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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?"
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 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.
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.
Einstein was qualified.
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...
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.
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.
Newtonian Mechanics are valid, just not as accurate as Relativity. Relativity is, in essence, a more accurate version of Newtonian Mechanics. It refines it, but the basic conclusions are very similar, save for extreme circumstances. Though relativity is more accurate, it's much more complicated, so most people will calculate things with N.M. It works fine at human-experienced scales, speeds and distances. Creationism is entirely different from evolution. It in no way refines the idea for more accuracy, it just throws the whole damn concept out the window and says "We know, and we're right because we said so." And it should be noted that Einstein, unlike the evolution-deniers, backed up his claims with math, logic and science, rather than just anecdotal evidence. Fact checking when you are an informed person or scientist is one thing, saying something is wrong because you don't get it and some old book told you it's wrong is entirely another, invalid, way of thinking.
"A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything." ~Friedrich Nietzsche
It would be nice if it was that simple.
But, at least one scientist who was going to study the validity of the ice core methodology was told that it would be immoral to undercut this important foundation for global warming and he was fired so his institute could continue to get funding.
Science is often badly distorted for decades at a time. Long term, you can't stop the truth. But short term, money wins out.
The journal, Science? (Nature?-- it's one of them) declared several years ago, after global warming was only a few years old and before many of the initial predictions failed, that the global warming debate was over and it was time for political action. Does that sound like the scientific method to you?
Nature just came out and said that the emails show nothing wrong and the ends justify the means. Does that sound like the scientific method to you?
Global warming is probably real- anthrocentric global warming is a little more in doubt.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
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.
"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.
Couldn't be that there's just so much to know and study that we can't help but specialize?
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
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
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.
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"
You're right. That's why technology has stood still since 1968. Obvious, really.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
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.
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.
Einstein questioned "valid" laws of science and look what it got him.
Indeed I shall - it got him a series of logical arguments with which to dispute the wisdom of the time. Gradually, through debate and observation and experimentation, more and more people realised he had made a series of logical points that disproved the old ways of doing things.
Let us compare this to the argument from incredulity - the equivalent would have been Einstein saying, "But I don't understand it! How does it work? No, look, see, the feather and the hammer land at different times! Ha! Scientists are dumb!" in which case I doubt he would have quite the same status in the history books.
Be smart, help people!
Why do you assume that liberals don't understand reality and you do? Maybe their theories are more accurate and complete than yours.
Every criticism of them has been answered,
Q: Can we see the data?
A: No, we lost it.
Q: Can we see the algorithms?
A: No, they're proprietary.
See, we've answered all your criticisms. Now go away.
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?
The worst bits in that email dump are petty squabbles between researchers and critics.
Then you haven't been paying attention. The worst problems are evading a legitimate FOIA request, coercing journals to not publish the works of "skeptics", and excluding "skeptic" literature from the IPCC record. Those aren't "petty" scrabbles due to the stakes involved.
We tried that with the state lottery system. It turns out that most people can't understand statistics, and if they could, we wouldn't be able to afford the schools that don't teach it.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
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.
The problem is that in a democratic system, they have the power to take the rest of us into the dark ages with them.
Step into a huge movement. Don't Tread In Me.
...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".
The reason why this has blown up into a huge deal is because the powers from on high are getting set to work out some sort of deal that will place on enormously burdensome tax on the major CO2 producing countries with lots of money (read - the USA). This tax (or whatever you want to call it) is based on this climate data and the interpretations of today's climatologists. And this tax would be imposed during a very difficult and widespread economic recession.
Any time you take away someone's hard-earned money, it becomes a big deal.
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.
If the Pythagorean Theorem required an increase in taxes people would start to doubt it. There was an interesting research paper in which conservatives were given a news article which outlined a study with evidence for humans being responsible for global warming. At the end of the article they either appended a paragraph explaining possible regulation and taxation solutions or a paragraph suggesting that we needed increased Nuclear Power to solve the problem.
Those who read that the solution was taxes were more likely to doubt the validity of the science than those conservatives who read the article with no mention of increased taxes but instead read about Nuclear power.
The problem with climate change science at this point isn't the science it's that the solutions go against conservative values.
"Liberals are trying to take over the world through fascism. Global Warming increases taxes and gives the government increased control over our lives. Therefore Global Warming is an eco-fascist plot to take away freedom and control us." The science doesn't actually matter one way or the other.
The real lesson of Galileo wasn't that science will persecute those it feels are heretics. It's that you can't change the minds of those who base their scientific conclusions not on empiricism and research but on whether or not it threatens completely unrelated personal beliefs.
We might not have perfect models or understand every nuance of climate change but we have pretty good research on the larger points. Challenges to climate change are similar to those against Evolution. "There is no way to know what really happened 100k years ago, because we can't trust proxy data or radio-isotope testing.", "Scientists don't completely understand the underlying mechanisms or why it's happened in the past or when exactly it'll happen in the future.", "There isn't enough time to do real studies since the time frames are so large.", "This is just a liberal plot to destroy our country and fill our children's minds with pseudo science." "It's a modern day religion.", "The scientists are suppressing dissent and withholding their data." "The science isn't settled." "So-and-so admitted that they have huge gaps in their understanding and that it's frustrating to not know X one way or the other."
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
"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.
That would be a truly welcome change.
"[This] will make the lay person unsure of the credibility of ALL sciences without fully seeing proof of it..."
Tada, that's how science is SUPPOSE to work. Don't blindly follow anyone including scientists without quantitative and reproducible proof. Science isn't a religion, it's a fact. YOU ARE ENCOURAGED, NAY REQUIRED TO QUESTION SCIENCE in order for it to prosper.
On a secondary note the same thing applies to government.. but that is a different rant.
I'll see your two words and raise you one: "... and Al Gore"
Mod down people who tell people how to mod in their sigs
Yeah, the credibility will be gone, as the public turn on their TVs, start their cars, play with the internet, put on their deoderant, enjoy their heart medicine...effing scientists..
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
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.
No doubt. There are more important things to focus on like Tiger Woods and his lady issues.
Can I bum a sig?
“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.
That is so retarded it needs to wear a helmet. The way to get ahead in science, if you want to really make your mark, is to kill the darling theories of your elders in a hail of factual bullets. Scientists are like sharks and lame hypotheses are blood in the water.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
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.
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.
Yeah, the credibility will be gone, as the public turn on their TVs, start their cars, play with the internet, put on their deoderant, enjoy their heart medicine...effing scientists..
Credibility can be misplaced without ever disappearing. It doesn't need to be either "fully present" or "gone" like some kind of light switch though it must seem that way to someone who limits himself to "either-or" thinking. So far as I know, no one is arguing that science has not done useful things.
The real question is this. If you had very good, high-quality evidence that something is seriously wrong with the fundamental theories of a scientific field, would those scientists within that field welcome this news and be glad for a chance to question and reform their theories, or, would they refuse to publish your papers and ridicule you and treat you like a religious heretic? Apparently global warming and cosmology are two fields where you would experience the latter and not the former. I think S.J. Gould put it best when he described science as a "gutsy human enterprise":
My message is not that biological determinists were bad scientists or even that they were always wrong. Rather, I believe that science must be understood as a social phenomenon, a gutsy, human enterprise, not the work of robots programmed to collect pure information. I also present this view as an upbeat for science, not as a gloomy epitaph for a noble hope sacrificed on the altar of human limitations.
I believe that a factual reality exists and that science, though often in an obtuse and erratic manner, can learn about it. Galileo was not shown the instruments of torture in an abstract debate about lunar motion. He had threatened the Church's conventional argument for social and doctrinal stability: the static world order with planets circling about a central earth, priests subordinate to the Pope and serfs to their lord. But the Church soon made its peace with Galileo's cosmology. They had no choice; the earth really does revolve about the sun.
The problem with climate change science at this point isn't the science it's that the solutions go against conservative values.
