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Montana Legislator Introduces Bills To Give His State His Own Science (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The legislator in question is Republican Joe Read, who represents an area north of Missoula, home of many fine scientists at the University of Montana. Read has eight bills under consideration in the current session of the legislature, and two of those focus on climate change. One of them focuses on his state's role in any greenhouse gas regulatory program that would be instituted under a future president. Read is apparently unaware of past legal precedent indicating that the federal government has the legal ability to regulate pollutants. Instead, the preamble of the bill seemingly argues that Montana's emissions are all due to commerce that takes place within the state, and thus "any federal greenhouse gas regulatory program in the form of law or rule violates the 10th Amendment of the Constitution of the United States."
As a result, the bill would prohibit state agencies, officials, and employees from doing anything to cooperate with federal efforts to limit greenhouse gas emissions. If passed, the Montana government "may not implement or enforce in any way any federal regulation, rule, or policy implementing a federal greenhouse gas regulatory program." But if you thought Read's grasp of constitutional law was shaky, you should check out his reason for objecting to doing anything about climate change. That's laid out in his second bill, which targets both science education and in-state programs designed to reduce carbon emissions. And it doesn't mince words, suggesting that pretty much all the scientists have it wrong: "the [US] National Climate Assessment makes the same errors as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and the National Academy of Sciences is also fundamentally wrong about climate change."
As a result, the bill would prohibit state agencies, officials, and employees from doing anything to cooperate with federal efforts to limit greenhouse gas emissions. If passed, the Montana government "may not implement or enforce in any way any federal regulation, rule, or policy implementing a federal greenhouse gas regulatory program." But if you thought Read's grasp of constitutional law was shaky, you should check out his reason for objecting to doing anything about climate change. That's laid out in his second bill, which targets both science education and in-state programs designed to reduce carbon emissions. And it doesn't mince words, suggesting that pretty much all the scientists have it wrong: "the [US] National Climate Assessment makes the same errors as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and the National Academy of Sciences is also fundamentally wrong about climate change."
Weed grown in California and consumed in California is constitutionally outside the jurisdiction of the DEA because no matter what Congress says, the butterfly effect does not expand the ICC into a general warrant to regulate anything that might remotely impact interstate commerce. Weed grown in California and sold illegally in another state is very much a federal manner per the the ICC.
Same with guns.
Same with pollution that can be reasonably shown to have either no interstate transmission or its interstate transmission does not meaningful damage to people, property or commerce.
Only muddle-headed morons treat SCOTUS precedence with real reverence. Much of the time the federal courts, including the SCOTUS, make stuff up as they go. You know how we go qualified immunity for cops and absolute immunity for prosecutors acting in a court? Because the SCOTUS decided it made sense in relation to other laws that didn't specify anything about their liability if they break the law in good faith. Why are parts of the Bill of Rights applied to the states via incorporation and others not? Because the SCOTUS said so. No "wow, damn, that's a good reason" argument, more like "meh, we don't think this should apply."
The guy is a fucking idiot.
This effort to write into law and enforce bad science through education reminds me of the battles over evolution. Science education should be as agnostic as possible to any viewpoint and should be teaching the lastest widely-held scientific understanding. We don't teach older models of the atom once Bohr's came along, and no other model of DNA beyond the double helix is taught. If our understanding of climate and CO2 changes in the future, we will teach that, but for now, an overwhelming majority (>90%) of the scientific community holds that climate change is real and is human-activity driven.
Yes, because of course the moment you find someone with a distant autistic relative with a PhD in liberal arts who's willing to disagree with the established science, that instantaneously invalidates everything, and global warming ceases to be a thing, because science. Moron.
Consensus is hugely important in science. The idea that "The instant you start rolling out "pretty much all" or "97% of scientists" say, you're INSTANTLY anti-science." would have trouble being less correct. You don't have to personally revalidate the sum of human knowledge to move further afield.
How do you people do this without brain damage from all the cognitive dissonance?
You are accusing a diverse group of people from having different opinions ? Or are you talking about a person in particular ?
science isn’t about consensus, it’s about truth
If there’s no consensus then what happens is you have your version of the truth and someone else has their version. For example Newton and Einstein were both right about gravity. Einstein’s version accommodates relativity whereas Newton does not.
