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House Panel Holds Hearing On "Politically Driven Science" - Without Scientists
sciencehabit writes: Representative Louie Gohmert (R–TX) is worried that scientists employed by the U.S. government have been running roughshod over the rights of Americans in pursuit of their personal political goals. So this week Gohmert, the chair of the oversight and investigations subpanel of the U.S. House of Representatives' Natural Resources Committee, held a hearing to explore "the consequences of politically driven science." Notably absent, however, were any scientists, including those alleged to have gone astray.
This gives me an idea...
Let's hold a hearing on scientifically driven politics, and don't invite the politicians!
Better still, let's just leave out the politicians altogether. Only problem is, then suddenly scientists would become politicians.
The US is really good at messing with about everything they touch. Maybe take it a step back, guys.
Let me tell y'all how this works, see. What goes up? It must come down. If factries sending it up? It comes down out in the ocean. Oceans make up 75% of the earth, right? Factries can't be doin nothin bad to all that, see? If so factries would need 75% of the earth's stuff to compete with all that water!
Now these here pencil necks keep talkin like they got sumpin ta say, confusing everyone and upsetting them over greenhouses and what not. But this has got to stop, my lil girl won't quit cryin over dead polar bears! I keeps sayin' "Polar bears ain't dyin, we got some in the zoo", but she won't stop cryin' and I can't take it anymore.
but it's not all science.
Sometimes my country really disappoints me.
Well, if they do things in a way that makes sense, they could be accused of doing them scientifically, and that would be a clear conflict of interest.
When someone says, "Any fool can see
..is what Daily Kos calls him. With good reason.
http://www.dailykos.com/search...
As a Republican voter, I am dismayed at those who represent the only Conservative party. They have lost their way. Although I don't think "carbon credits" will help anyone but Al Gore, I do see the need to stop polluting our water, air and land.
This whole thing reminds me of the entire "Lead in Gasoline" fight back in the 60's.
I wish liberals would abandon the "climate change" mantra and focus on air and water quality. It's fairly easy to prove that we are poisoning everything.
Some things need to be said...
Why would they invite scientists to this panel? That's not what these are for. THe whole point of panels/investigations/committees is for those sitting on them to make public statements about whatever the issue is. If they even bring people in the Senators/Reps hardly ever ask questions, they use their floor time to read prepared statements or make comments. When they say "Senate Panel on X", it doesn't mean they are going to be asking experts about X. It just means you can expect soundbites about X from the politicians to be played back or reported on in their home districts.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
These next 2 years are going to be a nightmare of politically driven witch hunts against Science. They are also working to cut the NASA climate research budget; and I expect cuts in similar research done through DoD, USDA, National Science Foundation and others.
I can also see them killing off alternative energy programs, even research by the military so they can get more money from the Koch brothers and friends. Even though the military and intelligence communities have flagged climate change as a major security threat to the US, and the military would like to get away from oil based fuels as they were a major vulnerability in Afghanistan. Fuel convoys kept getting attacked.
They will do anything to line their pockets and torment those who do not conform to their dead of the norm.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Growing up in the 80s, all I heard was how liberal the media was and how we had to fight against it. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, it's clear that the phrase "liberal media" was a conservative talking point that they repeated ad infinitum until people stopped questioning it and just assumed it was true.
The same thing is happening now with claiming scientists are politically or monetarily motivated (the conservative machine hasn't settled on which script to stick with).
Look, I'm a scientist. I know scientists. I know scientists at NOAA, NCAR, NIST, the Labs, in academia, in industry, at biotechs, at agri-science companies, at space exploration companies, and at oil and gas companies. I know conservative scientists, liberal scientists, agnostic scientists, religious scientists, and hedonistic scientists.
You know what motivates scientists? Science. And to a lesser extent, their ego. If someone doesn't love science, there's no way they can cut it as a scientist. There are no political or monetary rewards available to scientists in the same way they're available to lawyers and lobbyists.
Science if hard work for little pay and possibly some recognition. Unfortunately, the conservative noise machine is slowly building a narrative that scientists are all politically and monetarily motivated. The public doesn't really know any better and will believe this to be true if they hear it enough.
This attempt to paint scientists as political actors is pure bullshit and demeans the hard work and great sacrifices working scientists make every day.
-Chris
Look at what the Democrat witness had to say:
As a guest of the democratic minority, I might be expected to attempt to refute the premise and argue that the science under consideration is not politically driven. What I want to do is slightly different. I want to challenge the presumption that politically-driven science is bad science. That presumption—while widely held—is demonstrably false. Some of the best and most famous science in the history of our country was driven by goals that were explicitly political.
This is a really dangerous tack to take. What happens to science when driven by a Republican agenda? Do not want!
I encourage scientists* to follow up with studies of politically-driven politics. Without involving any politicians, of course.
*Social scientists, I suppose, but that's better than nothing ;)
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
.. Is an old, old, old page out of the tyranny handbook.
It's not as much politically as money driven...if the best way to get a grant is to include something about climate change (for example) then you include climate change in the grant proposal. Grants and research can be half of a PhD's paycheck as well as a significant source of income to a university driving the research community to include it. To deal with this situation we would need to look at the funding source to see how the call for inputs is done.
Yes - me. While I acknowledge that there are some minor discrepancies in *some* of the data, it does not negate the overwhelming consensus of current knowledge and - quite frankly - the costs of the deniers being wrong are dramatically more than the costs of (gasp!) getting cleaner air if they should happen, against all odds, to be correct. PS - you betray your political orientation by throwing out an alphabet soup of gummint agencies and then use "tyrannical" to describe the scientists working there. Rrrrriiigghhtt, big fella.....
I would love to see science just be ... you know, science. And I would accept any conclusions drawn therefrom, whether I liked them or not. (For instance, I may not "like" the law of gravity, because it means I can't fly off tall buildings, but I have no choice but to accept it.)
Science tainted with politics or political correctness is harder to trust. By the way, I mean this from any angle. In the specific instance of climate change, there are agendas on both sides.