Science doesn't come up with "solutions", (or problems, for that matter) it comes up with theories. It's up to engineers, economists, and politicians to define the implications of a theory as problems, and come up with solutions.
And that's where most of the debate lies: the more specifically we try to define the problem and solution, the more confident we need to be in the more specific theories. But we simply aren't confident in climate theories that have any specificity. A lot of people may agree that "more CO2 means warmer", but without more specific predictions and confidence nobody is going to agree on the problem or the solution.
There's nothing wrong with being skeptical of a politician's "solutions", because there's a lot of judgment required between a scientific theory and a political "solution". Especially when the "solutions" all seem to involve more money and power for all of the scientists and politicians involved (and businesses, like Al Gore's).
Social scientists are inspired by theories; scientists are humbled by facts.
Just curious, based on your argument, how are you qualified to say who is and is not qualified to have a valid opinion on AGW/ACC?
Want Big Business out of government? Take away the incentive and start by getting government out of big business!
The thing I find most amusing is that scientists used to be branded as heretics. Now certain groups of them are going the branding.
When it comes to climate change, for instance, I can't simply find myself agreeing with an alternate hypothesis. Nope. I'm one of those "deniers" as if I was some kind of Jew murdering Nazi or something. Which, you know, is a really healthy way to handle the whole discussion.
Here's another spin on that: the idea of taking huge measures to stop climate change comes mostly from the left. Since it comes from the left, it becomes suspicious when the suggested measures happen to match the policy goals of the left.
If the measures we are supposed to take include things which don't match left-wing policies, it's more likely that the claims are genuine, because there's much less of a motive to exaggerate or be overconfident (or to distort or lie).
You can bet that if a left-winger says that global warming is so bad that he wants nuclear power, he's sincere about it. If he says that global warming is so bad that he wants taxes and regulation, he could be sincere, but might be using the global warming as an excuse, since he wants those things anyway.
It's a type of conflict of interest. People are more trustworthy when they say you should do things that don't match their other goals, than when they say you should do things that do. It's really not surprising.
it doesn't, but the vast majority of climate change deniers aren't showing any data proving their point.
The mad rush to claim 'Climategate' over the email disclosures proves they don't have any data of their own to stand on.
If people have valid reproducible data, I, and any 'scientific' person would be happy to debate the issue. There have been a shameful few if any that have anything like that to contribute to the discussion.
Also in referencing their arguments against Global Warming, first it was "It isn't happening" and now it's gone to "well maybe it is but it's not Human's fault". (reasons Ms. Palin claimed both of in her Op-Ed, which in itself is astounding).
The data as we know it is alarmingly out of scale with anything in recorded history. The models we used 30 years ago to predict the situation today have proved horribly conservative. The realities are much more severe than forecast.
Now take the claim by the deniers that it won't really be that bad. Blindly ignoring the fact that proven history has shown it will in fact be worse than the models predict.
They aren't contributing anything useful to the conversation as a whole, so as whole, sadly, the get represented by the wingnuts and crazies.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
What's "wrong" supposed to mean? We also know that neither GR nor QM can simultaneous be correct explanations of the Universe, because of their mutual incompatibility, but that doesn't make them "wrong".
The Universe has some rules it plays by. We still don't know what they are, we may not ever. The best we ever do is to model those rules. Each model is "correct" within a particular range of validity. GR is correct at large length scales. QM is correct at small. Newton is correct at gamma approximately equal to 1. And so on...
Perhaps it may surprise you to know that reputable scientists also use Special Relativity *a lot*, despite being replaced by GR, or that we use different models (point, parton, and valence quark) of the proton depending on what regime we're in.
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.
All too often in the debates about GCC someone who is a climate researcher will go "Well I'm a climate researcher so I'm right and the people that don't agree with me are idiots." Yea, not the best way to approach people
They have every right to say this; when the people arguing against them are not climate scientists, or in scientific fields related. If I tell someone with a PhD in climate science that they are wrong, they have every right to chuckle at me, since I really don't know what I'm talking about. This is not a problem.
The problem is some idea that science should be "fair and balanced", and that every view, from any source, is valid, or at least should be debated or considered. Scientists should tell MORE people to STFU, if you ask me.
I think it stems from being walled up in Universities and not having to work for a living.
I'm also getting sick of this sentiment. Being a undereducated working stiff DOES NOT make you the paragon of virtue, or some special font of insight. It makes you an average moron, thats it, nothing more. Having to "work for a living" (which, last I checked, most evil academics do as well) doesn't mean that you get the right to weigh authoritatively on topics you know nothing about.
These morally dubious (sarcasm there) ivory tower types earned their "arrogance", I use irony quotes there because someone "admitting to know more than a NASCAR watching moron" has become arrogant. If someone spent 8 years of their life trying to be proficient in a feild, I'd say they know more than some blue collar worker, and earned having a preferred opinion on that topic.
And no, I'm not an academic, though I pride myself as trying to be as intellectual as I possibly can. I see being intellectually average, or ignorant as a character flaw, and not something to work toward (or revel in), but something to work to remedy.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
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.
One picture tells it all:
(graph of the difference in degrees between raw and "final" data sets)
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/img/climate/research/ushcn/ts.ushcn_anom25_diffs_urb-raw_pg.gif
People aren't doubting SCIENCE.
People are understanding that SCIENTISTS are as likely as anyone to be venal, petty, biased, partisan, and above all the previous 8 year administration showed us: political.
When someone shows a graph of temperature data, that's interesting science.
When I (thanks to the internet) can pull up the raw paleoclimatological data from NOAA, and ask "hey, Mr. Scientist, why is it that your data doesn't match what I see?" and I get a lot of bullshit, handwaving, and a cavalcade of smoke and mirrors - I become somewhat skeptical.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/08/the-smoking-gun-at-darwin-zero/ ... and then don't you DARE call my questioning of your methods "doubts about science" - that's just you building a strawman to try to paint me as some mullet-wearing, Creationism-believing rube.
I understand, it's much easier to just call your critics "stupid" than to acknowledge that the dogma you've been parroting is falling apart.
-Styopa
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.
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
If you pride yourself on being intellectual you should be capable of drawing reasonable conclusions from information presented to you. For a scientist to say STFU you don't have a degree in my field is childish and enforces the notion that a PhD is somehow required to contribute meaningfully to the body of human knowledge. This is not true at all.
"I'll buy that argument once religious whackadoodles promise to renounce their faith because of televangelists and pedo-priests."
Um, the proper thing to do (for me, anyways) is to renounce the televangelists and pedo-priests.
It's a common mistake you made, and you need not apologize.
We shouldn't shut down the climate change debate EVEN if it is proven that the climate change evangelists have cooked the data and obstructed debate. But we should, at least, be dealing with the best available data and rigorous scrutiny of the data and the analysis.
From what I've seen of the scandal, it's apparent that some the global warming crowd can't tolerate dissent, and some of those least tolerant are also most influential. But this isn't news to me, personally. I've been trying to find current global temperature data for almost 3 years, and I've found that data for the last 10 years is being hidden. All we get are conclusions. And data from before is rapidly disappearing.
It's this hiding of the data that concerns me. You can't even stand the light of your own data? Something is wrong there.
ps- The argument that we need to develop renewable energy sources is important, but misses a huge point. Climate change is the reason that so many draconian measures are being proposed, from cap 'n trade to outright bans on useful things. Developing renewable energy need not require such measures. It makes sense on purely economic grounds, if oil is going to run out. And it is defensible on purely stewardship grounds - clean energy is preferable to dirty energy. Maybe a better sales job on that would work. Sadly, the readily available clean energy (nuclear fission) is alrady demonized in the U.S. Solar requires both capital and resources (real estate). Wind? Just to set the record straight, hydro power is not clean, it just makes pretty lakes out of pretty rivers, which changes the ecology greatly. Ask the fish. But we sent men to walk on the Moon. We can solve this if we get focused and make the decision to 'do it'. So, Mr. President, how about directing some of that TARP money into solving *real* problems?
