manning is a traitor. HE will always be viewed as such.
Snowden too.
By stupid rednecks, sure. The type of people who think (ok, that's a legal fiction) that they are right not because of their actions, but by default. The type who "thinks" that there is a finite supply of bad people in the world, and that we can solve all our problems by killing or incarcerating them, never mind the collateral damage. The type who may have heard of human rights, but does not understand that they apply to all humans, even those that disagree with them.
I'm not a big fan of Assange, but he wrote an excellent statement on the Manning case, quoting John Adams: "“Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right and a desire to know.” He does not quote the second part, but I find it just as applicable: "...but besides this, they have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean of the characters and conduct of their rulers."
If you look at how Manning was treated both pre- and post-trial, its "as incontrovertible as geometry to any enlightened community of minds" that the people responsible for that treatment are guilty of severe crimes under both national and international laws - regardless of what Manning had done. But, as the presidential election has shown, "this community is an insult to the world" (to steal from Henry Drummond/Spencer Tracy), and so the chance for actual justice is remote.
IWould prefer a trial where he would be allowed to make his case. Manning wasn't afforded that opportunity either.
Huh? Manning was convicted - hence there was a trial. What use would another trial be?
Well for one it would be a trial against Snowden, not against Manning. And the request was for "a trial where [the defendant] would be allowed to make his case", not a secret trial by a Mickey Mouse court with a pre-determined outcome.
It does. But at the moment, getting 5% or even 7% for a small time investor seems to be unlikely. And the compound interest effect is contributing less if, realistically, your income increases over time as you get experience and promotions - you're able to safe less in your early career, with lower pay and (often) higher expenses.
In other words you have a %2.6 chance of being a millionaire in the U.S vs a %1 in France.
Note quite. If you work both hard and at least a little smart in the US you are almost sure to become a millionaire by retirement. It would take less than 10% of median income in retirement savings over a 45 year career to reach millionaire status (in 2017 dollars). Either way for it to be nearly 3x harder to become a millionaire, which is by no means rich for a someone in the developed world, in France vs the USA is a serious problem.
Well, that seems to be dubious math to me. According to this article, median personal income was about US$ 32000/year in 2005, and has mostly gone down since then. 10% of that is US$ 32000, and summed over 45 years, gives you US$ 144000, or US$ 856000 short of the first million. You need a very good return on investment to make up that gap (and that ignores inflation).
Moreover, the basic comparison is skewed. In the US, you mostly rely on your own accumulated funds for retirement. Social security is not a big contributor for high-earners. In France, state pensions kick in at age 62, and you get full benefits after 41 years of employment or at age 67, whichever comes first. State pensions are a significant part of retirement funding, but don't show up as personal wealth. And, IIRC, basic health insurance is free for pensioners - another factual and tangible benefit not accounted for by just looking at personal wealth.
I'm WAY more interested in the real work boston dynamics and others are doing in the feild of robots. I'm WAY more interested in the technology breakthroughs david sodenburg is claiming with liquid metal batteries. The EM drive is definately tickling my fancy right now as well.
I don't know why these kinds of stories pop up. I half figure the editors love science and technology the way I do...these complete tabloid toilet trash stories though about emotions and social issues are really annoying me. None of it has anything to do with hard engineering science or even point to new ideas or possibilities it's just an emotional wank/opinion fest with no content.
It's a bit naive to think that a world with robots will be just like our world, only with robots, or that a world with much better batteries will be just like our world, only with better batteries. The human and social implications and moral questions of technology are just as hard, and just as important, and just as interesting as the pure science and technology. Science Fiction learned that in the 60s.
Better robots will destroy more manufacturing jobs. Better AI will destroy more simple office jobs. To quote from Luna: New Moon: The financialised economy didn't need workers and mechanisation was driving the middle class into a race to the bottom.
Alternatively, these techniques will create wealth for all and help us liberate human creativity, as e.g. in Ian M. Bank's Culture. But thinking about which trajectory we are on is anything but boring.
