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The Science Credibility Bubble
eldavojohn writes "The real fallout of climategate may have nothing to do with the credibility of climate change. Daniel Henninger thinks it's a bigger problem for the scientific community as a whole and he calls out the real problem as seen through the eyes of a lay person in an opinion piece for the WSJ. Henninger muses, 'I don't think most scientists appreciate what has hit them,' and carries on in that vein, saying, 'This has harsh implications for the credibility of science generally. Hard science, alongside medicine, was one of the few things left accorded automatic stature and respect by most untrained lay persons. But the average person reading accounts of the East Anglia emails will conclude that hard science has become just another faction, as politicized and "messy" as, say, gender studies.' While nothing interesting was found by most scientific journals, he explains that the attacks against scientists in these leaked e-mails for proposing opposite views will recall the reader to the persecution of Galileo. In doing so, it will make the lay person unsure of the credibility of all sciences without fully seeing proof of it, but assuming that infighting exists in them all. Is this a serious risk? Will people even begin to doubt the most rigorous sciences like Mathematics and Physics?"
The argument from incredulity is often applied to science by the layperson. You don't need an opponent or a debate to use a logical fallacy. The fact that the Kitzmiller vs. Dover case had to happen proves that people question science regardless of it's validity.
"A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything." ~Friedrich Nietzsche
Didn't we see the same bloviation from the mainstream media when cold fusion went from the energy source of the future to a byword for scientific fraud? It seems to me if the reputation of hard science could survive out and out fraud like that, it will probably survive the climate change "fraud".
Science shouldn't be "accorded automatic stature and respect" any more than politics should. There's no reason to trust a scientist any more than you'd trust your barber.
The problem isn't that people aren't automatically believing science, it's almost the exact opposite: people are automatically doubting science. And that's quite another thing entirely.
When I was a kid, I used to genuinely believe that humans were on a path to greater wisdom, more profound discourse, and perfect knowledge.
Lately, I just see a bunch of power-hungry assholes doing their utmost to discredit intelligent thought and dumb-down the world around them, so they can continue on an unimpeded path toward greater assholism.
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
Will people even begin to doubt the most rigorous sciences like Mathematics and Physics
The answer is no. The good thing about science is that it is open source. For mathematics, you can go through all of the proofs from your text books. For physics you would need a bit of gear to reproduce some of the experiments, but again, that is just a question of money and interest.
The basic point is that the scientific method don't expect you to accept anything without proof. If you can falsify any of the theories by experiment, people will pay attention to you, regardless of politics.
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
The lay public has been mistrusting science for quite a while now. Witness the disbelief in findings regarding the lack of connection between autism and vaccines, brain cancer and cellphones and climate change.
/. all the time - cue all the rants about how nobody gets funding unless they parrot the party line about global warming and how doctors who support vaccinations are just puppets of Big Pharma.
We're already well into the era when people doubt the motives and findings of scientists. You can see it here on
Problem is, people really believe that they can become experts on extremely complicated topics and weigh the evidence for themselves. I'm not saying we need to have blind trust in authority, but sometimes you've got to recognize that someone who studied climatology for X years might actually know a thing or two that you can't pick up from reading a blog.
Who could have possibly predicted that accepting hundreds of billions of dollars from governments over the last couple of decades could have somehow politicized Science?
-Peter
If people are afraid to question what we now consider laws in physics, mathematics, etc, then there will never be breakthroughs in learning.
I mean, there are extremes, and people shouldn't be disbelieving scientists just because they're scientists, but at the same time, we shouldn't always take things at face value just because Bill Nye the Science Guy says so. There is a happy medium...
I work in a field closely associated with climatology (satellite remote sensing), and I work with climatologists. And I agree with the article on one point: We really do not understand how big a deal this 'climategate' is.
The worst bits in that email dump are petty squabbles between researchers and critics. That's standard -- often critics are dishonest people who are attacking the science in order to advance a political agenda, and that is very frustrating to someone who wants to do honest science. Yes, tempers flare in private emails. Scientists are human. If people are going to lose faith in science because scientists are human...then we as a race are doomed, in my opinion.
As for the results of the CSU climate research, they're not in any doubt. Every criticism of them has been answered, and there are other studies that agree with the CSU results. So attack the scientists for being human if you must, but the science is sound and must be heeded.