In fact the problem is that there shouldn't be sides, there should just be objective science, accepted as such, and acted on as such.
If you're not trolling, you've internalized Republican lies. Is it possible that you didn't notice that the House GOP is batshit insane?
Emphasis mine.
Wow! Talk about delusional! Looks like there are a good few members of Congress that need psyche evaluation! And possibly meds, and/or a padded room!
Two things:
1. Gohmert is an idiot.
2. His district will reelect him until he dies or moves on o greener pastures.
Unlike Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Blackwater, Haliburton,.....
There's no nice way to put this: You are totally fucking stupid.
You have no idea how much dedicated scientists get paid (damn little, especially when you consider the education required to become one). Or how much actual work is involved (a huge amount, one that only someone truly dedicated to their field could ever possibly tolerate).
I know this because I came extremely close to heading back to grad school for a Ph.D., and I would have taken an 85% pay cut for the privilege (for a minimum of four years). And those I know who did take the plunge, got the three letters, endured the low-paying post-doc fellowship, and managed to latch onto an associate professorship.. got very tired very quickly. Tired of hustling for whatever precious grant money they could, and not doing the work they were trained to do, and left academia altogether.
So, Sparky, I would strongly recommend turning off Fox News, leaving your trailer, and enjoying some fresh air.
--- The American Way of Life is not a birthright. Hell, it's not even sustainable.
Really? Remind me again who apologized to BP after the worst oil disaster in history.
I know scientists at NOAA,....
I read an allegation - can't remember where - that the oil companies were financing pro-global warming studies. The reason being that coal is considered the biggest offender and all the anti-global warming legislation is going to really destroy coal and everyone will go with gas among other cleaner energy sources. Oil companies don't own coal mines; they own gas wells.
Like I said, it is something I read somewhere and I want to find out for myself. Is this also a battle between the coal and oil industries?
Hey Louie, you mean like trying to get government to force biology teachers to teach creationism? Is that what you mean by politically driven science?
Psst...even the "consensus" is Bad Science.
Most of the "politically driven science" isn't actually driven by scientists. It's driven by politicians and bureaucrats.
The scientists? Hell, they're third or fourth on the list at best.
For a quick example: DDT. Banned because of the science, right? Well... no.
The actual EPA scientists of the time pretty much said "no, DDT isn't that bad, and all of the stuff you read in that Rachel Carson book was made up from scratch." They refused to sign off on banning the stuff.
So the politically-driven "science bureaucrat" heading the EPA at the time banned it. And since it was from the EPA, it became "official science."
THAT is "politically driven science."
Please cite evidence to back up your assertion.
Only 7% of reporters are Republicans.
What are the odds that the 14% "other" is Libertarian?
Yes, nearly a quarter label themselves as Democrat, but most don't label themselves anything, which is good!
Napoleon Bonaparte summed it up quite nicely when he said "You don't argue with intellectuals, you shoot them.". That is all you need to know about politics and power.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
In a deliberative body that's chock-full of dumb sonsabitches, Louis Gohmert stands head and shoulders above them all.
Here's my favorite Louis Gohmert quote.
On gays in the military:
Want another?
Regarding caribou and the oil pipeline:
You are welcome on my lawn.
Politically driven "science" is what Republicans excel at, so investigating themselves is exactly what they *should* be doing.
The predictions of climate change hysterics are completely wrong. By luck alone they should have had a 50% change to get it right. That's what makes them so laughable. Climate change hysteria is about the growth of the state at the expense of individual liberty. Period. I am indeed a rock-ribbed Republican!
I'm still registered as a Republican and I agree with this. Many years ago, when my daughter was little, I remember her picking up a discarded coke can and placing it in a trash bin at the park. A young man standing nearby said, in the kind of patronizing voice that some people use with children, "Yes, people should learn to recycle." I responded, "I would settle for them just throwning away their trash properly." My point being, that teaching recycling while people are just tossing trash around is putting the cart before the horse. Twenty years down the road, and the situation is worse than ever. I have actually witnessed people just open their car window and toss out the McDonald's bag without even slowing down. How can you expect people to understand something as complex as global warming when you can't even get them to put their garbage in the trash can?
Maybe a good start is to show Republicans that their vaunted mascot for their party, the elephant, is going extinct. They might deny global warming, but it's pretty hard for them to deny the fact that elephants are disappearing from the planet, mainly due to people. Maybe we could get them to see the disappearance of the elephants as a harbinger of their own loss of popularity. Perhaps if we could get the GOP to save their pachyderms, they could learn something important in the process.
Proverbs 21:19
jesus fucking christ, do they not teach reading comprehension any more? Unless you forgot the /s tag, then carry on. Otherwise your ability to take and spin out of context is truly a gift worthy of fox news.
So you admit that the "scientists" you know were desperately "hustling" for grant money, and were "not doing the work they were trained to do".
Your anecdote supports the AC's assertion.
AC is blaming the scientists. Parent rightly blames the system. You can't tell the difference or are dishonest about it.
"Blatant falsehoods such as global warming" will likely kill off our species and a ton of others. We're clearly in the middle of an extinction level event but your monkey brain is too damned busy counting scheckles to get it. Hopefully the planet bounces back after the idiot primates have left.
Please cite your evidence for this assertion.
Most federal science research funding is solicited by scientists trying to manipulate the government into giving them money.
Most DoD contracts to the companies you despise are solicited by the government, and the defense contractors are the respondents.
Who's fault is it that Ratheon gives me the garbage bullshit that I ask for? Is it my fault, as the government agency soliciting bids, or Raytheon, for complying with the contract? The logical conclusion to that kind of sucks. However, to GP's point that scientists view the government as a bottomless source of funding, they don't, because it isn't. Instead, they view it as a very fixed pie that they have to fight for the slice that they're entitled to, because they deserve it because they're scientists. I'm just as disgusted with many of our scientists, who are blatantly political, as I am with the defense contractors who give us a shitty product. However, I know that the idiots at Raytheon and LMCO are giving us the shit we told them to give us.
