist. Pretty simple if you ask me.
Excellent, so we can dismiss global warming then?
Temperatures went down from the 1930s to the 1960s, and again in the last 10 years. 10 years is too long for random variation to be credited to the decrease. In fact, what we found out from Climategate was that the scientists were at a loss to explain the decline, calling it a travesty that nobody could explain it.
While I'm being about half tongue-in-cheek here, this does highlight why CLIMATE SCIENCE IS NOT SCIENCE. There's no testing, experimentation, or falsification of theories. If we had a bunch of identical copies of Earth to work on, and could engineer them in different ways... then yeah, it'd be science.
The real issue at stake here is that climate science is not science, and by calling themselves scientists (practicing science), they called into question real scientific disciplines like physics, where you actually can test your theories. Unless it's string theory. Then you just sort of flap your hands around a lot.
*bored now, so pedantic nitpicking*
I couldn't say about California forest fires. I venture that California will have grass fires next year, and every year until global climate change makes that state a lot wetter in the summer. It's a seasonal natural phenomenon, like spring floods in rivers.
Note to humans with two brain cells to rub together: building houses on a hill covered with grass that turns into beautiful golden tinder every summer is just as stupid as building an unelevated house on the flood-plain of a major river.
---dragoness
Stop modding that flamebait! That is the exact reason this thread was made. High and mighty So called expert says X and everyone is supposed to just bow down and believe it. Except by his own admission Mr so called expert doesn't know shit.