I think rather, something does need to be said here because the problems with climategate documents aren't that obvious.
For me, the problem is that we have scientists acting in part as ideologues and politicians. There are repeated examples of conflicts, concerns, and debates which are carefully hidden from public view, not because they are too esoteric for public consumption, but because it would dilute the message.
An example of the time was the Northern hemisphere tree ring data, which nose dives after about 1950. Yes, some "denialists" are going to be up in arms about an important temperature proxy diving, but "hiding the decline" was not the scientific solution to that concern. Yet we find around 30 examples of comparison graphs of temperature constructions which trim the tree ring data after 1950 or so.
However, rather than this being a "single lapse of judgement", to my knowledge, there is NOT A SINGLE graphic in "peer reviewed literature" that shows the Briffa decline in a spaghetti graph comparison of temperature reconstructions.
I've done a quick inventory below (and other examples will come to mind) and re-examined the handling of the Briffa reconstruction in the spaghetti graph in each article. In 22 of the 28 diagrams listed below, the Briffa reconstruction has been truncated to hide-the-decline (following the practice of IPCC AR3 where Mann had been Lead Author.) As an alternative to showing the decline, Mann, in 1999, proposed that IPCC simply not show the Briffa reconstruction. This practice has been followed in 6 of the 28 listed below, including the influential 2006 NAS report and 2009 EPA Endangerment Finding (which used the diagram from the NAS report.) But remarkably, not a single one contains a graphic comparing the actual Briffa reconstruction to other reconstructions.
There are two things to remember about this situation. First, the comic wouldn't have been made, if those elderly physicists had wholeheartedly agreed with the beliefs of the comic artist. The comic artist happens to believe in AGW and came up with an insulting comic to express his or her beliefs.
Second, elderly physicists can afford to express controversial opinions. Just because young physicists aren't endangering their future careers by taking a public stance on the state of climate research or the possibility of catastrophic climate change, doesn't mean that they agree.
It's intellectually dishonest to post that letter without giving the APS a chance to respond
Since the APS responded, that means your concern was misplaced. It's not reasonable to expect a Slashdot post to hold to your standards of intellectual dishonesty. Especially, when you were there to represent the APS side.
As to the downplaying of the funding received by APS members, I have a pair of simple questions. What was order of magnitude of this funding? What was the order of magnitude of the cost of issuing the above policy statement? I suspect it was tens of millions of dollars of funding per year defended for the cost of a one-time cost of a few thousand dollars.
I disagree. Disproving chance is redundant, this is already built into the scientific method. Collect data, come up with some explanations for it (model, hypothesis, theory), then test these on new data. Any time the data is capable of distinguishing between multiple "real" explanations then chance will also be ruled out.
"Disproving the null hypothesis" is a rudimentary statistical method for implementing the scientific method in cases where null hypotheses can exist (in particular, used in a sea of phenomena where correlation happens, but most phenomena are relatively independent of each other). It's not a complete waste of time, but it is an avenue for introducing crap research via confirmation bias. Nutrition research is chock full of studies that claim to show all sorts of irreproducible results that happened just because someone ran enough experiments or looked at enough possible correlations, and as a result found some just by statistical coincidence.
The tool can be useful, but only if you keep in mind how much searching you are doing. For example, if you compare a single pair of statistical sequences and get p=0.001 (in the not quite kosher interpretation of frequentist statistics, that's the probability that the two sequences correlate that much by random chance), then that could be significant, if you compare thousands of parameters and find a p=0.001 correlation from a pair, then that is expected just by random chance (it might even be lower than expected by random chance).
Null hypothesis testing coupled with good experiment design and Bayesian statistical analysis can help a lot. Because a key problem with hypothesis building, is that just because you have a hypothesis that can explain observed phenomena, doesn't mean that it's scientifically valid.
just like in the private sector we have seen more and more engineering called R&D
R&D is research and development. That latter part is the obvious part where engineering comes in. When you also consider that a lot of experimental setups require good engineering skills, then it's no surprise that engineering shows up a lot. Certain engineering backgrounds as a results are really good fits for experimental pure science.
As to your other complaints, it's supply and demand. There's an oversupply of PhDs. So fund sources can be more picky as a result.
Short term thinking is a "moral hazard" consequence of the elimination of a lot of future-oriented risk. We can use a lot of words that have "corporate" in them, but bottom line is that public funding and government regulation lead to this whether due to "corporate capture" or other causes. Then it all gets run through the media filter which exaggerates the flaws of just about everything.
