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

Yes, Here's Why

[Lieutenant Buddha]

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.

Re:Yes, Here's Why

[ground.zero.612]

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.

It wouldn't be real science without real skepticism. A theory should remain a theory until it can stand up the to the scrutiny of skepticism.

Re:Yes, Here's Why

[Austerity Empowers]

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.

Exactly. There has never been, nor ought their be, an automatic trust of anything, including science. By definition of "layperson", we do not know and are not read-up on, the exact arguments for an against any particular theory. It has long been the case that unscrupulous individuals will try to sell a product or an idea "because science says so". This is behind every diet fad, every exercise machine, every crackpot "business methodology", that we've been exposed to for centuries (see: snake oil salesman).

The reason that climate change has been resisted and argued by so many, for so long, is exactly this. We do not trust the people interpreting this for us at the national level. We see a group of people who have financial motivation to resist, a group of people who have financial motivation to sell green-wash products, and a group of people who advocate shucking technology and returning to some insane, idealized view of nature, where man and animal and nature all get along, and don't eat or kill each other. All "climategate" has done, is confuse us further. We still lack faith in science, we still do not trust any of the people arguing, and we have good reason for this lack of trust.

Re:Yes, Here's Why

[liquiddark]

There's a difference between skepticism and uninformed judgement with a preexisting bias.

Re:Yes, Here's Why

[Kythe]

The reason that climate change has been resisted and argued by so many, for so long, is exactly this. We do not trust the people interpreting this for us at the national level.

I wish. What I see instead is a large number of credulous people who believe whatever certain pundits tell them is the best way to screw with liberals.

Re:Yes, Here's Why

[bluesatin]

I don't think that means, what you think it means: Scientific Theory

Re:Yes, Here's Why

[CohibaVancouver]

There has never been, nor ought their [sic] be, an automatic trust of anything, including science

"Automatic" trust? Perhaps not. "General" trust? Yes.

We generally 'trust' science thousands of times per today. This morning I went into a man-made 'cave' deep in the ground and got on the subway. The 'cave' didn't fall in and the subway didn't crash. The subway train didn't have a 'driver' - It was automatic and operated by a computer. I listened to my mp3 player and trusted everything.

Two weeks ago I let my doctor inject two different kinds of vaccines into my arm.

I could go on and on with examples, but the bottom line is I trust science and the mechanisms that are put in place by scientists (engineers, doctors et al) to accredit each other - And I trust these people orders of magnitude more than Palinesque drones who believe some kind of flying spaghetti monster made the world 6,000 years ago and that Fred Flintsone lived with Triceratops.

Re:Yes, Here's Why

[Anonymous Coward]

A theory should remain a theory until it can stand up the to the scrutiny of skepticism.

Wrong.

A theory should remain a theory only as long as it can stand up the to the scrutiny of skepticism.

Re:Yes, Here's Why

[mi]

There's a difference between skepticism and uninformed judgement with a preexisting bias.

Only in the eye of a beholder... No objective difference exists...

Re:Yes, Here's Why

[Jaeph]

Yes, but the emails show that the preexisting bias is on the climate-scientists side, not the skeptic's side.

Look, we have a group of people discussing the deletion of emails in response to a FOI request. They also discuss boycotting forums that publish an opposing point of view. That these items were even considered is all the sign we need that something is not kosher. Sure, the science may remain legitamite, but these particular scientists are not to be trusted. They are snake-oil salesman who at best may have lucked into the correct side of a debate.

-Jeff

Re:Yes, Here's Why

[A beautiful mind]

Actually, it is a slightly wrong, totally unimportant and absolutely human response that the scientists in question exhibited.

In a networking analogy, it's RIPE, ARIN and the other registrars facing people calling them chicken little for pointing out IPv4 exhaustion and suggesting to use ip addresses "with higher than 256 parts", calling networking engineers "stupid people didn't think of that" and calling IPv6 a scam "to sell some routers".

So it's perfectly understandable that scientists with 20+ years in the field feel a little touchy and get annoyed by the 50th FOI request. The best solution for creationists, climate change denialists and 9/11 conspiracy theorist is to send them to school. If I were a climate scientists I would have been really annoyed by that time now by the elementary ignorance demonstrated by these people.

Snake oil salesmen my ass, if you examine someone's private correspondence over a 10 year period and that's all you find, then I want to give the give a damn medal for integrity.

Re:Yes, Here's Why

[BobMcD]

In a networking analogy, it's RIPE, ARIN and the other registrars facing people calling them chicken little for pointing out IPv4 exhaustion and suggesting to use ip addresses "with higher than 256 parts", calling networking engineers "stupid people didn't think of that" and calling IPv6 a scam "to sell some routers".

Perhaps this is a sound analogy. Especially because, in a lot of ways, IPv6 is indeed inflated to sell some routers. Or at least it is aggressively timed. There still exists no foreseeable need for each node in the network to communicate with every other node and the very presence of NAT-based firewalls have eroded this from common practice. In fact, the ISP's won't let you operate 'servers' on their end nodes anyway, without extra fees, and the non-elite user stands to lose from this transition. Finally, nothing at all precluded the adoption of VLANs or similar wire-sharing technology that could segregate telephony (for example) and allow re-use of address space.

So yes, this is kind of the same thing. We're seeing a religious push towards the most drastic and least convenient of changes when there is little agreement about the exact date when we will have no other choice.

Re:Yes, Here's Why

[mrfunnypants]

Except the FOI request was from other scientist in the same field. It is one thing to be annoyed by an FOI request by someone outside the field but this was not the case. It is quite disturbing when you have scientist "20+ years" in the filed refusing to share data because???

No, as a scientist, something is very wrong with the way these professors acted and it should not be simply overlooked as anger and annoyance. The emails and the way they have acted all suggest they wanted to hide something.

Calling Pons and Fleischmann...

[Captain Damnit]

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".

Re:Calling Pons and Fleischmann...

[NotBornYesterday]

Excellent comparison. The difference I see is that in the case of cold fusion, the scientific critique and exposure as fraud was done within the science community. If anything, this proved that rigorous science was robust and the community could correct itself, much like an unjust verdict overturned on appeal proves the legal system works. In the AGW debate, the publicized emails create the appearance that powerful people in the scientific community stifled the dissent, open debate, and peer review that might cast doubt on their views.

So, the main difference is not that scientists might be proved wrong or fraudulent, since that happens from time to time and is proof that the system works. The problem here is that the system itself is alleged to be rigged.

Re:Calling Pons and Fleischmann...

[Kythe]

In the AGW debate, the publicized emails create the appearance that powerful people in the scientific community stifled the dissent, open debate, and peer review that might cast doubt on their views.