A fair number of posters here despise women, and view anyone who advocates for female empowerment as an SJW who needs to be derided, trolled, threatened with rape, or any other mechanism possible to silence anyone with a vagina.
I have a hard time coming up with somebody less fitting the SJW stereotype than Hitchens. But I'm quite sure he would adopt the term with aplomb.
If we succeed in destroying ourselves as a species on Earth, it will probably be with a nuclear war. But even that is a situation that essentially peaked in the 1980's, and nations have taken steps to back-pedal from it since then.
Well, climate change and nuclear war are not necessarily independent. With Himalaya glaciers shrinking, water supply for India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and even China will become a lot less stable. There are 3 billion people in these countries, and 3 of the 4 states already have nuclear weapons. If they start to seriously compete for limited water resources, things may easily become very ugly. There is a reason why China is in Tibet, and why India and Pakistan are fighting a slow war over what currently is an extremely inhospitable ice desert.
And what do you think will happen to the stability of the region if a few tens of millions of (mostly Muslim) Bangladeshis will be forced to flee into India because sea level rise is going to flood significant parts of the Bengal delta, one of the most fertile and most densely populated areas of the planet?
The key to keeping the price of energy low is to always be ready to increase production. Putting it off for five years would put us five years behind the curve. Look for Obama's order to be replaced by late 2017.
The key to keeping the perceived price of energy low is to externalise a large part of the cost - e.g. the health costs of particulate emissions from burning coal and petrol, the cost of nuclear wast processing and insurance against nuclear accidents, the cost of military intervention to keep oil-rich regions under control, and yes, the cost of climate change. We should really find a way to internalise these costs, so that the consumer price of energy reflects the real cost to society, and we avoid a tragedy of the commons.
Well-operating markets are great tools for optimisation. But in order for them to serve the community, we must set them up to work appropriately. Otherwise the market will gladly optimise the destruction of "free" shared resources.
Bullshit. There aren't that many climate researchers in the world. And Stephan, I have a bit of hate for you right now for making me read this stupid piece of shit just so I could refute your argument. Here's the problem right in the methodology:
To find the number of recent articles that reject AGW, I used the following method:
[...]
Notice that the author does not actually count climate research papers, doesn't actually find authors who refute or affirm AGW or other climate change theory, and doesn't actually count climate researchers.
Waste of my time.
You do understand that by casting a wide net, Powell increases the chance of finding sceptical papers, right?
As for the number of climate scientists, we can do a simple Fermi approximation. There are apparently around 40000 universities in the world (which jibes nicely with a bit over 400 universities for approximately 80 million inhabitants in Germany). Going with the German sample, about 1/4 to 3/4 of these are research universities (depending on your definition) - so call it 20000. Assuming that half of these do climate research and that the average research group has 10 people, we are at 100000 climate scientists just at universities - without counting NASA (which spends approximately US$ 2e9 on Earth sciences - that should pay about 10000 people alone) or NOAA (with a nearly US$ 5e9 budget - another 25000 people) or Max Planck Institutes in Germany or JAXA in Japan, or any of the corresponding organisations in other states. Now neither NASA not NOAA is all scientists, but it should be clear that 69000 is not an implausible number of climate scientists.
I first wanted to say thank you for holding your scientific position here in the face of ignorant objections.
AthanasiusKircher, this sort of research is as profoundly unscientific as it comes (including the stuff you quote from Cook et al). And your comments are just as bad. For example, consensus about what?
Notice that the alleged 97% consensus is relatively accurate when the claim is that there is global warming. It goes down once you add that the global warming is human-induced. And then it goes down much further when the claim is that the impact is catastrophic or severe over the next 50 to 100 years to 41%. 41% is a bit less than 97%, right?
I suspect you will find similar divided opinion on the matter of whether immediate mitigation efforts are required right now.