The incentives are all about grant money and outside (the campus) capital. As a result, the science takes a back seat to market economics, market-ing (both of corporate partners and of academic institutions themselves, which increasingly operate in a competitive marketplace for enrollments), management concerns, investors, etc.
And public funding sources. Calling the whole of scientific endeavors "market economics" is disingenuous. There are several things to note. First, scientific research has usually been results-oriented and short term goal-oriented throughout its history.
There usually have been "market economics" at play in who gets funded and what they can do with that funding. The fantasy world where scientists do science first has never existed except for the rare cases where the scientist was independently wealthy and could fund their own research.
Also, I have yet to see a better way to fund science than via relatively free market competition. I think it reasonable that if you think there's a better way, then you describe this better way.
If this were true, then we would see some flavor of actual free market capitalism in "many" fields. What we see in practice is that a lot of fields simply have little to no private funding and are instead funded mostly by public sources, like climate research or astronomy.
and has progressed now to where various political factions essentially 'buy off' people with college degrees (I won't call them scientists) to get up in front of people and publicly throw support behind their positions
Let's discuss these factions for a bit. There're obvious capital factions like Big Oil or tobacco companies. But then there're environmentalist and labor-oriented NGOs. There're political parties and government bureaucracies. There're religious cults and ideological factions. There're scammers and crooks. There're journalists looking for an eye-catching story. I think calling this vast gaming "capitalism" is delusional since it misses the point: when there are enough stakes to the research, be it capitalist or not, then someone will compromise their integrity for advantage.
Noncapitalist societies have had their own problems with science. For example, the Soviets had Lysenkoism in biology, polywater (which still lingers with us in the homeopathic remedies which depend for their alleged curative properties on trace or zero amounts of a substance in water), and economics. Nazism is notorious for its eugenics-based scientific rationalizations.
Elected officials and bureaucrats are not natural allies. They have some things in common, sure, but they also are at odds in motivation and goals.
And in a democratic state, the power should be concentrated in the elected officials. So yes, it is better to have a competent but corrupt elected official than the incompetent version, because then the power is concentrated more in the elected official and their motivations (such as appeasing voters enough to get reelected) than in the bureaucracy.
On an American university campus, if a woman claims she has been raped, then that means she has been raped. There are severe penalties for her rapist.
Unless of course, she wasn't actually raped. Then it doesn't mean that she was raped. And with how screwed up US campuses are these days, even a false accusation of rape can have severe penalties.
Why wouldn't this be the reason for the request? Investigator isn't the same thing as prosecutor. For someone investigating the alleged rape it would be pretty convenient if it could be shown that the accusation is fabricated. No need to prove intent or anything, just shut down the case and move on.
Both parties agree to the claim that they had sex. The police haven't presented a reason to need DNA evidence.
I don't necessarily agree with the OP that there is evidence that 1 Billion is the right number, but there is ample evidence that it cannot support 7 billion in the long term.
I disagree. But let's go through your argument.
We're exhausting arable land at an alarming rate, and have done so to the extent that, without petroleum-based chemical fertilizer, nothing will grow anymore in the scales that are required to feed us. Organic, chemical-free agriculture cannot support our numbers. No way. No how.
There are several problems with these assertions. First, while I agree we are going through arable land at an alarming rate, it doesn't need to be that way. Developed world agriculture is far more sustainable than the worst cases.
Second, fertilizer is not petroleum-based. It is nitrogen-based. Methane from natural gas, which is not petroleum-based, can be used to fix atmospheric nitrogen to yield ammonia, a common fertilizer component. Similarly, there are a variety of nitrogen-fixing crops like clover, alfalfa, and peas/lentils, which can be used to fix nitrogen in situ (especially, if the crop is plowed under).
Also, just look at what we do to massive stocks of animals, too, living in squalid, severely inhumane conditions
So what? Animals happen to not be human. Why should I be concerned?
Last I checked, not nearly all of the Earth's 7 billion inhabitants have clean water, let alone enough food. Less than half of the global population has access to sanitary water and sewer.
It wouldn't require that much in the way of infrastructure to change that. The developed world already did it and they started poorer than the current developing world.
In my view, the arguments about sustainability are silly. It all boils down to stability of global scale infrastructure. If the infrastructure stays relatively stable, then we can have a much larger sustainable human presence, if it doesn't then we probably would go through some sort of die off to a temporarily smaller human population.
Misuse of agriculture resources is one such instability. We can manage these well, and in large part we have. But large portions of the world have not. It's sustainable, but that doesn't mean it will be sustained.