Perhaps "excerpts from a few cherry-picked stolen emails, sometimes taken out of context" might be a more accurate description.

Re:Calling Pons and Fleischmann...

[Anonymous Coward]

There is nothing out of context about the fraud involved in selectively using a temperature proxy only for specific time periods when it agrees with your preconceived notion. That is "Mike's trick ... to hide the decline [in the tree ring proxy temperature]."

Re:Calling Pons and Fleischmann...

[phantomcircuit]

Yes some of the emails happened to be more interesting than the others. Would people stop trying to pretend like each and every email must indicate fraud for there to be any fraud?

Re:Calling Pons and Fleischmann...

[Bakkster]

So, the main difference is not that scientists might be proved wrong or fraudulent, since that happens from time to time and is proof that the system works. The problem here is that the system itself is alleged to be rigged.

Within the academic community, you have the same problem in both of these cases: inability to repeat the experiment. With Cold Fusion, you can't get the same results when you follow the experimental procedure. That's failed science. With the global warming 'scandal', you have a few scientists who are the only ones with access to the raw temperature data. There is no independent analysis of the data, meaning the statistics (and released data) can be tweaked or cherry-picked until the authors get results they want. Without independent analysis repeating their results, that's failed science as well.

The issue is when other studies are based off of the 'groomed' data, rather than the raw measurements. We need to take their word that the data wasn't cherry-picked to seem hotter, and nobody can independently verify that it wasn't. That makes it easy to dismiss the findings, and makes it hell for those who want to study the phenomenon. It's too important not to verify.

The other problem is that a layperson (or even many scientists) wouldn't know if it was rigged or not. For the layperson, we see news articles that say "In a research paper published in Nature...", and nobody gets to read the paper. So the average person is told "take our word for it", which doesn't do much to combat rumors of poor science. Without people who are science-literate (though perhaps not PhD scientists) being able to read the paper, see that it is sound, and tell their non-scientific friends why, it will always appear like a bunch of hand-waving.

Re:Calling Pons and Fleischmann...

[A beautiful mind]

1. "Trick" is frequently used in scientific context to mean "clever method" or "correction".

2. The tree ring proxy temperature problem is pretty well documented for the past 10 years at least. The basic idea is that using tree rings as thermometers gave an error bar +-x% and it has been discovered, that since 1960, actual temperature records started to disagree slightly with tree ring temperature records. Actual temperature records have an error bar of +-x/y%, where y is > 1, so they are more accurate than tree ring proxy records (which is why they are called a proxy in the first place).

3. The deviation since 1960 doesn't automatically mean that the records are wrong before 1960, as the instrumental records validate a large chunk of the pre 1960 period tree ring proxy data as correct within a given error bar. Noone knows the reasons why the tree ring proxy data is wrong "recently", but it is entirely possible that the cause is something like "more recent rings on trees take time to dry out" or something like that. It would be interesting to find out the cause.

4. The tree ring proxy data wasn't destroyed or altered, the "decline" is "hidden" in a graph for policymakers that depicted temperature data. It makes sense to replace the tree ring data with more accurate instrument records, because they are well, more accurate.

Re:Calling Pons and Fleischmann...

[epiphani]

I recommend the following:

1. Collect a bunch of data
2. Try to build a model that predicts that data
3. Run the model

Does the model match the data? No? Mess with the model. No? Is the data correct? Probably. Do we have any other sources of the data? Yup. Try that. Does that work?

This is fraudulent how? That sounds like a normal way of testing a model in a closed laboratory situation never intended for public consumption.

Next time you write some code, I'll criticize your use of static variables and constants in the concept phase without knowing anything about the model you're building.

What

[Tobor the Eighth Man]

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.

Re:What

[h2oliu]

I would argue that people don't know when to doubt, and when to believe.

Which scientists do they believe when it comes to Autism and vaccines? Which scientist to believe when it comes to global warming? It is just they have more insight into the infighting that is present into the community now.

The infighting has ALWAYS been there. When I was in graduate school I never saw a larger bunch of petty people whining over who was the bigger fish in there tiny ponds.

Re:What

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm certain that people believe it when a spacecraft launches, or their new TV is even thinner.

Thing is, do they even realise that is science?

In their mind science is a term for the fuzzy stuff that they read about in the papers - like is a glass of wine good or bad for you? Are potatoes/fish/eggs/etc good or bad for you? And all the U-turns since. Science is the word they associate with anything that goes wrong or seems to be a stupid waste of money to research.

The media has propagated this view of science, because journalists could never hack the subjects themselves, and they just want to get their own back on those people who could do it.

Re:What

[QuantumPion]

I would argue that people don't know when to doubt, and when to believe.

Which scientists do they believe when it comes to Autism and vaccines? Which scientist to believe when it comes to global warming? It is just they have more insight into the infighting that is present into the community now.

The infighting has ALWAYS been there. When I was in graduate school I never saw a larger bunch of petty people whining over who was the bigger fish in there tiny ponds.

You believe the theory that has observations to prove it works. Not the scientist. Pretty simple if you ask me.

Re:What

[Tobor the Eighth Man]

Haven't seen Sweeney Todd, have you? There's plenty the tonsorial-industrial complex doesn't want you finding out.

Re:What

[5KVGhost]

The problem isn't that people aren't automatically believing science, it's almost the exact opposite: people are automatically doubting science.

People aren't doubting science, necessarily. They're just not as ready to accept everything a scientist claim is "science". Some scientists don't like this, preferring to think themselves above such elementary barriers of trust. That's too bad for them.

Doubt is good. Healthy skepticism is a sign of maturity and intellectual involvement.

Re:What

[gowen]

Healthy skepticism is a sign of maturity and intellectual involvement.

This is "healthy skepticism" in the same way that believing that God created Man and Woman within the last 10,000 years is a "healthy skepticism about evolution". Skepticism requires an awareness and weighting of the evidence. Denialism and dogmatism don't.

Re:What

[NeutronCowboy]

Indeed. Personally, I would like to see a bit more skepticism when it comes to science. As in "Hey, show me some data and explain to me why what you say should work before I take your word for it." Or at least go out and do some of your own research before accepting something from some random scientist. Too often news organizations quote someone with some professorial or scientific title and pretend that the quote has value. Unless I know that person and have been able to assess their credibility in some way beforehand, they could have just as well quoted my barber. This presentation issue is a failing of news organizations though. Any person can still do their own filtering.

What we're getting now though is that ad hominem attacks on scientists (of the sort of "You work for institution XYZ, you're automatically disqualified from contributing.") is seen as valid approach in any discussion on any topic. This is complete idiocy, and a mark of the intellectually lazy. To some extent, the public press and scientists themselves contributed to the problem. The press has elevated scientists to the status of oracles, and the public was happy to believe the oracles. Many scientists thrived on that elevated status, and did little to dispel it. Now that the oracles have been shown to be as human as everybody, the public is engaging in a massive back-lash. To some extent, it's to be expected.

