No, you don't need machine vision algorithms or real-time human intervention. People often deal with much bigger delays in analyzing microscope images on earth. Phoenix actually had a microscope, they just aren't good at detecting bacteria.
Marx came up with a theory of human nature and economics, and communist states tried to put that into practice. Because Marx's theory was wrong, those states failed, consistently and repeatedly. The fault is with Marx's theory.
When scientific theories are correct, their application usually leads to positive results. The theory of vaccination leads to vaccination programs and that leads to more health. The theory of the effect of air pollution on lungs leads to clean air laws and improvements in public health.
the point of godwin's law is to point out the essential wrongness of comparing someone's opinion to something hitler or a nazi would do. it's just derails an argument into hysteria and absurdity
That may be true if that person has no connection with the Third Reich. But many of the post-war German academics, judges, secret service members, and police used to support the Nazis. Those people made laws, taught the next generation of students, and wrote history textbooks. Several of the (conservative) political parties in Germany that supported the Nazis simply reconstituted themselves after WWII, adopted similar programs to their pre-war programs, and pretended like they had nothing to do with the Nazi regime. And Neo Nazis and right-wing extremism are widespread in Germany.
Pointing out analogies and connections between Nazis and modern German political and social institutions and figures is justified and not an ad hoc comparison.
What I was trying to say was, why do you trust whomever you read? I think that's the essential question. It's not a scientific question, at least the for the broader issues the research has been done, the results leave us with a clear decision - if you believe them. If you don't believe them, then who do you believe and why?
That's the problem. Many of the key scientific results about global warming are correct in a narrow, scientific sense; they have been looked at enough. But those results do not leave us with clear decisions at all.
If you believe that global warming is going to be so severe that it will destroy civilization or perhaps even lead to the extinction of humanity, then one must take immediate action now no matter what. I used to believe that myself, because some global warming scientists and activists misrepresented the scientific results that way. But it turns out to be an unsupported conclusion even according to the IPCC report itself.
Once "the end of civilization/humanity" is off the table, this merely becomes an economic question: what are the costs and risks of action and inaction. As far as I can tell, action wouldn't be warranted even if a 4C warming were certainty, since the cost of addressing problems later would be lower than the cost and risk of attempting to prevent such warming. In any case, climate scientists are not the people qualified to make those trade-offs, and they should not make policy recommendations on subjects outside their area of expertise.
Bringing this back to the question of what to believe, you can generally believe the experimental results of widely cited scientific papers, but you shouldn't automatically believe their conclusions or interpretation of the results. In a scientific paper, the experimental results must be objectively true and verifiable, but conclusions and interpretations are often intended as the basis for further discussion, and reviewers review papers accordingly. There is a big difference between "our simulations show a 4C rise by 2100" (objective result) and "the earth will be getting 4C warmer over the 21st century" (interpretation and conclusion).
Since you just told us that truth is of no importance to you in when it comes to discrediting people who don't believe what you do about political issues,
Truth is of paramount importance when I criticize the positions of other people. I just don't care whether other people reached their conclusions for the right reasons or the wrong reasons; in most cases, I don't even know what their reasons are.
But truth is obviously something you play fast and loose with to suit your ideology.
why should I credit what you say about people who don't believe what you do?
You shouldn't "credit" anything I say. Neither should you "credit" anything any of these other people say. And that's your problem: instead of being able to judge the science for yourself, you have to take things on "credit". And that means that you really have nothing to contribute to the debate on climate change.
There is no support either for or against the existence of life on other planets. Bayesian analysis doesn't transform that lack of knowledge into evidence against life. After Bayesian analysis, people still don't have any facts.
However, I'd say things certainly look better now than they did a few decades ago, given that we have discovered both vast amounts of organic molecules in space, as well as lots of planets in the Goldilocks zone.
However, people are attacking the science because they want to make a political points. I am not find with that.
I have a much bigger problem with people like Lockwood, Hansen, and Mann: even though they have done some solid work, they have also been misrepresenting their political views as scientific facts, some of their work has been sloppy, and they have been arrogant. That's what pisses off politicians, and it has done harm not just to their cause, it has harmed the standing of science in our society as a whole.
Do you simply fail to understand that a small number of highly utilized long distance buses are not representative of the kind of bus service we're talking about when replacing the car?
The future isn't AMTRAK vs the modern Prius, but the modern Prius vs modern electrically powered trains.