Eh, I'll bite.
I see what you did there, but I think they were implying that (1) there isn't really that much grant money to be had (which there isn't, written from inside of academia and looking to get out) and (2) it's not like scientists are actually earning much money from those grants if they can be gotten. There's certainly nothing to drastically gain from the bountiful teat of grant funding (sarcasm) for most scientists, however there is a lot to be gained from politicians and corporations looking for scientific signatures on dubious studies cobbled together by those corporations' exceedingly deep pockets and politicians inside of them.
Now back to not feeding the trolls....
Seeing the lack of education, gotta go with the first one. Which actually makes sense then.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
You selectively reading motherfuckers.
Isn't this basically what the church was doing during the dark ages. "What the church (insert current political structure) says is truth regardless of any evidence otherwise." Evidence pointing to any other view is heresy, dangerous, and should be burned.
"Notably absent, however, were any scientists"
Sounds like the GOP's ideal version of "science" these days... the climate, abortion, you name it, they'll substitute Moms, Businessmen, and the Clearly Insane for actual scientists in any science discussion.
Simply put: you're a fucking idiot.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
As another poster pointed out, these two statements were clearly meant that (a) there's not much grant money to be had, and I'll explain the second half of the post as well, which is that (a) leads to (b), where the scientists had to reach into areas less focused on their particular speciality to find grant money.
About my "Moms" crack... that was not meant to diminish the contribution of Mothers everywhere to science, procreation, or common sense. I was just making fun of the idea that "Moms" have some sort of special superpower that gives them powers of intuition that can ignore science.
Ebola!!!! Fucking EBOLA!!!!!!!!!
If Louie Gohmert is involved it's nothing other than a fiasco of stupidity that will go exactly nowhere.
Keep up the good work Louie!
I would agree that the house GOP is horribly tainted and diseased... and that you are an idiot.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
I am one of those scientists (well, engineer actually these days), and I can say that you've got this pretty far backwards. I am an assistant professor, which means I have 6 years to prove my worth to my university. Part of that proof is that I must raise grants and fund grad students through a Ph.D. program. In fact, grad student support is the bulk of what I request in my grant applications -- my own salary is paid by tuition and legislative appropriations (I do teach classes too after all). But raising grants is currently nearly impossible.
I work on concrete solutions to climate change (e.g., studying how much wind and solar power we can use without cheap storage, or designing home appliances and electric vehicle chargers that can synchronize their demand with the supply of renewable power). Even in these "hot" areas, the funding rate for grant proposals is about 3%. Each proposal takes about a month of intense thinking, writing and document-chasing. Everyone competing for these grants has a Ph.D. from a top school, and the external review process is incredibly rigorous. So I would not call this a gravy train. I do this work because I think that humanity is on a reckless and destructive path, digging up hundreds of millions of years worth of accumulated carbon and poofing it into the atmosphere in 100 years, and because I think we can do better. If I wanted the gravy train, I'd be at Google or Microsoft or Facebook, not writing NSF grant proposals.
I believe the house once held a committee on Women's Health issues, particularly abortion. Notably absent were any women.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
The fundamental problem is the circular firing squad that exists inside academia and the scientific community. There are many positions, both scientific and political, which if questioned will get a solid, intelligent, practicing scientist fired, ostracized and blocked from every working in their field again. Rather than a facts based rebuttal, this is what it has come to on many of the key points in the scientific orthodoxy. If you don't believe this you are either ignorant or you have been brainwashed by academia during your 20+ years being educated what to think (as opposed to how to think). If you want to un-brainwash yourself, just pull up Netflix and watch Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed by Ben Stein. His topic is not the only one, there are dozens of areas where disagreement is not only not tolerated, but actively persecuted. It is a disgrace that the scientific field has been reduced to the current state. Remember that Newtonian physics was "settled science" until it wasn't. Where the hell would we be if Einstein had gotten the same exact treatment as his modern counterparts.
The solution to the inbred ideas and us vs them and "settled science" mentality of the scientific community, at least in this case, is to bring in practicing engineers to review and provide technical expertise to the politicians. There are plenty of engineers out there who are every bit as intelligent as our top scientists, and unlike scientists, engineers actually work and have to perform for a living. They create useful things and are accountable for their performance (i.e. when an engineer screws up, people may die, depending on the design), and while it does happen, it is extremely rare when you look around you and see all of the items in your everyday life and realize that just about every one has the potential to kill or inflict serious injury if designed incorrectly.
One other key difference between engineers and scientists is that engineers posses perspective and judgement. Scientists have proven time and again that they are generally un-trustworthy: anyone on /. old enough to remember global cooling? the "hole" in the ozone layer? Global warming? thats right kids, it's climate change now because FACT: the globe hasn't warmed in 10 years. Find a real scientist, pro or con climate change and ask them, they will tell you. These were all huge scares foisted on the population by a scientific community without the good sense to take a look back 50,000 years and realize "Shit, we have had ice ages, and warm periods, and humans haven't caused either, maybe we should take a common sense approach and just collect data for a few hundred more years." No they didn't do this because it wasn't sexy, it didn't get them invited to avant garde parties or onto GMA and the Sunday talk shows. Most importantly, the government is not going to pour billions of tax payer dollars into a wait and see study. A few million perhaps, but then what do the rest of the climatologists do? And this is why we have the current crisis of confidence in the scientific community, where there is a widening gap between what the scientific community is peddling and what the people are buying.
Practicing engineers on the other hand are used to making the hard choices. Balancing cost and benefit. Calculating long term risk versus short term cost. In short, working to find an optimal solution not an all-or-nothing the sky is falling attitude. I looked at both sides of the global warming argument, and aside from the assertions of worse storms, which all the real scientists admit is wild speculation (sorry Al Gore) the only real concern was sea level rise. Snowfall locations and cloud moisture content arguments aside, the realistic models at the time were projecting a 6ft sea level rise... If we honestly believed this to be the case, would could put a series of 3 layers of 12 foot seawalls up in the places that mattered (much of the coastline would not be affected at all by a 6 ft sea level rise). The cost of the proj
they now want to discredit the messenger: Science and Scientists. With 97% of scientists seeing climate change as real. It's really the only way to keep the current system going as is.
