You don't think they're capable of twisting, distortion, selective quoting, poor analysis? Yes, it all *could* be debunked given enough time, and willingness of people to listen. But who has that kind of time, especially considering they'll never accept they were wrong and just drop it [1] and move onto their next poorly thought out point. And all people will remember is that there were a lot of criticisms, with the fact that they were unfounded being lost in the cognitive biases. Don't forget, if you don't care about the quality of your criticisms, you can throw them up much faster than they can be shown to be wrong. And it's all made worse that invalid criticisms can nevertheless look quite plausible to the untrained eye.
This isn't just paranoia on my part, there's clear evidence of the "sceptics" doing just this if you look. As with the boy who cried wolf, I've now filed most of them in the "not credible and can be ignored" bin.
Your suggestion that the true evidence will win out in the public sphere is quite amazingly naive.
[1] Temporarily, anyway. I've seen lots of cases where some point was comprehensively proved wrong but the same person used it again later anyway, despite the fact that he must now be well aware of the flaws. Honesty? Fat chance.
. Unfortunately, there is no computer model that can accurately simulate the earth's climate.
Isn't there? That depends on what you mean by "accurately". A model which predicts a temperature change of 0 +/- 50 degrees C is obviously not precise or indeed useful, but it's nevertheless correct. One that claims 4 +- 0.1 when the correct value is 5 is wrong. The last time I looked the models had fairly wide error bars associated with their predictions but the lower bound was still positive, and some decent estimates could be made as to the likely effects of different emissions scenarios. There's always the possibility that something has been missed and that the error analysis is not correct, but that's true of pretty much any measurement or calculation. But you don't need perfect precision in your predictions to get a useful result, you just need a decent understanding of the errors and limitations of your method.
Not really, no. Generally scientists are assumed to be honest until proven otherwise. How would you work any other way? Perhaps *if* data collection was done by a completely separate team to analysis (with no possibility of collusion) and absolutely everything was published down to the last detail. In practice, these conditions can't be satisfied and would be horrendously time consuming, expensive and wasteful.
Fortunately, there's no need. Since the whole point of science is that results are reproducible, any fraud of significance isn't going to last long before it's discovered. Someone claiming a great discovery that nobody can reproduce looks pretty suspicious. Even fields with large, centralised data sets (such as climatology) have more than one set and typically more than one researcher working on it. Fraud would require conspiracy on a grand and utterly implausible scale - even if there was a plausible motive, which there isn't.
Presumption of innocence and independent reproduction of results, the same way we've always done it?
More importantly, how do you know if they're honest even if they provide data? They could have faked the raw data. Independent (i.e. different data/code) reproduction is the only way.
Wen you do that, even with the small amount of data that is publically available, you see a small linear temperature fall for the last 10 years
Well of course, you're fitting over a short range of time in which you expect normal weather related fluctuations to dominate long term trends. You can do the same thing for other ten year periods, yet the long term trend of an increase is clear on a multi-decade basis.
The *ONLY* way to settle this, is to release the data. Given the far reaching implications of the decisions that will be reached through interpretation of this data, FOR EVERYONE IN THE WORLD, I fail to see how the financial interests of the people who collected it can outweigh the invested interest of the rest of the whole world, who's economical and climatological futures hinge upon it.
You really think that will settle anything, and it won't simply be cherry picked dishonestly like it has every time before? Organising and providing data to people who are not competent to make good use of it is not a sensible use of time. Scientists aren't exactly swimming in resources, and would rather get on with their work. The "sceptics" won't believe it no matter what, and the non-conspiracy theorists don't need it.
Your "second opinion" argument is bizarre, considering there are hundreds of second opinions in climate science, made with numerous independent data sets. The vast majority of them say the same thing. If hundreds of doctors had examined you, doing their own tests each time (not sharing data), and 95% of them said it was necessary to operate, would you accept it then? Even if they didn't show you the raw test data but only the final, summarised results?
