At best, this data is too unreliable to incorporate. At worst, it's showing that temperatures actually went down. But these scientists are so far off the scientific method that they think it's okay to tweak them to say whatever they want, and call any deviation from what they wanted to see, a "problem" that needs to be corrected.
As opposed to a "problem" which needs explaining or their hypothesis adjusting. If you you have two (or more) data sources which appear to show something mutually exclusive than arbitarily ignoring the set which you don't like or which leads to the "wrong" conclusion isn't science.
The tree ring data was used as a proxy for temperature. The results of this proxy formula didn't match up with actual temperature readings past 1960, so to make their method look like it had more skill (accuracy) than it did, they simply grafted the actual temperature series to the end of the tree ring proxy temperature series. This is what was meant by "hide the decline".
A real scientist would have investigated why the proxy failed to to reflect actual temperatures in recent times, and might have questioned if the methodology actually applied correctly to any time in the past.
Then they'd have either come up with a better model or given up on whatever hypothesis they were using as the basis for their model. A conclusion of "hypothesis is incorrect" is (or at least should be) acceptable to any half decent scientist.
Instead, they grafted apples to oranges and then told everyone they had discovered something that they had not.
Very bad science.
Or not even "science" at all.
If this happened in any other field, these clowns would be out of a job.
Unfortunatly not, especially when politics involved.
Glaciers can melt from many sources, which is nothign that surprises anyone. But you can't hide behind "it's natural".
It's just as much "hiding behind" to say that "it's due to human activity".
10 years of stable or colling temperatures mean nothing. There has been several such periods in the last 100 years, but the overall trend is rising.
Trend depends where you start from. If you take the last thousand years it got cooler then warm again. However this dosn't correlate well with human activity. Over a much longer time you have both "ice ages" and "water ages".
On the other hand, many of the skeptics have been supporting the solar variation side of the theory of global climate change, and (surprise!) it matches up quite nicely to observed temperature changes, including the prediction of the stable/cooling trend in the last ten years.
There's also the matter of observations in other parts of the solar system. Something with an AGW theory simply could not explain.
If temperature is what you are after, thermometers are the gold standard. Therefore the post 1960 results really aren't in question.
So long as all other factors have remained the same. If an urban area has expanded to include the location of your thermometer then things have changed. The same as if there is the external radiator of an AC unit that wasn't there before now pointing in its direction... How many cases are there of urban areas changing to not urban in the last 50 years?
The problem with the icecaps is, at least in part, one of chaos - it can be compared to knowing with 99% certainty that an earthquake will occur near San Francisco in the next few hundred years, but not being able to tell you at what date & time it will occur.
Earthquakes are quite common in that part of the world. Ice around the North Pole can come and go quite rapidly. A rapid increase in ice was a major cause of Norse colony in Greenland failing about a thousand years ago.
The problem is that in the climate debate, some people then pretend that, because we cannot predict the exact date & time of the earthquake, we know nothing about earthquakes and we are wrong in predicting that the earthquake will occur.
People have been studying earthquakes for a long time. But we do not have the equivalent of a Zhang Heng studying climate.
This is also why no serious climate scientist is claiming that in 2100 the average temperature will have gone up 2.7548C, what they are claiming is that, given a few assumptions on the evolution of the rise in CO2, the most likely result in 2100 will be a rise in average temperature of between 2C and 4.5C
Further, the uncertainty is much bigger on the high end than on the low end. We are virtually certain that, unless significant reductions in CO2-output are realised, the rise will be no smaller than 2C, and the most likely figure looks to be 2.5C-3.5C.
Even with the assumption that human activity is the only factor at work here it dosn't make sense to concentrate on carbon dioxide. Methane is a far more potent "greenhouse gas" yet a lot less fuss is made about landfill sites and sewerage works.
In recent years, we have actually been surprised regularly, unfortunately this was rarely in the direction of slowing global warming. Did you know that scientists even as recently as 5 years ago, scientists were expecting a gradually increasing melting of the Greenland icecap, but what we are actually seeing now is that this melting is increasing far far more rapidly? Glaciers running out to sea at 3 km/year in 1995 have now accelerated to 12km/year.
So is it warmer or colder than when people named it "Greenland" in the first place?