I really do not understand why this has blown up into such a conflagration. Anyone who gives up on science because of this trifling matter is welcome to go back to the dark ages and live their short, wholesome, science-free life.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
Newtonian Mechanics are valid, just not as accurate as Relativity. Relativity is, in essence, a more accurate version of Newtonian Mechanics. It refines it, but the basic conclusions are very similar, save for extreme circumstances. Though relativity is more accurate, it's much more complicated, so most people will calculate things with N.M. It works fine at human-experienced scales, speeds and distances. Creationism is entirely different from evolution. It in no way refines the idea for more accuracy, it just throws the whole damn concept out the window and says "We know, and we're right because we said so." And it should be noted that Einstein, unlike the evolution-deniers, backed up his claims with math, logic and science, rather than just anecdotal evidence. Fact checking when you are an informed person or scientist is one thing, saying something is wrong because you don't get it and some old book told you it's wrong is entirely another, invalid, way of thinking.
"A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything." ~Friedrich Nietzsche
"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.
Oh, I'm sorry. I guess that we can't really thank science for medicine, computers, airplanes, the food on our table. I guess that one murderous programmer working on an open source file system means all of Linux is shit, too. And you know what? I got taken for a ride buying speculative real estate in Florida. I guess this means that you can't make money in real estate, that the whole thing's a rotten idea. Incidentally, I threw out the bath water. Where'd the baby go?
I'll buy that argument once religious whackadoodles promise to renounce their faith because of televangelists and pedo-priests.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
It would be nice if it was that simple.
But, at least one scientist who was going to study the validity of the ice core methodology was told that it would be immoral to undercut this important foundation for global warming and he was fired so his institute could continue to get funding.
Science is often badly distorted for decades at a time. Long term, you can't stop the truth. But short term, money wins out.
The journal, Science? (Nature?-- it's one of them) declared several years ago, after global warming was only a few years old and before many of the initial predictions failed, that the global warming debate was over and it was time for political action. Does that sound like the scientific method to you?
Nature just came out and said that the emails show nothing wrong and the ends justify the means. Does that sound like the scientific method to you?
Global warming is probably real- anthrocentric global warming is a little more in doubt.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
"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.
Will people even begin to doubt the most rigorous sciences like Mathematics and Physics?
Some people already doubt science in general, to limit it to just math and physics belies the current trend of refusing to accept what science, in all its forms, tells us.
Men on the moon? Nope, can't be done because of . WTC towers collapsed because of structural damage compounded by extreme temperatures? Nope, it was a government plot because . Vaccines help prevent acquisition of serious diseases? Nope, doesn't work because . Evolution? It's impossible because .
There will always be those who will find any excuse to deny the scientific evidence. That doesn't mean one shouldn't question the evidence or how it's gathered. Rather, instead of saying, "See! They used the word 'hide' so they must be falsifying the data!", one should look at the entire context of quotes and information to see what is meant.
Science, in all its forms, is one of those areas where there will always be discussion about something, but once someone, or some group, comes up with an explanation, their data and processes can be checked by others to see if those people get the same results. If not, go back and see what the differences were. If still failure, back to square one.
I am reminded of the one CSI episode* where after doing all the evidence gathering, interviewing suspects and finally finding the body, the only conclusion was that the girl, upon trying to retrieve her waste can from a garbage bin, had been partially crushed between the bin and the wall when a vehicle came by and accidentally clipped the bin.
The parents were sure their daughter was murdered and planned on hiring their own investigator to find out who killed her. Grissom remarks, "Mrs. Rycoff there is no one guilty of this."
"Because you say so?"
"Because the evidence says so."
*The episode is called Chaos Theory and is one of my all-time favorite CSI shows. Right up there with Fur and Loathing (the plushy and furry convention episode).
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
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.
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.
Einstein questioned "valid" laws of science and look what it got him.
Indeed I shall - it got him a series of logical arguments with which to dispute the wisdom of the time. Gradually, through debate and observation and experimentation, more and more people realised he had made a series of logical points that disproved the old ways of doing things.
Let us compare this to the argument from incredulity - the equivalent would have been Einstein saying, "But I don't understand it! How does it work? No, look, see, the feather and the hammer land at different times! Ha! Scientists are dumb!" in which case I doubt he would have quite the same status in the history books.
Be smart, help people!
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.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
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.