But no matter how explainable the situation, there is a fundamental problem if science is being put on the same level as high-school English Lit (see posters above for ready examples) - and that's going to cause more problems down the line. Sadly , I find this attitude is mostly prevalent in the US - and various voodoo-practicing countries.

Re:What

[jesup]

You believe the theory that has observations to prove it works. Not the scientist. Pretty simple if you ask me.

That's fine, if you can read the papers, and read the papers confirming (or not) the observations, etc. For example, with the whole autism/vaccine kerfluffle, the original paper by a British doctor has been debunked, and apparently he made up and/or mis-represented his data. Plus various doctors (which the public conflates with scientists, which is sometimes true and sometimes not) make all sorts of claims, often based not on scientific methods or verifiable proof, but instead on personal opinion/experience and a few particular cases they've seen. The problem is that it's way to easy to jump to an unwarranted conclusion, or to do what humans are all too good at - picking facts that support what we already believe or want to believe.

The public has little or no understanding of how science works (even many non-scientist academics don't). Combine that with the modern media's preference to not interpret, but instead present all points-of-view as equivalent (or to prefer certain points-of-view based on politics), and it's easy to see how the public can reach the belief that science is just opinion too - that you can pick who to agree with, based on what you want to be true.

Re:What

[Daniel_Staal]

Great. Now, who's set of observations do you trust? And who's analysis of those observations?

Doing the observations and analyzing them is a specialized skill, and quite often these days takes complicated and expensive equipment.

So we still have to trust the scientists to tell us what they've observed, so we can tell which scientists to trust.

Re:What

[Brickwall]

You believe the theory that has observations to prove it works. Not the scientist. Pretty simple if you ask me.

Um, but if that scientist consistently, and repeatedly, refuses to give you his data or his methods (hi Michael Mann!) and just says "believe me" on an issue that will cost your country literally billions of dollars, are you just supposed to shut up and go along? Especially when it appears after much prodding and poking that some of the data were cherry-picked, others were "adjusted", and finally, the raw data was deleted? The Earth may well be warming, but it has warmed and cooled countless times over the millenia, and the case for AGW is certainly "not proven". So I think a healthy skepticism before imposing the huge financial penalties and bureaucracies that are being punted about is the only wise position.

Dumber dumbed-down discourse

[oldspewey]

When I was a kid, I used to genuinely believe that humans were on a path to greater wisdom, more profound discourse, and perfect knowledge.

Lately, I just see a bunch of power-hungry assholes doing their utmost to discredit intelligent thought and dumb-down the world around them, so they can continue on an unimpeded path toward greater assholism.

Re:Dumber dumbed-down discourse

[B1oodAnge1]

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."

Open source

[javilon]

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.

Re:Open source

[Anonymous Coward]

The climategate scientists didn't seem to be very open with their sources. Deleting their original source data sounds pretty suspicious to me - not the sort of thing that gets done accidentally.

Re:Open source

[monoqlith]

"If you can falsify any of the theories by experiment, people will pay attention to you, regardless of politics."

The upside to this is that science appears to hold itself to a higher standard of truth than religion and politics. The downside to this is also that science appears to hold itself to a higher standard of truth than religion and politics. Science always says first to its student: "Doubt me." It's a tough marketing job from there on out. As science has skepticism as a built-in requirement, people will always doubt its findings more than the claims of religion or the promises of politicians. Of course, science has the added benefit of being difficult to understand, much unlike the prescriptions of religion. This all creates a situation where knowledge and rational skepticism actually have no political force, and their antitheses, ignorance and hysteria, drive our political discussion.

  If people reserved nearly as much skepticism for religion as they did for science, we would live in a much more sensible world.

Re:Open source

[Anonymous Codger]

Sure, you can go through the proofs and run some experiments - if you're a mathematician or a scientist. For the average Joe, these activities are as foreign as eating boiled locusts for dinner. Average Joe will doubt (and already does doubt) because he lacks the training to understand how math and science work. And average Joes outnumber and outvote mathematicians and scientists by a large margin, and end up electing the scientific ignoramuses who dominate one of the US national political parties.

Re:Open source

[Volante3192]

NASA destroyed old tapes of data too.

Why? Because back in the days storage space was a premium. There just wasn't the room. Someone made an executive decision to make more space and they decided to get rid of the raw data.

Not saying this is what happened to the climate data, but sometimes shit happens. This isn't stuff people consider historic, so while we'll go out of our way to save Terabytes of White House email because it's instantly an historic record (...the ones that still exist *snort*) no one gives a poop about the raw data on the mytosis of genetic material in the Burandan Sea Slug.

Re:Open source

[smidget2k4]

You can falsify by finding data that makes no sense to your current theory and should be explained by the current theory. But thanks for playing.

I mean, would you also like us to recreate the Big Bang so we can "run a true experiment" on it or would you rather we look at observable data and draw a reasonable conclusion that Big Bang did happen?

Re:Open source

[limaxray]

Yes, it's not unheard of to destroy raw data, but a list of what data was used and how is usually maintained. This way, someone else can collect the same raw data again and verify the original results.

The big problem with the CRU is they've failed to even disclose a list of exactly what data was used and what they did with that data. This makes it impossible to verify their results. It should also be noted that this info is required for publication in most journals, but they have managed to get published (most of the time) without it anyway. After all, if you can't peer-review their work, what's the point of a peer-reviewed publication? This is the heart of the controversy - not just a few leaked emails.

Didn't start it, just makes it worse

[confusednoise]

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.

We're already well into the era when people doubt the motives and findings of scientists. You can see it here on /. 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.

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.

Re:Didn't start it, just makes it worse

[Volante3192]

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

This.

Happens in every field; I get it all the time supporting computers. I ask them to do something, and suddenly I'm questioned, berated, argued with, told it won't work, they've done it, yadda yadda, and when I finally get them to do it and humor me...it fixes their problem and they hang up. No apology, no thank you, and likely no realization that they don't know my field as well as I know my field.

Re:Didn't start it, just makes it worse

[pz]

Problem is, people really believe that they can become experts on extremely complicated topics and weigh the evidence for themselves.