That argument fails as well. Modern cars are much more efficient than older cars not because of new technologies but changed preferences. Modern electric trains have much less room for improvement because they are pretty much the same weight, size, and capacity as they used to be. Hence, cars will overtake trains in terms of efficiency in a few years, even at current utilization. And since an expansion of train service would result in lower average utilization, train service will get worse and worse in comparison to cars.
And highway capacity is poorly utilized at 3:00 am.
Poorly utilized highways don't emit much CO2, poorly utilized trains emit nearly as much CO2 as fully utilized ones.
But that's been a double standard in this country for decades: public roads are a car subsidy worth hundreds of billions a year, while mass transit is supposed to be self-sufficient.
Transit is massively subsidized, both in construction and in operation. Caltrain, for example, only recovers 47% of its operating costs from riders, and it's one of the better systems.
Since you skipped it the first two times here it is again: slash military spending and use those funds for green energy development.
That's not an answer. Whether we slash the military budget or not is independent of what transportation options we choose. In fact, whatever we slash, we need to pay off the national debt.
Why should I bother to address your straw man? Because, even if your storyline had any basis in reality, climate change is everyone's business.
That's presuming that climate change is actually a problem. I and the majority of Americans happen to disagree.
And of course, there's the FACT that the costs of mitigating climate change are INSIGNIFICANT next to the costs of *not* mitigating it.
Well, we agree that's what it all comes down to. A 4C rise in global temperatures costs 1-5% in global GDP, and most of that not even in the US (since the US is less affected by climate change than other regions). The US military budget (which you want to spend on this) is about 5% of GDP. So you want to spend 5% of GDP now to fix a problem that may or may not happen decades from now and is likely cheaper to fix then. But even if we were to spend that, it would be ineffective because China and India aren't going to do shit. Those are the FACTs. Don't believe my numbers? Look at the IPCC report itself, that's where they come from.
I don't know what's more impressive, the attempt at deflection or arguing that successful federal projects have increased energy use right after arguing that federal projects could not change our energy use.
Federal action can indeed decrease energy use, just not the federal action you propose.
Unless you want to come back to reality and make an argument that doesn't depend on ignoring the costs of climate change while absurdly inflating the costs of mitigating it and completely ignoring the fact that saving energy MEANS SAVING MONEY.
Reality is that the majority of Americans does not think that climate change is a serious problem. Reality is that no major industrialized nation is taking serious action. Reality is that India and China are refusing to take action. And reality is that because saving energy means saving (lots of) money, there is no need to subsidize "green energy" at all, whatever companies can do, they are already doing.
Those are the realities you need to return to, instead of your fictions of global disaster and dreams of massive subsidies for companies you are in bed with.
As long as you attack the proposals by showing why they are ineffective and/or dangerous or for that matter other reasons why they are inadvisible, and not by saying "I disagree with the policy, therefore the science is wrong," I'm fine with that.
You got it backwards. If you want action to happen on global warming, you need to make a strong economic case for it and you need to demonstrate that there is a feasible path to global action. If you can't connect the science to my economic interests, the science is nothing more than a curiosity.
and I most particularly do care about people calling scientists criminals because they find that to be an easy way to make a political point
As far as I'm concerned, a number of prominent climate scientists are guilty of scientific misconduct, not just in aspects of their work, but simply because, in addition to a core of scientific truth, they also misrepresent their political views and preferences as scientific facts.
I find 11.6 million search hits on the terms “fraud” and "global warming"
Yeah, so? The idea that some of the statements about global warming have been true doesn't mean that there hasn't also been scientific incompetence, misconduct and fraud.
It is those millions of people who have been convinced that it is all a fraud concocted by scientists who are criminals or completely ignorant that I would like to convince otherwise.
I think these scientists only have themselves to blame for losing the public's trust. The fact that some of their statements happen to be true doesn't alter that, and it isn't my or anybody else's responsibility to separate truth from misconduct and fiction in their work.
As far as I'm concerned, the proposals for government intervention on climate change are ineffective and dangerous, and I'm glad they don't have a chance of getting implemented. I really don't care whether people distrust these people for the right reasons or for the wrong reasons.
it does. Buses are far more fuel efficient than cars and transport far more people. Trains are far more fuel efficient than and transport more people than buses. And that's even if they are powered by fossil fuels, much less powered by air, solar, or hydro power.