Did you also know that the sea-ice conditions seen in 2007 were expected to occur no sooner than 2020 according to projections from only a few years earlier, and that, despite claims of "recovery" in 2008 & 2009 by deniers, the reality is that in both these years, the sea-ice conditions were quite close to the record-breaking year 2007, and multi-year ice, which was the "bedrock" of the northern polar cap, has all but disappeared.
This "multi-year" ice is how many years old? Also is it formed from precipitation (which is low at the poles) or freezing of sea water?
- We have direct temperature measurements going back about 150-200 years, to go further back, we use a huge number of "temperature proxies", not just tree rings, but sedimentation data, ice-core data, pollen data, etc, etc - Geologic time has very little to do with this, we *know* climate has varied in the past, for many reasons and over many timescales, but that in no way "proves" that we are not the cause of the current changes
It dosn't prove that we are either. All that can be proven is that there has been a change, not what might have caused it. Claiming that "we can't think of another explanation so it must be due to human activity" is at best faith.
Measuring the amount of ice in the arctic is not easy, but we have been doing it quite accurately for at least 30 years (turns out the US Military was doing the measuring, but didn't share the data with scientists for a long time) - and we know enough to say that in those 30 years, and particularly in the last few years, the ice has been decreasing in ways that we are quite sure have not ever occured in historical times.
How do you know what had been happening prior to 1979? Do you have any measurements at all from the Romans? How about from the Moors?
The most recent data is *not* saying global warming has temporarily halted, that's a canard the "deniers" are spreading (the idea is that repeating a lie often enough makes it appear true).
It's rather more likely that the "true believers" would be making such claims as "temporarily halted". Rather than "the models have failed to correspond with observations, but we arn't sure why".
And on the idiotic reference to manifold/string theories : if one of those theories had been making predictions for 150-odd years, predictions which turn out to fit the data very very well,
What exactly has been making accurate predictions since the 1850's. The only obvious thing of note from 1859 would be a publication by a certain Charles Darwin... As for climate predictions there's the little matter of the ice age which was ment to be just around the corner abouit 40 years ago. Whatever happened to that.
When you can come up with a decent, evidence-supported argument
Something the "Global Warming", "Climate Change", "AGW", "whatever it is this year" lot appear to be having a little trouble with. Even before the emails got leaked.
Computerworld magazine cited the view of the RealClimate blog that what was not contained in the e-mails was the most interesting element: "There is no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy
The minimum number of people you need for a conspiracy is two. If you had a conspiracy between three people all several thousand miles apart then you could quite reasonably call that a "worldwide conspiracy". To determine if there is one (or more) conspiracy going on you'd need to look at what the emails are saying. To determine if it is "worldwide" then the email addresses might be a big clue. e.g. if they are all from uea.ac.uk then it certainly isn't "worldwide".
Given the massive importance of this issue, and the extraordinary claims that have been made, I feel that extraordinary evidence is warranted. I do not think this makes me a "denialist". I think this makes me a skeptic: someone unwilling to assume that things are true, just because an authority figure says they are.
The term "denialist" or "denier" often appears to be applied to skeptics when there is a great deal of "political capital" invested in the "right" answer. For the whole AGW thing to be wrong would leave lots of people, including most of the world's "leaders", with a great deal of egg on their faces. For most of these people "saving face" is more important than and kind of objective truth.
No surprises here. Both of these publications long ago transitioned from hard science to activism, and having made their bed with the Warmites they're going to defend it no matter what the facts say.
Which makes you wonder what else these publications might be being less than honest about.
As a modeling and simulations expert, I've studied some of the code and find it abominable. Where I work these people would be *fired*, immediately and without reservation, for the work they did. The emails are *bad*, the code is *damning*.
Even (supposedly) much better models can't predict the weather. So what hope have any models of predicting "climate" over even a short period of time.
You speak of the US version of 'cellphone' as if it is different to the rest of the world's idea of 'cellphone',
Various technical aspects, including frequencies and transmission not often used elsewhere. Which can mean a US phone may be unusable elsewhere and a phone which can easily be used in many countries may be unusable in the US/Canada. In most parts of the world mobile/cellular phone numbers have easily identifiable "area" codes which may cost more to the caller but have no cost the the reciever. Whereas in the US cellphones have regular numbers, but incomming calls may be charged. For the latter reason telesales ("phone spam") calls are forbidden. The only obvious exception is that Orange in the UK (and possible some other parts of Europe) do offer some phones with numbers (apparently) in a few major cities, which charge for incomming calls. They don't sell that many, even to business customers.
