There's a difference here between criminal and civil action. There's a fairly good chance she's going to sue him in civil court, (and settle for doctor bills, time off work, maybe some pain and suffering compensation etc) and that alone could be quite punishing. Don't think of this criminal sentence as the retribution for the crime, that will come later.
This is all about the criminal case. Try to keep in mind it is supposed to weigh things like criminal intent, deliberate as well as actual negligence with respect to the public, etc. There certainly was negligence here, but is the punishment appropriate?
If I'm riding my bicycle down the sidewalk (which is illegal in this city btw, you're supposed to keep to the streets to avoid hitting peds) and I am talking with my friend behind me and don't see that ped on the sidewalk and run into them, knock them down, I'm likely to do more damage to them than most drones. Maybe I even give the 'ol gal a mild concussion when she hits the sidewalk. There was no criminal intent, I didn't intend to be negligent but in the end I was. (and in this case I was even breaking a law, which here is used primarily simply to make the collision undeniably my fault, rather than to ticket or arrest me) Now, in addition to any civil case she may file against me, do I deserve a month in jail?
I think his chances on appeal are quite justified, and quite good. That judge needs some perspective rather than a knee-jerk response. He will probably get his sentence replaced with some sort of citation, pay a $350 ticket or so for some related offense. And that makes a heck of a lot more sense than jail time. (I'm assuming this is his first offense - obviously jail time starts becoming appropriate on repeat offenders in cases like this)
Don't know about Seattle, but in the various states and municipalities where I have been actually mugged (with physical assault), the police have informed me that such behavior, without the perpetrators having actually robbed me of anything, is a mere misdemeanor, and that even if they caught the guy the court would undoubtedly just give him a slap on the wrist.
Ironic.
System wide failings and uncoordinated care are not malpractice in the conventional sense, unless you want to consider it malpractice on the part of civilized society. In fact, this rise of drug resistant bacteria can be considered a subset of those system wide failings and uncoordinated care.
No your coworker is dead because a racist bigot decided to kill him.
Thankfully, our new Trumpist overlords (whom I, for one, welcome) have removed the illogical ruling which prevents those found cognitively incapable of managing their own disability checks without another person's supervision from indulging their Second Amendment rights without assessment by authorities. After all, just because you are one of the 0.025% of the population found by a court to lack the rational ability to manage a disability check doesn't mean that you should lose your constitutional right to take up arms against a government you feel to be oppressive. Or, maybe a brown guy in a bar.
"This notion that guns have some kind of magic killing power that doesn't readily exist elsewhere is pure nonsense"
Well, no. You can't just spur-of-the-moment pull a machete or a car out of your pocket, point it at someone, pull a little lever, and they die. Guns literally DO have some kind of magic killing power that doesn't readily exist elsewhere. They make killing far, far, far, far easier and more accessible than other means, and that's the problem.
Sure, a firearm wasn't the only factor here, and yes it's possible the guy would have ended up dead otherwise. But let's not pretend that firearms aren't actually anything other than highly efficient killing devices.
It's kind of amusing how the same folks who argue that without a gun people would still be able to kill other people without too much trouble are the same people who interpret the Second Amendment's Right to Bear Arms as meaning...... Guns!
Next guy who tells me, "Firearms in the hands of the citizenry are the way to assure that governments do not assume tyrannical power, therefore the Second Amendment" or similar gets a dose of "Guns are not the only way to kill a person, if somebody wants to kill government tyrants they will find a way, even if guns are not available" etc.
And I'm not even a real gun-hater.
It's not a good thing, but you're also making a big assumption. That he wouldn't have killed otherwise if this guy didn't have access to firearms. There are many, many ways to kill someone. The guy could have waited for your coworker to leave the restaurant and simply run him over with his car or attacked him with a machete. You're only limited by your imagination. This notion that guns have some kind of magic killing power that doesn't readily exist elsewhere is pure nonsense. The bottom line is that if this guy REALLY wanted to kill middle easterners (or whatever), he would find a way. Guns are just one of a million ways to express violence.