If you take US data, buses are about 2.7 MJ/passenger-mile, cars are about 2.3, commuter rail about 1.8, and AMTRAK about 1.6. So, buses are already less efficient, and commuter rail and AMTRAK only reach their efficiencies because of high utilization. But you can't get high utilization if you try to switch people from cars to public transit because then you need many more trains at more times, a lot of which are going to be poorly utilized. Furthermore, cars are only as high as they are because lots of people are still driving old gas guzzlers. New vehicles are so much more efficient that cars actually become more efficient than rail systems even at current utilization levels.
But let's step back to the "carbon tax" bullshit. I don't mean BS as in the notion that carbon couldn't be taxed - that your straw man - but that completely sidesteps the real way to promote green energy - massive government investment - in favor of a top heavy approach that would be unpopular with nearly the entire population.
Massive government investment has to be paid through taxes somehow. So, either you tax fossil fuels, or you tax everything, or you tax someone else who isn't causing the problem. You want to tax everything because what you really want is increase taxes further, you're just using "global warming" as an excuse to do so. Do you really believe people are going to be happy with having their taxes increased for solving a problem they aren't even creating? Why should I, in my energy-efficient home and with my tiny car, pay higher taxes for the costs other people (according to you) are imposing on poor south sea islanders?
It's not as if we haven't had massive investment in federal projects before. Rural electrification. Federal highway system. NASA putting a man on the moon. The Army Corpse of Engineers putting in hydroelectric dams on hundreds of rivers across the country.
First, those were nowhere near as massive as changing over a large part of the energy producing capacity of the world to some different energy source. Many of those government projects also turned out to be harmful and/or inefficient. Rural electrification and the federal highway system are, after all, in large part responsible for the kind of inefficient energy utilization you are now complaining about. If low density living hadn't been subsidized by the US government in the first place, we wouldn't be as inefficient as we are. And because people like you engaged in stupid interventions in the market before that gave us our current system, you now want to tinker some more to fix it. No. way.
I even told you were we could get the money: by carving a trillion dollars out of our annual $1.2 trillion+ war budget and spend it on wind, solar, and hydro power.
I'm all for reducing the "war budget". But I see no reason why that money should be spent by the government on some set of government-picked companies.
And again, if we subsidized green energy the way we subsidized the fossil fuel industry and the industrial-congressional-contractor-surrvielance-prison complex (much of which is also spent propping up the fossil fuel industry), green energy would not just be cheaper, but vastly cheaper.
So, you're saying that if green energy and fossil fuels were subsidized at the same level, green energy would win? Great. Let's have zero subsidies for both (including ending military support for undemocratic oil rich nations), and let the free market make the choice. That's pretty much all I and a lot of the other people who criticize the global warming alarmists want: le
the people who think that carbon-credit trading is not a good idea don't address it, but instead argue that the greenhouse effect doesn't exist
No, that's just the strawman climate alarmists put up.
By denying that a possible problem even exists, the discussion of solutions ends up being completely one-sided.
You are again putting up a strawman. The fact that a problem possibly exists doesn't mean that it is rational to do anything about it. Take it from the horse's mouth: the IPCC puts the cost of dealing with global warming at about 1-5% of global GDP for 4C of warming. Now tell me why it is rational to do anything costly today to prevent that.
Let's instead make a small effort, and put 5% of GDP into minimizing our contribution to climate change
According to the IPCC, if we do nothing, "global mean losses could be 1-5% of GDP for 4C of warming". Keep in mind those are average world-wide losses a century from now. Losses for the US and Europe would likely be below average. Spending 5% of GDP today to prevent the possibility of 1-5% losses a century from now isn't rational.
No, that's where climate scientists are the most dishonest. While climate scientists are qualified to make predictions about future temperatures, and biologists may have some limited ability to predict ecological consequences, they are in no way qualified to make predictions about the economic and social effects of climate change; that's the domain of economists and social scientists, and their models are nowhere near as good as even climate models.
Many scientists believe that it has been getting warmer over the last century. There is less agreement about the climate predictions for this century. There is a wide range of opinions on what the consequences will be, and essentially no agreement on what to do about it. Trying to present this as a "two sides" issue, where you either accept massive government intervention in the economy or you are a luddite, is completely dishonest. This is a complex issue with many possible positions.
My personal position is that it has been getting warmer, but that I think we should do nothing. CO2 emissions will likely taper off without intervention anyway. If fossil fuels remain economically compelling, there is no government policy in the world that will appreciably reduce them. And even if the most dire predictions of the IPCC report come true, we can easily live with them.