If nothing else, maybe improve our transportation infrastructure - some impact there, like reducing drive times? Making public transit work? Making alternatives like car-trains and autopilot driving possible? We haven't begun to explore the solutions. We're just waxing on about how serious the problem is, and how someone has to do somethign about it.
Meh.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
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.
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."
Just because one has the "right" to say it, doesn't mean they should.
Aristotle would call it Hubris - "to cause shame to the victim, not in order that anything may happen to you, nor because anything has happened to you, but merely for your own gratification. Hubris is not the requital of past injuries; this is revenge. As for the pleasure in hubris, its cause is this: men think that by ill-treating others they make their own superiority the greater."
I've done both academics and working both in agriculture and the public sector and in my view no one "earns arrogance".
Bullshit.
I am perfectly qualified, and so is anyone else who is able to think critically, admittedly a shrinking demographic.
RUGBYRUGBYRUGBY
Well, she's at least as qualified as Al Gore...
Yes, there is a long, long list of people who should have been told to STFU. Newton, Galileo, Celeste - ohh, the list goes on and on.
Seriously, #1 on my list would be that douchebag, Al Gore. He did more to politicize the global warming crap than anyone. If you want my most serious opinion on GW - yeah, the earth is warming. It's going to warm, no matter what we do. Do I really think that mankind is hastening the inevitable? Wellll - not really, but it's possible. Yeah, let's do whatever we can to clean up the environment, and to stop wasting shit - that makes sense with or without the threat of global warming. Stop polluting. I like it. Those things that you just HAVE to have, you should shop for the most energy efficient model. Stop driving cars to the corner for a gallon of milk. Stop wasting. Everyone will benefit - global warming or not.
But, as for man CAUSING global warming - BULLSHIT!!! How many ice ages has the earth had now? And, how many interglacial periods?
The earth didn't end with any of the ice ages, or during any of the interglacials.
It's time to adapt, people. Doomsayers go under the bus. People with a plan can get on the bus.
"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
http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=25526754-e53a-4899-84af-5d9089a5dcb6
Because of the high importance of this realization, in 1994 Dr. Jaworowski, together with a team from the Norwegian Institute for Energy Technics, proposed a research project on the reliability of trace-gas determinations in the polar ice. The prospective sponsors of the research refused to fund it, claiming the research would be "immoral" if it served to undermine the foundations of climate research.
The refusal did not come as a surprise. Several years earlier, in a peer-reviewed article published by the Norwegian Polar Institute, Dr. Jaworowski criticized the methods by which CO2 levels were ascertained from ice cores, and cast doubt on the global-warming hypothesis. The institute's director, while agreeing to publish his article, also warned Dr. Jaworowski that "this is not the way one gets research projects." Once published, the institute came under fire, especially since the report soon sold out and was reprinted. Said one prominent critic, "this paper puts the Norsk Polarinstitutt in disrepute." Although none of the critics faulted Dr. Jaworowski's science, the institute nevertheless fired him to maintain its access to funding.
---
Does "we won't fund the research because it "MIGHT" undermine climate research and so is immoral" sound like an impartial search for the truth?
The global warming agenda stinks of corporate propaganda and group think to me.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
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
There are a couple key differences here through.
In the Pons and Fleischmann case, they were putting forth an experiment which, if it had actually worked, would have caused massive social upheaval as we changed over to a cold fusion based society. When their experiments proved to not be reproducible the status quo was maintained, and everyone got on with life. While it was important in the scientific community, for the average layperson it was a bunch of news about crap they didn't understand, didn't care about, and since it didn't effect them in the end, didn't need to care about.
In contrast, the scientists who are putting forth the theory of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) are also stating that the only real solution is going to involve massive social uchange. In general, people don't like change. Worse yet, the AGW folks are asking people who have grown up with the mindset of consumerism and waste to give that up. Again, it should come as little surprise that people are resistant to this.
And then there is the politics behind how to deal with AGW. Deserved or not, the green movement managed to get itself linked with socialism, and because of poor education in the US, communism in the 1970's. And, unfortunately, most of the solutions to the AGW problem need to be on a massive scale, involving whole societies working together, in other words: socialism. And, all the opponents of change need to so is raise this specter and many people in the US will eat it up. Coupled with the natural resistance to change, and people will go through all sorts of mental contortions to not have to deal with it.
The next political problem is that the people with money in this country are willing to spend that money to protect their income. Since the current system is known to make them money and the new system is an unknown, but will likely involve higher costs without an obvious mechanism for higher profits, the safe bet is to fight to keep the current system in place. Moreover, some of the people with the most money, the folks who run the oil companies, can easily recognize that the proposed changes are a threat to their primary revenue stream. It's no wonder they throw tons of money into fighting the changes.
As for solutions, I don't think there is an easy way to deal with all of this. Trying to force the change to happen fast has the possibility of backfiring. In the US right now the current makeup of government (heavily Democrat) has the best chance of getting something done on the AGW issue. However, too much change at once will give the Republicans a lot of ammo to use in 2010 and 2012. If the current government tries to force the people of the US too far out of their comfort zone at once, they may well be tossed out in the next election cycle which will give the Republicans the ability to undo those changes, and even the blessing of the people to do so. Instead, the change is going to have to happen slowly and incrementally.
The problem here, of course, is that we may really need to get something done quickly. My opinion on this would be that we really need to look at geo-engineering solutions for the short term. Certainly, it's not an optimal solution, and there is the problem that we cannot guarantee that tinkering with the climate is going to work; but, we're doing that at the moment anyway. We are dumping tons of gasses into the atmosphere every day which we know modify how the climate reacts to solar inputs. While the best solution would be to stop doing that, that solution isn't really practicable. The political situation to get it done just isn't there at the moment, And, while we may be able to get that change to happen via small changes in the market economy, that is likely to be a slow and inaccurate solution. And yes, I do realize that if everyone would just consume a little less, drive a little less, and get out of their comfort zone, we wouldn't need to do this. Wonderful, great, ain't gonna happen. The "reduce, recycle, reuse" horse is dead, American consumerism killed it, so either fuck it or walk away, but please quit beating it.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
Don't blindly follow anyone including scientists without quantitative and reproducible proof.
I would believe that if skeptics actually argued their case scientifically. Instead we get a bunch of conspiracy theories and attacks on scientists' motives. Nobody has made a scientific refutation of AGW, and that is what is important to me.
If you were objective, then you would offer an objective criteria to assuage your guilt, and then study the science.
Science is about more than being incredulous. Any idiot can say they don't believe something.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
two words - Sarah Palin. .
how exactly is she *qualified* in *any* respect to comment on this?
How exactly are you *qualified* in *any* respect to comment on this?
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
There's also a lot of money to be made by saying that global warming is not a man-made phenomena, too. I'm not an economist, so I couldn't tell you for sure where more of the money is, but given that global warming deniers are arguing from the status quo, I'd say that there's more money in denying global warming.
Yes, as the GP pointed out, science is supposed to work by critical analysis. The problem is this: the general public is too dumb. They don't understand logic. They don't understand basic statistical methods. Heck, most of them can't even form a cogent argument using facts they do know. But modern civilization requires that public policy be determined by the facts, and sometimes, those facts are complicated. You need an education in science to understand them.
So what do we do? Obviously, the right solution is education, but that takes time. When you have urgent issues that the public must act on, you run a public campaign, i.e., propaganda. Sometimes this is a good thing. Sometimes it is not. Successful public policy has depended on an implicit trust the public has in the experts. I don't think that the public will ever stop looking to experts-- but a big worry here is that they start thinking that the local minister or the blowhard on the radio is the expert, and not the scientist who has spent a lifetime studying the thing. That would have major repercussions for our quality of life.
