Slashdot Mirror
Australia Cuts 110 Climate Scientist Jobs: "The Science is Settled."
An anonymous reader writes: With an ax rather than a scalpel, Australia's federal science agency last week chopped off its climate research arm in a decision that has stunned scientists and left employees dispirited. Why? Because the science is settled, there is no need for more basic research, the government says. No doubt many will experience a case of schadenfreude as they see those who have long claimed "the science is settled" face the inevitable and logical consequence of that stance.
Sure, we know the answer is "The world is getting hotter and it's all our fault" - but there are still a heck of a lot of questions that need to be answered. "How Fast?" and "Will the extra CO2 help crops or weeds grow faster?" and "What can we do about it?" and "Will such-and-such course of action have enough effect to avoid such-and-such consequences?"
We need those guys even more than we did before the original question was answered.
www.sjbaker.org
Anyone that tells you the science is settled is not a scientist.... they are a politician wanting to shutdown inquiry on an issue and install dogma in its place.
Science is not dogma, and if someone who is a scientist tells you that "The science is settled"; that is really just their personal opinion on the topic, And it should be taken to assume that the research results they produce might be accidentally (or maliciously) biased to reflect results consistent to the bit of science they would claim to be "settled".
Which is why I test gravity every day by jumping off of the Empire State Building.
At a certain point you have to get off the shitter and act on the information you have. Sitting around while you go from 99.99% certainty to 99.999% certainty is inefficient.
Yes, I know you're not supposed to read the article. You find out all sorts of interesting things like the fact that noone was actually fired, they were re-assigned to other stuff. You also find out why some of the stuff they were doing was interesting.
But the thing that caught my attention with shades of "we have to pass the bill before we know what it does" was that one of the reasons given not to transfer the people was that they were needed to figure out what the recent climate agreement actually meant.
So apparently the climate agreement was so badly expressed that the several people who were not transferred away from basic climate research are not sufficient to figure out what it actually meant?
Didn't Kerry block the language change that would have made it require anything?
Sorry, "smoking leads to lung disease" isn't dismissable as religion, and simply denying it isn't 'skepticism'. The current crop of oil-company-shill climate denialists are no different than the tobacco company liars of a generation ago.
No one in climate science is interested in answering those questions. It's all "X is caused by global climate change", where X can be literally anything,
If you read what actual climate scientists say, and not the hype in the press, they in fact don't say "It's all "X is caused by global climate change", where X can be literally anything," Over and over, they say things like, no particular storm can be attributed to global warming-- it's a long term global effect. Over and over and over. But the press likes disaster stories. They'll keep looking until they can find a way to write the story that makes it a disaster story, and bury the "other scientists caution that there's not enough data to attribute X to climate change" on page 2.
with pictures of polar bears in the background.
I've read a lot of papers by climate scientists, and never seen one with "pictures of polar bears in the background." I think I can safely say that if what you're reading has pictures of polar bears in the background, you're reading the popular press, and not a scientific paper. Even the paper (one paper-- count it, one) that talked about dead polar bears in the arctic didn't have pictures of polar bears in the background.
Proof is for mathematics and liquor. The fact that you don't know that shows you know fuck all about science.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Science is based in SKEPTICISM and PROOF.
That's true... but what I've noticed is that far too often, the people who call themselves climate skeptics aren't skeptical at all; they are absolutely credulous-- to anything they hear that denies the reality of global warming. Garbage articles that could be debunked in two minutes of thinking get picked up and passed along with notes of "see? it's all a HOAX!"
One-sided skepticism isn't skepticism at all. Skepticism doesn't consist of "I don't care what you say, I won't believe it, but I'll believe anything the other guys say, no matter how goofy." If you want to say you're a skeptic: be equally skeptical of both sides.
Real science doesn't consist of repeated skepticism, in fact; that goes nowhere. Real science consists of getting better data and improving understanding.
And those climate models have been created and are available as software. It's now just a question of applying them.
The global climate models are there, and are getting pretty well validated-- although you do know that the error bars are still plus or minus fifty percent, right? But the more you want fine-grained data, though, the more you're still going to need to do a lot more work.