James L. Powell's 99.99% paper is ridiculous and you can see that just by looking through the methodology. It doesn't measure what it claims to measure. You can't get more damning than that. Yet once again, we have these slashdot posts talking about scientific positions and holding the line in the face of "ignorant objections".
You may not like Powell, but he is entirely clear about his methodologies, about how he measures what he measures, and about what data he used. You can certainly disagree with his conclusion, but if you want to be taken serious, you should actually do the work of re-doing the analysis with the same transparency and provide a clear argument for your different interpretation (if it still differs - "Powell is totally wrong, the consensus is only 99.3%";--).
I think we are now into infinite regression territory. Everybody who is scientifically literate and looks at the primary literature (and by than I don't mean propaganda blogs) can easily determine the prevailing position. And with a bit of experience in reviewing it's also easy to see the quality (rare) and scope (narrow) of the very few disagreeing publications. But that apparently is not good enough, and we get nit-picking from people who don't like the consensus. What we don't see are significant publications providing alternative explanations.
So now we have meta-analyses, where people go to great length to analyse papers, to count positions, to interview scientists, and to publish their findings in the peer-reviewed literature. But that apparently is not good enough either, and we get nit-picking from people who don't like the consensus. What we don't see are significant academic publications showing that there is indeed no consensus - the best we get is the occasional opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal or the 17 year old fraudulent Oregon Petition.
What's next? Meta-meta studies? Meta-meta-meta-studies? As far as I can tell, the opposition to the consensus is largely immune to rational arguments - "global warming is a hoax invented by the Chinese" is one of the more prominent stupidities in this field.
The latest analysis among actually publishing scientists [sagepub.com] (by James Powell [wikipedia.org]) finds "above 99.99%", or what he calls "virtual unanimity".
In other words, a crap study. There aren't that many climate researchers in the world to maintain a 10,000 to 1 ratio over the publishing skeptics by probably two orders of magnitude.
Powell counted 69406 to 4, and apparently the referees and editors at the Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society agreed. The full paper including the methodology is online, as are the data sets.
Former climate sceptic Richard Muller [wikipedia.org] got funded by the Koch brothers, and, with his team, did a completely independent reconstruction of the temperature record of the last.
He wasn't a skeptic: that was propaganda and you fell for it.
But disproving an establish theory is real science, and real science has no place in this debate! All we need is Al Gore.
97%? You must mean 97% of a cherry picked group of 74 people, quite a few of whom lack actual backgrounds in climate or meteorological science.
Well, there are several sources for the ca. 97%, but they seem to have been too conservative (in the non-political sense of the term). The latest analysis among actually publishing scientists (by James Powell) finds "above 99.99%", or what he calls "virtual unanimity". The fact that several studies with different methodologies all find support in the high 95+% is a nice example of consilience, and that usually is takes as very strong evidence for a fact.
Of course an alternative explanation is that all the scientists, all the editors, and all the scientific organisations are conspiring to keep THE TRUTH from us, with only a small number of heroic conservative think tanks and fossil fuel companies desperately trying to defend it. You take your pick...
Sadly, you are very wrong. One of the biggest problems ot the scientific fields of today is precisely that debunking existing theories achieves literally nothing for the people doing the debunking.
Scientist careers today live and die by citations - how often their published work is cited by others. The problem is that published works that debunk an existing theory get cited several orders of magnitute LESS than the work they are trying to debunk. Worse yet, among people who actually read the "works of disproval", the majority only slightly change their opinion of the work being criticized.
So no, in the current environment it is highly improfitable and illogical for a scientist to engage in anything but original work (or work that at least looks original).
"Debunking" is a very soft term. But if you look e.g. at "Unidentified curved bacilli on gastric epithelium in active chronic gastritis" (by Warren and Marshall), which identified a bacterial cause for most peptic ulcers, and followup-paper "Prospective double-blind trial of duodenal ulcer relapse after eradication of Campylobacter pylori", "debunking" the prevailing theory that fatty diets and stress are the primary causes of ulcers, they received over 4000 and over 1000 citations, respectively. That is more than many scientists collect in a lifetime.