You should have said American wireless carriers. European wireless carriers don't get to play that game, nor do South American carriers, nor Asian carriers. So really the PCMag columnist is pretty myopic. The utterly bizarre wireless market that exists in the United States is nearly unique in the world,
Actually just about everything to do with telephones is different in the US. Even to the point where the likes of a NT DMS100 actually comes in North American and everywhere else on the planet versions. Though IIRC some of the smaller NANP countries use "rest of the world" hardware and software...
And since it's not like the Nokia N900 or any of its components are manufactured in the United States
How many phones are manufactured in the US (or the EU)?
Computer failures are much more likely as a result of regular power cycling than extended use, and the cost of parts replacement and down time far outweighs the cost of powering them regularly in low power mode.
Though in such a low powered mode they are unlikely to be running BOINC or anything else.
"A decent copyright/patent system promotes innovation."
Not only a "decent" one, but a constitutionally abidden one: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". Any copyright law that doesn't abide to this basic premise (like if it's focus is "to promote the benefit of some corporation") is against USA constitution.
One thing to remember is that US Constitution does not require copyrights (or patents) in the first place.
A decent copyright/patent system promotes innovation. Either extreme (no copyrights/patents or copyrights that last too long) will retard innovation.
Whilst it's quite obvious that excessive copyright and patent terms retard innovation it's very much a matter of faith that more moderate terms would actually promote innovation. Even assuming there is an optimal term and there is some way to reliably work this out. (Which may be different for software, movies, etc.) It may well be better to err on the side of "too little" than "too much".
That's really going to depend on the intended use. And on whether the intended use involves problems that a) can be efficiently parallelized, and more importantly, b) actually have been efficiently parallelized.
There's also the degree to which a task can be effectivly done in parallel (things get interesting when the number of parallel subtasks is greater than the number of execution units, especially where this isn't a multiple of the number of EUs and/or the subtasks are diverse.) which may well vary throughout the task including having to wait until the last of a set of subtasks has finished. But unless each core gets its own memory bus and its own dedicated memory with its own cache,
Which is likely to give issues with memory coherence, "memory" effectivly becoming additional "cache" With a need for a sophisticated MMU to sort things out.
I rather expect that the only things that are going to be parallelized to their maximum potential are wait states. All that said, it will still probably run faster than a two- or four-core CPU for many tasks, but it won't be running 48 times faster.
Performance never scales linearly to number of CPU/cores even in an idea situation.
Cloud computing is certainly a big deal. I recently explained to my boss that instead of spending weeks going through tickets, bureaucracy, approvals, and procurement to get a server in our own datacenter, we could go to Amazon, type the credit card number, and be up-and-running with a few clicks!
Without any idea where your data actually is or who has access to it...
If the cops give the impression of pick on someone, then it may look like they have lost whatever impartiality they may have.
The same thing will happen if they give the impression of ignoring (even protecting) law breakers. If anything they should hold the likes of other police officers and politicans to a higher standard than members of the general public.
Wrong, there is lots of UK evidence to show that laser guns can do strange things on angular surfaces or reflective surfaces and that they are a bit too specific in the point they measure. There are various cases of motorcycles being clocked and impossible speeds for the conditions/traffic etc.
Or possibly even just "impossible". Given that some police force managed to clock a Mini going faster than Thrust SSC...
Test have also had lasers register walls moving at 50mph due to operator error.
Which you'd expect to classify the thing as "not fit for purpose".
Except that science only requires observation as a postulate and no other 'leaps of faith'. That is the difference between science and religion. Science doesn't expect you to believe in a bearded man on a cloud that watches your every move, or in angels or in eternal damnation. Observation and thought, that's it.
Nothing stops scientists having religious beliefs. Also plenty of religious would discount "a bearded man on a cloud..." as being incompatable with their faith.
Priests and CEOs are both potentially dangerous, and quite likely to cover for their buddies; but you don't generally tell children that CEOs are trusted authority figures who deserve their respect and obedience.
Were do politicians, even cops, rate on how much children are told to blindly trust?
Slashdot Mirror
At best, this data is too unreliable to incorporate. At worst, it's showing that temperatures actually went down. But these scientists are so far off the scientific method that they think it's okay to tweak them to say whatever they want, and call any deviation from what they wanted to see, a "problem" that needs to be corrected.