Why? Because with climate change deemed as "real" there will be a public demand that all externalities be paid for by the parties that created the harmful externalities. Global Free market capitalism cannot survive such a change as it never pays the true costs of the damage it creates. It's purpose is to socialize externalities costs while privatizing profit. So the reality of 'climate change' will be fought via virtually all means.
Here is what monied capitalists most fear: If climate change is real, either free market capitalism dies or a sizable of chunk of humanity does.
With a 97% consensus of scientists global free market capitalism must be altered significantly so that 100 years from now the Earth is at least as livable as it is for us.
Facebook is billions of individual "Skinner Boxes." And if you use it you are the pigeon!
The people doing this work are scientists. That means they work with probabilistic uncertainty bands, not vague measures like "within 80% of the predicted value". They also recognize that you can't make short-term predictions of a noisy system (the Earth's weather) with a narrow uncertainty band. So if anything they have erred on the side of making cautious forecasts -- i.e., things are turning out worse than the thresholds that scientists were willing to go public with (i.e., the lower edge of the 95% uncertainty band around anyone's forecast for a particular year's temperatures will be significantly cooler than their central estimate).
Because of this, no one would have been willing to predict (with high degree of certainty) that 13 of the warmest years since 1880 would occur in 2000-2014. But they have.
I challenge you to show me any global climate model that predicts that doubling CO2 concentrations won't warm the planet, or that shows that we would have had this century's steady increase in temperatures even if we hadn't increased CO2 concentrations. You can pretend there is no connection between CO2 and temperature, but you are the one burying your head in the sand.
You can't fix stupid.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Irony is dead.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
He runs roughshod over science because he doesn't like the conclusions, they conflict with his politics.. Claims that scientists make up conclusions to coincide with their politics and interfere with politicians.
After all, HE does it, so why is it they don't?
Always bloody projection.
And politicians, corporations, and the wealthy have NOT?
Let's not have a double standard here. If we are going to hunt down bias, hunt down ALL bias.
Table-ized A.I.
Republican means you shouldn't trust a word they're saying.
I would.
I've worked in a physics lab (fusion). I've worked in a geophysics lab. Here's the thing about experimental Earth science: you're not working with a idealized, simplified object under controlled laboratory conditions. You are working with something that is immense and messy and which inherently generates a lot of contradictory data. It doesn't make the big picture impossible to put together, it just means it takes a lot of hard to obtain data to shift the consensus one way or the other. It took forty years for anthropogenic global warming to become the scientific consensus; the first papers were published in the fifties and the idea that the world was warming was hotly contested for at least three decades
Contradictory data is something fundamental to empirical science. Empirical science generalizes from contradictory evidence.
When I was in college, "conservative" meant someone who was cautiously pragmatic. Now it refers to someone who adheres to certain conservative axioms -- a radical in other words (radical == "root"). Radicals by their nature prefer deduction from known truths to induction from messy evidence. This is evident in your citing mathematics as the gold standard, despite the utter inapplicability of its methods to geoscience. Mathematics doesn't deal in messy, mutually contradicting truths. Nor does political orthodoxy of any stripe.
That's why "conservatives" latch on to local phenomena -- like the snow outside their door -- that seem to confirm their preconception that the globe is not currently warming. In mathematics the number 9 disproves the assertion that all odd counting numbers are prime. In climate science the medieval warming period in Europe doesn't disprove that the globe as a whole was cooler at that time. To radicals the existence of contradictions in the supporting data is corrupt. To scientists the lack of contradictions in data is fishy.
Left-wing radicals are equally confused by apparently contradictory data points, and likewise seize on the ones that "prove" their universal truths (e.g. that vaccines cause autism).
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
You can bet that if a theory of gravity came out and it threatened the political or economic status quo, it would provoke a political response. When Edwin Armstrong's invention of FM radio started to gain market traction, RCA used it's political influence to have the FCC take the frequency band Armstrong's radios worked on shifted, making all the radios he'd sold useless. And if that had been done today, the next thing you'd have is is an army of PR flacks and FOX selling the public on the idea that FM radio was "tainted engineering".
Climate science isn't politically tainted. That's only PR BS. If you want to see for yourself, use Google Scholar to search for climate science paper abstracts from the early 50s to the 80s -- well before anyone outside the field heard the term "global warming". You'll be able to actually see the scientific consensus shift from global cooling to warming over the course of thirty years, completely outside the public spotlight.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
That wasn't what the GP said at all. Not e
You have to understand that when he says things like "politically driven science" he is intending, not to communicate, but to bamboozle and deceive. This has been pointed out before:
(Politics and the English Language, 1946.)
You might also want to take a look at this post (just came across it with a quick search), which notes that a mainstream projection (in Science Magazine) in 1981 has come in very close to actual warming, but a little lower. Or you could look at this post or this post about projections made in 1990 and 1999 which are also coming out right.
More fundamentally, I'd ask you to take a look at the basics of atmospheric modeling, and point out where you think the mainstream models are wrong. You could start with the American Chemical Society's section on "Atmospheric Warming", particularly the Single-Layer Atmosphere Model and Multi-Layer Atmosphere Model. These are pretty easy to understand, and the underlying principles are at least as well established as the other areas of science we rely on for our high-tech lives. If you can't be bothered to understand the basic physical processes involved, you have no business debating climate science.
In other news, monkeys in zoo throw feces.
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It used to be that at one time, republicans believed in the importance of science to inform them and make for a better world and ensure America's preeminence in the world. Now, republicans hate science as it is the bearer of bad news, namely that republicans are bad for the environment, the long term technological security of the country, and for social progress.
It used to be that the accused were entitled to stand before their accusers to rebut their accusations. In modern republican America this right is being taken away because republicans find it politically convenient.