This is a serious problem. On the one hand, a democratic society holds that each member can and should act independently, weighing the factors that they find personally important, to come to vital decisions. On the other hand, most people are ignorant on nearly every subject, and lack the means, ability, incentive, or time to become expert on each subject as it comes along. Making medical decisions is one of the most important examples of this. When presented with a treatment for a condition, who among us can really make an informed decision? Are we ever even given the proper tools to make decisions (such as percentages of success, side-effect, and failure for the treatment, practioner, or hospital? Hardly. Instead we have FUD like, "OMFG they're putting POISON in vaccines." I work in neuroscience research at a big hospital, and *I* don't know why thimerisol is used as a standard preservative in multi-dose vials of H1N1 vaccine. I don't even know how much mercury would end up being in a standard dose of a vaccine, or if that is enough to cause neurological issues long-term. If I'm in the same general field, and I don't have the proper tools to evaluate the risks, how possibly can the general public?

Right. They can't. Not possible; not even remotely possible. It would take a motivated, highly educated person with a lot of money to pay for scientific articles (they aren't by-and-large free except when you have a university affiliation), and lost of time to comb through stacks and stacks of papers in order to make an informed decision about one treatment. This is a barrier to knowledge that is not realistic. Expecting the lay person to make good, informed decisions is a joke. Expecting that the lay person can understand the myriad of complexities about climate change when the very idea of a static climate is demonstrably bogus is nothing more than political propaganda.

So, people have been brainwashed into thinking they can become experts on any subject in a few short minutes (witness all of the "well, why dont' they just do ..." comments on Slashdot where readers who are familiar with a subject for the time it takes to read a condensed summary presume to be able to second guess experts who have devoted their lives to a particular field). They clearly cannot do this, and nothing is going to get any better in that regard as science and technology continue to make astonishing advances. We, the scientists, must therefore be absolutely certain and vigilant about promulgating only truth, and fighting propaganda at every turn.

I am not a climate scientist. I am not a geologist. I have friends who are, and from my second-hand understanding of anthropogenic climate change, no one really understands what is going on. Sure, there's some evidence for anthropogenic climate changes (like the ozone hole over Antarctica), but *I* lack the skills and knowledge to understand the issues. So when I hear Al Gore saying things like, "we dump billions of tons of CO2 into our thin atmosphere like it was a sewer," it makes me angry that anyone is listening to that drivel at all. He might be right, anthropogenic CO2 may be a really, really big problem, but delivering that message with distortions and distractions that make the Soviet propaganda machine appear tame in comparison, ultimately is doing far more harm than good.

Blind trust in authority is bad. But so is what we have now where fear, uncertainty and doubt determines what the public thinks.

Funding

[pete-classic]

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

Re:Funding

[confusednoise]

Government has been funding science for much much longer than a couple of decades.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_society

Just out of curiosity, if pure science is not funded by government, how should it be paid for? By private industry? Do you somehow think that we can place greater trust results of science paid for by corporations?

Re:Funding

[QuantumPion]

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

Dwight D. Eisenhower - 1961.

"The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded. Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientifictechnological elite."

Re:Funding

[qmaqdk]

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

For some reason people have a very romantic view of what it means to be a scientist. They seem to think that the scientists just pocket the money they get. All of it goes to research, i.e. salaries for post-docs, phd students, etc. (of the not Ferrari-driving nor private jet flying kind), equipment, and conference expenses. And it is expensive do to science.

But until you see scientists buying private jets, yachts and arrive at the university in Bugatti Veyrons, I suggest you calm down.

Science Should Always be Questioned

[rehtonAesoohC]

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...

Re:Science Should Always be Questioned

[zz5555]

But the questioning needs to be done intelligently. Most of the questioning that came about from climategate has seemed to come from people that either don't understand science or (and I think this is more likely) don't want to understand it.

Re:Science Should Always be Questioned

[1%warren]

The intelligent questions are at http://climateaudit.org/ . Most of the trouble that came about from climategate has come from them not being answered.

Scientists are human.

[Remus Shepherd]

I work in a field closely associated with climatology (satellite remote sensing), and I work with climatologists. And I agree with the article on one point: We really do not understand how big a deal this 'climategate' is.

The worst bits in that email dump are petty squabbles between researchers and critics. That's standard -- often critics are dishonest people who are attacking the science in order to advance a political agenda, and that is very frustrating to someone who wants to do honest science. Yes, tempers flare in private emails. Scientists are human. If people are going to lose faith in science because scientists are human...then we as a race are doomed, in my opinion.

As for the results of the CSU climate research, they're not in any doubt. Every criticism of them has been answered, and there are other studies that agree with the CSU results. So attack the scientists for being human if you must, but the science is sound and must be heeded.

I really do not understand why this has blown up into such a conflagration. Anyone who gives up on science because of this trifling matter is welcome to go back to the dark ages and live their short, wholesome, science-free life.

Re:Scientists are human.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Scientists are human.

[khallow]

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.

Re:Scientists are human.

[Peter Trepan]

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.

Re:Scientists are human.

[epiphani]

(Reposting this where appropriate)

People seem to forget the context of that "undermining the peer review process" took place.

They certainly tried to impact the peer review process. The paper in question resulted in half of the editorial board of the journal in question resigning over the peer review process that took place.

http://www.sgr.org.uk/climate/StormyTimes_NL28.htm

The paper in question turned out to be underwritten by the American Petroleum Institute.

As for Mann and Jones' apparent effort to punish the journal Climate Research, the paper that ignited his indignation is a 2003 study that turned out to be underwritten by the American Petroleum Institute. Eventually half the editorial board of the journal quit in protest. And even if CRU's climate data turns out to have some holes, the group is only one of four major agencies, including NASA, that contribute temperature data to major climate models — and CRU's data largely matches up with the others'.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1946082-2,00.html#ixzz0ZJERceR1

Re:Scientists are human.

[A beautiful mind]

A picture can lie a lot better than a thousand words. I see that picture popping up in the climate denialist literature all over the place, without most places referencing the paper it is taken from.

The paper actually contains information that explains what you're seeing on the picture. The adjustments made are detailed, compared and explained. The references for the expanded reasoning can be followed.

Besides, the graph is about the US temperature measurements. US != global. It could show warming and global warming could not be happening or it could show a decrease in temperature and global warming could be highly severe. Your argument is simply bad.

Re:And that's bad how?

[Lieutenant Buddha]

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.

One citation explains it all.

[BlueParrot]

"The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt."
- Bertrand Russel

As evidence of the validity of Russel's insight, consider the people who are cocksure enough to assume it is they who are the doubters. They will even quarrel amongst each other about which of them is the intelligent, when in reality they are all idiots.

Skeptical of science?

[jollyreaper]

Oh, I'm sorry. I guess that we can't really thank science for medicine, computers, airplanes, the food on our table. I guess that one murderous programmer working on an open source file system means all of Linux is shit, too. And you know what? I got taken for a ride buying speculative real estate in Florida. I guess this means that you can't make money in real estate, that the whole thing's a rotten idea. Incidentally, I threw out the bath water. Where'd the baby go?