"Overall, things are getting slightly warmer at a pace we know to within a factor of two"-- that's something we know. "Australia is getting hotter"-- that's slightly harder to say with certainty: Australia is not the world. "These detailed results will be the result"-- that's getting very hard to predict.
The devil is in the details.
So tell me, what do yuo consider science?
Taking data, analyzing data, making models, verifying models, refining models, taking more data, taking more data.
All the stuff that climate scientists actually do, and climate deniers don't.
Most skeptics couldn't tell good science from bad science if their life depended on it, they're just borderline conspiracy theorists who has decided that the establishment or mainstream media are pushing an agenda with cherry-picked data, flawed models and spurious reasoning to give a false, but plausible impression. And because they've found some whack jobs contradicting it they think they're part of a small elite who haven't bought into the lies. They're just as much sheep as the sheep they despise, just going in the opposite direction of the herd.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
If this is enough for you to say Economics is a science, then it is the softest science of all. Parapsychology (and I'm absolutely serious about this), is based more on data and scientific rigor than economics. Psychology is many times more rigorous than Economics. Fucking Gender Studies is more rigorous and data-based than Economics.
I am probably the only Slashdot user who has actually taken a course from Milton Friedman. My views on the pseudoscience of Economics is based on 30 years experience having economists as colleagues, friends, neighbors and lunchmates. I have played in a weekly poker game with economists. I lived next door to a Nobel-nominated economist for years back in Chicago. I watched Superbowl XLI with him and had to explain what it means to arbitrage a point spread that has moved 10 points.
Plus, if you read any Economics articles, you will find that their math is very unimpressive, and even suspect.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Myth: The predictions/models are always wrong.
Reality: Global surface temperature measurements fall within the range of IPCC projections. Models successfully reproduce temperatures since 1900 globally, by land, in the air and the ocean.
You seem to lack understanding of the relativeness or kinds of wrong.
IE, you seem to equate "wrong" with anything less than 100% accuracy and precision.
That's not how science works, particularly data driven science. A key concept here is the meanings of Precision and Accuracy, which are not the same thing:
http://withfriendship.com/imag...
You can be completely wrong (or 'not even wrong'): "gravity is from unicorn farts!"
You can be partly wrong but still on the right track: "we predicted of rise of 0.5, but found only 0.4"
You can be right, but for the wrong reason: "we predicted a rise of 0.5 because unicorn farts, but it turned out to be from CO2"
You can be totally right and have the perfect outcome.
You appear to only recognize last possibility, and demand that anything else be discarded out of hand.
But that isn't reality or proper scientific understanding.
Posts such as yours are not insightful, nor does it show any actual understanding of what takes place, let alone is it all reflective of reality and what the scientists have actually been doing.
I guess in summary what I mean is: you're an idiot.
https://www.skepticalscience.c...
https://www.skepticalscience.c...
http://www.latimes.com/science...
http://climatenexus.org/debunk...
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
It would help if any of the climate models demonstrated some degree of predictive ability. The difference between model projections and reality have grown to ridiculous proportions.
Let's look at that. The very first numerical greenhouse effect model was Manabe and Wetherald 1967-- That's the classic, the model from which pretty much all current climate models stem. Since the paper was submitted in 1966, that's 50 years ago-- definitely long enough to see how well the prediction worked. They predicted that the climate sensitivity to CO2 (assuming constant relative humidity) was 2.3C. Comparing that to the actual carbon dioxide, for the rise from 320 ppm to 400 ppm (here) using the Arrhenius relation, we get 0.74C for the temperature rise from 1966 to 2015. The measured temperature rise (here) is 0.7C, with the error bars in the figure 0.1C.
Looks like not merely a good prediction, but an outstandingly accurate prediction.
For comparison, the current IPCC 5th Assessment report estimate of sensitivity is that it is the range 1.5C to 4.5C with "high confidence", so Manabe and Wetherald's value of 2.3 is still is the range of current estimates.
It isn't until you get to the last paragraph that TFA finally gives you the underlying cause of this astonishingly shortsighted and imminently disastrous decision:
“Climate science becomes secondary to business; business comes first
So there you have it. The ability to make money trumps EVERYTHING. Kind of answers the question of why we never see aliens. If all intelligent species tend towards a capitalist society, they all end up committing environmental suicide.
*** *** You're just jealous 'cause the voices talk to me... ***