I should point out that the term "scare tactic" is itself a bit of propaganda. If the guy who's calling a global warming campaign a "scare tactic" is a lobbyist for an oil company, guess what-- you've been duped. When you hear that term, think about who's saying it.
And yet, he still managed to get funding and publish his paper. Seems to me like everything's working.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Michael Moor and Al Gore are both certainly not Republicans and if you think they are intellectual then good luck with that.
The two parties certainly aren't any different when it comes to "fostering the populist anti-intellectual movement."
RUGBYRUGBYRUGBY
Anthropogenic Global warming believers don't want anyone to drive SUVs without feeling bad about it, so they cherrypick data that supports their already determined philosophical standpoint.
There, fixed that for you in accord with what actually happened. It was the the High Priests of AGW who conveniently lost the data they were asked to release -- i.e., cherrypicked it.
-- Alastair
The problem for the average layperson is this: We have a vast island now under a huge glacier that is called Greenland, one that was once green enough to earn this name. We had several movies about the Ice Age, that, while distorted enough, show prehistoric times when half of Europe was under ice.
Anyone more familiar with the subject knows about the Medieval Warm Period, where tropical plants could be cultivated across most of Europe and also of much older periods where there weren't permanent ice sheets even in Antarctica.
Therefore, everyone should know that Earth has been much much warmer and colder than today and a delta of annual average temperatures of even 5 or more degrees has already happened long before even the great apes had evolved. The world sure looked much different and today would mean a danger to many human settlements, but as the climate itself shifted so much greater degrees before humans arrived, we cannot ever hope to prove humans are the reason for the current warming. We have a warming now: yes. We had warmings and coolings before humans were expending any amount of CO2: yes. We had even greater amounts of warming and cooling long before civilizations fomed: yes. We had still greater warmings and coolings before the Great Apes used their first improvised tool: yes, yes and yes.
I don't know of any reliable way to prove that it's our human CO2 expenditure that's causing the current warming when all we have is fairy tales from the Middle Ages, ice cores from times before the first Human and proxy data from trees of questionable origin. All we could conclude is that we now have a period of warming. Fine. Now prove that it's the human's and ONLY the human's fault without circular reasoning.
> two words - Sarah Palin.
And we thought BDS was bad enough. The mention of Mrs. Palin's name seems to instantly polarize any conversation, so why bring her into this thread, already a certainty to become a veritable flamefest?
But since you did, lets do examine her ideas on the merits instead of ad hominim attacks on her. Seems she is saying pretty much what I have been saying here on /. for years. That the science and politics of GW and especially AGW have blurred into a horrid muddle such that even the raw data (where it hasn't been destroyed) isn't trustworthy. Therefore basing multi-trillion dollar reordering of the world's economy on it is stupid. Therefore The Won trying to ram a New Deal on Carbon down our thoats by hook (Copenhagan) or crook (EPA) isn't even on the same planet with science, it is ideology, pure and simple.
> Because of some possible (and if so quite serious) data shenanigans, Obama should boycott
> the talks entirely to send a message. i.e. Quit.
Yes. Because the reaction has been to attack the messengers, bury the whole matter and proceed on the same predetermined course. By going Obama is declaring for that faction. No other spin is possible. The only exception would be if he went and used the occasion to put his speaking skills into the service of Science by utterly flaying the whole perverted exercise, which we both know won't happen.
Global warming MAY be happening (but probably hasn't for a decade now..), AGW even MIGHT be the major cause. But with even the raw sensor data in serious doubt (ask Google about the recent review of the raw data in Darwin or the rerun of the New Zealand long term trend data from their raw data. The rot extends far beyond EAU's CRU now.) and the main actors proven by their own words to be activists instead of scientists who can say? And that is the point, nobody who hasn't got a few years to dig into data has no rational basis to decide. The experts are tainted on both sides by trillions of dollars of incentives, political/religious beliefs and the raw data is suspect. So on the one hand we might all be Doomed! yet the only proposed solution to the possibility is 100% certain to produce ruin. So the rational person looks for option #3 and says, so just how much would mitigation cost should we do nothing and the Warmers prove to be right?
If you are going to cry wolf on such a biblical scale as the AGW theory does, you really should make every attempt to be open and above reproach. If the warmers had truly believed the science was settled they should have put together a datadump worthy of the claims. Put the full raw data, the adjustments with detailed explanations for each out along with the complete fully commented source to the models used to process it that gave the results that lead them to their frightening theory of doom. Let everyone fully examine the whole thing to the best of their abilities. That would have settled the science.
Instead they let Al Gore ride in and turn the whole thing into a crappy PowerPoint, then into a movie and finally ride it to become the Nobel Goracle with a hundred million dollar personal forture riding on a pet theory that just happened (amazing coincidence, Trust Me!) to require the exact same policies his ilk had been pushing since Karl Marx defiled the Earth with his presence.
Or take James Hansen. He is going around saying anyone who "Denies" his theory should be tried for crimes against The Earth. Were he just another crackpot pundit he could be safely ignored. Look at MSNBC's raings, we are pretty good at ignoring crackpots. The problem isn't even that Hansen wears the robes of a High Priest of Science!, hell he has the NASA patch on his robes, in the ranks of Science! that is better than a cardinal's hat. No, the problem is that the rest of the priesthood hasn't taken any action against him.
When a heretic priest comes busting into yer temple demanding everyone adopt a new set of beliefs the established church
Democrat delenda est
Greenpeace != climatologists. Al Gore != climatologist. IPCC: there's one big subset of climatologic science. And yes, I've red (a part of) the IPCC reports, and yes i read (parts of) Nature(the scientific journal), and yes I can see the changes already happening in nature. And yes, i have a lot of friends in active scientific work: and I assure you : they are NOT in it for the money. greenpeace is also not in it for the money. If you actually believe the greens and the scientists are in it for the big bucks, i'll call you an idiot.
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
“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.
That is so retarded it needs to wear a helmet. The way to get ahead in science, if you want to really make your mark, is to kill the darling theories of your elders in a hail of factual bullets. Scientists are like sharks and lame hypotheses are blood in the water.
That's all very whimsical dear Slashdotter, but did you actually read that article before you decided to comment about it? Doing otherwise is a great way to miss its point, after all.
It's hard to "kill the darling theories of your elders in a hail of factual bullets" when those elders refuse to publish your papers in peer-reviewed journals and when those elders deny your access to telescopes and other scientific instruments that are used to find facts. None of that has anything to do with the correctness or incorrectness of a scientific theory. Sort of like how it's hard to defend yourself in a fistfight when you're hog-tied, but this proves nothing about the martial prowess of your opponent. The refusal to publish in peer-reviewed journals is particularly inexcusable and downright cowardly, because if it's really so wrong, the peers should have no problem openly demonstrating that. It's censorship, plain and simple.
All of your notions derive from assuming that there is a level playing field and that factual correctness is the only thing you need to change the dominant beliefs of the day. I can see why you'd really like to believe that. I would too. The harsh reality is that you can have all the facts in the world and still not be listened to, because what is purportedly about facts is actually about institutional authority and orthodoxy.
IF Vikings farmed on Greenland that might mean that Greenland was warmer back then. Local warming is not indicative of global warming. The so called medieval warm period is _discounted_ from global climate studies because it was an effect that held true only for Europe. Other parts of the world have shown no warming back then.
Global warming means the warming of the global average temperature.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Kudos for putting a bit of perspective on things. I'd mod you +1 Informative, but I'd rather add to the discussion.
Have you noticed how these days, any law or protocol or recommendation has to be of the form "You must do X otherwise Y will happen" ?
You must endure them stealing your water at the airport because of Homeland Security concerns.
You must endure ISP privacy violations because the RIAA needs to make money
You must endure carbon credits because of global warming (no don't call it that, it's colder) climate change.
etc etc
Why do we need to be "blackmailed" into doing anything.
Every point you raised above, recycling, saving energy etc all come under the heading "good fucking common sense". You should do them because it makes sense, at a very base level. Waste not, want not, as my Grandmother used to lecture into me.