I'll buy that argument once religious whackadoodles promise to renounce their faith because of televangelists and pedo-priests.

Re:Skeptical of science?

[rickb928]

"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.

Re:Math is now a science?

[Maxo-Texas]

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.

Science costs money, ergo...

[starglider29a]

To do any useful science that hasn't already been done requires money. Money carries an agenda. Scientists who work for sponsors, including foundations, oil companies or even governments AND who disagree with the predispositions of the above are soon out of money, out of work, out of science.

"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.

What does he mean, begin to doubt?

[smooth wombat]

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).

Hundreds of billions???

[Anonymous Coward]

Hundreds of billions??? You have the wrong side. 20 Billion dollars over 30 years for the entire world. Compared with 37Bn dollars given as subsidies to fossil fuel and nuclear power industry *EACH* *YEAR* by the *US* ALONE* and I think you find the finger points a different direction.

How many people would want a piece of THAT action?

Much more.

When politics/religion meddle with science

[erroneus]

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.

That much different?

[ndogg]

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.

Re:These "scientists" weren't

[_Swank]

please, please, please get your facts straight on what these scientists did with their data when they 'threw out raw data'

they threw out siberian tree-ring data for certain years (i believe it was 1960 to present) that they were using to infer local temperatures and, instead, used the actual local air temperatures. this turned a graph that showed temperatures over a period of time longer than thermometers have existed in from one relying on only tree-ring data, to one relying solely on tree-ring temperature data to one using mostly tree-ring data with some tree-ring data replaced by more accurate actual temperature readings.

yes, the tree-ring data in this location diverges unexpectedly from the actual temps recorded. that is a problem to explain. but it has nothing to do with the fact that the temperatures really did continue to increase.

Re:And that's bad how?

[DangerFace]

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.

Re:These "scientists" weren't

[gowen]

They obviously had an agenda, and they threw out raw data, keeping only their "massaged" data.

They threw out the data 25 years ago -- long before the majority of these scientists had any agenda at all, besides getting laid, because it was on magnetic tape and punch cards, and they were moving buildings. But hey, don't let a few facts interfere with your conspiracy theory.

Re:Doubt is justified

[Aenoxi]

ORLY?

OK, I'll feed the troll. What's your "clear and unambiguous experimental and observational falsification" of Big Bang cosmology?

Re:These "scientists" weren't

[khallow]

They threw out more than that. They also managed to "lose" raw data. And this loss was announced after the head of the CRU emailed that he would delete such data before he allowed it to be exposed under a FOIA request.

How to restore healthy debate

[MillenneumMan]

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.

Peer Review and Grant Awards

[anorlunda]

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?

Re:Nobody deserves a free pass

[stevelinton]

The more science is viewed with skepticism the better the science will be in my opinion.

Fair enough, but sometimes you have to make a decision now, based on what you know now. If you allow your "skepticism" to turn into "I'll make decisions based on the theory that is most personally convenient to me, even if the current evidence, while not conclusive, weighs against it" then you are not just being skeptical, you're being foolish.

Every serious scientific review that has looked at the evidence carefully (and at the raw data and at the analysis procedures, etc.) has concluded that the balance of evidence strongly supports AGW and strongly supports action now to curb emissions.

It is possible that in ten years time the balance of evidence will shift (or even tomorrow) but for the decisions we have to make today, that is irrelevant.

Re:Ummm. No.

[zippthorne]

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.

Skepticism requires more than just questioning

[orthancstone]

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.

Nothing interesting? Look at the code

[SuperKendall]

It's amazing the poster can claim with a stright face "nothing interesting" was found, when the top Slashot post in the very article he links to has a very long debate covering the source code that was released.

One very "interesting" item from that is this code:

;mknormal,yyy,timey,refperiod=[1881,1940]
;
; Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!
;
yrloc=[1400,findgen(19)*5.+1904]
valadj=[0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,-0.1,-0.25,-0.3,0.,-0.1,0.3,0.8,1.2,1.7,2.5,2.6,2.6,$
2.6,2.6,2.6]*0.75 ; fudge factor
(...)
;
; APPLY ARTIFICIAL CORRECTION
;
yearlyadj=interpol(valadj,yrloc,x)
densall=densall+yearlyadj

Which to me, is pretty damning stuff. Yes if you look currently that recalculation is not used (in that module anyway) but that code should NEVER have been typed and is a giant red flag something weird is going on. Yes I mock up sample data in my own code, but never have I taken real data and applied varying magic constants across the dataset. At the very least you'd expect to see a source for these amazing numbers quoted in the code - the only information we have is that it is "a correction for the decline" which is the heart of what worries people about the emails too.

Furthermore, the use of this is commented out NOW. But when exactly was it commented out? What datasets were published when this code was running? You can't say "look it does nothing now" because at some time it was doing something. And that is the heart of the problem, without data or the code visible no-one can know. So all the output they have produced is simply not science, even if parts of it happen to be accurate - because we have no way to independently discern what is fact and what is manipulated speculation.

Modern-Day Galileo

[Anonymous Coward]

Some of us have noticed this about cosmology for a long, long time now. Global warming is just a trendier issue so it gets noticed first, that's all.

“Certain results of observational cosmology cast critical doubt on the foundations of standard cosmology but leave most cosmologists untroubled. Alternative cosmological models that differ from the Big Bang have been published and defended by heterodox scientists; however, most cosmologists do not heed these. This may be because standard theory is correct and all other ideas and criticisms are incorrect, but it is also to a great extent due to sociological phenomena such as the ‘snowball effect’ or ‘groupthink’. We might wonder whether cosmology, the study of the Universe as a whole, is a science like other branches of physics or just a dominant ideology.”
—Martin Lopez-Corredoira, astrophysicist.
http://www.holoscience.com/news.php?article=bqx15w21

Some of you more knee-jerk types would also benefit from this article because some of you use some really weak arguments.

Re:Modern-Day Galileo

[buswolley]

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..

Re:Modern-Day Galileo

[aplusjimages]

No doubt. There are more important things to focus on like Tiger Woods and his lady issues.

Re:Modern-Day Galileo

[paiute]

“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.

Re:Modern-Day Galileo

[Wyatt Earp]

There is the difference, just as people have been distrusting some sciences recently there has also been an increase in intellectual elites showing distain for the, lets call 'em Plebes. I think it stems from being walled up in Universities and not having to work for a living.

Someone in the real world that works on cars, develops deodorant or makes heart medication doesn't say "I'm a Scientist so I'm right!" They say "I'm an automative engineer, or a chemist that works on medication, or I'm a chemist that designs right guard." Its like the BASF commercials here in the US, "Helping Make Products Better."