In my view, we should have different concerns. More people in smaller areas means a tougher control problem. For example (to use the recent gun control debate as example), if I shoot a high caliber hand gun blindly in deep wilderness, it is likely to affect no one except to scare a few animals. If I do so in an apartment complex, then the bullet will probably travel through several apartments (and perhaps several people!) before the bullet comes to rest.
In some high traffic US cities, if I stubbornly travel at the speed limit in the passing lane of a highway, I can create a traffic jam that affects hundreds of people. Not so in a rural road where I might see another traveler once an hour.
Crime is another area where high populations are important. There's economies of scale or crime to having dense human populations. There are more victims, more places to hide, and less chance of getting caught, than in a rural, low population environment.
The problem here is that simple human misbehavior can cause more problems and harm in a crowded urban environment than in a sparse, rural environment. Hence. the incentive to control human behavior is bigger in an urban environment. And the consequences of a society-wide loss of control of human behavior can be a disaster on its own. High population creates a potential for risk that must always be guarded against with more extreme safeguards required as the population grows.
It depends on location, I bet. New York City, for example, starting implementing a lot of walking beats again about that time and they're still doing it as far as I know.
I don't buy that at all. While the cat is away the mice will play. Just because your highly visible, elected official is incompetent, doesn't mean that the bureaucrats are. At least a competence official can keep the bureaucrats in line.
I think helicopters would work better than drones here because they're a visible and audible reminder of the police. I think seeing a police officer walking down the street would work as well. There are a bunch of impulsive people who will behave better, if they saw a cop earlier that night.
I believe most of the core of a white dwarf consists of iron nuclei and most of its internal heat comes from the supernova with a little additional gravitational compression over time, unless it happens to be pulling matter in, say from a star it orbits.
Anything can be attributed to global warming. It doesn't mean that it actually is due to global warming. And increased frequency of extremely cold weather is one of those things that I just don't buy coming from global warming.
Because when the sun burns out we need to find a new home anyway. It's also 4 orders of magnitude further away than the best projections for fissile fuel on earth.
50,000-100,000 years or so is still a long time. I don't see the point of this concern especially since there's fissionables elsewhere in the Solar System (and a vast amount of them on Earth in addition to the amount we can get currently).
Slashdot Mirror
For me, the problem is that we have scientists acting in part as ideologues and politicians. There are repeated examples of conflicts, concerns, and debates which are carefully hidden from public view, not because they are too esoteric for public consumption, but because it would dilute the message.
An example of the time was the Northern hemisphere tree ring data, which nose dives after about 1950. Yes, some "denialists" are going to be up in arms about an important temperature proxy diving, but "hiding the decline" was not the scientific solution to that concern. Yet we find around 30 examples of comparison graphs of temperature constructions which trim the tree ring data after 1950 or so.
However, rather than this being a "single lapse of judgement", to my knowledge, there is NOT A SINGLE graphic in "peer reviewed literature" that shows the Briffa decline in a spaghetti graph comparison of temperature reconstructions.
I've done a quick inventory below (and other examples will come to mind) and re-examined the handling of the Briffa reconstruction in the spaghetti graph in each article. In 22 of the 28 diagrams listed below, the Briffa reconstruction has been truncated to hide-the-decline (following the practice of IPCC AR3 where Mann had been Lead Author.) As an alternative to showing the decline, Mann, in 1999, proposed that IPCC simply not show the Briffa reconstruction. This practice has been followed in 6 of the 28 listed below, including the influential 2006 NAS report and 2009 EPA Endangerment Finding (which used the diagram from the NAS report.) But remarkably, not a single one contains a graphic comparing the actual Briffa reconstruction to other reconstructions.
There are two things to remember about this situation. First, the comic wouldn't have been made, if those elderly physicists had wholeheartedly agreed with the beliefs of the comic artist. The comic artist happens to believe in AGW and came up with an insulting comic to express his or her beliefs.
Second, elderly physicists can afford to express controversial opinions. Just because young physicists aren't endangering their future careers by taking a public stance on the state of climate research or the possibility of catastrophic climate change, doesn't mean that they agree.
It's intellectually dishonest to post that letter without giving the APS a chance to respond
Since the APS responded, that means your concern was misplaced. It's not reasonable to expect a Slashdot post to hold to your standards of intellectual dishonesty. Especially, when you were there to represent the APS side.
As to the downplaying of the funding received by APS members, I have a pair of simple questions. What was order of magnitude of this funding? What was the order of magnitude of the cost of issuing the above policy statement? I suspect it was tens of millions of dollars of funding per year defended for the cost of a one-time cost of a few thousand dollars.