The calculation done in 1967 by Manabe and Wetherald-- it's summarized in any textbook about atmospheric science. This was the first numerical calculation of the global greenhouse effect; their calculated response value is still near the center of the consensus value used today
Yes, but their model isn't what modern climate change predictions are based on. Modern predictions postulate the existence of positive feedback cycles that amplify change, in addition to a whole lot of other assumptions that link temperature changes to supposed economic consequences.
Another problem with the interpretation of these models is that the implicit assumption is that if we stop CO2 emissions, things will stay stable, but historical data clearly shows that that's not the case either. And when it comes to climate, "too warm" is definitely better than 'too cold".
Notice how the predictions on that graph are in the linear portion, before the graph even splits. Predictions up to that point are fairly easy. It's what happens next that's under dispute: is there massive feedback or are things going to taper out no matter how much CO2 we emit?
Also, temperatures have risen by about 1C already since the 1800s, but that's not what caused the big problems in the 20th century, crazy dictators and crazy economic theories caused mass devastation in the 20th century.
Yes, the data fits the models, but prediction up to now has largely been based on simple greenhouse effects. The long term predictions, in contrast, involve postulated complicated feedback loops. But let's assume that temperature predictions are correct, large amounts of ice will melt, it will get a lot warmer, sea levels will rise. So what? The amount of change even the worst case predictions entail is small compared to the kinds of changes humanity has undergone over the last century.
The problem with the dire global warming predictions is that it presumes that if we act, the West can keep the current situation indefinitely. That's of course utter nonsense. The 20th century saw mass migrations, vast devastation, and enormous political and social change, and so will the 21st century, global warming or not.
If you want vindication, just read the IPCC report itself. Even the panel of climate change alarmists says that climate change will at most be an inconvenience to civilization and that we can throw money at to fix--probably less money than we have wasted on the war on terrorism or the drug war.
No, I am not. My proposals are based on the provable fact that there is a high level of fraud in research AND on the provable fact that it is impossible to distinguish good research from bad.
So, you admit that it is impossible to distinguish good research from bad. And then you turn right around and propose that people do exactly that: via reproducing experiments, more government grant comittees, etc.
And that's a key difference you'll see between my posts and those of my critics -- I acknowledge that my ideas are a starting point, you and the others argue that it's worthless to start at all.
Your ideas aren't a "starting point", they are a dead end. The solution to a shortage of qualified reviewers, a shortage of qualified experimentalists willing to reproduce experiments, and grants that are awarded based on politics and personal connections is not to create an even greater workload of meaningless experimental reproductions and meaningless grant reviews. You have completely bought into the mindset that science is the output from a business process and you get better and more output through rewards and tinkering with the process, and it's that bogus mindset that has created the problem in the first place. Science is not an industrial process, and it doesn't improve through rewards or pressures.
The solution to scientific fraud is much simpler: reduce the financial rewards for scientific fraud by reducing the pressure to publish and reducing the funding of megaprojects. Good science needs time and reflection, and the only way of achieving that is to not reward scientists for additional publications or results beyond some minimum standards.
And the way to reduce the motivation to engage in politicking and fraud for megaprojects is to let people decide for themselves whether to participate in it. So, instead of giving a billion dollars over 10 years to 500 scientists for some big project, give each scientist two million dollars over ten years and let them decide whether to put it into the megaproject or not. If the project is worthwhile, they will do it, if not, they'll do something better with the money.
Science should NOT be corporate-funded, it should be grant-funded -- directly from a scientific organization like NIST, or indirectly via university (or other educational) departments.
That doesn't help. Sometimes corporate funding biases research, at other times, corporations have better quality control than fellow researchers. Many "peers" in peer reviews of grants and publications have their own axes to grind; they want research that supports their results and interests to be funded, and they will punish research and researchers whose work contradicts theirs.
A paper should NOT be considered as having been refereed until the work has been reproduced.
And who is going to waste their time reproducing other people's results? You still won't get tenure for that, or the recognition of your peers. For a lot of research, reproduction also doesn't make sense. How are you going to "reproduce" the hockey stick or climate models? Either you believe their assumptions or not, but you won't get any more results or data.