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. /Disclaimer, I spent the last 6 years at a University not working for a living, now I'm out doing real work again.

Re:Modern-Day Galileo

[binary paladin]

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.

Re:Modern-Day Galileo

[Omestes]

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.

Re:Modern-Day Galileo

[mR.bRiGhTsId3]

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.

Re:Modern-Day Galileo

[Wyatt Earp]

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".

Re:Modern-Day Galileo

[Runaway1956]

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.

Re:Modern-Day Galileo

[secondhand_Buddah]

I think the issue here is that someone like Al Gores makes a film full of factual inaccuracies, wins a Nobel peace prize for his efforts and is lauded by the pro Climate change scientists.
The scientists should actually have pointed out the inaccuracies in the video, but they didn't. So when average Joe like me sees this, what do I use to draw my conclusions? Well its not rocket science - Al Gore talks rubbish and the scientists still support him. Where does that leave the credibility of the scientists? Well in my book, up the creek without a paddle.
As far as I am concerned, this is an engineered crisis to manipulate people to start being more conservative with their energy consumption, while moving towards using sustainable and renewable forms of energy and manufacturing. While I am all for the objective, I object being lied to and coerced, and will never be able consciously align myself ethically with people who believe that they have the right to behave in such a manner.

Re:Modern-Day Galileo

[daveime]

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.

Re:Modern-Day Galileo

[Hellpop]

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.

Re:Modern-Day Galileo

[Grax]

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.

Re:Modern-Day Galileo

[DragonWriter]

I think the issue here is that someone like Al Gores makes a film full of factual inaccuracies, wins a Nobel peace prize for his efforts and is lauded by the pro Climate change scientists.

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.

The scientists should actually have pointed out the inaccuracies in the video, but they didn't.

In fact, plenty of them have, including those who support the point Gore was making in the speeches and video.

Re:Modern-Day Galileo

[daveime]

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.

Re:Modern-Day Galileo

[Stradivarius]

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.

It is when the guy with the PhD thinks his expertise entitles him to refuse to publish the full, raw data he used along with his analytic methods. It is when he uses his influence with a journal to exclude equivalently credentialed scientists' papers because they disagree with his interpretations of the data. Science is not a priesthood. We do not (and should not) accept proclamations from scientists as truth because they hold a piece of paper or have three letters next to their name. We analyze their data and their methods,and try to poke holes. If nobody can poke valid holes, then his analysis gains acceptance until someone comes up with a better analysis. When certain scientists - the very people who should know the merits of scientific scrutiny the best - start trying to circumvent this process, it damages their credibility and the hard-earned reputation of science as being based on fact rather than emotion or politics.

It is also a problem when the guy with the PhD thinks his expertise in a given scientific field makes him an expert on public policy. Folks can accept scientific observations that the world has been warming in recent years yet have differing views on appropriate solutions. One of the disturbing things about many practitioners of climate science is how they've been merging with a parallel alarmist religious/political movement that thinks warming is our capitalistic sin against the planet, and which assumes the solution has to be drastic carbon output reductions regardless of how much economic collateral damage it would cause. The thought of engineering other ways to produce planetary cooling is dismissed. Discussions of such policies is not the realm of science. It is the realm of public policy, which thankfully is not left simply to a handful of people whose expertise is often exceeded by their hubris.

We need to remember that scientists are human beings too. They are as fallible as anyone else. Back in the 1970s there was a big scare from climate scientists that we were going to have massive global cooling and enter a new ice age. The problem is that climate is very complex, and attempts to model it inevitably miss something. While such models are valuable tools to gain understanding and predict future events, they do need to be taken with a grain of salt. So let's have a debate about what we should do about global warming. But let's go into it open-eyed, realizing that the participants and the models all have faults that should make us leery of hasty and dramatic changes in policy.

Re:Modern-Day Galileo

[ehrichweiss]

Funny you should say that. There is a guy at the heart of a branch of psychology who, before he got into psychology, was a computer programmer back in the 60's and all the grad students used to come to him so he'd make a program that could create data that fit within their deviation. He now says that it scares the bejesus out of him because those studies are now heavily quoted and HE was personally responsible for make all that shit up...

Re:Modern-Day Galileo

[Penguinisto]

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.

...you do realize that Albert Einstein was shut of out academia for years (as he was only a so-so student with a poor grasp of academic politics), which is why he was a Swiss patent clerk in the first place (and not considered as a "scientist" for many years)? 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? Maybe Einstein should've shat the fuck up too, as you so eloquently put it...

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?)

Re:Modern-Day Galileo

[Gorobei]

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 !

My belief in science over, say, unicorns and fairies, does not mean I have perfect knowledge of the future.

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.

It is usually easier to estimate and predict "large stuff" compared to "small stuff." This is why insurance companies exist, and why my toothbrush is in my bathroom rather than in Jakarta due to quantum effects.

And don't talk to me about localised effects being difficult to predict ... when it comes to floods, droughts, hurricanes, typhoons etc, they *are* localised effects. They ARE important to the survival of the human race. So it's 0.6 oC warmer in the Antarctic ... who gives a fuck ? When there's 8 foot of water in your living room, THATS IMPORTANT !!

Oh, it's important that I have $100 million. Curse you, science, for not giving me that. I don't give a fuck about molecules or forces, I want the money.

Averaging out the whole planet and then declaring "yes it it getting warmer" is hardly a PhD conclusion ... any fool with a college electrical certificate can tell you the more light bulbs are turned on, the bighter the room will be.

There is hope for you yet.

In the period 1950 till 2009, we've gone from 2.5 billion people to almost 7 billion ... what did you EXPECT to happen to global average temperature ?

Oh, this is the inverse Flying Spaghetti Monster pirates vs global warming theory.

Try correlating temperature against population, and guess what kind of slope the line has ?

Thanks for sharing that. It did get a bit chilly after the black death, and was damn cold in the USA after the Spanish Flu outbreak.

Re:Modern-Day Galileo

[MBGMorden]

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.

Re:Modern-Day Galileo

[dargaud]

What inaccuracies ?!? I've actually seen the list compiled by some right-wing group and they are extremely minor [disclaimer, I've worked 15 years in climate research, acquiring hard data]. On the other hand you have some so-called opponents to climate change who spout lies after lies on FOX news but hardly get any comments from scientists.

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.

Re:Modern-Day Galileo

[Traa]

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!

Re:Modern-Day Galileo

[Gonoff]

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.

Re:Modern-Day Galileo

[frank_adrian314159]

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.

Re:Modern-Day Galileo

[Chris Burke]

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!

Re:Modern-Day Galileo

[bzipitidoo]

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

Re:Modern-Day Galileo

[grumbel]

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?

