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Climate Change and the Integrity of Science
blau tips news of an open letter from 255 members of the US National Academy of Sciences, including 11 Nobel laureates, decrying the "recent escalation of political assaults on scientists in general and on climate scientists in particular." The letter lays out the basics of the scientific method, and explains how certainly highly-regarded theories — such as the big bang, evolution, and Earth's origin — are commonly accepted due to the strength of the evidence supporting them, though "fame still awaits anyone who could show these theories to be wrong." It goes on to "call for an end to McCarthy-like threats of criminal prosecution against our colleagues based on innuendo and guilt by association, the harassment of scientists by politicians seeking distractions to avoid taking action, and the outright lies being spread about them." According to the Guardian, the letter "originated with a number of NAS members who were frustrated at the misinformation being spread by climate deniers and the assaults on scientists by some policy-makers who hope to delay or avoid making policy decisions and are hiding behind the recent controversy around emails and minor errors in the IPCC."
As long as the average person thinks the relative likelihood of "science being right" and "nutball propaganda being right" is about the same or worse, nothing will change. It pays to keep people uneducated: it's easier to scare, persuade, and misinform them.
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Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli's lawsuit against former UVA faculty Michael Mann. In criticising Cuccinelli's lawsuit, I'm not even saying he has to admit or agree with everything or anything that Mann wrote. But political persecution of scientists is bad... like 15th century Vatican bad.
And, of course, they say nothing about the subversion of the peer review process discussed in the emails.
We have essentially the same thing today. No matter how much evidence is shown for evolution, anthropogenic global warming, and so on, the fundamentalist wackos will rail against it and find some rationale for continuing in their thoroughly disproved ideas. About 25% of the American public cannot in any way be convinced, no matter how much evidence is shown them. These are the same people who think Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11, and who still believe Obama is a Kenyan citizen and George W Bush actually cares about them and their Christian religion.
Similar to the upcoming US election results
TFA says:
Exactly.
The problem is political, not scientific. Exxon & Co. have managed to convince the tin-foil-hat gang that all scientists are united in a vast conspiracy against people who own SUVs.
Scientists are scientists, not marketeers, how can they convince people who believe the world is 6000 years old that CO2 does absorb infrared radiation?
We either accept the methods by which the big bang, evolution, and climate change (along with pretty much everything else we think we know about how the world works) are understood, or we don't. If we do, then the economics are irrelevant: the universe doesn't care about our economy. If we don't, then we should have a better reason for this decision than saying "the motivations are different," because the universe also doesn't care about motivation, at least as far as we can tell.
In other words, you're letting your politics interfere with your understanding of science. Thanks for providing such a useful demonstration of how this works.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
So scientists who challenge the prevailing politically-correct liberal thesis are "climate deniers" - this is the basic problem. Even the term is ridiculous. Compare it to "holocaust denier". The holocaust was undeniably real - because there are still some living eye witnesses, photographs, original videos, documents etc. that clearly prove that it happened. What does it mean to be a "climate denier"? No one denies there is "climate". For too long people who challenged the "science" behind global warming were shouted down and ridiculed by their "peers". Now for a little bit, the shoe is on the other foot, and they don't like it a bit. BTW - CFL bulbs are a perfect example of why this type of "science" really has to be tried before accepted, and not pitch a fit if it is challenged - http://www.energystar.gov/ia/products/lighting/cfls/downloads/CFL_Cleanup_and_Disposal.pdf Just think about that - what about places where there is no window, where the only ventilation is forced air. Give me an incandescent bulb anyday. If it breaks, worst you worry about is a cut. When it burns out, you can safely toss it w/out worry about what its components will do to the environment or your local groundwater. Not to mention that the CFLs do not last anywhere as long as promised if you don't follow their optimal usage pattern (leave on for at least 15 mins, etc.) Certainly there are places where they are appropriate, but "environmentalists" pushing them down everyone's throat, and corporate greed (Walmart) jumping on the green bandwagon and being dishonest with people - you wonder why people with a brain are skeptical? If they posted the cleanup instructions next to the bulbs on the shelf, would people still be buying these?
The temperature of the earth is warming over time.
It only matters if the temperature of the earth is warming through the timeframe that humanity has been settled throughout the globe, or at least within a range of climate zones.
The amount of this warming is unprecedented.
Again, this only matters within the relatively short timeframe that humanity has been settled throughout the globe, or at least within a range of climate zones.
The warming will continue past the point where the earth's feedback mechanisms can correct it.
... in the short term. It doesn't matter if the earth can correct in 100,000 years. What matters is whether the earth can correct what we are doing in 100 years.
The warming will cause catastrophic impacts to life on earth, particularly humans.
This one is okay, but how falsifying this falsify point 5? Also, this is one of the few points you listed that is pretty well proven. See sea level rise, which will have catastrophic economic consequences at the very least.