Next, there need to be central scientific libraries that collect ALL journals (regardless of obscurity), ALL reviewed lab notes, etc, making that information available to absolutely anyone,
Access to publications just isn't a problem these days. The problem is that many people don't even bother to read the literature, or often aren't even capable of understanding anything outside a really narrow area.
What to do with negative results, though? Journals hate publishing those. So, have the central funding agencies ALSO fund an "open journal" that ONLY publishes negative results.
It's not clear that that's needed or helpful. A lot of "negative results" are negative because the experimenter screwed up. And results that contradict existing results already have an easy time getting published.
Journals can't complain that it's competing, since there's no overlap.
That, on the other hand, doesn't matter. Nobody cares whether journals complain or not.
Ok, but even with all of that, nobody has time to read every paper and certainly nobody has time to go back and correlate current science with past papers even if all this information was available. Doesn't matter. If there's a central store of everything, and that everything is properly linked up, the reasoners that have already been written for Semantic Web logic will work on those links to determine if the data is internally consistent. That information can be passed back to the funding agencies to determine what experiments are needed (if any) to identify what results are good, what ones are fraud and what ones are merely incompetent.
Funding agencies, like scientists, face enormously complex tasks and have few people really qualified to deal with it.
Your proposals are based on the false assumption that people are doing their job badly and that if you only do something different, peer reviews, funding agencies, etc. will behave better. But that's wrong. Funding agencies, peer reviews, and science is done by the smartest people you can find for the job, and they work hard and generally with the best of intentions. They just can't do any better.
If you want to change the system, there's a much simpler solution: stop putting so much pressure on scientists. We can never eliminate the pressure to publish and get citations (since it is its own reward), but we can at least remove unnecessary pressure, such as the more-is-better mentality for publications and citations. Maybe we should have a kind of "quote system" where scientists are rewarded for the single best publication each year, not for their total number.
While conditions at many universities can be tough, if you're at a top university in field like computer science, medicine, or molecular biology, you can make a very good salary and have lots of consulting opportunities in addition to that. That's one of the reasons science is so competitive: everybody wants to get to the schools that actually make it worthwhile.
Consensus means that independent testing has verified results
Consensus ought to be based on "independent testing", but in the case of global warming, it isn't. In the case of global warming, neither the data nor the numerical models for making predictions by different scientists are independent of one another, and there has been no experimental testing at all (because their can't be). And most of the scientists agreeing with the "consensus" have never even run the numerical models themselves.
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No, you don't need machine vision algorithms or real-time human intervention. People often deal with much bigger delays in analyzing microscope images on earth. Phoenix actually had a microscope, they just aren't good at detecting bacteria.
Marx came up with a theory of human nature and economics, and communist states tried to put that into practice. Because Marx's theory was wrong, those states failed, consistently and repeatedly. The fault is with Marx's theory.
When scientific theories are correct, their application usually leads to positive results. The theory of vaccination leads to vaccination programs and that leads to more health. The theory of the effect of air pollution on lungs leads to clean air laws and improvements in public health.
That may be true if that person has no connection with the Third Reich. But many of the post-war German academics, judges, secret service members, and police used to support the Nazis. Those people made laws, taught the next generation of students, and wrote history textbooks. Several of the (conservative) political parties in Germany that supported the Nazis simply reconstituted themselves after WWII, adopted similar programs to their pre-war programs, and pretended like they had nothing to do with the Nazi regime. And Neo Nazis and right-wing extremism are widespread in Germany.
Pointing out analogies and connections between Nazis and modern German political and social institutions and figures is justified and not an ad hoc comparison.
That's the problem. Many of the key scientific results about global warming are correct in a narrow, scientific sense; they have been looked at enough. But those results do not leave us with clear decisions at all.
If you believe that global warming is going to be so severe that it will destroy civilization or perhaps even lead to the extinction of humanity, then one must take immediate action now no matter what. I used to believe that myself, because some global warming scientists and activists misrepresented the scientific results that way. But it turns out to be an unsupported conclusion even according to the IPCC report itself.
Once "the end of civilization/humanity" is off the table, this merely becomes an economic question: what are the costs and risks of action and inaction. As far as I can tell, action wouldn't be warranted even if a 4C warming were certainty, since the cost of addressing problems later would be lower than the cost and risk of attempting to prevent such warming. In any case, climate scientists are not the people qualified to make those trade-offs, and they should not make policy recommendations on subjects outside their area of expertise.