CRU wasn't the original source for most of the data, they just held a copy of it, which is why them deleting the data is a total non-issue, most original data is still happily sitting around at their original sources.

Re:Modern-Day Galileo

[lawpoop]

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

Re:Climate Science isn't a Science!

[icensnow]

That is so bogus. There are many fields of scientific study where all we can do is observe what happens now, try to reconstruct, often from proxy data, what has happened in the past before the era of human observation, and use extrapolations from physical principles (i.e., numerical models) to try to better understand processes. Climatology, geology, ecology, paleontology, much of astronomy, much of what we think we know about evolution, and a lot of oceanography -- in other words most things having to do with the large scale, have the same observational, not lab-experimental, basis. Climatology is at least physically based enough that we can try to project the future (arguing about accuracy of those predictions is fair, and that argument is a robust part of current climate research).

The canard about what we know in the 1970s is getting really stale. In the early 1970s, climate modeling was in its infancy and we were trying to nail down what, among many possible climate problems, was most likely. If your library has a copy of S.H.Schneider's The Genesis Strategy, look it up for a view of the uncertainty we had back then. News magazines picked up on the ice age side of things more back then, not because there was any scientific consensus at all, but because it sold magazines. By the early 1980s, the scientific consensus was that CO2-greenhouse gases were the imminent concern. Nobody has been seriously pushing the encroaching ice age as a problem for 30 years. This is how science works: hypotheses lead to research which leads to corrections and improvements.

Re:Math is now a science?

[im_thatoneguy]

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."

Re:Yeah, about that...

[NeutronCowboy]

Once you've tagged an entire class of people as untrustworthy because of the basic fact of them being employed, you are incapable of engaging in any relevant discussion about the topic without redoing everything yourself.

Since I'm pretty sure you don't have an LHC in your backyard or your own temperature satellite in orbit, it means that you have two options when talking about science: shut up, or make crap up. And again, judging from the fact you're posting in this story, I'm pretty sure you are not prone to silence.

It's people like you that are ruining the US.

Quoting Sagan

[heidaro]

"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.

Re:These "scientists" weren't

[JWW]

You are correct. In fact the actual data is better to use than the tree ring proxy data. BUT the tree ring proxy data is trending downward when temperatures are going up. This means that there is something fundamentally wrong with the calculation of a proxy temperature from tree ring data from 1960 on. However, if the tree ring data cannot determine correct temperature proxies over the last 40 years, then what is the quality of all the other proxy temperatures calculated from tree ring data over the last 1000 years?

In other words if the tree ring temperature proxy values are wrong now, then they're probably wrong then.

What does this mean? It means that the logical conclusion is that they are still using the tree ring data to determine proxy temperatures because is produces a result they desire. That result is the elimination of the Medieval Warm Period from the climate record.

The reason for eliminating the MWP is all about having the ability to use the word "unprecedented". Our current release of CO2 may be causing harm, and may require action, but the climate scientists apparently felt they needed more. If the MWP shows temperatures have been as high as they are now in the fairly recent (geologically speaking) past, then maybe the current change isn't due to CO2 but is due to some other factor. They did not want that question to exist. The warming had to be unprecedented in order to be "certain" that the warming was man made.

Hiding the decline was all about making sure that the graphs didn't show temperature trending up when the tree ring proxy temps were heading down. It doesn't matter how you parse out the e-mails what they did here is wrong and it is FRAUD and it did a great disservice to science.

Re:And that's bad how?

[NFN_NLN]

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.

Jesus, I have not seen more worthless CRAP on /.

[somethingwicked]

I can not believe that someone on this forum, FOR NERDS, would make such a huge mistake on the REAL stuff that matters.

"You've never worked in the real world... they expect RESULTS!" -- RAY STANTZ TO Dr. Peter Venkman

As a Slashdot reader, you should know better...You might as well have misquoted a Python line, sheesh

Re:And that's bad how?

[Le Marteau]

two words - Sarah Palin.

how exactly is she *qualified* in *any* respect to comment on this?

I'll see your two words and raise you one: "... and Al Gore"

Laypeople.

[SanityInAnarchy]

You're assuming that everyone who has an opinion about this will actually be informed, will take the time to look through those proofs, reproduce those experiments, etc.

Read this.

In particular, look at that graph. Are you frightened yet?

Evolution is one of the crowing triumphs of modern science. It has more evidence than any other theory I know of, from many branches of science -- the "tree of life" is repeated, exactly, in genetics, in the fossil record, in the geologic record, everywhere we care to look for it. It informs pretty much all of modern medicine and biology, and it is a humbling look at our origins and our true status with respect to other life on the planet. It is beautiful, important, and solidly supported by fact.

Even the Catholic Church has officially embraced evolution, and the big bang theory, as truth.

And a third of Americans reject evolution outright. These aren't people who just aren't sure -- they say it is definitely false.

Want to guess why?

Because they feel it threatens their religion. Because if evolution is true, the Earth (and certainly the Universe) cannot be six thousand years old, and they must accept that they are descended from apes -- or that, by any honest classification, humans are still a species of ape. Because they cannot accept the fact that at least some part of that religion is a fairy tale, or at least a metaphor.

The problem is, in order to reject evolution, they find they have to doubt just about every legitimate scientist who has an opinion on the subject, and keep themselves willfully ignorant. Furthermore, in order to believe the earth is six thousand years old, they pretty nearly have to stick their fingers in their ear and go "la la la la" in order to avoid pretty much every branch of science that has anything to say about the subject.

That is, if they are right, even the most basic grade-school cosmology must be wrong -- there are objects more than six thousand light years away from us. Geology must also be wrong -- not merely carbon-dating (which is already quite rigorous), but the kind of time scales modern geology suggests. And of course, modern medicine must be wrong -- our understanding of things like antibiotics relies on evolution to work.

And yet, they will feel qualified to address these issues, to challenge real scientists with such arguments as, "That's microevolution. Show me one 'kind' turning into another, and I'll believe it." When this fails to get them anywhere, they again close their eyes, ears, and minds, and ultimately turn to the very simplistic, reassuring, and ultimately wrong words of Ken Ham: "Who should you believe -- God or the scientists?"

The problem here is not just the validity of evolution. It is that in order to believe what the creationist wants to believe, they have to reject huge chunks of modern science. In order to continue to be relevant, they have consistently attempted to get their strange ideas taught in school -- not just as a philosophy, or a class in its own right, but as part of science.

And it's not just america -- 22% of Canadians are creationists. Something like a third of Americans are.