Sadly, it looks as if this trend will continue until global warming gets so bad that no one will be able to live in Victoria, Texas and consequently, won't be able to vote for Louis Gohmert, who seems intent on killing the messenger of the bad news rather than addressing the problem.
Is this that story from last week where the GOP is trying to pass a bill that forces the EPA to be open and transparent with the data they use to make public policy?
We talked about already. It did not go well for advocates of secrecy.
Take II ?
Need Mercedes parts ?
most of the real bad pollution was moved to China in the 70s & 80s. Because of this it's hard to get people to buy into the whole "poisoning everything" mantra. Also the only people who have a shot at any change are the middle class; the poor's voting districts are so gerrymandered and corrupt they're basically voiceless. But the middle class live in the suburbs and don't really feel the pollution. That limits our options.
Climate change, for whatever reason, resonates with the middle class. It's about the only thing that draws any attention. You don't win elections based on logic and reason. People vote with their 'gut'. I wish they didn't, but that's just the way it works.
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that's where the statement came from. Nobody is liberal on economic issues, and the environment is just another economic issue in disguise. This is where the disconnect is. If you were socially conservative you'd notice more and the phrase "liberal media" would resonate with you.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
This is highly dependent on what your degree is and what PhD you are going for. I'm pretty sure some liberal arts grads would be happy to pursue a PhD on a grant instead of serving people happy meals. At least here (Belgium and maybe Europe in general), going for a PhD the regular way (meaning you had a good grade during your Master and got the grant/scolarship to pursue the PhD) ensures you a good starters income for 4 years. It's actually hard as a starting professional (even with a Master in Engineering or CS) to find a better paying job at the beginning of your career. This of course changes if you are an engineer and get some years of experience professionally.
Don't expect much out of mi. I tangled with him about his request to list 2 or 3 successful predictions back in March and gave him a link to this paper which compares IPCC AR3 & AR4 predictions for temperature and sea level rise to current (2011) observations.
Comparing climate projections to observations up to 2011 (Rahmstorf, Foster, Cazenave, Environmental Research Letters 2012)
He wouldn't accept it apparently because it wasn't formatted exactly as he requested. Apparently he won't take yes for an answer.
Okay, I'll bite. The model that you say matches reality only matches the low forecast for temperature and you may be right it does match that (minus the pause, which they admit they don't match). However, the low forecast is what was supposed to happen if CO2 emissions and concentrations were capped. They weren't. Therefore, I'm happy to say, the models do not match reality. You need both to match or you are just talking out your ass. Saying one of our 99 models matched part of reality is a really lame claim.
The effects of CO2 are logarithmic and most of the heating we should expect to see has already happened. Reality and science agree, yay!
It's not usually customary to invite those under investigation to the investigation... or did I miss something? They are not on trial. What's being looked into is whether the overall process is broken. That's a behavioral question. Maybe they could have invited some psychologists, economists or ethisists to the inquiry. But why invite the scientists who are under the investigation?
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Politics - change reality to match your political beliefs
Science - observe reality to establish objective understanding (which may very well be contrary to personally held beliefs)
Ego driven politicians don't like science. It gets in the way of not questioning their reality.
The undergraduate students I teach regularly have their starting salaries on par or higher than mine after I've been teaching for 10+ years with a PhD, which itself took ~10 years of dedicated poverty-line living to get, plus a couple of post-doc years that were pretty lean too.
Yeah, we're all in it for the money, especially for those sweet government grants that don't even contribute to my salary. I get paid to do teaching and research, and I'm supposed to bring in more money in order to do the research itself, although that varies with institution (some do draw salary from grants).
While I deeply appreciate access to (ever dwindling) public money, the reality is most of the grants I've received recently have been either directly or indirectly from industry. Supposedly I have no marketable skills to offer, yet industry is still willing to throw good money at scientists to work on scientific problems that benefit them and the public (some grants are 50-50 matches between government and industry)? That math doesn't add up.
You have no [expletive deleted] clue what you are talking about. Politicians with an axe to grind can drag up a few ridiculous-sounding research projects and fool people like you into thinking that's the normal situation. It isn't. Half the projects they do drag up aren't as ridiculous as they spin them anyway, once you look into the details.
Talk to some actual scientists. Become informed. You're being played by politicians who would like nothing more than to cut any and everything other than the military and police and then give everything back to the richest taxpayers that are lining the *politicians* pockets. As demonstrated by the 2008 financial crisis they'll happily run the country and the rest of the global economy into the ground. If that takes the health of the planet along with it, so be it. Those scientists don't know what they're talking about anyway and are "only in it for the money".
It is to laugh.
I see where Oreskes says politically-driven science isn't inherently bad. I wholeheartedly agree. But. People tend to make the assumption (and you know where that leads) that politically-driven science is wholesome and rewarding, whereas financially-driven science isn't.
Thing is, if either fail the tests of actual, you know, science, then they don't deserve the appellation. Such tests being reproducibility, peer review, publishing the actual data for independent analysis, etc. If you're not willing to share how the data for a test is "manipulated" or "corrected" or "adjusted," then you guessed it -- your results are going to be suspect. Especially so when you have enough examples of "government science" getting the benefit of the doubt when it affects citizens, but "independent science" having to go through government approval before anything can come from it.
Fine, fine. Climate change is irrelevant if you say so. At your whim we will ignore the evidence for it or the predictions of harm from it. We still have to figure out how to switch from fossil fuels that toss CO2 into the atmosphere and that is getting absorbed into the oceans and acidifying them because, well, I don't know if you dispute this too, but they're non-renewable resources and becoming more challenging to obtain. That's why the oil companies are drilling in expensive places like the Arctic and in more than 2000m of water, and resorting to expensive techniques like hydraulic fracturing. It's not getting easier to find the stuff. Even if the last year has seen more supply than demand, that's not going to persist. Then there's the fact that some countries are net importers of oil and gas and have to make huge military investments in an effort to stabilize far corners of the world to keep supply stable. That's a huge taxpayer cost rolled into the real cost of using these resources that you don't see showing up at the pump.