Bringing this back to the question of what to believe, you can generally believe the experimental results of widely cited scientific papers, but you shouldn't automatically believe their conclusions or interpretation of the results. In a scientific paper, the experimental results must be objectively true and verifiable, but conclusions and interpretations are often intended as the basis for further discussion, and reviewers review papers accordingly. There is a big difference between "our simulations show a 4C rise by 2100" (objective result) and "the earth will be getting 4C warmer over the 21st century" (interpretation and conclusion).
Truth is of paramount importance when I criticize the positions of other people. I just don't care whether other people reached their conclusions for the right reasons or the wrong reasons; in most cases, I don't even know what their reasons are.
But truth is obviously something you play fast and loose with to suit your ideology.
You shouldn't "credit" anything I say. Neither should you "credit" anything any of these other people say. And that's your problem: instead of being able to judge the science for yourself, you have to take things on "credit". And that means that you really have nothing to contribute to the debate on climate change.
There is no support either for or against the existence of life on other planets. Bayesian analysis doesn't transform that lack of knowledge into evidence against life. After Bayesian analysis, people still don't have any facts.
However, I'd say things certainly look better now than they did a few decades ago, given that we have discovered both vast amounts of organic molecules in space, as well as lots of planets in the Goldilocks zone.
I have a much bigger problem with people like Lockwood, Hansen, and Mann: even though they have done some solid work, they have also been misrepresenting their political views as scientific facts, some of their work has been sloppy, and they have been arrogant. That's what pisses off politicians, and it has done harm not just to their cause, it has harmed the standing of science in our society as a whole.
Do you simply fail to understand that a small number of highly utilized long distance buses are not representative of the kind of bus service we're talking about when replacing the car?
That argument fails as well. Modern cars are much more efficient than older cars not because of new technologies but changed preferences. Modern electric trains have much less room for improvement because they are pretty much the same weight, size, and capacity as they used to be. Hence, cars will overtake trains in terms of efficiency in a few years, even at current utilization. And since an expansion of train service would result in lower average utilization, train service will get worse and worse in comparison to cars.
Poorly utilized highways don't emit much CO2, poorly utilized trains emit nearly as much CO2 as fully utilized ones.
Transit is massively subsidized, both in construction and in operation. Caltrain, for example, only recovers 47% of its operating costs from riders, and it's one of the better systems.
That's not an answer. Whether we slash the military budget or not is independent of what transportation options we choose. In fact, whatever we slash, we need to pay off the national debt.
That's presuming that climate change is actually a problem. I and the majority of Americans happen to disagree.
Well, we agree that's what it all comes down to. A 4C rise in global temperatures costs 1-5% in global GDP, and most of that not even in the US (since the US is less affected by climate change than other regions). The US military budget (which you want to spend on this) is about 5% of GDP. So you want to spend 5% of GDP now to fix a problem that may or may not happen decades from now and is likely cheaper to fix then. But even if we were to spend that, it would be ineffective because China and India aren't going to do shit. Those are the FACTs. Don't believe my numbers? Look at the IPCC report itself, that's where they come from.
Federal action can indeed decrease energy use, just not the federal action you propose.
Reality is that the majority of Americans does not think that climate change is a serious problem. Reality is that no major industrialized nation is taking serious action. Reality is that India and China are refusing to take action. And reality is that because saving energy means saving (lots of) money, there is no need to subsidize "green energy" at all, whatever companies can do, they are already doing.
Those are the realities you need to return to, instead of your fictions of global disaster and dreams of massive subsidies for companies you are in bed with.
The only specific characterization I made was that scientists think it has been getting warmer. You disagree with that?
In fact, your response is the typical attempt at character assassination of anybody who doesn't agree with the policies you advocate.
I look at the original literature. What about you?
You got it backwards. If you want action to happen on global warming, you need to make a strong economic case for it and you need to demonstrate that there is a feasible path to global action. If you can't connect the science to my economic interests, the science is nothing more than a curiosity.
As far as I'm concerned, a number of prominent climate scientists are guilty of scientific misconduct, not just in aspects of their work, but simply because, in addition to a core of scientific truth, they also misrepresent their political views and preferences as scientific facts.
Yeah, so? The idea that some of the statements about global warming have been true doesn't mean that there hasn't also been scientific incompetence, misconduct and fraud.
I think these scientists only have themselves to blame for losing the public's trust. The fact that some of their statements happen to be true doesn't alter that, and it isn't my or anybody else's responsibility to separate truth from misconduct and fiction in their work.