As opposed to a "problem" which needs explaining or their hypothesis adjusting. If you you have two (or more) data sources which appear to show something mutually exclusive than arbitarily ignoring the set which you don't like or which leads to the "wrong" conclusion isn't science.
The tree ring data was used as a proxy for temperature. The results of this proxy formula didn't match up with actual temperature readings past 1960, so to make their method look like it had more skill (accuracy) than it did, they simply grafted the actual temperature series to the end of the tree ring proxy temperature series. This is what was meant by "hide the decline".
A real scientist would have investigated why the proxy failed to to reflect actual temperatures in recent times, and might have questioned if the methodology actually applied correctly to any time in the past.
Then they'd have either come up with a better model or given up on whatever hypothesis they were using as the basis for their model. A conclusion of "hypothesis is incorrect" is (or at least should be) acceptable to any half decent scientist.
Instead, they grafted apples to oranges and then told everyone they had discovered something that they had not.
Very bad science.
Or not even "science" at all.
If this happened in any other field, these clowns would be out of a job.
Unfortunatly not, especially when politics involved.
Glaciers can melt from many sources, which is nothign that surprises anyone. But you can't hide behind "it's natural".
It's just as much "hiding behind" to say that "it's due to human activity".
10 years of stable or colling temperatures mean nothing. There has been several such periods in the last 100 years, but the overall trend is rising.
Trend depends where you start from. If you take the last thousand years it got cooler then warm again. However this dosn't correlate well with human activity. Over a much longer time you have both "ice ages" and "water ages".
On the other hand, many of the skeptics have been supporting the solar variation side of the theory of global climate change, and (surprise!) it matches up quite nicely to observed temperature changes, including the prediction of the stable/cooling trend in the last ten years.
There's also the matter of observations in other parts of the solar system. Something with an AGW theory simply could not explain.
If temperature is what you are after, thermometers are the gold standard. Therefore the post 1960 results really aren't in question.
So long as all other factors have remained the same. If an urban area has expanded to include the location of your thermometer then things have changed. The same as if there is the external radiator of an AC unit that wasn't there before now pointing in its direction... How many cases are there of urban areas changing to not urban in the last 50 years?
The problem with the icecaps is, at least in part, one of chaos - it can be compared to knowing with 99% certainty that an earthquake will occur near San Francisco in the next few hundred years, but not being able to tell you at what date & time it will occur.
Earthquakes are quite common in that part of the world. Ice around the North Pole can come and go quite rapidly. A rapid increase in ice was a major cause of Norse colony in Greenland failing about a thousand years ago.
The problem is that in the climate debate, some people then pretend that, because we cannot predict the exact date & time of the earthquake, we know nothing about earthquakes and we are wrong in predicting that the earthquake will occur.
People have been studying earthquakes for a long time. But we do not have the equivalent of a Zhang Heng studying climate.
This is also why no serious climate scientist is claiming that in 2100 the average temperature will have gone up 2.7548C, what they are claiming is that, given a few assumptions on the evolution of the rise in CO2, the most likely result in 2100 will be a rise in average temperature of between 2C and 4.5C
Further, the uncertainty is much bigger on the high end than on the low end. We are virtually certain that, unless significant reductions in CO2-output are realised, the rise will be no smaller than 2C, and the most likely figure looks to be 2.5C-3.5C.
Even with the assumption that human activity is the only factor at work here it dosn't make sense to concentrate on carbon dioxide. Methane is a far more potent "greenhouse gas" yet a lot less fuss is made about landfill sites and sewerage works.
In recent years, we have actually been surprised regularly, unfortunately this was rarely in the direction of slowing global warming. Did you know that scientists even as recently as 5 years ago, scientists were expecting a gradually increasing melting of the Greenland icecap, but what we are actually seeing now is that this melting is increasing far far more rapidly? Glaciers running out to sea at 3 km/year in 1995 have now accelerated to 12km/year.
So is it warmer or colder than when people named it "Greenland" in the first place?
Did you also know that the sea-ice conditions seen in 2007 were expected to occur no sooner than 2020 according to projections from only a few years earlier, and that, despite claims of "recovery" in 2008 & 2009 by deniers, the reality is that in both these years, the sea-ice conditions were quite close to the record-breaking year 2007, and multi-year ice, which was the "bedrock" of the northern polar cap, has all but disappeared.