It is a big problem that exists and deserves solving, even if you don't think the particular flavor (climate change) is part of it. And for people who do think it's an issue, it's kind of a two-for-one deal when working on solutions.
I don't know which article you're referring to, but honestly it doesn't matter. There is plenty of evidence that the atmosphere is warming, plenty of models that predict or predicted this as a consequence of increased CO2 concentrations, and no credible models that predict otherwise.
I have no idea where you get the idea that "most of the heating we should expect to see has already happened." We are still accelerating our CO2 emissions, and it will take centuries for temperatures to reach their final equilibrium even after we stop. We have seen about 0.85 degrees C of warming already (top of p. 5 here), and if CO2 concentrations reach 2x pre-industrial levels, we can eventually expect something around 3.2 degrees C (middle of p. 1110 here).
Given reasonable grounds to expect serious harm, the correct policy approach is to take action to avert that harm, not to do nothing and hope things will be OK, or to demand exact forecasts of the behavior of a highly variable system.
However, "this" century hasn't seen a steady increase in temperatures, all the while CO2 has been rising steadily.
Let's hold a hearing on scientifically driven politics, and don't invite the politicians!
Great, lets just look in on this group of scientists I found that are not funded by government money:
*crickets*
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Are you just having fun, or do you really misunderstand complex systems this badly?
Here is an obligatory car analogy (OCA): Suppose you hitch a trailer to your car and drive it to work every day. Every day you add another big rock to the trailer. After a few weeks, you think, "hmm, my car is not climbing hills as well as it used to, and I would swear it's overheating more often than it used to." But your brother says "nah, those are just extra-steep hills, and it only overheats on hot days." So you keep adding rocks, one a day. After a few more weeks, you say "I'm sure there's something wrong, and I bet it has something to do with those rocks." But your brother says "no way, your car is faster than ever going downhill, and the overheating is just due to hot weather. Last week the weather was cold and your car didn't overheat at all. You keep telling me the car is going to overheat, but it's always done fine. I'm tired of hearing about it." Your brother is right about the variability, but does that mean you don't have a problem?
When TNG came out in 1987 and they wanted to highlight the low point in Earth's dystopian future/past, the writers of the episode took most villainized non-criminal class of individuals at the time (lawyers) -- had them all executed, and made it a capital crime to be one.
Nowadays, I fear far more for the scientists than the lawyers.
and I would have taken an 85% pay cut for the privilege
Exactly. There's a lot of people willing to make huge compromises in order to become scientists. Just like you.
One of the things I find interesting about this debate is the huge level of cognitive dissonance in scientists (practicing and would-be) concerning their foundation myths. But in practice, outside interests are a huge bias that needs to be corrected for.
jesus fucking christ, do they not teach reading comprehension any more?
He quoted from the relevant sections, which demonstrates reading comprehension
The Republican Party HATES science. So any scientist to them is "political".
F*** the Republicans!
I have to admit, you seem to have put allot of thought into that one.
However, it doesn't really change anything.
If CO2 was the main driver of temperature, as it steadily increases, there is no way there would be no effect for almost 18 years.
Now before you go calling me names (maybe your not that type, and I apologies in advance), I don't deny that CO2 does contribute to rising temperatures. However, we seem to have all lost our marbles and completely forgotten natural variations, as if they do not exists.
If you look at the data, it doesn't really show a tale worth being scared like chicken little's for.
The slight increase is only felt in daily lows, not daily highs (as a first), also increases are most noticed in colder months than in warmer ones. This barely increases global averages (which is honestly a very ridiculous yard stick). The amounts claimed as warmest years are so far below instrumental precision, on a global scale its quit ludicrous.
I honestly think main stream media and politics have hi-jacked climate research and spun it into something that is much more dire than it actually is.
It seems you partly agree with my point, which is this: climate change consists of a long-term upward temperature trend, with normal weather variation superimposed on top of it. Thus, you would expect a few up years, a few flat or down years, a few more up years, etc. But over several decades, the trend would be upward. And that is exactly what we're seeing, as shown in the link above. i.e., if 2000-2014 contains 13 of the hottest years of the last 130, then it is clearly part of an upward trend on a 2+ decade time scale, even if temperatures jumped up and down a bit within this 15-year period. Further, since climate change is a multi-decade or multi-century process, we can't ignore it just because the world hasn't ended in the first 30 years. The climate has clearly changed, but the biggest changes are yet to come.
I think you misunderstand some statistical techniques when you criticize instrumental precision. Yes, there are measurement errors at individual sites, and there is no way to measure the whole globe's temperature directly. However, two factors make it possible to estimate the long-term global trend very accurately. The first factor is the use of a longitudinal study format, where temperature is measured repeatedly at the same location. This makes it possible to observe the trend at that site very accurately -- i.e., the long term trend will emerge despite small measurement errors on individual days. Second, even if you can't measure the whole planet's temperature at each time step, you can observe that the weighted mean of your sampling sites is rising. If you choose the sites carefully, and observe them repeatedly, you can estimate the global temperature trend with a high degree of certainty; i.e., you can say that even with random errors in individual measurements, there is a greater than 95% (or 99%) chance that the actual temperature increase is within a certain (narrow) range around the number you've calculated.
It sounds nice to us (as a warm-blooded species who mostly live in colder climates than we evolved in) that temperatures are rising more at night and in winter (exactly what you'd expect if you threw a thicker "blanket" of CO2 on the planet), but that doesn't make climate change any less dangerous. It is still a sudden change in the temperature and weather regimes that human and natural systems have adapted to over thousands of years, and a small change can make a big difference. The difference between the last ice age and today is only about 5 degrees C, and we're on track for a 2-3 degree rise from pre-industrial times. I wouldn't shrug it off lightly.
The House is dominated by "Republicans", and a republic is supposed to be defined by the rules in a "constitution".
How about they start investigating why they are doing the exact opposite of their job, namely making sure that the Constitution is heeded? Instead of meddling in the jobs of others because they don't like to face truth?