As far as I'm concerned, the proposals for government intervention on climate change are ineffective and dangerous, and I'm glad they don't have a chance of getting implemented. I really don't care whether people distrust these people for the right reasons or for the wrong reasons.
If you take US data, buses are about 2.7 MJ/passenger-mile, cars are about 2.3, commuter rail about 1.8, and AMTRAK about 1.6. So, buses are already less efficient, and commuter rail and AMTRAK only reach their efficiencies because of high utilization. But you can't get high utilization if you try to switch people from cars to public transit because then you need many more trains at more times, a lot of which are going to be poorly utilized. Furthermore, cars are only as high as they are because lots of people are still driving old gas guzzlers. New vehicles are so much more efficient that cars actually become more efficient than rail systems even at current utilization levels.
Massive government investment has to be paid through taxes somehow. So, either you tax fossil fuels, or you tax everything, or you tax someone else who isn't causing the problem. You want to tax everything because what you really want is increase taxes further, you're just using "global warming" as an excuse to do so. Do you really believe people are going to be happy with having their taxes increased for solving a problem they aren't even creating? Why should I, in my energy-efficient home and with my tiny car, pay higher taxes for the costs other people (according to you) are imposing on poor south sea islanders?
First, those were nowhere near as massive as changing over a large part of the energy producing capacity of the world to some different energy source. Many of those government projects also turned out to be harmful and/or inefficient. Rural electrification and the federal highway system are, after all, in large part responsible for the kind of inefficient energy utilization you are now complaining about. If low density living hadn't been subsidized by the US government in the first place, we wouldn't be as inefficient as we are. And because people like you engaged in stupid interventions in the market before that gave us our current system, you now want to tinker some more to fix it. No. way.
I'm all for reducing the "war budget". But I see no reason why that money should be spent by the government on some set of government-picked companies.
So, you're saying that if green energy and fossil fuels were subsidized at the same level, green energy would win? Great. Let's have zero subsidies for both (including ending military support for undemocratic oil rich nations), and let the free market make the choice. That's pretty much all I and a lot of the other people who criticize the global warming alarmists want: le
No, that's just the strawman climate alarmists put up.
You are again putting up a strawman. The fact that a problem possibly exists doesn't mean that it is rational to do anything about it. Take it from the horse's mouth: the IPCC puts the cost of dealing with global warming at about 1-5% of global GDP for 4C of warming. Now tell me why it is rational to do anything costly today to prevent that.
According to the IPCC, if we do nothing, "global mean losses could be 1-5% of GDP for 4C of warming". Keep in mind those are average world-wide losses a century from now. Losses for the US and Europe would likely be below average. Spending 5% of GDP today to prevent the possibility of 1-5% losses a century from now isn't rational.
No, that's where climate scientists are the most dishonest. While climate scientists are qualified to make predictions about future temperatures, and biologists may have some limited ability to predict ecological consequences, they are in no way qualified to make predictions about the economic and social effects of climate change; that's the domain of economists and social scientists, and their models are nowhere near as good as even climate models.
Many scientists believe that it has been getting warmer over the last century. There is less agreement about the climate predictions for this century. There is a wide range of opinions on what the consequences will be, and essentially no agreement on what to do about it. Trying to present this as a "two sides" issue, where you either accept massive government intervention in the economy or you are a luddite, is completely dishonest. This is a complex issue with many possible positions.
My personal position is that it has been getting warmer, but that I think we should do nothing. CO2 emissions will likely taper off without intervention anyway. If fossil fuels remain economically compelling, there is no government policy in the world that will appreciably reduce them. And even if the most dire predictions of the IPCC report come true, we can easily live with them.
Yes, but their model isn't what modern climate change predictions are based on. Modern predictions postulate the existence of positive feedback cycles that amplify change, in addition to a whole lot of other assumptions that link temperature changes to supposed economic consequences.
Another problem with the interpretation of these models is that the implicit assumption is that if we stop CO2 emissions, things will stay stable, but historical data clearly shows that that's not the case either. And when it comes to climate, "too warm" is definitely better than 'too cold".
Notice how the predictions on that graph are in the linear portion, before the graph even splits. Predictions up to that point are fairly easy. It's what happens next that's under dispute: is there massive feedback or are things going to taper out no matter how much CO2 we emit?
Also, temperatures have risen by about 1C already since the 1800s, but that's not what caused the big problems in the 20th century, crazy dictators and crazy economic theories caused mass devastation in the 20th century.