Or, too look more closely, "Proxy climatic and environmental changes of the past 1000 years" by Soon and Baliunas received 190 citations, despite being utter crap. That's apparently more than any other paper by Willie Soon, and in particular more than any of the papers on astrophysics he ever wrote.
If you want to see the oppositions disproval, then you Need to fund their research equally, just like the researchers received the massive funding for their work who actually started off with assumption that greenhouse-gas-caused climate change exists and is caused by humans.
The ones who assume work doesn't prove the foundation of their research is true though,
they just further developed the theory, which doesn't receive adequate funding for critical truth analysis.
LOL. For any scientist, disproving an established theory is a dream come true. This is the stuff to make careers. And it's not as if people haven't tried. Former climate sceptic Richard Muller got funded by the Koch brothers, and, with his team, did a completely independent reconstruction of the temperature record of the last. Of course, he came up with essentially the same results NASA, NOAA, and the HadCRUT team had previously found, and, as a good scientist, changed his position in response to the data.
Of course, we don't fund science by desired result, but by the importance of the questions asked and the plausibility that progress towards an answer can be made. Assuming equal quality of grant applications, if 97% of working scientist hold one broad position, you would expect 97% of funding to go to this group. And, from what I have seen of so-called "sceptic" science, "equal quality" would be a long stretch...
Its not a fallacy to make such an association as its directly relavant to the subject matter of how academia handles theories that question estabilished beliefs. Further Ignaz Seemelweis DID have evidence to back up his claim; Additionaly Darwin did not have as easy a time of it as you seem to be suggesting.
You seem to be the one guilty of such a fallacy by associating those who make correct claims with those who make incorrect claims when both have been rejected by academia. Look under the heading of "Guilt by association as an ad hominem fallacy" from the article you refered to. As it is a fallacy to treat the two sets as equivalent it is wrong to excuse missing important correct theories because other people make wild theories.
Well, the case of Semmelweis is not that simple. For one, his observations were correct - hand-washing of hospital staff with a solution of calcium hypochlorite did reduce incidence of puerperal fever -, but his theory that this was due to "cadaverous matter" was wrong, and he got lucky that his cleansing agent was antibacterial. It took until Pasteur and Koch came up with the modern germ theory of disease that the mechanism was reasonably understood. Also, Semmelweis became embroiled in the political fallout of the 1848 revolutions, which slowed down the scientific discourse. And despite this, it only took about 20 years until Lister developed antiseptic techniques that were widely accepted. Pons and Fleischmann gave their press conference in 1989, now 27 years ago, and that in an age when communication takes days to seconds, not months, to cross the globe.
As you yourself seem to acknowledge, it takes significant time and evidence until a theory reaches scientific acceptance. A new, competing, theory needs to be at least similarly compelling to be accepted. Scientist are naturally sceptic. To quote Sagan again: "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" - a sentiment shared by Laplace and Hume. The vast majority of claims that would overturn accepted scientific theories are complete crap. Of those that are serious and not obvious nonsense, most are still wrong. That's why the onus is on the proponent to demonstrate that they understand the field they work in, and that they have carefully considered other options and potential errors before people start spending resources on new claims.
Yes, you're right. No idea how that happened - I think I pasted the link directly. Must have clicked in the wrong place somewhere. I was referring to Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar of 1.4 solar masses...
Through the last 200+ years, scientists have had the cycle of someone saying they're wrong, they resist it, then it's proven right, and they look like stubborn and very unscientific idiots then repeat the cycle.
I think the poster boy for this is Ignaz Semmelweis. The scientific community dismissed his results out of pride, and thousands died as a result.