Also your assertion is somehow 97% of the people who know, study, and understand a subject will gladly accept a lie. Have you met scientists? These are some of the most anal-retentitive people in the world. They will argue endlessly about whether a hyphen sound belong in the name of a newly discovered thing. Yet according to you, they’ll gladly swallow a lie that everyone is propagating.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Or just plain dishonest. Which is the case here? You forgot the fifth group: idealogues who NEED a story that helps them support their insanity as rational.
Your group 1 does not exist.
Your group 2 does not exist,
Your group 3 does not exist, because you added a caveat that does not exist to them.
Your group 4 and 5 does.
You invented 1 and 2 so that you could deny AGW while pretending you're in the moderate rational middle. Without them your group 3, those that don't accept that the problem is a real big one with dangerous consequences is still a massive outlier and not in the middle of anything.
That's because SCOTUS started with a conclusion and bullshitted its wait to a justification. The interstate commerce clause was clearly written specifically to allow the federal government to play arbitrator in commerce disputes among the states. If the purpose was for the federal government to have supreme power over commerce, there would no reason to specify "interstate". Of course the whole problem with being a mere arbitrator of commerce disputes is you don't get to dictate rules upon the states to have control of commerce, especially when the states can and will actively limit certain economic sectors entirely within a state to avoid federal involvement.
The fundamental issue is, then, that the federal government wanted powers it could only legally have if the Constitution was changed. But there never was enough support to change the federal government enough, even in the Great Depression, to really empower it in the way a unified nation of laws requires. This still is the greatest weakness of the United States which still manifests itself in the Republican/Democrat split upon the absurd notion that SCOTUS will ever revert the clearly illegal ruling and that Republicans, as a national party, have any real interest in returning power to the states. I truly wish the Constitution was changed to reflect the reality of things, and I wish the Republican party to self-disband because of its obviously delusional base upon which they support a party that is nothing at all like they market themselves*.
* And to the point, Donald Trump very much marketed himself on the stated Republican platform, yet of course in practice he's not followed through at all on any of his promises precisely because virtually no one in his part in Congress has any interest in following through with any of what he, and they, have stated is their agenda. It's quite amazing, amusing, and disturbing that anyone would still vote Republican at this point.
My gut tells me when I'm being conned; I don't need to be an expert to know when I'm being lied to.
Truth is simple; when the "experts" give you a complicated non-answer it's BS.
I'm fed up with "mathematicians" going on about irrational numbers; they can't even give an exact answer--just a string of digits that seems to keep going on forever.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
In science, that's called a theory until proven. AGW is unproven.
There’s multiple things wrong with your statement. An idea is a hypothesis until consensus deems it to be correct. A theory is a set of accepted (by consensus) hypothesis. There also isn’t really “proven” as science isn’t math and there are no “proofs”. Evidence is found for or against hypotheses.
The disagreement over AGW is more fundamental. While pro-AGW scientists may argue about whether a hyphen should be used, anti-AGW scientists argue a hyphen doesn't exist in the alphabet or that pro-AGW scientists fail to recognize extra characters in the alphabet that should be used or considered (metaphorically).
As for pro-AGW vs anti-AGW, the anti-AGW is a very, very tiny minority. The vast majority of those who know and understand the science are pro. They aren’t arguing over a hyphen. They aren’t arguing whether it is true. They’ve moved on as arguing whether it is true is like arguing whether gravity exists.
Not to mention, it's career suicide for a scientist to come out against AGW in any way at this point. Wouldn't want to be a homeless denier, would they?
Do you know what scientists call other scientists that come up with ground-breaking science that changes the fundamentals of their field? Visionaries and most of the time, Nobel prize winners. The difference between them and deniers is that visionaries have evidence.
Unless you can verify the work of pro-AGW scientists, you could be swallowing a giant lie as well. The burden is on those claiming the sky is falling, not those who present evidence to the contrary.
Me personally or scientists? You understand that’s why scientists publish right? Here’s a fatal flaw to this logic. Just because you can’t understand the science or how to validate it, doesn’t mean it wasn’t validated by people who can understand.
It would go a long way if the pro-AGW crowd divorced the movement from politics and found a way to explain AGW in a way that is verifiable by your lay man. It would also help if the pro-AGW scientists could make some short-term predictions that accurately come true. The track record of predictions to this point isn't very good. The methodology for collecting and manipulating data (especially temperature data) is also a big problem for anti-AGW folks and needs to be standardized in an unbiased way that removes the questions and uncertainty about the data.