I disagree. Disproving chance is redundant, this is already built into the scientific method. Collect data, come up with some explanations for it (model, hypothesis, theory), then test these on new data. Any time the data is capable of distinguishing between multiple "real" explanations then chance will also be ruled out.
"Disproving the null hypothesis" is a rudimentary statistical method for implementing the scientific method in cases where null hypotheses can exist (in particular, used in a sea of phenomena where correlation happens, but most phenomena are relatively independent of each other). It's not a complete waste of time, but it is an avenue for introducing crap research via confirmation bias. Nutrition research is chock full of studies that claim to show all sorts of irreproducible results that happened just because someone ran enough experiments or looked at enough possible correlations, and as a result found some just by statistical coincidence.
The tool can be useful, but only if you keep in mind how much searching you are doing. For example, if you compare a single pair of statistical sequences and get p=0.001 (in the not quite kosher interpretation of frequentist statistics, that's the probability that the two sequences correlate that much by random chance), then that could be significant, if you compare thousands of parameters and find a p=0.001 correlation from a pair, then that is expected just by random chance (it might even be lower than expected by random chance).
Null hypothesis testing coupled with good experiment design and Bayesian statistical analysis can help a lot. Because a key problem with hypothesis building, is that just because you have a hypothesis that can explain observed phenomena, doesn't mean that it's scientifically valid.
just like in the private sector we have seen more and more engineering called R&D
R&D is research and development. That latter part is the obvious part where engineering comes in. When you also consider that a lot of experimental setups require good engineering skills, then it's no surprise that engineering shows up a lot. Certain engineering backgrounds as a results are really good fits for experimental pure science.
As to your other complaints, it's supply and demand. There's an oversupply of PhDs. So fund sources can be more picky as a result.
Then lengthen the lifespan of a generation.
Short term thinking is a "moral hazard" consequence of the elimination of a lot of future-oriented risk. We can use a lot of words that have "corporate" in them, but bottom line is that public funding and government regulation lead to this whether due to "corporate capture" or other causes. Then it all gets run through the media filter which exaggerates the flaws of just about everything.
The incentives are all about grant money and outside (the campus) capital. As a result, the science takes a back seat to market economics, market-ing (both of corporate partners and of academic institutions themselves, which increasingly operate in a competitive marketplace for enrollments), management concerns, investors, etc.
And public funding sources. Calling the whole of scientific endeavors "market economics" is disingenuous. There are several things to note. First, scientific research has usually been results-oriented and short term goal-oriented throughout its history.
There usually have been "market economics" at play in who gets funded and what they can do with that funding. The fantasy world where scientists do science first has never existed except for the rare cases where the scientist was independently wealthy and could fund their own research.
Also, I have yet to see a better way to fund science than via relatively free market competition. I think it reasonable that if you think there's a better way, then you describe this better way.
and has progressed now to where various political factions essentially 'buy off' people with college degrees (I won't call them scientists) to get up in front of people and publicly throw support behind their positions
Let's discuss these factions for a bit. There're obvious capital factions like Big Oil or tobacco companies. But then there're environmentalist and labor-oriented NGOs. There're political parties and government bureaucracies. There're religious cults and ideological factions. There're scammers and crooks. There're journalists looking for an eye-catching story. I think calling this vast gaming "capitalism" is delusional since it misses the point: when there are enough stakes to the research, be it capitalist or not, then someone will compromise their integrity for advantage.
Noncapitalist societies have had their own problems with science. For example, the Soviets had Lysenkoism in biology, polywater (which still lingers with us in the homeopathic remedies which depend for their alleged curative properties on trace or zero amounts of a substance in water), and economics. Nazism is notorious for its eugenics-based scientific rationalizations.
Because it isn't much of a step from there to "people in khallow's class are not in my class. Why should I be concerned?"
Except that there is a huge step in reality. You will get decades in prison for murdering someone as opposed to an animal.
And you are right. I have considerable lack of concern on this issue. How about you comment on the other stuff that I have concern about?
Back at you.
Elected officials and bureaucrats are not natural allies. They have some things in common, sure, but they also are at odds in motivation and goals.
And in a democratic state, the power should be concentrated in the elected officials. So yes, it is better to have a competent but corrupt elected official than the incompetent version, because then the power is concentrated more in the elected official and their motivations (such as appeasing voters enough to get reelected) than in the bureaucracy.
I'm good with "nothing" here. I don't see what government is going to do to address these issues that's better than doing nothing at all.
Given that this is an economic argument, I'm not seeing the basis for complaint.
On an American university campus, if a woman claims she has been raped, then that means she has been raped. There are severe penalties for her rapist.
Unless of course, she wasn't actually raped. Then it doesn't mean that she was raped. And with how screwed up US campuses are these days, even a false accusation of rape can have severe penalties.
Why wouldn't this be the reason for the request? Investigator isn't the same thing as prosecutor. For someone investigating the alleged rape it would be pretty convenient if it could be shown that the accusation is fabricated. No need to prove intent or anything, just shut down the case and move on.
Both parties agree to the claim that they had sex. The police haven't presented a reason to need DNA evidence.
I don't necessarily agree with the OP that there is evidence that 1 Billion is the right number, but there is ample evidence that it cannot support 7 billion in the long term.
I disagree. But let's go through your argument.
We're exhausting arable land at an alarming rate, and have done so to the extent that, without petroleum-based chemical fertilizer, nothing will grow anymore in the scales that are required to feed us. Organic, chemical-free agriculture cannot support our numbers. No way. No how.
There are several problems with these assertions. First, while I agree we are going through arable land at an alarming rate, it doesn't need to be that way. Developed world agriculture is far more sustainable than the worst cases.
Second, fertilizer is not petroleum-based. It is nitrogen-based. Methane from natural gas, which is not petroleum-based, can be used to fix atmospheric nitrogen to yield ammonia, a common fertilizer component. Similarly, there are a variety of nitrogen-fixing crops like clover, alfalfa, and peas/lentils, which can be used to fix nitrogen in situ (especially, if the crop is plowed under).
Also, just look at what we do to massive stocks of animals, too, living in squalid, severely inhumane conditions
So what? Animals happen to not be human. Why should I be concerned?
Last I checked, not nearly all of the Earth's 7 billion inhabitants have clean water, let alone enough food. Less than half of the global population has access to sanitary water and sewer.
It wouldn't require that much in the way of infrastructure to change that. The developed world already did it and they started poorer than the current developing world.
In my view, the arguments about sustainability are silly. It all boils down to stability of global scale infrastructure. If the infrastructure stays relatively stable, then we can have a much larger sustainable human presence, if it doesn't then we probably would go through some sort of die off to a temporarily smaller human population.
Misuse of agriculture resources is one such instability. We can manage these well, and in large part we have. But large portions of the world have not. It's sustainable, but that doesn't mean it will be sustained.
In my view, we should have different concerns. More people in smaller areas means a tougher control problem. For example (to use the recent gun control debate as example), if I shoot a high caliber hand gun blindly in deep wilderness, it is likely to affect no one except to scare a few animals. If I do so in an apartment complex, then the bullet will probably travel through several apartments (and perhaps several people!) before the bullet comes to rest.
In some high traffic US cities, if I stubbornly travel at the speed limit in the passing lane of a highway, I can create a traffic jam that affects hundreds of people. Not so in a rural road where I might see another traveler once an hour.
Crime is another area where high populations are important. There's economies of scale or crime to having dense human populations. There are more victims, more places to hide, and less chance of getting caught, than in a rural, low population environment.
The problem here is that simple human misbehavior can cause more problems and harm in a crowded urban environment than in a sparse, rural environment. Hence. the incentive to control human behavior is bigger in an urban environment. And the consequences of a society-wide loss of control of human behavior can be a disaster on its own. High population creates a potential for risk that must always be guarded against with more extreme safeguards required as the population grows.
It depends on location, I bet. New York City, for example, starting implementing a lot of walking beats again about that time and they're still doing it as far as I know.
I don't buy it either. If your real-time message passing system can be thrown off by modest clock anomalies, then there's something wrong with it.
Sure you could do it that way but why ??
To get funding for your FOSS project.
I don't buy that at all. While the cat is away the mice will play. Just because your highly visible, elected official is incompetent, doesn't mean that the bureaucrats are. At least a competence official can keep the bureaucrats in line.
I think helicopters would work better than drones here because they're a visible and audible reminder of the police. I think seeing a police officer walking down the street would work as well. There are a bunch of impulsive people who will behave better, if they saw a cop earlier that night.
I believe most of the core of a white dwarf consists of iron nuclei and most of its internal heat comes from the supernova with a little additional gravitational compression over time, unless it happens to be pulling matter in, say from a star it orbits.
Anything can be attributed to global warming. It doesn't mean that it actually is due to global warming. And increased frequency of extremely cold weather is one of those things that I just don't buy coming from global warming.
Because when the sun burns out we need to find a new home anyway. It's also 4 orders of magnitude further away than the best projections for fissile fuel on earth.
50,000-100,000 years or so is still a long time. I don't see the point of this concern especially since there's fissionables elsewhere in the Solar System (and a vast amount of them on Earth in addition to the amount we can get currently).