This "multi-year" ice is how many years old? Also is it formed from precipitation (which is low at the poles) or freezing of sea water?
- We have direct temperature measurements going back about 150-200 years, to go further back, we use a huge number of "temperature proxies", not just tree rings, but sedimentation data, ice-core data, pollen data, etc, etc - Geologic time has very little to do with this, we *know* climate has varied in the past, for many reasons and over many timescales, but that in no way "proves" that we are not the cause of the current changes
It dosn't prove that we are either. All that can be proven is that there has been a change, not what might have caused it. Claiming that "we can't think of another explanation so it must be due to human activity" is at best faith.
Measuring the amount of ice in the arctic is not easy, but we have been doing it quite accurately for at least 30 years (turns out the US Military was doing the measuring, but didn't share the data with scientists for a long time) - and we know enough to say that in those 30 years, and particularly in the last few years, the ice has been decreasing in ways that we are quite sure have not ever occured in historical times.
How do you know what had been happening prior to 1979? Do you have any measurements at all from the Romans? How about from the Moors?
The most recent data is *not* saying global warming has temporarily halted, that's a canard the "deniers" are spreading (the idea is that repeating a lie often enough makes it appear true).
It's rather more likely that the "true believers" would be making such claims as "temporarily halted". Rather than "the models have failed to correspond with observations, but we arn't sure why".
And on the idiotic reference to manifold/string theories : if one of those theories had been making predictions for 150-odd years, predictions which turn out to fit the data very very well,
What exactly has been making accurate predictions since the 1850's. The only obvious thing of note from 1859 would be a publication by a certain Charles Darwin... As for climate predictions there's the little matter of the ice age which was ment to be just around the corner abouit 40 years ago. Whatever happened to that.
When you can come up with a decent, evidence-supported argument
Something the "Global Warming", "Climate Change", "AGW", "whatever it is this year" lot appear to be having a little trouble with. Even before the emails got leaked.
Computerworld magazine cited the view of the RealClimate blog that what was not contained in the e-mails was the most interesting element: "There is no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy
The minimum number of people you need for a conspiracy is two. If you had a conspiracy between three people all several thousand miles apart then you could quite reasonably call that a "worldwide conspiracy".
To determine if there is one (or more) conspiracy going on you'd need to look at what the emails are saying. To determine if it is "worldwide" then the email addresses might be a big clue. e.g. if they are all from uea.ac.uk then it certainly isn't "worldwide".
Given the massive importance of this issue, and the extraordinary claims that have been made, I feel that extraordinary evidence is warranted. I do not think this makes me a "denialist". I think this makes me a skeptic: someone unwilling to assume that things are true, just because an authority figure says they are.
The term "denialist" or "denier" often appears to be applied to skeptics when there is a great deal of "political capital" invested in the "right" answer. For the whole AGW thing to be wrong would leave lots of people, including most of the world's "leaders", with a great deal of egg on their faces. For most of these people "saving face" is more important than and kind of objective truth.
No surprises here. Both of these publications long ago transitioned from hard science to activism, and having made their bed with the Warmites they're going to defend it no matter what the facts say.
Which makes you wonder what else these publications might be being less than honest about.
As a modeling and simulations expert, I've studied some of the code and find it abominable. Where I work these people would be *fired*, immediately and without reservation, for the work they did. The emails are *bad*, the code is *damning*.
Even (supposedly) much better models can't predict the weather. So what hope have any models of predicting "climate" over even a short period of time.
You speak of the US version of 'cellphone' as if it is different to the rest of the world's idea of 'cellphone',
Various technical aspects, including frequencies and transmission not often used elsewhere. Which can mean a US phone may be unusable elsewhere and a phone which can easily be used in many countries may be unusable in the US/Canada.
In most parts of the world mobile/cellular phone numbers have easily identifiable "area" codes which may cost more to the caller but have no cost the the reciever. Whereas in the US cellphones have regular numbers, but incomming calls may be charged. For the latter reason telesales ("phone spam") calls are forbidden. The only obvious exception is that Orange in the UK (and possible some other parts of Europe) do offer some phones with numbers (apparently) in a few major cities, which charge for incomming calls. They don't sell that many, even to business customers.