You do understand that it isn’t in the realm of science to change the behavior of people and society right? As for the secon part of your post, have you looked at the data because it doesn’t seem that you have.
Otherwise, expect those with a critical eye toward science and politics to dismiss AGW as yet another issue created by politicians for their own gain. Like any political issue, it will have its loyal followers and those who disagree.
Um didn’t you just post that the vast majority of scientists are pro-AGW. That alone makes this sentence nonsense.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
cthon stated:
No, they don't. They propose different hypotheses. The set of validated (by measurement, observation, proof, experiment, reasoning picked apart) hypotheses is what constitutes a theory.
You're so close to being right.
The distinction between hypothesis and theory in science is not a clear, bright line - and, for the most part, scientific theories are always subject to revision in light of new evidence.
That's because the scientific method is not about proving anything other than that a given hypothesis cannot be true, because experimental evidence proves it incorrect. It doesn't matter how many experiments have lent support to a given hypothesis in the past - all it takes is a single one that conclusively demonstrates that it's wrong to invalidate it. It then is discarded in favor of the next-best alternative (regardless of whether that alternative is an older hypothesis that has not yet been proven wrong, a revised version of the same hypothesis, or is a brand-new, minty-fresh one that is consistent with all the evidence to date).
The graduation of a hypothesis to the status of scientific theory is a gradual process, and one that can happen only by (wait for it!) consensus. The greater the number and variety of different experiments that fail to disprove it, the more the scientific community comes to agree that a hypothesis should be considered as reliable enough for practical purposes to deserve to be treated as if it were correct.
The thing is, though, that status is never set in stone. Take Newtonian physics, for example. For three centuries, Newton's theories withstood experimental efforts to disprove them so reliably that they came to be regarded as actual laws. (And, I hasten to add, they're still reliable enough to be treated that way by engineers for quotidian, practical purposes.) But then Einstein proposed his General Theory of Relativity, and Newtonian physics went out the window - at least at astronomical scales. It was an actual revolution in scientific understanding of how physics works in our universe, and general relativity achieved the status of theory in what was pretty much record time, because every experiment that attempted to disprove it at the macro level failed miserably.
But it broke down at the nano scale. There, accumulated observational data poked progressively bigger holes in Einstein's theory, until it became undeniable that Something Else was going on.
Enter quantum mechanics.
Einstein hated it - and it wasn't because it contradicted his own theory. It was because the notion of what he called "spooky action at a distance" offended his sense of order. Uncertainty, superposition of states, entanglement (the "spooky action" to which Einstein's sarcastic comment referred), and the fundamental randomness of the nature of the universe at the smallest scale bothered him so deeply that he famously thundered, "God does not play dice with the universe."
But he was wrong about that. At the quantum scale, as an ever-increasing body of experimental evidence has established, randomness and uncertainty are inescapable - to the point where, at the Planck scale, the current model of quantum theory holds that "virtual particles" actually blink into and out of existence in such profusion that the fabric of reality itself consists of a so-called "quantum foam." (That bit has not yet been tested by experiment, mostly because we simply don't yet have the tools to conduct direct observation of such incredibly tiny phenomena. In fact, given the ever-increasing effects of quantum uncertainty as we approach the Planck scale, it may be physically impossible for us ever to directly observe and measure those virtual particles. The best evidence of their existence in the real world may forever remain indirect - which doesn't mean the model is wrong, or that won't earn the status of theory, however.)
There's an ever-growing mountain of evidence that both general relativity and quantum mechanics accurately model
Check out my novel.
Besides lying about getting a little side action in the Oval Office, what crimes did the many investigations into the Clintons produce?
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
>Is undeserved blind confidence a trait that's required to go into the field?
yes, because people will mostly vote for the person that gives a confident answer (even if wrong) over the one that says they don't know or aren't sure.
horror vacui
Skepticism is fine. I have no problem with skeptics.
However, I do have a problem with people with fixed opinions who call themselves skeptics. If you're honest-to-FSM skeptical about something, you neither fully believe it nor fully disbelieve it. There's a lot of people who have made it very clear that they aren't skeptical about global warming, but are absolutely convinced it isn't happening. To that end, they'll believe anything else, no matter how improbable. Those are deniers, and members of a cult of ignorance.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes