10 grand per paper is an ENORMOUS sum of money for the average scientist.
That very well may be true, but you bring up a good point almost by accident -> it's not just about the post-doc doing the research, it's the whole bureaucracy of academic research that needs to be maintained. A whole lab includes not only scientists, but paper pushers of all sorts, and administrators to whom 10 grand is nothing. An entire ecosystem of graft exists for getting government funding for research, filled with all the corruption and politics you can possibly imagine, with the ultimate arbiter of worth being a government with vested interests that are not always coincident with the vested interests of the people.
Simply put, if the point is being made that money corrupts the process of science, there is no reason for us to believe that government money is any less corrupting than industry money.
The bottom line is that in the field of climatology, there is much to learn, much to debate, and no valid "consensus" on anything. And the only way that this field is going to move forward from the astrology stage to the astronomy stage, is for people to be open with their research, data, and methods, and to apply relentless skepticism to even their own closely held beliefs.
But if the existence of the Higgs Boson was determinative of whether or not Congress Critter A could promote his legislation for State Sponsored Project X, you bet there would be political pressure on the results the scientists came up with.
Certainly if a corporate scientist is doing research that doesn't affect the bottom line of the corporation (let's say it's being done as a tax writeoff in the first place), nobody is going to pressure them for results. From a practical application standpoint, you could even have things that affect the bottom line that would still result in honest science (since it has to really work to make the company money, not just work on paper). But to assume a government scientist working on a program with significant consequences to government programs, legislation, policies and pork barrel spending won't be pressured is quite naive.
Now, I'm not sure if you're trying to be funny (since government research can often occur without really having useful results), but it is plain that if your research does not jibe with the government's position, you're simply not funded.
Government funds science based on it's own bias - be it to promote legislation favored by a certain party, or to reinforce a view that increases the relevance and importance of any given government program. To believe otherwise is the height of naivety.
Observation to prove the theory false: let's drill up and burn all available oil there is, drop a nuclear warhead into the Macondo oil field to release the entire reservoir into the ocean, burn all fossil fuel sources like coal, burn all rainforests there are, burn the regular forests. If the climate then will be as it is now, and there are no massive deserts where there once were forests, then the hypothesis is falsified.
So that's your best idea? No temperature data could convince you? No atmospheric data could convince you? Only armageddon or the lack thereof could possibly falsify your theory?
How about this observation to prove the theory false: let's give you a sex change, tattoo your forehead with "poor impulse control", and if the climate doesn't change, then AGW is false. It sounds just as reasonable of a test of a hypothesis as yours, right?:)
Caring about your own future does not mean that you have to become a caveman and live without electricity and computers.
But asserting that the use of electricity is evil, admonishing others not to use it, and then using it yourself is hypocrisy.
Well, I stay honest and let the mods answer to their own consciences. The fact that they would burn mod points on my critique of them lends more credibility to my assertions anyway.
And I'm sure the people who believed the consensus about a geo-centric earth at the time of Ptolemy were reasonable to believe the sun revolved around the earth.
And I'm sure the people who believed the consensus that the world was flat were reasonable at the time.
And I'm sure the people who believed that fat is bad for you and carbohydrates are good for you were reasonable at the time.
Consensus is not science, not matter how reasonable it may seem.
Seriously, how do these warmist comments get modded so damn high?
If you think that climate does not always change, take a look at any proxy record.
If you think that climate change is man made, provide us with your falsifiable hypothesis -> be very specific about what observations would prove your theory false.
If you enjoy ranting about being such a superior environmentalist, please, feel free to turn off the computer, eliminate all electricity in your life, and for good measure, stop exhaling CO2 into the atmosphere.
The problem is that NASA and the NOAA is a superset of the CRU data. In order to reproduce the results of the CRU stuff, you need to know what subset they used.
All the words in the novel "Catcher in the Rye" are publicly available in a dictionary of sufficient size, but simply knowing the data in "Catcher in the Rye" exists in Webster's Dictionary does not mean Webster's Dictionary is sufficient to recreate Salinger's novel.
Peer review is not what you think it is. It is not an endorsement of the validity of any hypothesis. It is simply a way of deciding what does and does not get published in journals. It is not double checking the data and it is not reproducing the experiments. It is subject to corruption, peer pressure, popularity and politics.
When a bum off the street demands access to the data that was produced by research funded by his tax dollars, he damn well deserves access to it.
Ten grand per paper? And this compares to the government funding of warmist science by what, a factor of 1 to 1000? 1 to 100,000?
