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?"

Comments

And that's bad how?

[abbynormal brain]

Einstein questioned "valid" laws of science and look what it got him.

Re:And that's bad how?

[GNT]

What evidence?

Is Greenland green yet or is it still covered in ice? If Vikings farmed there then, doesn't that mean the world was much much warmer than today?

Has the hockey-stick effect not been shown, what , 3 times now, to be a deliberate artifact created by throwing data points away?

Get over yourself. Maybe you should take a look at what happened at temps from the Civil War to the 1940s and then ask yourself to think twice.

Re:And that's bad how?

[Bigjeff5]

Al Gore also happens to be full of shit, and willing to use any piece of research - proven, disproven, or unconfirmed - to prove his point. Just look at his movie, it has been so punched full of holes it puts swiss cheese to shame. He also hasn't done a lick of studying on his own, he goes and picks out whatever research fits his agenda and flys that in his private jet around the world.

He also tells people to cut their consumption, reduce their carbon footprint, yadda yadda yadda, but his own carbon footprint (not counting his private jets, mind you) is 20-30 times higher than the average American's. I'd be surprised if he even recycles. Throw in his private jet rides - which are COMPLETELY unneccesary, going commercial would drastically cut the pollution his jets cause - and he is in a league of pollution few people in the world can touch.

And yet, he is the hero of environmental causes. Please. He's a hypocrite, through and through. He has an agenda, and he's using global warming as a tool. Anybody who takes him at face value is a fool.

Let him go chase down man-bear-pig and leave the rest of us alone.

That is not to say I am against conservation and caring for our planet, quite the opposite. I think we have the potential to do serious damage, and as we are the only creatures capable of consciously affecting the health of the entire planet we have a duty to take care of it. But people like Al Gore piss me off, and trying to portray him as someone who has "been studying and involved with global research since the late 1960's" is bullshit. He had a college class once, that's about all the studying he has done on the subject, and that is nothing like what scientists do when they study the climate. The rest has been agenda pushing via politics, regardless of what the actual research showed.

...Because It's a Religion!

[RobotRunAmok]

It's not just "stolen e-mails" (ooooh, felony!! Quick! Lock up the miscreants!! There's never an Inquisitor around when you need one...); these huckleberries actually cooked the code. The Warmers are fanatics, more narrow-minded than Creationists, more dangerous and better connected politically than the Scientologists, but fundamentally no different. It's the indulgence-granting, end-is-nighing, repent-or-burn Medieval Catholic Church all over again, except this time without the pleasant chanting and neat robes. And just like that Dark Age sect, the top-placed five percent know that the fix is in while the bottom 95 percent are motivated by faith, fear, and social vengeance.

Re:So because Einstein refined Newton's mechanics.

[GNT]

What majority? The vast "majority of scientists" that is always quoted are the SOCIAL scientists.

Most couldn't calculate a linear regression to save their lives.

The so-called hard science folks know (as most hard science folks know) that water vapor is the primary determinant of IR absorption reflection and then methane and a distant distant place (1-2% if that) comes from CO2.

CO2 (all you goose-stomping morons out there who want to "limit" my emission -- you and what army?) is PLANT FOOD. Methane is naturally produced all over the planet and the SEA FLOOR. Water vapor -- good luck with that on a planet that is mostly covered with water! NONE of these are bad and have been in our environment since the beginning of life on Earth.

Oh, and it's legion the number of hard scientists that scream from the rooftops that this isn't an issue. Do the google searches.

Re:Modern-Day Galileo

[PopeRatzo]

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 !

Do you understand the difference between "weather" and "climate"?

Here's a good example of why a climate scientist might not want to engage everyone with a gripe. If you don't even have a basic vocabulary, how can you expect a scientist to answer your questions?

As far as I can tell, the climate scientists aren't saying "STFU" so much as saying "come back when you are prepared to understand simple concepts.

If the "skeptics" were acting in good faith instead of just trying to "even the score" there might be a little more patience.

I really hope the new threshold for science doesn't become "no Science is allowed unless you can explain it all to Glenn Beck's satisfaction".