Slashdot Mirror
How Climate Scientists Parallel Early Atomic Scientists
Lasrick writes "Kennette Benedict writes in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists about the existential threat of climate change, and how the scientists who study and write about it are similar to the early atomic scientists who created, and then worried about, the threat that nuclear weapons posed to humanity: 'Just as the Manhattan Project participants could foresee the coming arms race, climate scientists today understand the consequences of deploying the technologies that defined the industrial age. They also know that action now to reduce greenhouse gas emissions will mitigate the worst consequences of climate change, just as the Manhattan Project scientists knew that early action to forestall a deadly arms race could prevent nuclear catastrophe.'"
If they were honest, why are they calling it "Climate Change" now, rather than Global Warming?
Seems to me they're trying to have it both ways.
(Note: This is just an observation, nothing more. If you try to argue with me about issues I haven't raised here today, I'm going to ignore you.)
The knuckle dragging idiots that make up 90% of humanity on this planet can just about grasp that a huge explosion with lots of radioactivity is a very bad thing. However trying to persuade them that climate change that may or may not affect their lives in a few decades time is also a very bad thing is rather an uphill task. Mainly because they don't understand the science but also because a lot of them think its all a conspiracy by The Man (tm) to control what they do. And then of course we have the Ostrich approach to problem solving - just hope it goes away.
It is not science if your hypothesis is not falsifiable.
Why stop at four billion years? Compared to the temperature some ~13.8 billion years ago, it's positively chilly right now!
I find it fascinating how science is often refered here on slashdot, but when it comes to climate scientists, all of a sudden the vast majority of scientists are stupid, lying, elitists scaremongers.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Manhattan Project scientists may have foretold the arms race, but could they have foreseen that the advent of nuclear weapons would produce the longest period of peace between industrialized nations in the past several centuries? Considering the countless lives lost in the wars of the 19th and 20th centuries, how many lives have been saved under the haunting specter of nuclear annihilation?
In this context the analogy to climate science is less clear.
When I was growing up, i.e. the 70ies and the 80ies, the climate scare was The Big Bad Global Cooling. At the end of the 90ies and until recently, the climate scare was The Big Bad Global Warming. Then the scare mongers got smarter and now the scare is The Big Bad Climate Change Whatever It Is. Since the climate is always changing it is a perfectly safe bet it is going to change, somehow. To prevent the climate from changing is about as possible as to prevent the Earth from rotating :)
BTW, we have an unusually cold summer here in the Balkans.
early atomic scientists:
- developed sound physical theories that any theoretical theorist could verify from first principles and a few key experiments
- proved that their theories worked in a series of repeatable experiments
- implemented their technologies as practical devices
- worried that the technology they themselves developed might be used for bad
climate scientists:
- make extrapolations involving tons of assumptions and unknowns
- their experiments and data collections cannot be reproduced
- haven't created any new technologies
- try to stop people from using other people's technologies
In the sixties and seventies, the climate hucksters were selling us on a man-made ice age. In the eighties, they told us California would be underwater by 2000. It's still there.
Maybe alot of people twist and exaggerate the evidence for their own reasons when $ billions are on the line. A $100k grant ? Just in the Obama years alone, he's handed hundreds of millions of your money to fake greenies. By fake , I mean ones that took the money and ran, never living up to any of their promises.
The AGW hypothesis may or may not reflect actual reality. That's the problem with an unfalsifiable hypothesis.
The AGW hypothesis is not unfalsifiable. People with no understanding of science often make that claim. A couple decades of significant cooling (0.05C per decade or so compared to the warming trend of 0.18C/decade warming since 1970. ) while CO2 levels continued to climb would probably be enough to do that.
The problem for people who like to lie about science is that the science of AGW is very basic and well understood. To pretend it's not going to happen you have to imagine something that could stop it. And so far nobody has been able to invent something that can stop it short of a catastrophic breakdown in global atmospheric and oceanic circulation. Be my guest. Find something that can prevent CO2 from increasing temperatures and prove it. In 1906, Arhennius calculated the climate sensitivity to a doubling of CO2 when including water vapor feedback was 2.1C. Current estimates are between 2C and 4.5C. Go ahead, find a way to make the climate sensitivity negative and show that it works.
Support SETI@home
That is exactly what I came to post. It turned out that those atomic scientists were as guilty of exaggerating the dire consequences that would result from the arms race as the climate scientists of today are of exaggerating the dire consequences of climate change.
As you said, good comparison (even though the submitter and the article don't even realize that the comparison they are making should cause one to draw the opposite conclusion to the one they want you to draw).
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
How about the exaggerations of the effects of global warming? Or just about anything said about "extreme weather" especially when claiming definitive proof of global warming. A recent example was the claim that Hurricane Sandy was a 1 in 700 year event even though we have at best 150 years of records to back that claim (meaning you can't really claim a frequency o f occurrence of less than 1 in 150 years). Even if that is a true statement, we still don't know how many 1 in 700 year trajectories there are that go through New York City (but it's enough that they get a hurricane every five years even in the absence of global warming).