If the Republicans take over the White House after the next election, Ted Cruz should be put in charge of the Department of Projection.
he's not interest in actual facts.
his posts fall into 3 general categories:
-science misinformation
-bad understanding of the Constitution
-expressing some form of bigotry, mostly against women, homosexuals, and Muslims.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
that is a blatantly false statement.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Mi is a bigot
If you want to stop politically-driven science, you have to end the approach of scientific funding being controlled by politicians.
What goes up must come down
What must rise must fall
And what goes on in your life
Is writing on the wall
If all things must fall
Why build a miracle at all?
If all things must pass
Even a miracle won't last
What goes up must come down
What must stand alone?
And what goes on in your mind
Is turning into stone
If all things must fall
Why build a miracle at all?
If all things must pass
Even a pyramid won't last
How can you be so sure?
How do you know what the end will endure?
How can you be so sure
That the wonders you've made in your life will be seen
By the millions who'll follow to visit the site of your dream?
What goes up must come down
What goes 'round must come 'round
What's been lost must be found
Parson/Woolfson
Re-read. Then refute with source.
But in practice, outside interests are a huge bias that needs to be corrected for.
In other words, you agree with the GP, that people should take what they hear on FoxNews (and people like the OP) with huge grains of salt.
Her take on the hearing: It âoewasnâ(TM)t really about the science at all,â but broader disagreements over environmental policy and the role of government.
Well, it was a meeting titled politically driven science and that's exactly what they did in there.
No, sir. I do not claim to "debate climate science" or the finer details of your trade. I just want to see successful predictions made by the discipline. Because, if you wish to convince (and compel!) me to change my ways, you better have something more solid than "trust me, I'm a scientist".
Again, I'm looking for a list with each entry containing a link to a prediction and a link confirming it materializing. What you've offered so far (realiclimate.org, theconversation.com, newscientist.com) are all claims of successful predictions — but without actual predictions themselves.
What I'm driving at is that, once the result is known, finding somebody having predicted it in the past is easy — but that's too late. Having 10 grad-students, for example, you can have each of them predict a change to, say, ocean levels going from -1cm to +1cm in 2mm increments. Then, 5 years later, you pull out the "lucky" prediction and run with it, discarding all others.
So, what I'm asking, are the predictions prominent enough at the time they were made to warrant a web-page (such as a magazine article or official report of some kind), that came true...
As riverat1 admits here, he "tangled" with me on this matter before — and was unable to offer suitable citations. Can you?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
As riverat1 admits here, he "tangled" with me on this matter before — and was unable to offer suitable citations. Can you?
So what is your problem with this citation? It looks at IPCC predictions for temperature and sea level rise and compares them to observations up to 2011.
Comparing climate projections to observations up to 2011 [iop.org] (Rahmstorf, Foster, Cazenave, Environmental Research Letters 2012)
Each entry in the list I am expecting would contain two links: one to a prediction, one to a confirmation. You've offered only one link here (although, inexplicably, you've listed it twice). Therefor, your submission is automatically rejected.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
with apologies to idiots
From the party of "I'm not a scientist" (but I question what they all say, because I have the Real Answer, which involves God (tm) creating the world 6k years ago, complete with false fossils and strata and radioisotopes, whatever th' hayull they are).
mark
I am not sure that you can claim that Dems love science either.
1) they are doing very little to stop the REAL issue with climate change, which is China.
2) they are fighting against new nukes which are needed to replace coal and nat gas plants.
And that is just for starters.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I see ... You care more about form than function. I've had teachers like that in the past.
Great book to read. Check it out sometime. It is about the EPA and sewage sludge being dumped on land mostly but it translates to all government agencies. FDA, EPA, CDC, USDA. You name it they are corrupting science in pursuit of the almighty dollar.
The congress people don't want to jeopardize their campaign funding so the blame the scientists personal agenda instead of the companies. While some scientists do have a personal agenda the vast majority of bad science is done for MONEY.
Dr. Marcia Angell, the editor of New England Journal of Medicine for 20 years, wrote the following:
"It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine." (NY Review of Books, January 15, 2009)
If you had content, you would've had no problem shaping it into the requested form.
But, instead, so many posts — some of them outright whining — instead of simply offering the list requested... I think, I understand, why you are still sore with some of thems teachers of yours...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
That's why you don't look to politicians or the media for scientific information. They're going to try to make a controversy, because that's what gets votes or sells commercials.
You look and see what the scientists are saying. They can be wrong, but agreeing with a whole lot of smart people who have spent a tremendous amount of time studying a subject is the way to bet.
If one side is busy vilifying scientists as a group, the odds are that they're wrong, since they're trying to taint all the useful evidence of what's going on.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
No effect for 18 years? Wrong. What was an anomalously hot year at the end of the 90s is pretty well normal now.
Also, you're not allowing for natural variation here. A certain amount of warming can be masked by natural variation. However, natural variation doesn't maintain trends decades long.
Also, by "no effect" you're referring to the slowdown in increase of atmospheric temperature, ignoring other possible heat sinks.
I'd suggest that you read something by real scientists, not media or politicians.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Every one of the links in this thread points to an easy-to-read article referencing a mainstream prediction of temperature trends and later evidence showing that the prediction was right. If you have so little interest that you won't read the articles unless the links are spoon fed to you in a particular format, then there's not much point discussing this with you.
The original predictions cited in this thread were published in Science magazine and several IPCC Assessment Reports. Those sources are at the pinnacle of global peer review and debate on climate change: they represent the mainstream view among climate scientists at the time they were published. They are not cherry-picked studies that happened to turn out right.
If you think it would be easy to retrospectively cherry-pick old studies that happened to be right (or wrong), you will enjoy my challenge to you: please give me one reference to a global temperature forecast published in a peer-reviewed source in the past 35 years that significantly overpredicted global warming. You can refer to the article and its rebuttal using an academic citation, a pretty table of URLs, a fun word game, or any other format you choose.