The best way to restore healthy debate on climate change science is to open source everything...the data, the source code for the computer models, and the methodology for how the data is collected: specific locations of data collection (is it a rural area, a parking lot in a city, on a school roof, in direct sunlight or in the shade), date and time of day (noon, midnight, 5pm), weather conditions at the time it is collected (sunny, raining, under a snow drift), age of the equipment (mercury thermometer installed in 1953 or digital sensor device). All of these factors would influence a simple temperature reading. Heck there are probably dozens of other factors that I am not considering.
Since our government is PAYING for so much of this research it should be no problem to PUBLISH all of these details and let everyone debate from a common framework. However, I believe our government has an agenda and therefore won't ever take such a logical approach.
While we are at it, let's do the same thing for how inflation, unemployment, public health statistics, education metrics, and poverty rates are calculated.
The 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.
We tried that with the state lottery system. It turns out that most people can't understand statistics, and if they could, we wouldn't be able to afford the schools that don't teach it.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
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.
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.
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."
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.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
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.
That would be a truly welcome change.
"[This] will make the lay person unsure of the credibility of ALL sciences without fully seeing proof of it..."
Tada, that's how science is SUPPOSE to work. Don't blindly follow anyone including scientists without quantitative and reproducible proof. Science isn't a religion, it's a fact. YOU ARE ENCOURAGED, NAY REQUIRED TO QUESTION SCIENCE in order for it to prosper.
On a secondary note the same thing applies to government.. but that is a different rant.
I can not believe that someone on this forum, FOR NERDS, would make such a huge mistake on the REAL stuff that matters.
"You've never worked in the real world... they expect RESULTS!" -- RAY STANTZ TO Dr. Peter Venkman
As a Slashdot reader, you should know better...You might as well have misquoted a Python line, sheesh
---"What did I say that sounded like 'Tell me about your day?'"---
I'll see your two words and raise you one: "... and Al Gore"
Mod down people who tell people how to mod in their sigs
You're assuming that everyone who has an opinion about this will actually be informed, will take the time to look through those proofs, reproduce those experiments, etc.
Read this.
In particular, look at that graph. Are you frightened yet?
Evolution is one of the crowing triumphs of modern science. It has more evidence than any other theory I know of, from many branches of science -- the "tree of life" is repeated, exactly, in genetics, in the fossil record, in the geologic record, everywhere we care to look for it. It informs pretty much all of modern medicine and biology, and it is a humbling look at our origins and our true status with respect to other life on the planet. It is beautiful, important, and solidly supported by fact.
Even the Catholic Church has officially embraced evolution, and the big bang theory, as truth.
And a third of Americans reject evolution outright. These aren't people who just aren't sure -- they say it is definitely false.
Want to guess why?
Because they feel it threatens their religion. Because if evolution is true, the Earth (and certainly the Universe) cannot be six thousand years old, and they must accept that they are descended from apes -- or that, by any honest classification, humans are still a species of ape. Because they cannot accept the fact that at least some part of that religion is a fairy tale, or at least a metaphor.
The problem is, in order to reject evolution, they find they have to doubt just about every legitimate scientist who has an opinion on the subject, and keep themselves willfully ignorant. Furthermore, in order to believe the earth is six thousand years old, they pretty nearly have to stick their fingers in their ear and go "la la la la" in order to avoid pretty much every branch of science that has anything to say about the subject.
That is, if they are right, even the most basic grade-school cosmology must be wrong -- there are objects more than six thousand light years away from us. Geology must also be wrong -- not merely carbon-dating (which is already quite rigorous), but the kind of time scales modern geology suggests. And of course, modern medicine must be wrong -- our understanding of things like antibiotics relies on evolution to work.
And yet, they will feel qualified to address these issues, to challenge real scientists with such arguments as, "That's microevolution. Show me one 'kind' turning into another, and I'll believe it." When this fails to get them anywhere, they again close their eyes, ears, and minds, and ultimately turn to the very simplistic, reassuring, and ultimately wrong words of Ken Ham: "Who should you believe -- God or the scientists?"
The problem here is not just the validity of evolution. It is that in order to believe what the creationist wants to believe, they have to reject huge chunks of modern science. In order to continue to be relevant, they have consistently attempted to get their strange ideas taught in school -- not just as a philosophy, or a class in its own right, but as part of science.
And it's not just america -- 22% of Canadians are creationists. Something like a third of Americans are.
So, the short answer is, yes, laypeople absolutely will doubt whatever they feel they have a problem with. If they doubt evolution, cosmology, Einsteinian relativity, geology, archeology, paleontology, etc, just so they can believe a certain way, it's certainly not a stretch that they would doubt anything that conflicts with their actual (polluting, wasteful) lifestyle.