The warming is caused by human activity, if not entirely, then mostly.
This is totally irrelevant. What matters is whether humans can do something to reduce the warming, and only that they can do enough to avoid a tipping point at which catastrophe is inevitable. Yes, this implies that humans have something to do with the warming if one is arguing for reduced emissions as a solution, but who knows what percentage it is? If we are responsible for 30% of the warming, will reducing warming by 20% reduce the likelihood of catastrophic warming?
I'm a proud skeptic, that is, somebody who wants to see evidence of extraordinary claims.
George Monbiot has pointed out that "skeptic" is not an appropriate word for somebody who goes far out of their way to ignore evidence presented to them and seizes upon the thinnest contrary statements. That was his defense of the word "denier" and it started me using the word again. I remained skeptical until about five years ago, when the evidence started to look very convincing. Then the 2007 IPCC report won me over.
What we're seeing the last few months is, to me, a fascinating study of how resistant people are to news they don't want to believe. The climate science has been slowly building up for decades, one peer-reviewed article after another, one dataset after another, the same story emerging from multiple angles. The scientific disputes dwindled away until we now have 97% of climate scientists surveyed last year on board with the same basic conclusions. Some thousands of scientists represented by the IPCC summary.
Yes, Michael Crichton was correct that science isn't subject to voting and one guy can be right and a thousand wrong. But public policy makers should go with the preponderance of evidence, just like a court; leaning to the views of a small minority is not sound policy-making. If 97% of 1000 nuclear scientists thought a nuclear plant would blow up, would you build it?
Then along comes "climategate" and everybody is actually told that they are being read a few sentences cherry-picked from thousands of E-mails, stripped of context. Hundreds of voices protest that the word "trick" is widely used for legitimate data manipulations.
Nonetheless, not only do the denier voices, many of them from organizations shown to be funded by Exxon, immediately proclaim this to outweigh decades of work by a couple of battalions of PhDs, the general public starts polling sharp drops in agreement with climate-change theory that had slowly won them over.
Conclusion: when people don't want to believe something because of its terrible costs, you have to convince them with a weight of evidence on the order of magnitude of 1000:1.
A thousand to one. Oh, man, we get all the hard jobs.
"and thus nobody's mind is ever changed."
Fortunately that is not true over the long run, having argued the case for AGW on slashdot for the last decade I can say that the slashdot consensus on AGW has done a complete 180 degree turn around in that time. Ten years ago I was definitely in the minority and was constantly modded down for debunking basic stuff such as the "volcanos release more CO2 than mankind" myth. Sure there's still a minority who for political or religious reasons will never accept that mankind can warm the globe but the rest of us (including me) are now much better informed for having had the amature scientific debate.
The public argument about the science of AGW is very similar to the public argument over smoking causing cancer. The strength of the FF lobby and their pet politicians is orders of magnitude greater than the strength of the tabacoo lobby in it's hayday. Scientists have not failed to communicate the science of AGW but they have not yet been successfull in battling the anti-science forces who know full well they are engaging in propoganda and witch hunts in an effort to keep the public in confused darkness. However you are right, it does not reflect well on society that there is still a vast army of usefull idiots who accept and parrot the anti-science position without question.
But all is not lost, unlike propoganda and politics, science is objective and always wins in the long run. Evolution, plate techtonics, and AGW, are "scientific facts" where people can see the evidence for themselves. Gun laws, abortion rights, and what to do about AGW, are subjective and those are the wedge arguments that, fueled by the blind faith of politics and religion, will rage forever.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
What money? Do you know how much funding your average climatology research unit gets? I bet you it's nowhere near BP or Exxon Mobile's profit margin this year. Hell, even Al Gore's much reviled investments into carbon offset companies don't amount to much more than a minuscule portion of that, and we're not talking about Al Gore here - we're talking about academics doing research.
Seriously, this is saying "Hey look, those guys get a drop of water! Don't pay any attention to our swimming pool!"
"A great part of the problem is that head smacking obvious issues like what caused the medieval global warming"
Nobody knows what caused the anomally known as the MWP but the fact that it was regional rules out the sun and other global phenomena. Whatever it was, it does not imply that CO2 is not causing the current warming. I'm sorry I only skimmed the the rest of your rant but that initial logical fallacy was enough to inform me that you are ill equiped to constructively critisize climate scientists.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
The existence of a medieval global warming period seems to be an article of faith among opponents of global warming, even though the evidence that it was global rather than regional is much weaker (PDF) than the evidence for modern global warming. The oddest thing is that they seem think that the possible existence of some additional mechanism that is not understood whereby the earth could warm more than is expected from current global climate models models should make people less concerned about the possible consequences of modern global warming. If the medieval warm period was indeed global, it would argue that there is some additional mechanism that could add to or amplify the modern CO2 induced warming so as to cause global temperatures to shoot up even higher than projected.