Not because "if you don't do this, the sky will fall". The government sounds more like Chicken Little every day.
This isn't only happening in Climate science. 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. Big Gov't gives them money to prove certain things for them, so inevitably, they need to prove those things to keep getting the money.
This happens wherever people's livelihood depends on Government Grants. Invariably, someone will end up committing fraud to keep getting the grants.
I love the irony in these CRU scientists refusing to release their data because "all they want to do is prove it wrong". Where would we be if Newton, Galileo, Einstein and others had felt that way. Methinks they doth protest too much. Besides, How the hell can you build a climate model without allowing for variations in the solar output??? How can you embed the data in the code. That is the number one rule for coders. Keep the code and data separate. If the data changes, the code can still run a new set of data. These huge gaps in logic keep me a skeptic.
"People are stupid; given proper motivation, almost anyone will believe almost anything."
How can the numbers have been verified to be accurate when the CRU in question admitted to throwing out the RAW data used to generate the numbers? No one can go back to the RAW data and show that the numbers were correctly processed. Please cite your verifications - and they better not be others who relied on the same RAW data that has been admitted to have been destroyed. (Good luck with that one.)
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
My logic tells me that true science is more about questions than answers. I believe that we continually need to move forward but with enough doubt about how far we have come to be able to freely discuss "facts" that we have already established.
In the fable of the Blind Men and the Elephant ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_Men_and_an_Elephant ), various people correctly observe things and make differing conclusions about them. While there are definitely times to apply Occam's Razor and accept certain facts and move on, that does not mean there is not more to the story that can be observed later from a different angle.
Any "scientist" who works to "shut up" the opposition, has ceased to be a scientist and has turned into a political creature. Science is not about manipulation but about free and open discussions based upon the merits of the arguments.
Coding Blog
they study PROXIES that maybe indicate what the climate was, but not the actual climate information itself. They can't study the climate itself because that requires hard numbers. What was the temperature at X places on day Y? What was the rainfall? What ocean/atmosphere currents existed?
They look at tree rings in petrified trees and make guesses based on assumptions. They dig up ice cores and measure something they assume hasn't changed for 10,000 years, even though its a gas that easily dissolves in water and has been sitting in what they tell us is an atmosphere already highly concentrated in that gas.
Then they confuse correlation with causation. "The industrial age started the same time we see temperatures going up." Ok. Correlation. And then ignore all the times the temperature went up when the industrial age was still tens of thousands of years away. And then forget that science requires the ability to test hypotheses, like "if CO2 is causing the increase, taking the CO2 away will make it stop."
And then they have the nerve to say "we know...". Just like big-bang theorists claim "we know". No, you don't know. You THINK you know, you have a PLAUSIBLE mechanism, but without SEEING it happen, you don't know that it happened that way.
That's how you can detect the Religion of Science versus real science. Real science measures and predicts. Religion of Science makes claims about unseen things that happened in the past.
As for the next fellow in this thread who claims that the data supporting the hockey stick is well supported, I say "hockey stick". No, it isn't. People have tried to get the data and duplicate the results and they're having a hard time just accounting for the data being used, much less the results from it. This is a well-known issue, to anyone who hasn't drunk the koolaid and joined the cult. Even the numbers from an organization as staid and solid as NOAA is suspect. A study done a while ago just looking at the temperature measurement system found that many of the sites had been repainted with a different paint and showed a correlated increase in temperatures, and many sites were located too close to buildings or parking lots and also had biases in their results. So, no, don't pretend the data is pristine and the interpretation obvious, it just ain't so.
I've seen him lauded for raising awareness of the issue. Like most popularizers, he's been criticized on the details by scientists, including those who support the broad consensus view on anthropogenic global warming. The Nobel Prize was the Peace Prize, not one of the scientific prizes.
In fact, plenty of them have, including those who support the point Gore was making in the speeches and video.
I guess that depends which subset of the numbers you choose to work with, and how "accurate" a model based on ice cores from 100,000 years ago can actually be, considering all their other models can't tell you if it will rain tomorrow.
Face it, any numbers older than about 50 years ago are based on best-guess, nothing more. So for them to declare what will happen in 20 years from now, based on a regression of 50 data points in the past is hardly valid statistics.
If, just if, next year's average is actually colder, will that make a difference ? No, they'll simply declare "localized variation" as always. Funny how when the data agrees with their guesstimate, it's "valid", but when it disagrees, it's "localized variation".
Now I'm not a PhD, hell I didn't even finish college, but common sense, gut instinct and 41 years in the school of life tells me something smells bad about the whole AGW agenda. And if the 75% or whatever percentage of "common schmucks" feel this way, how successful do you think any emission reduction efforts will be ?
I always placed my belief that the scientists knew a hell of a lot more than me, and I could trust what they said. But recently, perhaps with age, has come the same cynicism I now feel for corporations, pharmaceuticals, politicians etc ... they ALL have another agenda behind their ideas, be it money, grant funding or plain old power.
For a bloody good read, try Tom Clancy's "State of Fear". It puts an awful lot of these issues into the perspective of the common man.
The problem is some idea that science should be "fair and balanced", and that every view, from any source, is valid, or at least should be debated or considered. Scientists should tell MORE people to STFU, if you ask me.
There is another problem with your view... insofar that it treads dangerously close to representing something else. Here, I'll paraphrase your quote and show you how it would parse:
'The problem is some idea that christianity should be "fair and balanced", and that every view, from any source, is valid, or at least should be debated or considered. Bishops and priests should tell MORE people to STFU, if you ask me.' (after all, only someone trained in, say, Canon Law would be qualified to speak authoritatively on christianity, right?)
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
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.
You (or someone else whose example you are following) is searching through the CSU data, to find cherry-picked results that contradict accepted climate research.
I am not accusing you of wearing a mullet. But what you are doing is very close to Creationist fanaticism. It is dishonest, politically motivated, and untrue.
The raw/final graph could be anything -- it is poorly labeled -- but I suspect it is the difference between the raw and final tree ring temperature observations. Of course there is a difference between the raw and final data, because the tree rings are *wrong* after 1960 and needed to be corrected. This has been explained.
The Darwin Zero results were biased upwards because they were homogenized (read: Averaged) with temperatures in the rest of the continent. Any time you average points together, some of them are going to go up (and others will go down). The Darwin Zero station temperatures were consistently lower than the other Australian measurements. They were *wrong* and needed to be adjusted or thrown out, and the scientists chose to adjust them.
There is nothing sinister here, and if critics were honest they'd mention the hundreds of data points that *support* the hypothesis of climate change rather than digging out the one badly-labeled graph and the one fallacious data point that disputes it.
It's like explaining to people that unicorns don't exist, while they keep shaking narwhal bones at us and shrieking 'Burn the witch!'
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
Any "scientist" who works to "shut up" the opposition, has ceased to be a scientist and has turned into a political creature. Science is not about manipulation but about free and open discussions based upon the merits of the arguments.
Yes, the scientific way to silence an idiot is to ask him lots of hard questions, and let him keep the floor as long as he's able. When he can't answer those questions to the audience's satisfaction, then it's time to deliver your own answers. For those of you who feel that this is cruel and/or wrong, do you not feel a moral obligation to prevent a speaker from misguiding his audience? There's nothing discriminatory about asking questions. If the speaker has the answer, then he can educate the audience. If he can't then someone else will step in to take up the slack.
If all ideas are NOT equally valid, then I challenge them to even predict what the weather will be over my house, in exactly 7 days from now !
You see the problem is, climatologists can't even predict the "small stuff" to any degree of accuracy, yet will quite happily stand 100% by their conclusions on what will happen in 10 years fro now, declaring that they know better, and everyone else is either unqualified, or misguided, or a moron.
That's a bit disingenuous. The "small stuff" is actually much harder to predict that "big picture" stuff.