And unfortunately, even when 99.9% of scientists agree on something, it doesn't help if they can't convince the public -- because laypeople are also voters.
We need another Carl Sagan.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Real skepticism provides criteria by which it can be satisfied. Unchanging skepticism in the face of evidence is not scientific.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
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.
But how do you explain all this to your average Sarah Palin follower? That's the scientists' conundrum here.
An effective way to start is to not insult them. Maybe rather than thinking that a college level education is what is needed, why don't you try and describe it in a manner that anybody at an 8th grade level could grasp? You might get a more welcome and understanding response than by being an elitist prick.
Change this later.
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.
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.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Just curious, based on your argument, how are you qualified to say who is and is not qualified to have a valid opinion on AGW/ACC?
Want Big Business out of government? Take away the incentive and start by getting government out of big business!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
Other research centers also collect similar data, and some have open-sourced their algorithms.
And yes, their conclusions are similar to those of the CRU. That's what the GP means by saying that criticisms have been answered.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
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.
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.
> two words - Sarah Palin.
And we thought BDS was bad enough. The mention of Mrs. Palin's name seems to instantly polarize any conversation, so why bring her into this thread, already a certainty to become a veritable flamefest?
But since you did, lets do examine her ideas on the merits instead of ad hominim attacks on her. Seems she is saying pretty much what I have been saying here on /. for years. That the science and politics of GW and especially AGW have blurred into a horrid muddle such that even the raw data (where it hasn't been destroyed) isn't trustworthy. Therefore basing multi-trillion dollar reordering of the world's economy on it is stupid. Therefore The Won trying to ram a New Deal on Carbon down our thoats by hook (Copenhagan) or crook (EPA) isn't even on the same planet with science, it is ideology, pure and simple.
> Because of some possible (and if so quite serious) data shenanigans, Obama should boycott
> the talks entirely to send a message. i.e. Quit.
Yes. Because the reaction has been to attack the messengers, bury the whole matter and proceed on the same predetermined course. By going Obama is declaring for that faction. No other spin is possible. The only exception would be if he went and used the occasion to put his speaking skills into the service of Science by utterly flaying the whole perverted exercise, which we both know won't happen.
Global warming MAY be happening (but probably hasn't for a decade now..), AGW even MIGHT be the major cause. But with even the raw sensor data in serious doubt (ask Google about the recent review of the raw data in Darwin or the rerun of the New Zealand long term trend data from their raw data. The rot extends far beyond EAU's CRU now.) and the main actors proven by their own words to be activists instead of scientists who can say? And that is the point, nobody who hasn't got a few years to dig into data has no rational basis to decide. The experts are tainted on both sides by trillions of dollars of incentives, political/religious beliefs and the raw data is suspect. So on the one hand we might all be Doomed! yet the only proposed solution to the possibility is 100% certain to produce ruin. So the rational person looks for option #3 and says, so just how much would mitigation cost should we do nothing and the Warmers prove to be right?
If you are going to cry wolf on such a biblical scale as the AGW theory does, you really should make every attempt to be open and above reproach. If the warmers had truly believed the science was settled they should have put together a datadump worthy of the claims. Put the full raw data, the adjustments with detailed explanations for each out along with the complete fully commented source to the models used to process it that gave the results that lead them to their frightening theory of doom. Let everyone fully examine the whole thing to the best of their abilities. That would have settled the science.
Instead they let Al Gore ride in and turn the whole thing into a crappy PowerPoint, then into a movie and finally ride it to become the Nobel Goracle with a hundred million dollar personal forture riding on a pet theory that just happened (amazing coincidence, Trust Me!) to require the exact same policies his ilk had been pushing since Karl Marx defiled the Earth with his presence.
Or take James Hansen. He is going around saying anyone who "Denies" his theory should be tried for crimes against The Earth. Were he just another crackpot pundit he could be safely ignored. Look at MSNBC's raings, we are pretty good at ignoring crackpots. The problem isn't even that Hansen wears the robes of a High Priest of Science!, hell he has the NASA patch on his robes, in the ranks of Science! that is better than a cardinal's hat. No, the problem is that the rest of the priesthood hasn't taken any action against him.
When a heretic priest comes busting into yer temple demanding everyone adopt a new set of beliefs the established church
Democrat delenda est
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.
Participatory Governance : The only feasible option for a real democracy, where everyone really does have a say.
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.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say