Yes, the data fits the models, but prediction up to now has largely been based on simple greenhouse effects. The long term predictions, in contrast, involve postulated complicated feedback loops. But let's assume that temperature predictions are correct, large amounts of ice will melt, it will get a lot warmer, sea levels will rise. So what? The amount of change even the worst case predictions entail is small compared to the kinds of changes humanity has undergone over the last century.
The problem with the dire global warming predictions is that it presumes that if we act, the West can keep the current situation indefinitely. That's of course utter nonsense. The 20th century saw mass migrations, vast devastation, and enormous political and social change, and so will the 21st century, global warming or not.
If you want vindication, just read the IPCC report itself. Even the panel of climate change alarmists says that climate change will at most be an inconvenience to civilization and that we can throw money at to fix--probably less money than we have wasted on the war on terrorism or the drug war.
Revenue and profit per employee went through the roof, though!
So, you admit that it is impossible to distinguish good research from bad. And then you turn right around and propose that people do exactly that: via reproducing experiments, more government grant comittees, etc.
Your ideas aren't a "starting point", they are a dead end. The solution to a shortage of qualified reviewers, a shortage of qualified experimentalists willing to reproduce experiments, and grants that are awarded based on politics and personal connections is not to create an even greater workload of meaningless experimental reproductions and meaningless grant reviews. You have completely bought into the mindset that science is the output from a business process and you get better and more output through rewards and tinkering with the process, and it's that bogus mindset that has created the problem in the first place. Science is not an industrial process, and it doesn't improve through rewards or pressures.
The solution to scientific fraud is much simpler: reduce the financial rewards for scientific fraud by reducing the pressure to publish and reducing the funding of megaprojects. Good science needs time and reflection, and the only way of achieving that is to not reward scientists for additional publications or results beyond some minimum standards.
And the way to reduce the motivation to engage in politicking and fraud for megaprojects is to let people decide for themselves whether to participate in it. So, instead of giving a billion dollars over 10 years to 500 scientists for some big project, give each scientist two million dollars over ten years and let them decide whether to put it into the megaproject or not. If the project is worthwhile, they will do it, if not, they'll do something better with the money.
That doesn't help. Sometimes corporate funding biases research, at other times, corporations have better quality control than fellow researchers. Many "peers" in peer reviews of grants and publications have their own axes to grind; they want research that supports their results and interests to be funded, and they will punish research and researchers whose work contradicts theirs.
And who is going to waste their time reproducing other people's results? You still won't get tenure for that, or the recognition of your peers. For a lot of research, reproduction also doesn't make sense. How are you going to "reproduce" the hockey stick or climate models? Either you believe their assumptions or not, but you won't get any more results or data.
Access to publications just isn't a problem these days. The problem is that many people don't even bother to read the literature, or often aren't even capable of understanding anything outside a really narrow area.
It's not clear that that's needed or helpful. A lot of "negative results" are negative because the experimenter screwed up. And results that contradict existing results already have an easy time getting published.
That, on the other hand, doesn't matter. Nobody cares whether journals complain or not.
Funding agencies, like scientists, face enormously complex tasks and have few people really qualified to deal with it.
Your proposals are based on the false assumption that people are doing their job badly and that if you only do something different, peer reviews, funding agencies, etc. will behave better. But that's wrong. Funding agencies, peer reviews, and science is done by the smartest people you can find for the job, and they work hard and generally with the best of intentions. They just can't do any better.
If you want to change the system, there's a much simpler solution: stop putting so much pressure on scientists. We can never eliminate the pressure to publish and get citations (since it is its own reward), but we can at least remove unnecessary pressure, such as the more-is-better mentality for publications and citations. Maybe we should have a kind of "quote system" where scientists are rewarded for the single best publication each year, not for their total number.
While conditions at many universities can be tough, if you're at a top university in field like computer science, medicine, or molecular biology, you can make a very good salary and have lots of consulting opportunities in addition to that. That's one of the reasons science is so competitive: everybody wants to get to the schools that actually make it worthwhile.
Consensus ought to be based on "independent testing", but in the case of global warming, it isn't. In the case of global warming, neither the data nor the numerical models for making predictions by different scientists are independent of one another, and there has been no experimental testing at all (because their can't be). And most of the scientists agreeing with the "consensus" have never even run the numerical models themselves.