You should have said American wireless carriers. European wireless carriers don't get to play that game, nor do South American carriers, nor Asian carriers. So really the PCMag columnist is pretty myopic. The utterly bizarre wireless market that exists in the United States is nearly unique in the world,
Actually just about everything to do with telephones is different in the US. Even to the point where the likes of a NT DMS100 actually comes in North American and everywhere else on the planet versions. Though IIRC some of the smaller NANP countries use "rest of the world" hardware and software...
And since it's not like the Nokia N900 or any of its components are manufactured in the United States
How many phones are manufactured in the US (or the EU)?
also schools are usually cleaned everyday so there would be lest dust then in your house which i doubt you clean everyday.
They also tend to be non smoking areas where any pets are not free to roam at will.
I guess they're too busy allocating all their resources trying to find intelligent life in their class rooms...
If they don't find any fairly quickly that dosn't give much hope for the faculty and students.
Computer failures are much more likely as a result of regular power cycling than extended use, and the cost of parts replacement and down time far outweighs the cost of powering them regularly in low power mode.
Though in such a low powered mode they are unlikely to be running BOINC or anything else.
"A decent copyright/patent system promotes innovation."
Not only a "decent" one, but a constitutionally abidden one: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". Any copyright law that doesn't abide to this basic premise (like if it's focus is "to promote the benefit of some corporation") is against USA constitution.
One thing to remember is that US Constitution does not require copyrights (or patents) in the first place.
A decent copyright/patent system promotes innovation. Either extreme (no copyrights/patents or copyrights that last too long) will retard innovation.
Whilst it's quite obvious that excessive copyright and patent terms retard innovation it's very much a matter of faith that more moderate terms would actually promote innovation. Even assuming there is an optimal term and there is some way to reliably work this out. (Which may be different for software, movies, etc.) It may well be better to err on the side of "too little" than "too much".
That's really going to depend on the intended use. And on whether the intended use involves problems that a) can be efficiently parallelized, and more importantly, b) actually have been efficiently parallelized.
There's also the degree to which a task can be effectivly done in parallel (things get interesting when the number of parallel subtasks is greater than the number of execution units, especially where this isn't a multiple of the number of EUs and/or the subtasks are diverse.) which may well vary throughout the task including having to wait until the last of a set of subtasks has finished.
But unless each core gets its own memory bus and its own dedicated memory with its own cache,
Which is likely to give issues with memory coherence, "memory" effectivly becoming additional "cache" With a need for a sophisticated MMU to sort things out.
I rather expect that the only things that are going to be parallelized to their maximum potential are wait states. All that said, it will still probably run faster than a two- or four-core CPU for many tasks, but it won't be running 48 times faster.
Performance never scales linearly to number of CPU/cores even in an idea situation.
Cloud computing is certainly a big deal. I recently explained to my boss that instead of spending weeks going through tickets, bureaucracy, approvals, and procurement to get a server in our own datacenter, we could go to Amazon, type the credit card number, and be up-and-running with a few clicks!
Without any idea where your data actually is or who has access to it...
All that tinfoil for the walls...
:)
Assuming it's not already built in
If the cops give the impression of pick on someone, then it may look like they have lost whatever impartiality they may have.
The same thing will happen if they give the impression of ignoring (even protecting) law breakers. If anything they should hold the likes of other police officers and politicans to a higher standard than members of the general public.
Wrong, there is lots of UK evidence to show that laser guns can do strange things on angular surfaces or reflective surfaces and that they are a bit too specific in the point they measure. There are various cases of motorcycles being clocked and impossible speeds for the conditions/traffic etc.
Or possibly even just "impossible". Given that some police force managed to clock a Mini going faster than Thrust SSC...
Test have also had lasers register walls moving at 50mph due to operator error.
Which you'd expect to classify the thing as "not fit for purpose".
Except that science only requires observation as a postulate and no other 'leaps of faith'. That is the difference between science and religion. Science doesn't expect you to believe in a bearded man on a cloud that watches your every move, or in angels or in eternal damnation. Observation and thought, that's it.
Nothing stops scientists having religious beliefs. Also plenty of religious would discount "a bearded man on a cloud..." as being incompatable with their faith.
Priests and CEOs are both potentially dangerous, and quite likely to cover for their buddies; but you don't generally tell children that CEOs are trusted authority figures who deserve their respect and obedience.
Were do politicians, even cops, rate on how much children are told to blindly trust?