The whole "living in glass houses" idiom comes to mind here -> if money is a corrupting influence on science, than it's clear the warmist position is the more corrupt position. Best to stick the basics of the falsifiable hypotheses being discussed, rather than drip into distracting ad hominem.
FWIW, I enjoyed CS as a victim, because respawning led to very "gamey" kamikaze runs, and altered the playing types significantly. If I couldn't play for 3 or 4 minutes because I ran flat out and got sniped, it at least gave me an opportunity to spectate and think about the next round.
Not to say there weren't assholes in CS, but I never felt like inflicting punishment was the purpose -> making intelligent tactical choices was far more satisfying.
For example, cs_assault was a map that had a nigh impenetrable warehouse camped by terrorists. Typically, the CTs would get wiped again and again on the map, and everyone would change sides to T whenever possible. I had the wonderful experience of turning around an entire server worth of CSers by suggesting that we pick a time (say, 2 minutes and 35 seconds left), camp until then (make the Ts nervous and maybe have them come out of hiding), and simultaneously breach when the time came up. It was a dead simple plan you could type out in the first 5 seconds of the round, and terrifyingly effective. Even when the Ts figured out what we were doing, it was still an open question as to which side was going to prevail during a coordinated assault.
You'd simply never get this kind of teamwork in something like UT or Quake 3, both of which I love, but for significantly different reasons that CS.
Pardon me, but there were certainly scientific authorities that truly believed the world was flat and that the earth was the center of the universe (heard of Ptolemy?).
So your defense fails miserably:)
Scientific consensus is a popularity contest, not science. Science is the ruthless application of skepticism to one's own theories and hypotheses. To assert that there is anything "scientific" about consensus is a abrogation of rational thought and the scientific process, period.
Calling them "independent" is a stretch, and I wonder if your opinion would change if the majority shifted...
Did you actually read the leaked emails? The context of them is quite clear, and the evidence they provide is damning by even the most generous interpretation.
The prevalence of "shrinkage" is de facto evidence that the price is too high.
The girl, as an example of the marketplace, has every right to challenge his business decisions. If he prices his product too high, people are going to avoid paying for it when they can. She's just another one of those people.
Mod parent up. What's missing from the equation put forward by the composer is the idea of competition - frankly, if you price an object too high, especially if it's easily copied, you're going to get what is called in the industry euphemistically as "shrinkage".
The girl should have asked if he would be willing to sell his product at 30 cents a pop if that meant he'd get 100x more sales.
Sorry if I haven't been clear - you made a claim that climategate did not challenge the "credibility of [a] scientist". This claim is simply unsupportable in any rational way, because at the very minimum, the perversion of the peer-review process, and the sad expose on just how lacking it is (including the fact that Jones never had a reviewer ask for his data, ever), was a severe challenge to credibility.
Of course the funny part about your ad hominem about fantasy prone conspiracy theories, non-truths, pseudo-science and science denial is that they more accurately drive in the direction of warmists rather than skeptics:) Not to degenerate into a "I know you are, but what am I" dialog, but the shoe fits at least as well on both feet.
So Myopic, I'm supposed to believe that peer review is a system that can guarantee quality without anyone actually bothering to check the original data? Would you accept any other system that does not actually check things before certifying them as credible?
I think the problem is that you're using words you don't completely understand.
Count the billions of dollars of government funding into the whole global warming scam. That's a whole stack of evidence.
The discernible motive is clear -> funding is provided by the government, so research proposals that toe the line of the government position will be preferred over others, and the more dramatic the claim can be made of danger, the greater the urgency and therefore the greater the funding. It's a crystal clear perfect storm of good intentions gone woefully awry, similar to the ridiculously dangerous dietary guidelines our government gives out insisting that fat is bad, and encouraging us to eat more high glycemic cereals and grains, while admonishing us to avoid "sugar" (which those cereals and grains turn into almost immediately after digestion).
I believe that you simply do not have a falsifiable hypothesis for catastrophic anthropogenic global warming, and until you're willing to share that falsifiable hypothesis, ad hominem attacks on people and their caring for their grandchildren is simply childish name calling. I also believe there is significant reason to doubt the integrity of both the proxy record and the existing surface station record (http://surfacestations.org), and a significant urban heat island effect that accounts for most if not all of the observed warming. I certainly don't believe that the himalayan glaciers will melt by 2035, and if you believed that part of the IPCC, I hope you have the honesty to admit you were wrong.
Reality also is that pollution effect dissipate, equipment is rebuilt, and failures are learned from. The point I was trying to make is that for all the hand wringing about Three mile island, cherynobl, hiroshima, the exxon valdez, to any other "epic" environmental catastrophe, life actually seems to be getting better (or more efficient in the case of your computing). We cannot afford to piss in our kitchen, or shit in our living room, but we cannot assert that exhaling CO2 is the same thing as shitting or pissing. The big problem with the knee jerk environmentalist position is that the basic assumption, "if man did it it was bad", simply doesn't hold true in all cases.
Even the term "pollution" is an odd one, assuming that any given ecosystem exists in some pure, platonic "non-polluted" state, when in fact that's simply a moment in time in a dynamically changing universe.
I guess the bottom line is this -> we're always going to get bitten in the ass some day, but we can't let the fear of that stop us from living life.
Yup, there was definitely a scientific consensus that bacteria were crazy imaginary monsters, and the world was flat, and the the earth was the center of the universe...consensus is a wonderful thing, but science, it ain't:)
Of course you'll forgive my anthropomorphized conspiracy theory - the point on Occam's razor still applies though. Never substitute a hypothesis with large number of assumptions and entities (such as assumptions of "water vapor feedback" never observed in the data) when a more simple hypothesis will do.
How about this for a conspiracy theory to watch out for then -> the conspiracy that all of these evil oil companies know that they're going to kill us all with their petroleum products, but are still willing to hide all evidence of it to preserve their next quarter profits:)
Have you read the IPCC working group reports? Have you actually looked at the ridiculous citations of grey literature?
But more to the point, the question the GP asked is opposite of what should have been asked. I'm not looking for proofs in a chain, I'm looking for a falsifiable hypothesis. In math, we can provide a proof with various steps based on given axioms. In science, we develop falsifiable hypotheses, and try our darndest to falsify them.
So honestly, what data would convince you (or anyone in the IPCC) that their hypothesis is incorrect?
The fact that you cite data from unrelated studies as "showing indications" is a good indication that you're ignoring any unrelated studies that are not "showing indications". Welcome to confirmation bias.
Seriously, though, share with us the falsifiable hypothesis, and then we can start talking science. Until then, it's just religion.
Mod parent up. This "investigation" was like having a world cup match played with only one person on the field for the opposing team, and putting a 7 foot brick wall in front of your goal. Of course the match is going to be one sided if you set the conditions just right.
Like the conspiracy theory that a trace gas measured in parts per million used by plants to grow is going to cause worldwide catastrophe and kill us all?
Slashdot Mirror
That very well may be true, but you bring up a good point almost by accident -> it's not just about the post-doc doing the research, it's the whole bureaucracy of academic research that needs to be maintained. A whole lab includes not only scientists, but paper pushers of all sorts, and administrators to whom 10 grand is nothing. An entire ecosystem of graft exists for getting government funding for research, filled with all the corruption and politics you can possibly imagine, with the ultimate arbiter of worth being a government with vested interests that are not always coincident with the vested interests of the people.
Simply put, if the point is being made that money corrupts the process of science, there is no reason for us to believe that government money is any less corrupting than industry money.
The bottom line is that in the field of climatology, there is much to learn, much to debate, and no valid "consensus" on anything. And the only way that this field is going to move forward from the astrology stage to the astronomy stage, is for people to be open with their research, data, and methods, and to apply relentless skepticism to even their own closely held beliefs.
But if the existence of the Higgs Boson was determinative of whether or not Congress Critter A could promote his legislation for State Sponsored Project X, you bet there would be political pressure on the results the scientists came up with.
Certainly if a corporate scientist is doing research that doesn't affect the bottom line of the corporation (let's say it's being done as a tax writeoff in the first place), nobody is going to pressure them for results. From a practical application standpoint, you could even have things that affect the bottom line that would still result in honest science (since it has to really work to make the company money, not just work on paper). But to assume a government scientist working on a program with significant consequences to government programs, legislation, policies and pork barrel spending won't be pressured is quite naive.
Now, I'm not sure if you're trying to be funny (since government research can often occur without really having useful results), but it is plain that if your research does not jibe with the government's position, you're simply not funded.
Government funds science based on it's own bias - be it to promote legislation favored by a certain party, or to reinforce a view that increases the relevance and importance of any given government program. To believe otherwise is the height of naivety.
So that's your best idea? No temperature data could convince you? No atmospheric data could convince you? Only armageddon or the lack thereof could possibly falsify your theory?
How about this observation to prove the theory false: let's give you a sex change, tattoo your forehead with "poor impulse control", and if the climate doesn't change, then AGW is false. It sounds just as reasonable of a test of a hypothesis as yours, right? :)
But asserting that the use of electricity is evil, admonishing others not to use it, and then using it yourself is hypocrisy.
Well, I stay honest and let the mods answer to their own consciences. The fact that they would burn mod points on my critique of them lends more credibility to my assertions anyway.
And I'm sure the people who believed the consensus about a geo-centric earth at the time of Ptolemy were reasonable to believe the sun revolved around the earth.
And I'm sure the people who believed the consensus that the world was flat were reasonable at the time.
And I'm sure the people who believed that fat is bad for you and carbohydrates are good for you were reasonable at the time.
Consensus is not science, not matter how reasonable it may seem.
Seriously, how do these warmist comments get modded so damn high?
If you think that climate does not always change, take a look at any proxy record.
If you think that climate change is man made, provide us with your falsifiable hypothesis -> be very specific about what observations would prove your theory false.
If you enjoy ranting about being such a superior environmentalist, please, feel free to turn off the computer, eliminate all electricity in your life, and for good measure, stop exhaling CO2 into the atmosphere.
The problem is that NASA and the NOAA is a superset of the CRU data. In order to reproduce the results of the CRU stuff, you need to know what subset they used.
All the words in the novel "Catcher in the Rye" are publicly available in a dictionary of sufficient size, but simply knowing the data in "Catcher in the Rye" exists in Webster's Dictionary does not mean Webster's Dictionary is sufficient to recreate Salinger's novel.
Peer review is not what you think it is. It is not an endorsement of the validity of any hypothesis. It is simply a way of deciding what does and does not get published in journals. It is not double checking the data and it is not reproducing the experiments. It is subject to corruption, peer pressure, popularity and politics.
When a bum off the street demands access to the data that was produced by research funded by his tax dollars, he damn well deserves access to it.
Ten grand per paper? And this compares to the government funding of warmist science by what, a factor of 1 to 1000? 1 to 100,000?
The whole "living in glass houses" idiom comes to mind here -> if money is a corrupting influence on science, than it's clear the warmist position is the more corrupt position. Best to stick the basics of the falsifiable hypotheses being discussed, rather than drip into distracting ad hominem.
Really? Parent gets "Insightful"? Overrated, Troll, Flamebait perhaps, but Insightful?
Whatever the case may be, it looks like the CRU crew has folks with slashdot moderation points in their pocket.
FWIW, I enjoyed CS as a victim, because respawning led to very "gamey" kamikaze runs, and altered the playing types significantly. If I couldn't play for 3 or 4 minutes because I ran flat out and got sniped, it at least gave me an opportunity to spectate and think about the next round.
Not to say there weren't assholes in CS, but I never felt like inflicting punishment was the purpose -> making intelligent tactical choices was far more satisfying.
For example, cs_assault was a map that had a nigh impenetrable warehouse camped by terrorists. Typically, the CTs would get wiped again and again on the map, and everyone would change sides to T whenever possible. I had the wonderful experience of turning around an entire server worth of CSers by suggesting that we pick a time (say, 2 minutes and 35 seconds left), camp until then (make the Ts nervous and maybe have them come out of hiding), and simultaneously breach when the time came up. It was a dead simple plan you could type out in the first 5 seconds of the round, and terrifyingly effective. Even when the Ts figured out what we were doing, it was still an open question as to which side was going to prevail during a coordinated assault.
You'd simply never get this kind of teamwork in something like UT or Quake 3, both of which I love, but for significantly different reasons that CS.
Pardon me, but there were certainly scientific authorities that truly believed the world was flat and that the earth was the center of the universe (heard of Ptolemy?).
So your defense fails miserably :)
Scientific consensus is a popularity contest, not science. Science is the ruthless application of skepticism to one's own theories and hypotheses. To assert that there is anything "scientific" about consensus is a abrogation of rational thought and the scientific process, period.
Calling them "independent" is a stretch, and I wonder if your opinion would change if the majority shifted...
Did you actually read the leaked emails? The context of them is quite clear, and the evidence they provide is damning by even the most generous interpretation.
The prevalence of "shrinkage" is de facto evidence that the price is too high.
The girl, as an example of the marketplace, has every right to challenge his business decisions. If he prices his product too high, people are going to avoid paying for it when they can. She's just another one of those people.
Mod parent up. What's missing from the equation put forward by the composer is the idea of competition - frankly, if you price an object too high, especially if it's easily copied, you're going to get what is called in the industry euphemistically as "shrinkage".
The girl should have asked if he would be willing to sell his product at 30 cents a pop if that meant he'd get 100x more sales.
Sorry if I haven't been clear - you made a claim that climategate did not challenge the "credibility of [a] scientist". This claim is simply unsupportable in any rational way, because at the very minimum, the perversion of the peer-review process, and the sad expose on just how lacking it is (including the fact that Jones never had a reviewer ask for his data, ever), was a severe challenge to credibility.
Of course the funny part about your ad hominem about fantasy prone conspiracy theories, non-truths, pseudo-science and science denial is that they more accurately drive in the direction of warmists rather than skeptics :) Not to degenerate into a "I know you are, but what am I" dialog, but the shoe fits at least as well on both feet.
So Myopic, I'm supposed to believe that peer review is a system that can guarantee quality without anyone actually bothering to check the original data? Would you accept any other system that does not actually check things before certifying them as credible?
I think the problem is that you're using words you don't completely understand.
Count the billions of dollars of government funding into the whole global warming scam. That's a whole stack of evidence.
The discernible motive is clear -> funding is provided by the government, so research proposals that toe the line of the government position will be preferred over others, and the more dramatic the claim can be made of danger, the greater the urgency and therefore the greater the funding. It's a crystal clear perfect storm of good intentions gone woefully awry, similar to the ridiculously dangerous dietary guidelines our government gives out insisting that fat is bad, and encouraging us to eat more high glycemic cereals and grains, while admonishing us to avoid "sugar" (which those cereals and grains turn into almost immediately after digestion).
I believe that you simply do not have a falsifiable hypothesis for catastrophic anthropogenic global warming, and until you're willing to share that falsifiable hypothesis, ad hominem attacks on people and their caring for their grandchildren is simply childish name calling. I also believe there is significant reason to doubt the integrity of both the proxy record and the existing surface station record (http://surfacestations.org), and a significant urban heat island effect that accounts for most if not all of the observed warming. I certainly don't believe that the himalayan glaciers will melt by 2035, and if you believed that part of the IPCC, I hope you have the honesty to admit you were wrong.
Reality also is that pollution effect dissipate, equipment is rebuilt, and failures are learned from. The point I was trying to make is that for all the hand wringing about Three mile island, cherynobl, hiroshima, the exxon valdez, to any other "epic" environmental catastrophe, life actually seems to be getting better (or more efficient in the case of your computing). We cannot afford to piss in our kitchen, or shit in our living room, but we cannot assert that exhaling CO2 is the same thing as shitting or pissing. The big problem with the knee jerk environmentalist position is that the basic assumption, "if man did it it was bad", simply doesn't hold true in all cases.
Even the term "pollution" is an odd one, assuming that any given ecosystem exists in some pure, platonic "non-polluted" state, when in fact that's simply a moment in time in a dynamically changing universe.
I guess the bottom line is this -> we're always going to get bitten in the ass some day, but we can't let the fear of that stop us from living life.
Yup, there was definitely a scientific consensus that bacteria were crazy imaginary monsters, and the world was flat, and the the earth was the center of the universe...consensus is a wonderful thing, but science, it ain't :)
Of course you'll forgive my anthropomorphized conspiracy theory - the point on Occam's razor still applies though. Never substitute a hypothesis with large number of assumptions and entities (such as assumptions of "water vapor feedback" never observed in the data) when a more simple hypothesis will do.
How about this for a conspiracy theory to watch out for then -> the conspiracy that all of these evil oil companies know that they're going to kill us all with their petroleum products, but are still willing to hide all evidence of it to preserve their next quarter profits :)
Have you read the IPCC working group reports? Have you actually looked at the ridiculous citations of grey literature?
But more to the point, the question the GP asked is opposite of what should have been asked. I'm not looking for proofs in a chain, I'm looking for a falsifiable hypothesis. In math, we can provide a proof with various steps based on given axioms. In science, we develop falsifiable hypotheses, and try our darndest to falsify them.
So honestly, what data would convince you (or anyone in the IPCC) that their hypothesis is incorrect?
The fact that you cite data from unrelated studies as "showing indications" is a good indication that you're ignoring any unrelated studies that are not "showing indications". Welcome to confirmation bias.
Seriously, though, share with us the falsifiable hypothesis, and then we can start talking science. Until then, it's just religion.
Mod parent up. This "investigation" was like having a world cup match played with only one person on the field for the opposing team, and putting a 7 foot brick wall in front of your goal. Of course the match is going to be one sided if you set the conditions just right.
Like the conspiracy theory that a trace gas measured in parts per million used by plants to grow is going to cause worldwide catastrophe and kill us all?
That razor cuts both ways.
Has your life become more, or less pleasant over the past 30 years?
I think if people are honest, a lot of the nostalgia for the past stops us from realizing just how pleasant cheap energy makes things.