You've never seen the ads in a firearm aficionado magazine, have you? Or read the strangely wistful fantasies, always featuring firearms, of what they would do to home invaders which are posted by Second Amendment Defenders in forums such as this? Or been instructed by the NRA about how defenseless we would all be without a gun at hand? Or tried to explain to a military group that they will in future be armed with edged weapons exclusively?
Let's be honest: guns are an inexpensive handheld point-and-click device designed to kill things.
Guns don't kill people; large holes punched into their bodies, the loss of bodily fluids from such a hole, and/or the gross tissue damage caused by the impact of leaden slugs propelled from a certain distance by the controlled ignition of a charge of gunpowder kill people!!!
Name one study offering a credible alternative explanation for observed phenomena.
What observed phenomena?
This, for a start: http://berkeleyearth.org/wp-co... . On the subject of replication, note that this image graphs results from four different research groups.
Yet in this chaotic system, the record highs increasingly outweigh the record lows, suggesting an increasing upward trend.
So, we've moved on from debating whether the change in temperature is caused by anthropogenic CO2 or not, to discussing whether there is any change in temperature at all, really. Our president says it's a hoax by the Chinese, who are we to disagree with someone of that stature? This is why it's futile for us to argue with climate change "skeptics". As long as skeptic1 says "there is no actual warming in reality" and skeptic2 says "nobody denies that the climate is changing, just whether humans are responsible" or "nobody denies that the climate is changing, just how harmful it will be", and both nod their heads in agreement, it's clear that logic is not a winning strategy.
Name one study offering a credible alternative explanation for observed phenomena.
What observed phenomena?
How about the higher average temperature of the surface of the earth as compared to that of the moon, despite being exposed to the same insolation? Which happens to be pretty much what was estimated by Svante Arrhenius in the 19th century from his studies of IR absorption by CO2, and led him to predict that further increases in CO2 as a result of human industry would lead to global warming?
Bad analogy. It's very expensive to emit less CO2. Humans will suffer from the reduced standard of living. What's the right trade off to minimize harm to people? That's the whole point of the debate. Dismissing people you disagree with without understanding what they're talking about is popular today, because it's easy, but it's not smart.
The same arguments were used against slavery, for instance, and yet we managed to struggle along without it. The track record of predictions from economics is not the kind of thing that leads one to believe that estimates of economic destruction from emitting less CO2 are more reliable than the estimates of climate change from continued production of CO2 we get from typical methods of estimation from physics.
he infrared absorption of carbon dioxide is experimentally measured in the laboratory
No one rational doubts this. That has never been what the climate change debate was about. But the atmosphere is not a bottle of air, or even a bottle of air and water (any modern meteorological model treats modeling he ocean at least as importantly as modeling the air). The atmosphere+hydrosphere is a complex, evolving system with many feedback mechanisms, both positive and negative.
I mean, really, do you think a climate model is simply modeling a static stack of air with some CO2 in it? Really?
The question is: quantitatively, what rate of human CO2 emission with create what effects, in detail. This is not the sort of science that lends itself to reproducible experiments, but that's fine, neither does astronomy or cosmology. It is, like any science, required to make falsifiable quantitative predictions.
And, frankly, the best models aren't doing so well, giving about 2 sigmas of accuracy. If you generated hundreds of models at random, you'd expect a couple dozen to have 2 sigmas of accuracy. That doesn't mean the models are flawed in any fundamental way, but there's a big gap between "not fundamentally flawed" and "great, proven science".
But even when you have a "complex, evolving system with many feedback mechanisms, both positive and negative," the default assumption is not that underlying well established physical principles are therefore negated; nobody argues that the fact that each hemisphere of the earth gets warmer during the daytime and colder at night is not due to the effect of IR from the sun, because the laboratory observations of IR heating things up in the lab are not relevant to a "complex, evolving system with many feedback mechanisms, both positive and negative," in the wild. Nobody argues that the fatal effects of arsenic in vivo are not related to the effect seen in vitro, because the human body is a "complex, evolving system with many feedback mechanisms, both positive and negative."
If you want to argue that a set of well established mechanisms consistent with a particular result do not operate in a particular system, you need to specify why they do not operate, and also what, then is responsible for that result, rather than just a shrug and "It might not work that way, it might be something completely different" with no evidence as to 1) what prevents the CO2 absorbance of IR from operating, and 2) what is therefore causing the warming.
In fact, the entire collection of climate change "skeptics" are at this point only united in a belief that something is preventing the CO2 absorbance of IR from operating, with a set of hypotheses varying from clouds to the will of God, and that something is causing the warming, with a set of hypotheses varying from cosmic rays to a hoax by the Chinese. The only coherent theory that has any relationship to reality at all is anthropogenic carbon dioxide from fossil fuels.
"measured in the laboratory"
What climate-related factors are *not* measured? Clouds? Water vapor? Convection?
These are, however, measured in the actual environment. Along with the variables from the lab experiments. https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/bibl... for example.
Many studies have been done on anthropic climate change, but almost no experiments.
As in the old joke about the final exam for the cosmology course, which states "Construct a functional universe. You will find the materials you need in a box under your desk"
Change "drug trials" to "climate change", though, and watch the true believers react....
You don't get to cite "lack of reproducibility" as a criticism of fields of science where it is physically impossible to reproduce an experiment. For instance, even those who are skeptical of the big bang theory do not argue that it has never been reproduced independently. Change origin of the universe to climate change, however, and watch the false skeptics react.
Record high temps, record low temps. record rain, record drought.
That's actually what you'd expect with a chaotic system built of multiple random variables. It would be unnatural for weather to always be the same.
It's pretty easy to demonstrate mathematically what you should also see intuitively, i.e. that in a stable process which is not "moving" (where the mean and variation do not change over time, which is what the "no climate change" folks propose), that the frequency of any sort of record should fall off as you accumulate more data. For instance, the first year every measurement will be a record, the second year each has a 50% chance of being the record, the third year every measurement has a 1/3 chance, etc. So the fact that we're seeing a high frequency of records now is enough to demonstrate a change in the basic underlying process.
I have a large interest in climate science instrumentation (at least relative to other laypeople).
There have been a few questions I've never been able to answer:
What is the precision of an ocean going thermometer?
what was the precision of a 1900s era thermometer?
What was the average uncertainty of a 1900s thermometer and how does it compare with current technology, also what are the known biases in temperature measurement of the time?
It would seem to me that any comparison of pre-modern temperatures to modern temperatures should include that information but I've never been able to find it. But back on the topic of reproducible scientific studies, can you show me a reproduction study for any study in the climate science field? I don't ask that to be facetious, I legitimately have no idea how to go about finding one.
What would reproducing a climate study consist of? You've got a bunch of temp measurements from all over the world over a period of time, you average them geographically for each time point and look for a trend. You can't go back and redo all those measurements, but on the other hand that's a different situation from one set of measurements in one lab's experiment one time. If you got another set of temp measurements, you'd just add them into the averaging for more precision, rather than say "well, Cleveland isn't warming, so there is some doubt". (Obviously, you don't just average in a bunch of measurements, everything has to be weighted in a rationally defensible manner).
I suppose the closest thing would be some sort of statistical analysis, like the "Monte Carlo" simulations where you take random subsets of the overall dataset, perform the same weighting etc. on them and see what's the confidence interval of all the different curves you get. http://www3.geosc.psu.edu/~kzk10/Urban_Keller_Tel_08.pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.574.6778&rep=rep1&type=pdf
But although that's a common statistical technique these days, it's not "conservative" in the sense of being mathematically defensible as to the confidence interval of your confidence intervals, if you can kind of see what I mean; for instance, the FDA would never accept that in an analysis of a drug study, so it won't convince the diehard skeptic. Not that that implies that something exists that would convince a diehard skeptic, of course.
There have been numerous cases of scientific discoveries which were reproduced by many investigators and whole scientific models developed which turned out to be entirely imaginary. N-rays are a terrific and lesser known example, but there's also the maps of the Martian Canals, cold fusion, polywater, in addition to the classic fields, still extensively researched vi the scientific method with full faith in the hypothetical reproducibility, such as homeopathy, ESP, magnetic medical therapy, wearing-copper medical therapy, dowsing, witchcraft/spellcasting, ghost/spirit/seances, UFOs, spinal surgery, etc.
I agree, documentation of protocols needs to be improved; however, it's hard to document everything you did for a paper when the journal doesn't give you very many words at all to actually explain what you did, and many don't support video sections for online papers.
I believe it was "Help" that had the British scientists in a scene, with the one reporting into a microphone "I am moving my right foot; I am moving my left foot; I am moving my right foot; I am moving my left foot" etc.
"You didn't use the right technique" is the first excuse used by researchers when their results don't hold up.
In Bio science this reproducibility problem is, at heart, a problem with having an experimental system that is under control, well defined and "stable".
There are plenty of very precise measurements made that are not accurate because there is something about the experiment that is not under control.
In biology, even if you do your best to account for statistical variation, it can often be the case that your results are bunk because there are things going on beyond your ken.
This is a real problem, people are now taking it seriously. It has impacted on my life in science on numerous occasions. I don't start something based on others' work unless I've tested the underlying rationale.
It's not my field, but an article I read a while back identified that as a problem in r&d on electrical batteries; supposedly the presence of even minute contaminants can make huge differences, which leads to all sorts of headlines like "New battery promises breakthrough in efficiency" which can't be replicated when the initial batch of research grade chemicals runs out and is replaced with a new batch.
Then why not describe the novel techniques you developed to complete the research in the paper? Any process that is claimed to require special abilities is actually one the needs training.
Because no one cares. The funding model for science in the US encourages each lab to find a "niche," an approach or an experimental model unique to that lab, defended by a barrier of custom-fabricated apparatus or years-long technique development. No other lab can afford the loss of productivity associated with that kind of investment, to say nothing of the direct expense.
This is also the reason it's hard to take the reproducibility project very seriously: if you're engaged in a project whose thesis is that many experiments are not reproducible, and you're not getting the same results as a subject paper, what's your interpretation? It could be that the original paper was a statisitical fluke; It could be that you need another six months practicing the technique to get it right.
In the average academic lab, the "custom-fabricated apparatus" tends to be an army of grad students and postdocs doing mindless grunt labor like filling test tubes or counting bacterial colonies for 16 hours a day.
Then why not describe the novel techniques you developed to complete the research in the paper? Any process that is claimed to require special abilities is actually one the needs training.
It's kind of a cliche joke about cooking that following a recipe doesn't mean you get the same result as the person who came up with the recipe did. Some people's techniques are, if not actually inferior, at least different. The reductio ad absurdum of that is the Monty Python skit about the TV kids' show teaching you to play the flute; "You blow in this end here and move your fingers up and down these holes".
A lot of times stuff is not replicatable (suck it spellchecker, i just invented the word) because it's fucking difficult. I mean I have spent thousands of dollars and even worse wasted many hours in the lab on getting something I thought should be straightforward, obvious, and simple to work. Sometimes you want things to work so badly, you might even see things (usually fluorescence) where there is none. It's like how Percival Lowell saw canals on Mars. As a scientist you have to fight hard against your own bias, and not take it personally when someone attacks your work. Biological systems are unreliable (or not easily modeled), it's not like a computer program where everything follows a known deterministic path. In biology, the conditions in which something happens may not be known. It may work in one lab because they are using a reagent with a trace contaminant of salt whereas in another it won't work because the conditions are too pure.
So anyway, I reckon we have 3 reasons why studies are not reproducible (here they are in order of unethicalness/immorality):
1. The actual conditions are not what the researcher thinks it is. (The reagent constituents are not normal for example).
2. The researcher wants to believe a result so badly that they see an effect that doesn't exist. (Nowadays you have to photograph your results and/or use software, so this *should* get caught in peer review).
3. The research was published due to pressure to get grants combined with confidence that a particular hypothesis is real and should work -- in spite of lab failure (which the researcher ignores, telling themselves somebody in their lab made a "pipetting error").
Obviously, #3 is the most evil of the above. None of these are an excuse for publishing bad science. In terms of mitigating effects, #1 is the hardest to avoid. #3 should be very avoidable if you have scruples.
Yeah in general, but "The research was published due to pressure to get grants" doesn't belong to #4 exclusively, it's a universal factor.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a difference here between criminal and civil action. There's a fairly good chance she's going to sue him in civil court, (and settle for doctor bills, time off work, maybe some pain and suffering compensation etc) and that alone could be quite punishing. Don't think of this criminal sentence as the retribution for the crime, that will come later.
This is all about the criminal case. Try to keep in mind it is supposed to weigh things like criminal intent, deliberate as well as actual negligence with respect to the public, etc. There certainly was negligence here, but is the punishment appropriate?
If I'm riding my bicycle down the sidewalk (which is illegal in this city btw, you're supposed to keep to the streets to avoid hitting peds) and I am talking with my friend behind me and don't see that ped on the sidewalk and run into them, knock them down, I'm likely to do more damage to them than most drones. Maybe I even give the 'ol gal a mild concussion when she hits the sidewalk. There was no criminal intent, I didn't intend to be negligent but in the end I was. (and in this case I was even breaking a law, which here is used primarily simply to make the collision undeniably my fault, rather than to ticket or arrest me) Now, in addition to any civil case she may file against me, do I deserve a month in jail?
I think his chances on appeal are quite justified, and quite good. That judge needs some perspective rather than a knee-jerk response. He will probably get his sentence replaced with some sort of citation, pay a $350 ticket or so for some related offense. And that makes a heck of a lot more sense than jail time. (I'm assuming this is his first offense - obviously jail time starts becoming appropriate on repeat offenders in cases like this)
Don't know about Seattle, but in the various states and municipalities where I have been actually mugged (with physical assault), the police have informed me that such behavior, without the perpetrators having actually robbed me of anything, is a mere misdemeanor, and that even if they caught the guy the court would undoubtedly just give him a slap on the wrist. Ironic.
System wide failings and uncoordinated care are not malpractice in the conventional sense, unless you want to consider it malpractice on the part of civilized society. In fact, this rise of drug resistant bacteria can be considered a subset of those system wide failings and uncoordinated care.
Dr. Who, that's WHO.
No your coworker is dead because a racist bigot decided to kill him.
Thankfully, our new Trumpist overlords (whom I, for one, welcome) have removed the illogical ruling which prevents those found cognitively incapable of managing their own disability checks without another person's supervision from indulging their Second Amendment rights without assessment by authorities. After all, just because you are one of the 0.025% of the population found by a court to lack the rational ability to manage a disability check doesn't mean that you should lose your constitutional right to take up arms against a government you feel to be oppressive. Or, maybe a brown guy in a bar.
"There is no silver bullet."
Way ironic.
"This notion that guns have some kind of magic killing power that doesn't readily exist elsewhere is pure nonsense"
Well, no. You can't just spur-of-the-moment pull a machete or a car out of your pocket, point it at someone, pull a little lever, and they die. Guns literally DO have some kind of magic killing power that doesn't readily exist elsewhere. They make killing far, far, far, far easier and more accessible than other means, and that's the problem.
Sure, a firearm wasn't the only factor here, and yes it's possible the guy would have ended up dead otherwise. But let's not pretend that firearms aren't actually anything other than highly efficient killing devices.
It's kind of amusing how the same folks who argue that without a gun people would still be able to kill other people without too much trouble are the same people who interpret the Second Amendment's Right to Bear Arms as meaning...... Guns!
Next guy who tells me, "Firearms in the hands of the citizenry are the way to assure that governments do not assume tyrannical power, therefore the Second Amendment" or similar gets a dose of "Guns are not the only way to kill a person, if somebody wants to kill government tyrants they will find a way, even if guns are not available" etc.
And I'm not even a real gun-hater.
It's not a good thing, but you're also making a big assumption. That he wouldn't have killed otherwise if this guy didn't have access to firearms. There are many, many ways to kill someone. The guy could have waited for your coworker to leave the restaurant and simply run him over with his car or attacked him with a machete. You're only limited by your imagination. This notion that guns have some kind of magic killing power that doesn't readily exist elsewhere is pure nonsense. The bottom line is that if this guy REALLY wanted to kill middle easterners (or whatever), he would find a way. Guns are just one of a million ways to express violence.
You've never seen the ads in a firearm aficionado magazine, have you? Or read the strangely wistful fantasies, always featuring firearms, of what they would do to home invaders which are posted by Second Amendment Defenders in forums such as this? Or been instructed by the NRA about how defenseless we would all be without a gun at hand? Or tried to explain to a military group that they will in future be armed with edged weapons exclusively?
Let's be honest: guns are an inexpensive handheld point-and-click device designed to kill things.
Guns don't kill people; large holes punched into their bodies, the loss of bodily fluids from such a hole, and/or the gross tissue damage caused by the impact of leaden slugs propelled from a certain distance by the controlled ignition of a charge of gunpowder kill people!!!
Name one study offering a credible alternative explanation for observed phenomena.
What observed phenomena?
This, for a start: http://berkeleyearth.org/wp-co... . On the subject of replication, note that this image graphs results from four different research groups.
Here is the fit of theory to experiment: http://berkeleyearth.org/wp-co...
on behalf of all skeptics, i'll just say "the fit of that graph is not good enough to convince me!"
Yet in this chaotic system, the record highs increasingly outweigh the record lows, suggesting an increasing upward trend.
So, we've moved on from debating whether the change in temperature is caused by anthropogenic CO2 or not, to discussing whether there is any change in temperature at all, really. Our president says it's a hoax by the Chinese, who are we to disagree with someone of that stature?
This is why it's futile for us to argue with climate change "skeptics". As long as skeptic1 says "there is no actual warming in reality" and skeptic2 says "nobody denies that the climate is changing, just whether humans are responsible" or "nobody denies that the climate is changing, just how harmful it will be", and both nod their heads in agreement, it's clear that logic is not a winning strategy.
Name one study offering a credible alternative explanation for observed phenomena.
What observed phenomena?
How about the higher average temperature of the surface of the earth as compared to that of the moon, despite being exposed to the same insolation? Which happens to be pretty much what was estimated by Svante Arrhenius in the 19th century from his studies of IR absorption by CO2, and led him to predict that further increases in CO2 as a result of human industry would lead to global warming?
Bad analogy. It's very expensive to emit less CO2. Humans will suffer from the reduced standard of living. What's the right trade off to minimize harm to people? That's the whole point of the debate. Dismissing people you disagree with without understanding what they're talking about is popular today, because it's easy, but it's not smart.
The same arguments were used against slavery, for instance, and yet we managed to struggle along without it. The track record of predictions from economics is not the kind of thing that leads one to believe that estimates of economic destruction from emitting less CO2 are more reliable than the estimates of climate change from continued production of CO2 we get from typical methods of estimation from physics.
he infrared absorption of carbon dioxide is experimentally measured in the laboratory
No one rational doubts this. That has never been what the climate change debate was about. But the atmosphere is not a bottle of air, or even a bottle of air and water (any modern meteorological model treats modeling he ocean at least as importantly as modeling the air). The atmosphere+hydrosphere is a complex, evolving system with many feedback mechanisms, both positive and negative.
I mean, really, do you think a climate model is simply modeling a static stack of air with some CO2 in it? Really?
The question is: quantitatively, what rate of human CO2 emission with create what effects, in detail. This is not the sort of science that lends itself to reproducible experiments, but that's fine, neither does astronomy or cosmology. It is, like any science, required to make falsifiable quantitative predictions.
And, frankly, the best models aren't doing so well, giving about 2 sigmas of accuracy. If you generated hundreds of models at random, you'd expect a couple dozen to have 2 sigmas of accuracy. That doesn't mean the models are flawed in any fundamental way, but there's a big gap between "not fundamentally flawed" and "great, proven science".
But even when you have a "complex, evolving system with many feedback mechanisms, both positive and negative," the default assumption is not that underlying well established physical principles are therefore negated; nobody argues that the fact that each hemisphere of the earth gets warmer during the daytime and colder at night is not due to the effect of IR from the sun, because the laboratory observations of IR heating things up in the lab are not relevant to a "complex, evolving system with many feedback mechanisms, both positive and negative," in the wild. Nobody argues that the fatal effects of arsenic in vivo are not related to the effect seen in vitro, because the human body is a "complex, evolving system with many feedback mechanisms, both positive and negative."
If you want to argue that a set of well established mechanisms consistent with a particular result do not operate in a particular system, you need to specify why they do not operate, and also what, then is responsible for that result, rather than just a shrug and "It might not work that way, it might be something completely different" with no evidence as to 1) what prevents the CO2 absorbance of IR from operating, and 2) what is therefore causing the warming.
In fact, the entire collection of climate change "skeptics" are at this point only united in a belief that something is preventing the CO2 absorbance of IR from operating, with a set of hypotheses varying from clouds to the will of God, and that something is causing the warming, with a set of hypotheses varying from cosmic rays to a hoax by the Chinese. The only coherent theory that has any relationship to reality at all is anthropogenic carbon dioxide from fossil fuels.
"measured in the laboratory" What climate-related factors are *not* measured? Clouds? Water vapor? Convection?
These are, however, measured in the actual environment. Along with the variables from the lab experiments. https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/bibl... for example.
Many studies have been done on anthropic climate change, but almost no experiments.
As in the old joke about the final exam for the cosmology course, which states "Construct a functional universe. You will find the materials you need in a box under your desk"
Change "drug trials" to "climate change", though, and watch the true believers react....
You don't get to cite "lack of reproducibility" as a criticism of fields of science where it is physically impossible to reproduce an experiment. For instance, even those who are skeptical of the big bang theory do not argue that it has never been reproduced independently. Change origin of the universe to climate change, however, and watch the false skeptics react.
Record high temps, record low temps. record rain, record drought.
That's actually what you'd expect with a chaotic system built of multiple random variables. It would be unnatural for weather to always be the same.
It's pretty easy to demonstrate mathematically what you should also see intuitively, i.e. that in a stable process which is not "moving" (where the mean and variation do not change over time, which is what the "no climate change" folks propose), that the frequency of any sort of record should fall off as you accumulate more data. For instance, the first year every measurement will be a record, the second year each has a 50% chance of being the record, the third year every measurement has a 1/3 chance, etc. So the fact that we're seeing a high frequency of records now is enough to demonstrate a change in the basic underlying process.
I have a large interest in climate science instrumentation (at least relative to other laypeople). There have been a few questions I've never been able to answer: What is the precision of an ocean going thermometer? what was the precision of a 1900s era thermometer? What was the average uncertainty of a 1900s thermometer and how does it compare with current technology, also what are the known biases in temperature measurement of the time? It would seem to me that any comparison of pre-modern temperatures to modern temperatures should include that information but I've never been able to find it. But back on the topic of reproducible scientific studies, can you show me a reproduction study for any study in the climate science field? I don't ask that to be facetious, I legitimately have no idea how to go about finding one.
What would reproducing a climate study consist of? You've got a bunch of temp measurements from all over the world over a period of time, you average them geographically for each time point and look for a trend. You can't go back and redo all those measurements, but on the other hand that's a different situation from one set of measurements in one lab's experiment one time.
If you got another set of temp measurements, you'd just add them into the averaging for more precision, rather than say "well, Cleveland isn't warming, so there is some doubt". (Obviously, you don't just average in a bunch of measurements, everything has to be weighted in a rationally defensible manner).
I suppose the closest thing would be some sort of statistical analysis, like the "Monte Carlo" simulations where you take random subsets of the overall dataset, perform the same weighting etc. on them and see what's the confidence interval of all the different curves you get.
http://www3.geosc.psu.edu/~kzk10/Urban_Keller_Tel_08.pdf
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.574.6778&rep=rep1&type=pdf
But although that's a common statistical technique these days, it's not "conservative" in the sense of being mathematically defensible as to the confidence interval of your confidence intervals, if you can kind of see what I mean; for instance, the FDA would never accept that in an analysis of a drug study, so it won't convince the diehard skeptic. Not that that implies that something exists that would convince a diehard skeptic, of course.
There have been numerous cases of scientific discoveries which were reproduced by many investigators and whole scientific models developed which turned out to be entirely imaginary. N-rays are a terrific and lesser known example, but there's also the maps of the Martian Canals, cold fusion, polywater, in addition to the classic fields, still extensively researched vi the scientific method with full faith in the hypothetical reproducibility, such as homeopathy, ESP, magnetic medical therapy, wearing-copper medical therapy, dowsing, witchcraft/spellcasting, ghost/spirit/seances, UFOs, spinal surgery, etc.
If you can't reproduce it, it's either fake or you were just being sloppy. Either way, it's no wonder ordinary civilians have doubts.
Sounds like something from The Onion: "Scientist fails to reproduce despite years of trying; feels his sloppiness is partially to blame"
I agree, documentation of protocols needs to be improved; however, it's hard to document everything you did for a paper when the journal doesn't give you very many words at all to actually explain what you did, and many don't support video sections for online papers.
I believe it was "Help" that had the British scientists in a scene, with the one reporting into a microphone "I am moving my right foot; I am moving my left foot; I am moving my right foot; I am moving my left foot" etc.
"You didn't use the right technique" is the first excuse used by researchers when their results don't hold up. In Bio science this reproducibility problem is, at heart, a problem with having an experimental system that is under control, well defined and "stable". There are plenty of very precise measurements made that are not accurate because there is something about the experiment that is not under control. In biology, even if you do your best to account for statistical variation, it can often be the case that your results are bunk because there are things going on beyond your ken. This is a real problem, people are now taking it seriously. It has impacted on my life in science on numerous occasions. I don't start something based on others' work unless I've tested the underlying rationale.
It's not my field, but an article I read a while back identified that as a problem in r&d on electrical batteries; supposedly the presence of even minute contaminants can make huge differences, which leads to all sorts of headlines like "New battery promises breakthrough in efficiency" which can't be replicated when the initial batch of research grade chemicals runs out and is replaced with a new batch.
Then why not describe the novel techniques you developed to complete the research in the paper? Any process that is claimed to require special abilities is actually one the needs training.
Because no one cares. The funding model for science in the US encourages each lab to find a "niche," an approach or an experimental model unique to that lab, defended by a barrier of custom-fabricated apparatus or years-long technique development. No other lab can afford the loss of productivity associated with that kind of investment, to say nothing of the direct expense.
This is also the reason it's hard to take the reproducibility project very seriously: if you're engaged in a project whose thesis is that many experiments are not reproducible, and you're not getting the same results as a subject paper, what's your interpretation? It could be that the original paper was a statisitical fluke; It could be that you need another six months practicing the technique to get it right.
In the average academic lab, the "custom-fabricated apparatus" tends to be an army of grad students and postdocs doing mindless grunt labor like filling test tubes or counting bacterial colonies for 16 hours a day.
Then why not describe the novel techniques you developed to complete the research in the paper? Any process that is claimed to require special abilities is actually one the needs training.
It's kind of a cliche joke about cooking that following a recipe doesn't mean you get the same result as the person who came up with the recipe did. Some people's techniques are, if not actually inferior, at least different. The reductio ad absurdum of that is the Monty Python skit about the TV kids' show teaching you to play the flute; "You blow in this end here and move your fingers up and down these holes".
A lot of times stuff is not replicatable (suck it spellchecker, i just invented the word) because it's fucking difficult. I mean I have spent thousands of dollars and even worse wasted many hours in the lab on getting something I thought should be straightforward, obvious, and simple to work. Sometimes you want things to work so badly, you might even see things (usually fluorescence) where there is none. It's like how Percival Lowell saw canals on Mars. As a scientist you have to fight hard against your own bias, and not take it personally when someone attacks your work. Biological systems are unreliable (or not easily modeled), it's not like a computer program where everything follows a known deterministic path. In biology, the conditions in which something happens may not be known. It may work in one lab because they are using a reagent with a trace contaminant of salt whereas in another it won't work because the conditions are too pure.
So anyway, I reckon we have 3 reasons why studies are not reproducible (here they are in order of unethicalness/immorality): 1. The actual conditions are not what the researcher thinks it is. (The reagent constituents are not normal for example). 2. The researcher wants to believe a result so badly that they see an effect that doesn't exist. (Nowadays you have to photograph your results and/or use software, so this *should* get caught in peer review). 3. The research was published due to pressure to get grants combined with confidence that a particular hypothesis is real and should work -- in spite of lab failure (which the researcher ignores, telling themselves somebody in their lab made a "pipetting error").
Obviously, #3 is the most evil of the above. None of these are an excuse for publishing bad science. In terms of mitigating effects, #1 is the hardest to avoid. #3 should be very avoidable if you have scruples.
Yeah in general, but "The research was published due to pressure to get grants" doesn't belong to #4 exclusively, it's a universal factor.