Slashdot Mirror
Sea Ice Extent Sinks To Record Lows At Both Poles (sciencedaily.com)
According to NASA, Arctic sea ice appears to have reached on March 7 a record low wintertime maximum extent. On the opposite side of the planet, Antartica ice hit its lowest extent ever recorded by satellites (since satellites began measuring sea ice in 1979) on March 3 at the end of summer in the Southern Hemisphere. Science Daily reports: Total polar sea ice covered 6.26 million square miles (16.21 million square kilometers), which is 790,000 square miles (2 million square kilometers) less than the average global minimum extent for 1981-2010 -- the equivalent of having lost a chunk of sea ice larger than Mexico. The ice floating on top of the Arctic Ocean and surrounding seas shrinks in a seasonal cycle from mid-March until mid-September. As the Arctic temperatures drop in the autumn and winter, the ice cover grows again until it reaches its yearly maximum extent, typically in March. The ring of sea ice around the Antarctic continent behaves in a similar manner, with the calendar flipped: it usually reaches its maximum in September and its minimum in February. This winter, a combination of warmer-than-average temperatures, winds unfavorable to ice expansion, and a series of storms halted sea ice growth in the Arctic. This year's maximum extent, reached on March 7 at 5.57 million square miles (14.42 million square kilometers), is 37,000 square miles (97,00 square kilometers) below the previous record low, which occurred in 2015, and 471,000 square miles (1.22 million square kilometers) smaller than the average maximum extent for 1981-2010.
Um, the point is, dare I say this, that there's very hard science and there's soft science. There's findings which are highly testable, repeatedly, and there's findings which are verging on the non-reproduceable. And whilst science tends to self-correct, sometimes, just sometimes, it can take decades for that self-correction to take place, simply because as you say, it is impossible to remove any bias and error all the time, yet science as a practice must go on.
We are just now, for example, a big example, witnessing a 100% reversal in the thinking behind dietary advice which was the basis for public health advice for the last 50 years. It seems it was soo wrong, that it actually created the epidemic of obesity, diabetes, and maybe even dementia. But this correction is ongoing, and we'll probably need another 50 years to know whether this correction is actually correct.
And it was all science. Albeit, given the limitations of what you can do to people in a lab, it was all soft science, but despite it being soft, the authorities and people in charge still pushed it as pretty definitive and correct. See, that's risk.
Put aside all the politics and questions of morality and ethics and whether humans are too stupid to do the right thing, there is always risk that the big theory is wrong, dead wrong, and that it will have consequences. And when you look at what things like, "97% of scientists are in consensus" are actually based on, you can see it is being oversold, for the sake of "saving the planet".
We cannot, well some people do, rule out the bias of "expert bias". It happens. We know it happens, from time to time. Especially when there is apparent consensus. I used to believe global warming 100% and assume it was all correct, because I normally trust science, but then started to wonder why people were touting consensus and virtual certainty.
Science, the one thing is needs to be in practice, is self-correcting, but once people declare consensus and virtual certainty, we can no longer know whether it can be trusted because that one thing, self-correction, it being open to question by anybody, "on the word of no-one", as the motto used to go, goes out the window.
It cannot self-correct if any dissenting scientists gets lambasted as deniers.
It may be right it may be wrong. Wait another 100 years to find out.
Act in the meantime as you see fit. May the consequences be on your head.