Free exchange of information isn't a problem between honest scientists. To some random political asshole who will merely use it as ammunition? Not really.
You can get access to the published papers easily enough, though you may have to pay (I don't like that, but it's the way it's done, blame the journals not the scientists). No special qualifications required. And actually there's a lot of published material for free.
but it's democratic in so far as you get to tick a box and stick it in the ballot box, the chance of you being one of the people whose tick actually counts for anything though is, well, going by the last election, only 35%.
Surely your vote is always meaningless in that sense, in that it only matters if there's a tie, which almost never happens, even with PR. For every election I've voted in, I can honestly say that the outcome would have been the same if I hadn't voted. The same is true for pretty much everyone, taken individually. Since the chances of my vote actually making a difference are negligible, there seems little practical point in it.
I think you might be overreacting a little. Doesn't every nation have jokes made about them, and have stereotypes? I see enough negative comments about my own country (UK) around the internet without needing to get defensive. Some of them are distressingly justified, such as the way we seemed to act like little more than the 51st State the way Blair sucked up to Bush, or that we tend to overstate our current relative importance in the world.
It is interesting that the French have been landed with the "surrender" stereotype though, given that their performance in WW2 was no worse than the rest of Europe. The UK was only saved by the Channel. I suspect it arises from the attitudes of some of their leaders post-war (particularly de Gaulle).
Oh, I think you're pointing too much at the US here. We British have been doing anti-French jokes for a lot longer than that. Hardly something to get all excited about, and I'm sure the French have plenty of jokes of their own.
You can't get any energy out of the Casimir effect. Put the two plates near to each other, you get a pressure. Let that move the plates, you may get some work out of it. But then what do you do? You have to put the energy back in to get them apart again, so there's no net gain.
Anyway, the conservation of momentum is one of the best established laws of physics, surviving from Newton to the present day, despite all the new discoveries since then. That one's *never* been wrong, though admittedly, relativity required momentum to be defined differently.
Yes, but all that is perfectly conventional. You'd need to use some on board power source to produce the particles, which would need fuelling somehow. The energy requirements would be horrific, though it would indeed be efficient in terms of mass usage.
Yes, I know that. In fact, I already knew that. What I said is still valid for the quantum vacuum - even when the ground state has a non-zero vacuum expectation value, it still has no direction of any kind. Hence, no momentum. "Pushing the vacuum" would mean exciting it to a state where it wasn't the vacuum any more, e.g. by creating photons and directing them out of the back of the rocket. Now that's fine, but hardly revolutionary.
You can't change the momentum of the vacuum. If the field is carrying momentum and energy, then it's not the vacuum - which is by definition the ground state.
Fortunately, you don't have to get your information from left-wing groups. Climate scientists aren't notably politically motivated. Also, disagreeing with measures is one thing, disagreeing with the science is a different matter entirely. Not liking the proposed measures doesn't mean the science is wrong.
I can see your point, and certainly think that providing an overview of the subject for the layman is useful. However, the trouble is that while it may be be possible to provide a simple version of the argument, your opponent can also provide a simple and, on the surface, plausible argument as to why you're wrong. How then does the non-expert tell which one is right? The argument would rapidly and inevitably descend into more technical detail until the layman was lost. Either that or it would turn towards a slanging match, in which case the person better skilled at that kind of argment would "win". That tends not to be the scientist though, as they're not used to that kind of thing.
Special relativity is something of a special case in that it can be described in straightforward terms and without any advanced maths. I guess I've seen too many simplified and appealing descriptions of things which are so far gone from the detailed description that the whole point is lost.
But your average person doesn't care enough to study it in enough detail to really grasp it. Simplified explanations are fine, and rather easier to grasp than for climate science than for quantum electrodynamics. The trouble is that the FUD brigade can throw enough misinformation around that people don't know what to believe, and they're not qualified or inclined to study it in depth for themselves. Neither am I, and I care about the issue more than the average person and at least have a scientific background. So most people go off trust, and casting doubt on that is a very effective tactic, and I think that's what we're seeing here.
I don't think that scientists have pushed the emotional angle. I don't remember seeing any anyway, though I'd welcome being corrected. That's mostly the preserve of the environmental groups.
If an 8th grader could grasp it it wouldn't take years of education and research expereience to do. Or to quote Feynman, "Listen, buddy, if I could tell you in a minute what I did, it wouldn't be worth the Nobel Prize". Any explanation on that level can be countered by someone with an equally plausible sounding but wrong explanation on a similar level.
Actually doing a full, detailed assessment of the validity of evidence would take an experienced scientist from a different field a *long* time to read through all the relevant publications, learn the material and arrive at his own conclusion.
Yes, but peer review is more a basic sanity check than a comprehensive, in-depth investigation. That part comes when people read the published paper and find things to criticise. The downside to inadequate pre-publication review is that the journal credibility is lower and people waste time reading poor papers.
Apparently your reading skills aren't as good as your code writing. My post said "Just because you've never written code that way", i.e. the way they wrote it and you criticised them for.
Again, you may do things one way but not everyone does. While I may not have written as much code as you, I do know how science is done, having done some in my time. I didn't release my code, nobody asked for it, and my "mock ups" often involved adding artificial elements to real data. Your assertion that there is never any reason to do so is in direct contradiction to my own experience.
I may not know how they used their code, but I'm assuming good faith until proved otherwise, as that's how science is typically done.
Peer review (as in what happens before a paper's published) can't detect outright fraud like Schon unless the fraudster is incompetent. The only way you can reliably detect fraud is for other people to try to independently reproduce the result, although in Schon's case some mistakes he made gave the game away before this was done.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't think they're capable of twisting, distortion, selective quoting, poor analysis? Yes, it all *could* be debunked given enough time, and willingness of people to listen. But who has that kind of time, especially considering they'll never accept they were wrong and just drop it [1] and move onto their next poorly thought out point. And all people will remember is that there were a lot of criticisms, with the fact that they were unfounded being lost in the cognitive biases. Don't forget, if you don't care about the quality of your criticisms, you can throw them up much faster than they can be shown to be wrong. And it's all made worse that invalid criticisms can nevertheless look quite plausible to the untrained eye.
This isn't just paranoia on my part, there's clear evidence of the "sceptics" doing just this if you look. As with the boy who cried wolf, I've now filed most of them in the "not credible and can be ignored" bin.
Your suggestion that the true evidence will win out in the public sphere is quite amazingly naive.
[1] Temporarily, anyway. I've seen lots of cases where some point was comprehensively proved wrong but the same person used it again later anyway, despite the fact that he must now be well aware of the flaws. Honesty? Fat chance.
. Unfortunately, there is no computer model that can accurately simulate the earth's climate.
Isn't there? That depends on what you mean by "accurately". A model which predicts a temperature change of 0 +/- 50 degrees C is obviously not precise or indeed useful, but it's nevertheless correct. One that claims 4 +- 0.1 when the correct value is 5 is wrong. The last time I looked the models had fairly wide error bars associated with their predictions but the lower bound was still positive, and some decent estimates could be made as to the likely effects of different emissions scenarios. There's always the possibility that something has been missed and that the error analysis is not correct, but that's true of pretty much any measurement or calculation. But you don't need perfect precision in your predictions to get a useful result, you just need a decent understanding of the errors and limitations of your method.
Not really, no. Generally scientists are assumed to be honest until proven otherwise. How would you work any other way? Perhaps *if* data collection was done by a completely separate team to analysis (with no possibility of collusion) and absolutely everything was published down to the last detail. In practice, these conditions can't be satisfied and would be horrendously time consuming, expensive and wasteful.
Fortunately, there's no need. Since the whole point of science is that results are reproducible, any fraud of significance isn't going to last long before it's discovered. Someone claiming a great discovery that nobody can reproduce looks pretty suspicious. Even fields with large, centralised data sets (such as climatology) have more than one set and typically more than one researcher working on it. Fraud would require conspiracy on a grand and utterly implausible scale - even if there was a plausible motive, which there isn't.
Presumption of innocence and independent reproduction of results, the same way we've always done it?
More importantly, how do you know if they're honest even if they provide data? They could have faked the raw data. Independent (i.e. different data/code) reproduction is the only way.
Wen you do that, even with the small amount of data that is publically available, you see a small linear temperature fall for the last 10 years
Well of course, you're fitting over a short range of time in which you expect normal weather related fluctuations to dominate long term trends. You can do the same thing for other ten year periods, yet the long term trend of an increase is clear on a multi-decade basis.
The *ONLY* way to settle this, is to release the data. Given the far reaching implications of the decisions that will be reached through interpretation of this data, FOR EVERYONE IN THE WORLD, I fail to see how the financial interests of the people who collected it can outweigh the invested interest of the rest of the whole world, who's economical and climatological futures hinge upon it.
You really think that will settle anything, and it won't simply be cherry picked dishonestly like it has every time before? Organising and providing data to people who are not competent to make good use of it is not a sensible use of time. Scientists aren't exactly swimming in resources, and would rather get on with their work. The "sceptics" won't believe it no matter what, and the non-conspiracy theorists don't need it.
Your "second opinion" argument is bizarre, considering there are hundreds of second opinions in climate science, made with numerous independent data sets. The vast majority of them say the same thing. If hundreds of doctors had examined you, doing their own tests each time (not sharing data), and 95% of them said it was necessary to operate, would you accept it then? Even if they didn't show you the raw test data but only the final, summarised results?
Free exchange of information isn't a problem between honest scientists. To some random political asshole who will merely use it as ammunition? Not really.
You can get access to the published papers easily enough, though you may have to pay (I don't like that, but it's the way it's done, blame the journals not the scientists). No special qualifications required. And actually there's a lot of published material for free.
but it's democratic in so far as you get to tick a box and stick it in the ballot box, the chance of you being one of the people whose tick actually counts for anything though is, well, going by the last election, only 35%.
Surely your vote is always meaningless in that sense, in that it only matters if there's a tie, which almost never happens, even with PR. For every election I've voted in, I can honestly say that the outcome would have been the same if I hadn't voted. The same is true for pretty much everyone, taken individually. Since the chances of my vote actually making a difference are negligible, there seems little practical point in it.
An ISP is a private entity and is free to filter its own traffic however it wants.
Why? The telephone companies aren't allowed to. Has the regulation of the telephone network led to censorship abuses?
So much for being anti-censorship anyway. Apparently it's only evil if it's the government doing it.
I think you might be overreacting a little. Doesn't every nation have jokes made about them, and have stereotypes? I see enough negative comments about my own country (UK) around the internet without needing to get defensive. Some of them are distressingly justified, such as the way we seemed to act like little more than the 51st State the way Blair sucked up to Bush, or that we tend to overstate our current relative importance in the world.
It is interesting that the French have been landed with the "surrender" stereotype though, given that their performance in WW2 was no worse than the rest of Europe. The UK was only saved by the Channel. I suspect it arises from the attitudes of some of their leaders post-war (particularly de Gaulle).
Oh, I think you're pointing too much at the US here. We British have been doing anti-French jokes for a lot longer than that. Hardly something to get all excited about, and I'm sure the French have plenty of jokes of their own.
TraceMonkey, SeaMonkey... SurrenderMonkey?
You can't get any energy out of the Casimir effect. Put the two plates near to each other, you get a pressure. Let that move the plates, you may get some work out of it. But then what do you do? You have to put the energy back in to get them apart again, so there's no net gain.
Anyway, the conservation of momentum is one of the best established laws of physics, surviving from Newton to the present day, despite all the new discoveries since then. That one's *never* been wrong, though admittedly, relativity required momentum to be defined differently.
Yes, but all that is perfectly conventional. You'd need to use some on board power source to produce the particles, which would need fuelling somehow. The energy requirements would be horrific, though it would indeed be efficient in terms of mass usage.
Yes, I know that. In fact, I already knew that. What I said is still valid for the quantum vacuum - even when the ground state has a non-zero vacuum expectation value, it still has no direction of any kind. Hence, no momentum. "Pushing the vacuum" would mean exciting it to a state where it wasn't the vacuum any more, e.g. by creating photons and directing them out of the back of the rocket. Now that's fine, but hardly revolutionary.
You can't change the momentum of the vacuum. If the field is carrying momentum and energy, then it's not the vacuum - which is by definition the ground state.
Sounds like nonsense to me.
Fortunately, you don't have to get your information from left-wing groups. Climate scientists aren't notably politically motivated. Also, disagreeing with measures is one thing, disagreeing with the science is a different matter entirely. Not liking the proposed measures doesn't mean the science is wrong.
I can see your point, and certainly think that providing an overview of the subject for the layman is useful. However, the trouble is that while it may be be possible to provide a simple version of the argument, your opponent can also provide a simple and, on the surface, plausible argument as to why you're wrong. How then does the non-expert tell which one is right? The argument would rapidly and inevitably descend into more technical detail until the layman was lost. Either that or it would turn towards a slanging match, in which case the person better skilled at that kind of argment would "win". That tends not to be the scientist though, as they're not used to that kind of thing.
Special relativity is something of a special case in that it can be described in straightforward terms and without any advanced maths. I guess I've seen too many simplified and appealing descriptions of things which are so far gone from the detailed description that the whole point is lost.
But your average person doesn't care enough to study it in enough detail to really grasp it. Simplified explanations are fine, and rather easier to grasp than for climate science than for quantum electrodynamics. The trouble is that the FUD brigade can throw enough misinformation around that people don't know what to believe, and they're not qualified or inclined to study it in depth for themselves. Neither am I, and I care about the issue more than the average person and at least have a scientific background. So most people go off trust, and casting doubt on that is a very effective tactic, and I think that's what we're seeing here.
I don't think that scientists have pushed the emotional angle. I don't remember seeing any anyway, though I'd welcome being corrected. That's mostly the preserve of the environmental groups.
What, never?
COBE.
But yes, 7 papers a month is... excessive.
If an 8th grader could grasp it it wouldn't take years of education and research expereience to do. Or to quote Feynman, "Listen, buddy, if I could tell you in a minute what I did, it wouldn't be worth the Nobel Prize". Any explanation on that level can be countered by someone with an equally plausible sounding but wrong explanation on a similar level.
Actually doing a full, detailed assessment of the validity of evidence would take an experienced scientist from a different field a *long* time to read through all the relevant publications, learn the material and arrive at his own conclusion.
Yes, but peer review is more a basic sanity check than a comprehensive, in-depth investigation. That part comes when people read the published paper and find things to criticise. The downside to inadequate pre-publication review is that the journal credibility is lower and people waste time reading poor papers.
Apparently your reading skills aren't as good as your code writing. My post said "Just because you've never written code that way", i.e. the way they wrote it and you criticised them for.
Again, you may do things one way but not everyone does.
While I may not have written as much code as you, I do know how science is done, having done some in my time. I didn't release my code, nobody asked for it, and my "mock ups" often involved adding artificial elements to real data. Your assertion that there is never any reason to do so is in direct contradiction to my own experience.
I may not know how they used their code, but I'm assuming good faith until proved otherwise, as that's how science is typically done.
Peer review (as in what happens before a paper's published) can't detect outright fraud like Schon unless the fraudster is incompetent. The only way you can reliably detect fraud is for other people to try to independently reproduce the result, although in Schon's case some mistakes he made gave the game away before this was done.