So, the short answer is, yes, laypeople absolutely will doubt whatever they feel they have a problem with. If they doubt evolution, cosmology, Einsteinian relativity, geology, archeology, paleontology, etc, just so they can believe a certain way, it's certainly not a stretch that they would doubt anything that conflicts with their actual (polluting, wasteful) lifestyle.

And unfortunately, even when 99.9% of scientists agree on something, it doesn't help if they can't convince the public -- because laypeople are also voters.

We need another Carl Sagan.

Real skepticism has criteria

[snowwrestler]

Real skepticism provides criteria by which it can be satisfied. Unchanging skepticism in the face of evidence is not scientific.

Re:And that's bad how?

[dlt074]

so you're saying that global warming is so complex and hard to understand that scientists who are used to doing real science need some sort of special scientific method to analyze the global warming data? only enlightened bought and paid for "scientists" are capable of reading the "proper" answers from the holy data? the climate changes over time. always has always SHOULD. it's not my fault and i don't want to pay for something natural and necessary. i especially don't want to handy cap humanity because of a bunch of whack jobs who think the sky is falling.

Re:qualified?

[Sharkeys-Day]

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.

Re:Real problem is Conservatism.

[DamonHD]

Not all scientists (a) are American (b) have fixed party-political views or allegiance (c) use the word "liberal" like you do above or associate it with the same concepts, etc, etc, etc.

Just as a data point, Mrs Thatcher (UK Prime Minister 1979 to 1990) was a chemist and apparently was brought up a strict Methodist. Where does that appear in your world map?

My point being: scientists are not a homogenised entity, distributed along a small number of dimensions. There is an awful lot of variety amongst the humans that practise science. Generalisations are generally misleading.

Rgds

Damon

Re:Global-warming denier papers are usually garbag

[TheAlkymyst]

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.

Re:Climate Science isn't a Science!

[A beautiful mind]

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. 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".

No. Climate science works on similar timescales as evolution and both biologists and climatologists would be shocked to hear that they can't formulate a hypothesis, make predictions and attempt to disprove them. That's exactly what they do. You seem to have a very naíve idea of what an experiment is - that stuff the chemists do in the labcoats right? Climate science produces testable predictions both for our current future and starting from past points to arrive at conclusions about our past. Climate scientists made predictions based on a theory about past climate, before knowing what the past climate looked like, then someone actually came up with a way of measuring the past climate. That's predictive value. Evolutionary biologists do the same, please read Richard Dawkins' latest book "The greatest show on earth" for a robust overview how evolution is based on testable ideas.

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 ... 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.

At no time in the past 100 years did the scientific consensus suggest that there would be imminent global cooling. There were some (one?) article that suggested global cooling in the 70s and the mainstream press run with it. It is also pretty well known that climate is cyclic and "imminent" in climate science might mean 10 thousands years. There was also a valid view that aerosol pollution would cause "global dimming" and reduce temperatures slightly. We fixed that problem by banning a lot of those pollutants in the 70s thus _averted_ the problem. There wasn't any serious following for "global cooling" among scientists in the past 100 years. You are exaggerating extremely heavily. Comparing climate science to 9/11 theories or creationists is disingenius. It reminds me of that Monty Python sketch about "what did the Romans ever gave us...". You have to realize that a lot of things in your life depend on the scientists and the scientific consensus getting it right. There would be no internet, computing industry, aviation, etc. without scientific base research in a lot of these areas. Science, it works.

Ooh! Links! I know this!

[SuperKendall]

I can link too:

http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/12/climategate_was_data_faked.php

My link is better than yours! It does not rely on group think and manipulated data! Thhpt!

If they so drastically manipulated data from Australia, what else have they done... this is why access to raw data is so vital, and why things that are based on raw data we cannot see simply cannot be trusted (especially given the penchant from the emails we have seen to shut out people going off-message).

Thanks for giving me an opportunity to shed even more light on the disturbing revelations from the data and code (which matter far more than the emails).

Re:And that's bad how?

[thtrgremlin]

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?

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Math is now a science?

[Jiro]

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.

Re:And that's bad how?

[Late Adopter]

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.

Data and algorithms

[snowwrestler]

Other research centers also collect similar data, and some have open-sourced their algorithms.

And yes, their conclusions are similar to those of the CRU. That's what the GP means by saying that criticisms have been answered.

Bullshit

[abulafia]

What I see instead is a large number of credulous people who believe whatever certain pundits tell them is the best way to screw with liberals.

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.

Re:Math is now a science?

[Maxo-Texas]

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.

Scientific debate

[microbox]

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.

Re:And that's bad how?

[virtualXTC]

I'm not sure if it was your intention, but your response seems to indicate that you think Al Gore is as equally un-qualified to speak about climate change as Palin. For the record, Gore at least studied in a climatology lab while at Harvard.

Re:And that's bad how?

[raddan]

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.

Re:And that's bad how?

[wh1pp3t]

Funny, Al Gore is going to profit the from all of his.

He is nothing more than a marketing man for carbon credit trading. He is the chairman for Generation Investment Management, partnered up with the former CEO of Goldman Sacks.

How convenient.

Re:And that's bad how?

[jmorris42]

> 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

About That Data

[sycodon]

Interesting thing about the NASA Data. Check this graph from NASA

This shows that virtually all of the warming seems to come from their "corrections".

Seems this would have a difficult time passing the smell test.

Re:About That Data

[A beautiful mind]

1. The data is from the NOAA, not the NASA.

2. The data is for the US land area, not the whole world.

3. Here is the paper listing and referencing the adjustments. Be the first to prove in detail how and why they are wrong to make and you'd be instantly famous.

Re:facutal inaccuracies?

[secondhand_Buddah]

http://www.google.com/search?q=An+Inconvenient+Truth+inaccuracies
Yes. Some of the science was valid. But some of the facts presented as true were blatantly designed to mislead.
My point is, one either supports the scientific method or one does not. There are no grey areas. Either its science, or its propaganda. It cannot be both. 'An Inconvenient Truth' is propaganda masquerading as science, which is actually what this forum topic is about.

Re:And that's bad how?

[niiler]

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.

Re:The Mother of all Ad Hominem Attacks

[catchblue22]

Or acid rain messed up the growth of your trees in the area. Or the lack of salmon runs have cut the nutrient input to the forests (yes, bears eating spawned salmon have been a major source of nutrients for the trees. Or???

Your example listed one thermometer. But what if there are hundreds of thermometers. Thermocouples, mercury, made by multiple manufactures, distributed over a wide area. What if there is satellite temperature data? What if multiple other temperature proxies all synced up with the instrumental temperature readings? What if all of those different sources of data all pointed to a single temperature trend. And then a single temperature proxy such as tree-ring measurements disagreed with those temperatures. And only over a limited area and a limited time. It seems reasonable to hypothesize that something weird is happening to the trees.