Try this example - take a hunting hound and turn loose a fox about 5 minutes ahead of him - the fox runs east. Now release the hound. Tell me what his exact position will be in 1 minute. I'm guessing you'll have a pretty hard time guessing exactly where the dog is going to be. HOWEVER, I'll bet you a month's pay that over the next 5 minutes his GENERAL DIRECTION will be east.
The same basic thing applies to climatology. The weather is a shaky little bugger that is far to variable to make exact predictions on specific days. It can however be perfectly possibly to extrapolate a general trend and direction in the data.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Free speech is one thing, but when talk-radio (just one example) come out with completely made up 'facts' and statistics on the fly to please their listeners, they ought to be fined hard if the study they pretend their stats come from doesn't exist in peer-reviewed form. I've listened to them 'debate' the current climate problems, and it would have been a good laugh if it hadn't made me cry first.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
Ah I get it: anything to the left of Rush Limbaugh is "Liberal Statist," so we can handily paint public health care, women's rights, or any form of government intervention at all with the same shade of "Kim Jong Il Red."
Handy! Saves a lot of messy "thinking" and "rational debate."
The point, I think is that they, they creationists, the flat earthers, the anti-vaccination groups, the moon landing conspiracy theorists, the alternative medicine crowd, the parapsychologists, and really anyone with a feeling of being persecuted just because they can't prove that anything they claim is true, is going to be trying to use this to undermine the rationalist and materialist foundations of science.
Given the anti-intellectual bias in much of popular culture, I'm not sure it will have much effect. It's going to be used to reinforce the faithful against facts and logic, but it may also be successfully used to recruit more people into the various cults of fantasy.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
There is actually a parallel between why the media jumped on Tiger and the science flub so badly. In both cases the media attention is strengthened by the idea of breaking an otherwise stable 'uninteresting' topic.
Tiger is important in the world (of entertainment). He is an awesome sportsman, successful, rich, married nice girl, blah, blah, whatever. Problem for the media has been that we already know all of this by now. There is rarely ever anything new, or better (media point of view) bad to report. Well...the car crash ignited this massive media blitz against him for the sake of _trying_ to bring the guy down to 'the rest of us'.
Science is also seen as uninteresting. It's all logical stuff done by smart folks that know what they are doing. Nothing to report on. Problem is that those boring and smug scientists are behind all this science that is telling us to change our lives, and we can't come up with any reasons to tell them to buzz off, because well...those reasons typically have to be scientific, and we can't beat them at their own game.
And up comes a reason we can slap them over the head with...they cheated, and we know all about that. You know what says the media to fuel a story they have been itching to get away with, they probably all cheat!
Here's yet another spin. Something bad happens and corrective action is urged. In fact it's so bad, that corrective action must be mandated because of the scale involved. The powers of the wealthy status quo don't want corrective action because they perceive it as cutting into their whiskey and Thai sex tour money. So they spend their money to create front groups to stall and question the there really is anything bad happening at all. They spend their money on politicians and talking heads to create "controversy," and spreading hokum about how that the bad thing is actually good, and how the people that want to stop the bad thing actually just want to steal all your money, piss on your Bible, round your family up into the UN mandated concentration camps, make you dig your own grave, and then machine gun you to death. Predictably the bad thing gets worse, and because of the unwarranted delay will take more effort now to not to prevent (since at this point we've passed well beyond the tipping point) but rather to just mitigate compared to the amount of effort required at the very beginning. So now the status quo proclaims that the bad thing must not have been so bad, because now the opposition doesn't want to stop it, just slow it, and anyway now they want more money, so obviously it must have been a fraud in the first place. Meanwhile the status quo forces continue to rake in the cash.
But no. This doesn't make sense because right-wing motivations are always pure as the driven snow, and only when those who I politically oppose argue for something that I already believe, are their motivations pure and conclusions correct, because I'm Right(tm). I know I'm right, because it's in my name, and I'm right. I'm a winner, and winners aren't wrong, so I'm right. If I was wrong, I'd have to change, but change is for losers, and I'm a winner, so I don't have to change, and because I don't have to change I'm right.
You can bet that if a left-winger says that global warming is so bad that he wants nuclear power, he's sincere about it. If he says that global warming is so bad that he wants taxes and regulation, he could be sincere, but might be using the global warming as an excuse, since he wants those things anyway.
Clearly you have never heard of James Lovelock and have no knowledge of the modern environmental and anti-climate change movement beyond what Glenn Beck tells you, since your "insight" is little more than a simplistic maligned caricature. But I'm sure you sleep well at night because it never enters your mind that you're premisses, let alone your conclusions, just might be wrong.
You tried to be amusing, but failed, so I'll not keep you long ...
Good idea, wouldn't want you to keep your supermodel friends waiting...
We almost tripled our population in 50 years, so why hasn't the temperature tripled ? Of course, this is nonsensical, you'd argue, the temperature of the earth is not effected SOLELY by humans, there are any number of much larger, more important effects.
Temperature tripled? In Kelvin or some other units? Please consult a basic physics textbook, a logician, or a psychiatrist.
But yet, according to the GW crowd, humans have caused this disaster by pumping CO2 into the atmosphere ? Forget water vapour, forget methane, forget solar flares and the solar cycles, forget everything else, yes for sure it's those bloody humans and their CO2 !
Wow, we climate guys didn't even consider these things. Thanks for pointing them out. This will just revolutionize the field.
So which is it ? Either human output of CO2 is a major factor in global climate, in which case my "population tripling" assertion above should be correct ?
Um, no, you are completely wrong. If all people in Burkina Faso were driving Escalades 50 miles a day, you would still be wrong.
Or human output of CO2 is NOT a major factor in global climate, and any trivial adjustments we make won't make a damn of difference.
You cannot have it both ways, you choose, okay ?
Ok, I'll choose the simplest explanation: you are a troll or a moron.
If you are going to cry wolf on such a biblical scale as the AGW theory does, you really should make every attempt to be open and above reproach.
You can't because it's been brewing for some decades, with newer models and hard facts (like antarctic cores) trickling in slowly. At a certain point you are able to say that you have enough data to conclude, but if you wait until you have perfect data, it'll be FAR TOO LATE. We need to act now.
Put the full raw data, the adjustments with detailed explanations
That's exabytes of data and tens of thousands of publications and it's already out there for who wants it. What are opponents (who can't even understand basic statistics) going to do with it that scientists haven't already done anyway, except nitpick that there's a comma missing in a sentence and therefore the whole thing must be wrong like they did in this email fiasco ?!?
Non-Linux Penguins ?
My favorite "data-based" proof of AGW skeptics is the "now that I've found the data sources finally I've done a simple graph of temperature vs. CO2 in excel which disproves AGW." The subtext to such comments is essentially that an outside analyst who only knows numbers (and not the field, or how the data were collected, or anything else other than computers and very basic statistics) is doing a correct analysis of the data whereas people who do understand the provenance of such data must be either hiding such findings as a community, or too incompetent to do a basic graph in excel. Furthermore such simple exercises ignore techniques like multiple linear regression (among others) which can account for the influence of multiple variables at the same time.
Knowing the method of data collection is crucial to correct analysis. In my previous life as an astronomer, we would typically image objects by taking four pictures: 1) an on wavelength on target image, 2) an on wavelength off target image, 3) an off wavelength on target image, and 4) an off wavelength off target image. Proper data reduction meant that you first found intensity on band due to the target (diff12): image 1)- image 2, then the blackbody offset for being on target (diff34): image 3) - image 4), and then the true intensity of the object in that wavelength diff12-diff34. It helps if you draw a picture. It also helps if you know what blackbody radiation is, the bandwidth of your filter, and a hundred other small things that you won't see if you are just presented with a cache of images. The point being that there are usually good reasons for collecting the data in a certain manner, and if you don't know what these are, you probably won't be able to reduce it correctly.