I would also point out that this debate doesn't even center on the right question, which is: given the evidence we have, what action should we take? If there is substantial evidence that people are causing climate change and that climate change could cause significant harm, then the correct policy is to take action to avoid the harm. The only sound argument for inaction would be compelling evidence that harm will not occur. Do you have that evidence? It's not enough to debate the precise magnitude of the risk. You have to show that on balance inaction can be expected to cause less harm than action. Anything else amounts to hoping the problem will not materialize, and as we know, "hope is not a plan."
If this were true, you would've had no problem enumerating the pairs in the form I asked for. That you didn't do so suggests, it is not there. That you later try to switch the topic confirms the suspicion.
Sorry, I don't feel like it. But I don't have to prove anything to you — I am not asking (much less demanding) you change your way of life to suit my views.
Begs the question, does not it? A giant "if"...
I see. So, unable to prove your contention, you are demanding, the opponents prove the opposite. Nope, not going to work. The burden of proof is on you. Put up or shut up.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Good heavens, no! That much salt would kill an elephant!
Sorry, I don't feel like it.
That is precisely why I am not arranging the links in the pretty little table you want. I have given sound evidence for my position, and don't care to jump through hoops putting them into the specific format you requested. Grow up and read the articles.
Anyone who has made the least effort to study the Earth's climate knows that (a) we are dumping a lot of CO2 into the atmosphere, (b) higher CO2 concentrations will cause the planet to warm, and (c) significant warming could cause serious harm. My "if" condition is satisfied: there is substantial evidence that people are causing climate change and that climate change could cause significant harm.
At this point, the burden of proof is on you. If you think we should do nothing about climate change, it's up to you to provide evidence to support your position, which you have not done and cannot do. This obligation is especially strong given the serious risks involved. If our ship is headed toward an iceberg, we must steer away, even if it is inconvenient. If you want the ship to keep sailing ahead instead, it's up to you to prove the iceberg won't damage the ship. As you say, put up or shut up.
Clearly you don't have a clue what that means...
Yeah, right. If the links really existed — as you claimed the do — you would simply listed them in the format requested — I am not asking for anything particularly complex — instead of posting yet again to explain, why refuse to do it.
Gee, right. One would've thought, Hans Christian Andersen dealt with this kind of argument once and for all back in the 19th century, but, behold, yet another "scientist" tries to use it...
Maybe.
They will? By how much?
And you could save 15% of more on car insurance — your statement is just as non-committal as Geico's "promise".
Well, if there is such evidence, I'm yet to see it. You made claims, but you have not offered evidence. Maybe, this is not the right forum for such. I would've taken a scientific argument for it. However, being able to make real predictions is one of the requirements for a scientific discipline. Yet, you would not (or, as is rather evident by not, can not) offer any meaningful predictions, that have come true. Ergo, whatever it is you are practicing, is not science.
Thank you for admitting, you have no proof.
Now, if you had a shred of common sense left still, you should be asking yourself this question: how come there are no obvious ways to satisfy this obnoxious guy's seemingly simple request? That's the only way for a healing to begin...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
1998 is not normal by any stretch. You would like to think so, but it just is not so.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/pl...
Choose another source than UAH and 1998 will still be an outlier by a long margin.
Also, while you are at it. Compare 2014 in many of those datasets with 1998. 2014 was not the warmest year in almost all if not all data sets.
Now back on topic. You accept that natural variation might hide the heat, but not that it might have been the cause of the heat? Why so? Because we are such experts at every aspect of our climate? Because we understand so thoroughly the AMO, PDO and all other cycles and phenomenons?
Natural variation most certainly does maintain trends that are decades long. Look at the data going back to 1850 or as far back as you can go. It is generally understood that CO2 (for those who attribute almost all the heat to it) has not noticeably affected global averages before the 1950's. However there are still decades long trends upward or downward before the '50s. Unless I misunderstood what you where trying to say...
Yes, I am referring to "the pause". I am not ignoring possible heat sinks. However AGW seems to have ignored the heatsinks before "the pause". They just suddenly "activated"? Heat sinks that weren't, just now... are?
None of the heat sinks trying to be linked to "the pause" or "slowdown" have been demonstrated to be true with a high level of certainty.
And about a hundred different things have been said to be a heat sink. The climate change community seem to be scrambling for answers, as well they should, since they are now realizing they did not understand climate as well as they wished they did.
I do read real scientists. I do not read media or politicians as is quite obvious from my statements (unless youd like to call me a right wing republican hillbilly), I'm Canadian, living in Quebec and couldnt care less about your political system and the idiots that actually think the end game is affected by Rs or Ds in power.
The media is actually on your side of this discussion, as are most politicians. However they are scrambling as the people just arent buying it.
There is a debate, but those in the climate change crew dont like to debate. Much easier to call others names, like deniers, shut out scientists who have dissenting views from discussions than to actually debate the science. Since it does not back up what they are peddling.
Sadly, no. Full of right wing retards and loonitarians Slashdot is.
I think we're in pretty close agreement on the science.
1998 was indeed anomalously warm, and the fact that we're getting temperatures like that normally is very strong evidence that the warming has continued. The "no effect" I've seen so much noise about is intellectually dishonest, and I don't know that any climate scientist said anything about monotonic or uniform effects of global warming.
I was making fun of the AC, who posted a reference to a paper (I don't know much more about it) that said that normal variations can account for much of the observed warming, and that the climate models are generally good, and claimed that refuted global warming observations. Of course, AC was very fast to ignore normal variations when it suited AC.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
There you have it ladies and gentlemen. The cited paper compares projections from two different IPCC reports (3 & 4) to observations of temperature and sea level rise up to 2011. mi is either too lazy to or not capable of understanding what is said in the paper. If he had he could have quibbled about the fact that they used multivariate correlation analysis to make adjustments for the effects of solar variation, volcanic aerosols and ENSO to adjust the temperatures before making the comparison for temperature. As far as mi's before and after requirement they are contained in the 30 references cited at the bottom of the paper. Actually this paper is better than having separate references since it does the comparison for you rather than forcing you to do the comparison yourself.
Of course. But Fox News isn't the only outside interest in existence.