Does that mean that if you don't have an advanced degree in physics or climatology you shouldn't be able to come to the table and express your opinion? No. But many of the AGW skeptics seem unwilling to listen to the reasoning and experience of those who have been in the game for a while. It's almost as if I felt that my prior experience with a .22 rifle qualified me to tell General Petraeus how to run operations having not ever been on the ground in the Middle East. I am able to differentiate my opinion about the war from my ability to prosecute it. In the same way AWG critics need to understand that while they may bring some fresh ideas to the table, it is likely that much of their reasoning has already been rigorously examined and discarded by people with far more experience than them.
The small stuff may be quite hard to predict. I can however make some make some more general predictions.
It will rain in England more this month than it did in august.
It will be colder in Moscow in February than it is now.
There will be forest fires in California next year.
I am not a meteorologist. I work in IT. The causes of these predictions are simple. I know that It rains more in the south UK at certain times than others. Anyone who did history should know that invaders do badly in Russian winters. Finally as far as I can see from the news, California has fires every summer.
Climatologists have a lot better information than that about their field and they are a lot cleverer than me. One of the big problems in our world is that so many people think their opinions are valid in all circumstances. Just as I would want PHBs to take my advice in IT, I tend to believe the majority of climate scientists know more about their field than those who are not from that field.
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
I don't really get this though. I can see why you'd want an SUV even if it's bad for the environment. They're comfortable, they hold a lot of stuff, they're cool looking, they're great off-road compared to a Prius. What I don't get is, why would AGW supporters care if you're driving a HMMWV if they don't feel that the theory is valid?
It sounds like you're saying their position is: "I hate SUVs. I must find a way to make people stop driving them. I must fudge my data to make it look like SUVs are bad". My question is, why do you think they care about people driving SUVs in the first place?
Some bring out the best in others, some the worst. Some bring out far more.
Any "scientist" who works to "shut up" the opposition, has ceased to be a scientist...
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? I guess than that trying to shut up the "creation scientists" is the wrong way to go - instead, we should use our limited time and resources endlessly debating them. Do that for flat earthers, too.
Eventually all debates come down to which facts one wants to believe (unless you actually do the experiments yourself - and good luck with that). All I'm saying is that our peer review process, even with its flaws, works better than any other system out there that we've had up to this time (sort of like democracy). Those who seek to tear down this system (and, make no mistake, those who are blowing this one incident out of proportion are doing this), in the guise of "fixing it" are evil.
That is all.
Typical. Ask a skeptic to produce something, and you get wild conspiracy theories.
Who are these "plenty of scientists", or were you just speaking without having thought this through.
If conspiracy is all you got, then that's is a pretty lame bet you're making on our childrens' future.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
What's really funny is that 20-30 years ago the earth was apparently cooling for all the man-made reasons it is warming now.
You know, I can't remember there being a massive consensus across the vast majority of climate scientists 20-30 years ago saying that the earth going through global cooling. No, there were a handful who came up with that theory and you know what, that theory has been shown to not be accurate.
Personally, I'll go with the general consensus and the multiple independent data sets that indicate that global warming is happening and is caused by man. When I look at who supports the AGW theory and who is against it, I know which ones I would choose to trust more.
Also consider that we don't get a second chance. The earth isn't a lab that we can reset if our "experiment" doesn't work. We had better err on the side of caution. Sure the world won't end, climate change won't wipe out the human race, but if it does continue the way it looks like it's going, then millions upon millions of people are going to die - though probably not you and me in the developed nations. Trillions of dollars worth of damage is going to be done to our infrastructure.
There was a big stink when the hole in the Ozone Layer over Antarctica was huge, but nobody said a word when it shrunk back up and nearly disappeard. I'll bet most people think it's just getting bigger.
This is just another area where climate scientists got it wrong, changed their mind about the whole thing, and the rest of the world just pretends nothing changed.
You are aware that scientists worked out the CFCs were the cause of the Ozone hole and that the nations of world got together and did something about it - the Montreal Protocol. When we stopped pumping CFCs into the atmosphere the ozone hole began to repair itself - just like the scientists predicted!
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.
By your logic, what right did a (then) non professional scientist like Albert Einstein have, meddling in a respected and obviously 'more-qualified-than-thou' field of professional science?
Actually, by the GP's logic, Albert Einstein's PHD in Physics made him qualified enough to question the established scientific thinking in the field of physics in a rigorous and meaningful way.
And it's absolutely no accident or quirk of fate that it took someone who was well studied in the field to up-end the established thinking, while the 'theories' of gaggles and gaggles of uneducated crackpots claiming to be following in Einstein's footsteps continue to come to naught. Because Einstein, armed with his PHD, understood the existing physics and thus its realistic flaws and limitations. Whereas the crackpot is theorizing from a position of ignorance.
Similarly, there are actual climatologists who take issue with certain studies and more so the strengths of their conclusions. They are useful. Then there are people who are not climatologists and don't understand climatology claiming it's all a huge conspiracy and it can't possibly be true because of the sun, ha ha, those stupid scientists never thought of the sun, or natural climate cycles, yeah, only the true rebels have ever thought of that etc etc.
It's not hard to tell the difference.
after all, only someone trained in, say, Canon Law would be qualified to speak authoritatively on christianity, right?
To the extent that I accept the existence or need of any worldly 'authority' on Christianity (which is to say not much... after all it's ultimately about a personal relationship between you and the Creator), then absolutely yes. Because if you haven't studied the Bible and Theology beyond attending church on Sunday, then you sure as fuck aren't an authority on either.
I mean, what are you trying to say? That you can be an 'authority' on something without having studied it? That only accepting people who actually know things about the subject at hand as authorities is elitist, or equivalent to Religious Orthodoxy?
Einstein is a very bad example for that point of view!
The enemies of Democracy are
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
Your average blue-collar idiot is also smart enough to see a conflict of interest... such as it not being in Jiffy Lube's best interest to tell you that your car doesn't need an oil change. What do climatologist do for a living other than telling us the sky is falling? Do they study the changes in the Earth's climate over billions of years? No, geologists do that. When geologists start telling me its time to panic, I'll panic.
Everyone has a conflict of interest. Everyone can see everyone else's conflict of interest, but intelligence comes to play when we can see our own.
The anti-global warming crowd has just as large a conflict of interest as the pro-warming crowd. Thus the "conflict of interest" argument is mute. On one hand you have a handful of academics making money by working in the field, and a couple startups hoping to bank on the green trend. On the other hand you have big oil, some of the richest companies and governments in the world, and the average Joe who really doesn't want to change his life.
Just because you have a financial incentive in something, doesn't invalidate the science. The pro's are making money, the cons are making TONS of money.
Also, if a academic climate scientists found that there wasn't global warming, they wouldn't be out of a job. Climate science preexists the global warming brouhaha, as do the grants they received.
such as it not being in Jiffy Lube's best interest to tell you that your car doesn't need an oil change.
But in this debate we're saying you don't need an oil change, just because Jiffy Lube told you that you did. Which is pretty bad logic, if you ask me.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
common sense, gut instinct and 41 years in the school of life tells me something smells bad about the whole AGW agenda
You should not rely on gut feelings when there is better information to hand. And there is. Ah, but you suspect that info is all cooked and made up, to support some agenda, which might be only to keep the government funding flowing? Your instincts missed much more plausible and likely explanations.
Science is competitive, as everyone can see from some of the less than honest suggestions in those emails. If there was good evidence that Global Warming was not real or was not our fault, there'd be a bunch of scientists eager to enhance their reputations by publishing this. To suppose that the majority of scientists could have agreed on the same something that isn't true and joined a vast conspiracy is ridiculous, and that's why people who entertain such thinking are given short shrift and dismissed as cranks, nutcases, and conspiracy theorists.
Perhaps you think it's not like that, it's more that this bandwagon has gotten sufficient momentum that most scientists are jumping on uncritically? You see, we have this thing called "peer review" that does a decent job of stopping that. Who is there qualified to check a scientist's work? Only another scientist, a peer. Obviously scientists can't spend too much time reviewing each other's work, so the system that's been adopted is to have 2 other scientists review each new work. It weeds out most of the garbage.
Face it, any numbers older than about 50 years ago are based on best-guess, nothing more.
No. This is another typical assertion, this claim that we don't or can't know very much. Oh yes we can! You think 50 year old data is worthless? You are wrong. Such data can and has been checked and cross checked. When tree ring data, lake sediment data, ice core data, historical data, and more, and from many different trees, lakes, ice cores, and observers are all in agreement, it's a safe bet that the data is good.
Now for the other explanations you have overlooked. Chicken Little doesn't work for the government, Chicken Little works for the media. The media is forever "sexing up" the news because drama sells. Of course they've cherry picked the juiciest emails. They love controversy, and will happily jump on and enhanced manufactured controversy as well as report on real controversy. For instance, among the educated, there is no controversy about Evolution, and anyone who suggests there is a controversy between Evolution and Creationism hasn't troubled with "trivial" things like reading any of the evidence, or giving the evidence a fair hearing, and learning why scientists concluded that we evolved. Those people won't spend time informing themselves. The rest of us are understandably annoyed when these ignorant trolls who won't spend time studying the issue they want to discuss try to waste everyone's else time with nonsense.
I always placed my belief that the scientists knew a hell of a lot more than me, and I could trust what they said. But recently, perhaps with age, has come the same cynicism I now feel for corporations, pharmaceuticals, politicians etc ...
And finally, you throw in the false equivalence. You think scientists are just as prone as corporations to manipulating and manufacturing evidence to support a conclusion? We're all equally scummy? Wrong again. Of course science is not immune to misconduct. But I might suggest that corporations, politicians, etc are more prone to unethical behavior than scientists. Science is all about finding the facts and modeling them, an activity inherently resistant to cheating, lying, and denial, and in which the chances of getting away with any of that are much lower. Soon as a few other scientists try to duplicate some fantastic result and cannot, the trouble starts. Those who have tried (Cold Fusion comes to mind) have been caught
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
No, actually, CRU was sent FOI requests for a listing of what data they included in their analysis and after a lot of resistance and trying to not reply to anything (documented in the emails), finally decided they could get away with just saying that the data is available from the original sources and thus they didn't think they had to provide anything. When it's very clear in the request discussion that what was actually being asked for was the information on what specific parts of the publicly available data they used.
It's impossible to try and recreate their model and their results without knowing which data it's based on. Just saying, "All the data is available somewhere, but we won't tell you which parts of it we actually used" doesn't respond to what is a legitimate request from someone trying to fairly reproduce their results.
If someone said, "We did a study of car crash frequency" it's completely reasonable to ask "What regions and data sets did you use in your study?" and not be told, "It's all crash data available online, but we won't tell you which parts we actually used in our study".
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
Why would anybody try to recreate their analysis exactly? That's a complete waste of time. When you recreate somebody else's analysis, you are likely to end up simply recreating their errors. A more scientific approach is to do your own independent analysis using the available data. There is certainly plenty available. If the conclusions are at all robust, they should not depend on the fine details of exactly which data was used.
Yes, the scientific way to silence an idiot is to ask him lots of hard questions, and let him keep the floor as long as he's able. When he can't answer those questions to the audience's satisfaction, then it's time to deliver your own answers
This is exactly why science is failing to grab the popular mind. If you do this, all you are doing is giving a smooth-talking fool all he needs to convince an audience who isn't smart enough or doesn't have enough background to know better. This is exactly what George Monbiot is talking about: Pretending the climate email leak isn't a crisis won't make it go away
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Or, to put it another way, if a person with a PhD in Physics tried to tell an auto mechanic how to do his job, he would rightly be laughed at and told to STFU. It should also work the other way.
Similar to the upcoming US election results
I hate this debate.
The reason that I hate this debate is this:
I'm not a PhD. I'm not a climate scientist of any sort. I took a couple of courses in undergrad, so I know just the smallest bit more than the typical lay person.
And I don't believe.
That is to say that I am not at this time convinced that there is a significant trend of global surface temperature increase that is directly attributable to human-caused emissions of CO2 and other gasses into the atmosphere that is, failing activity to greatly curtail these emissions, will continue apace long into the future, with devastating consequences to humanity including massive flooding in low-lying areas and massive, unending drought in other areas.
That is more-or-less the thesis of the "consensus viewpoint" on climate change, is it not?
I won't dispute at all that the last 10-15 years were hotter on average than the 10-20 years prior. I won't even dispute that the record appears to indicate a general increase in temperatures over the last 50 years that is at a faster pace than temperature increases over the 80-90 years prior.
I have a few issues with the big thesis, though. And because there is so much stupid on "my" side (that is, among the "skeptics"), the debate has devolved to the point that little if any actual data is getting out. I don't know which side started the stupid, but there is so much stupid now on both sides that there's just nothing going on anymore.
I have seen pretty charts and graphs showing proxies for global mean temperature going back a few hundred years, a few thousand years, and one (ice cores, I think) going back like 500,000 years. These charts are often made for what I'll call political effect, and so have the last 500,000 years of data using one model, but the most recent 50 years or so using actual live temperatures.
That's disingenuous. What I really want to see are the following:
Graphs of all of these proxies that begin only at the earliest period for which we have consistent data and end sometime in the last 5 years, with each proxy either on a separate graph or as a clearly separate dataset within a single graph. The last 150 years of actual temperature data may appear on this graph, but only as a separate dataset, NOT appended onto the end of any of the proxy sets.
Then, I want to see another set of graphs. On each of these graphs, I want to see exactly two datasets: the last 150-200 years of data using one of the proxies, ending no more than 5 years ago as one dataset, and the actual recorded temperatures as the other dataset.
I don't want to see any data-smoothing or other wonkiness in the graphs. And I want the graphs to be put together honestly, with the raw data and their sources available upon request.
If I saw those things, I could draw some conclusions from them. They are not everything... all that these graphs would do is illustrate whether or not the last 50 years of warming is or is not a statistically significant outlier.
If those graphs would in fact show that the temperature is rising much more rapidly in the past 50 years than any similar experience over the last 500,000 years, then that is saying something quite significant. It still doesn't speak to CO2, of course... and I would want to see some additional data regarding the amount of CO2 humans emit, the amounts of carbon and CO2 moving through various phases of the "carbon cycle" each year (are we emitting .0001% of the annual cycle? 99.9999% of the annual cycle, or somewhere in between?)
All of these things are reasonable to ask to see. I can't draw conclusive proof from any of it. But I could become more informed. I don't have to know all of the details: how to collect the proxy data, how to analyze the data, what it all means... I won't be able to be absolutely certain... but then, that's not the point.
I just want honest science.
And right now, I have seen very little real data that wasn't obviously manipulate
However the AGW camp has data *models* which is a way of saying "this is my best hypothesis thusfar"
AND?????? What the heck do you want to say with that?
Clima change is certain. The only things where the models are uncertain is: does x billion tons CO2 increase in the atmosphere translate into 0.1 degrees temperature increase or 0.102 or 0.2 or 0.25 or what ever. Thats the point where the models are weak.
What makes me frightened meanwhile when I read /. is that there are so many slash dotters who seem to believe we are not in deep shit. Scary, really.
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Actually any layman with concerns is qualified to question science. ,industry and religion.
Science, if truly based on fact should have no trouble defending itself.
Rabid apologists are part of the problem, that only increase laymens distrust due to centuries of propaganda from government
60 some MB of expose should be addressed in public seriously and not poo- pooed by apologists with a personal stake. When the evidence is this damning in a laymans eyes, some pretty forthright talk from investigation by more neutral parties is definitely in order.
This fiasco is really a good thing and iconic infallibility being accorded to the liberal wing of science studying climate is in bad need of 10ccs of reality.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!