This is just a variant of the Galileo Gambit. Yes, over the last 200 years there have been several instances where "science" (as in the majority of scientists) has been sceptical to accept paradigm-changing new claims. Semmelweis is one example, as is Alfred Wegener with his idea of continental drift. But for every genius causing a major shift in scientific opinion, there have been legions of bozos proposing perpetuum mobiles, morphic fields, magnetic water cures, electric universes, and other crap. And on the other hand, many earth-shattering new theories like relativity (both versions) and evolution have been rather quickly accepted, because they were presented with convincing arguments and testable hypotheses. As Sagan said: they also laughed at Bozo the Clown...
It's a guest blog contribution, not an article by Scientific American staff. Unless it's backed by some real science, it's not significant. The first author, Steven Krivit, is a journalist with a long history of publishing borderline claims on "Low Energy Nuclear Reactions", the newish euphemism for "Cold Fusion" - i.e. he makes suggestive claims, but keeps just south of complete bullshit, to maintain some kind of intellectual deniability.
Notice how in this article he name-drops Chandrasekhar to bolster the reputation of Lewis Larsen and thus the so-called "Widom-Larsen theory" without explicitly endorsing it or claiming it explains the purported experimental evidence.
That doesn't make any sense. One person leaving his car at a supercharger too long is ruining it for who? The others who leave their car at the supercharger too long?
Everybody else who needs to charge their car, maybe while on the way to stop a new fracking bore hole near the San Andreas rift, or to stop Dr. Evil from testing his new device under Yellowstone, or maybe just of a way to perform brain surgery on the child that will in 20 years defend the planet against the Bugs from Outer Space.
Your absolutely irrational. His real estate empire is big enough that it can't be divested in a meaningful time frame, and to attempt so would seriously damage that part of the real estate market.
Of course he could get rid of his empire - he could sell it for 10 cents on the dollar to some non-profit, which slowly sells of the assets. If he is really worth 10 billion, that would leave him one billion - or, assuming he retires in 2020, and manages to stay alive another 50 years ("the greatest age ever seen"), 20 million a year just from the capital, without any profits from investment. If he gets a return of 2 percent, that's 20 million a year forever - or more per year than a typical well-educated, well-employed software-engineer makes in a lifetime.
If he doesn't sell, either he's greedy, or he know it's not worth remotely what he claims.
Slashdot Mirror
Manning is a traitor, Snowden is a hero, and you are a bigot.
Isn't it convenient that the world is nice and simple and black&white?
manning is a traitor. HE will always be viewed as such.
Snowden too.
By stupid rednecks, sure. The type of people who think (ok, that's a legal fiction) that they are right not because of their actions, but by default. The type who "thinks" that there is a finite supply of bad people in the world, and that we can solve all our problems by killing or incarcerating them, never mind the collateral damage. The type who may have heard of human rights, but does not understand that they apply to all humans, even those that disagree with them.
I'm not a big fan of Assange, but he wrote an excellent statement on the Manning case, quoting John Adams: "“Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right and a desire to know.” He does not quote the second part, but I find it just as applicable: "...but besides this, they have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean of the characters and conduct of their rulers."
If you look at how Manning was treated both pre- and post-trial, its "as incontrovertible as geometry to any enlightened community of minds" that the people responsible for that treatment are guilty of severe crimes under both national and international laws - regardless of what Manning had done. But, as the presidential election has shown, "this community is an insult to the world" (to steal from Henry Drummond/Spencer Tracy), and so the chance for actual justice is remote.
IWould prefer a trial where he would be allowed to make his case. Manning wasn't afforded that opportunity either.
Huh? Manning was convicted - hence there was a trial. What use would another trial be?
Well for one it would be a trial against Snowden, not against Manning. And the request was for "a trial where [the defendant] would be allowed to make his case", not a secret trial by a Mickey Mouse court with a pre-determined outcome.
Depends on what you call a "very good return on investment".
At 5% per year, $3,200 per year for 45 years comes to a bit under $550k
To end up with $1M after 45 years investing $3,200 per year, you need a return of under 7.1%
Compound interest makes a big difference...
It does. But at the moment, getting 5% or even 7% for a small time investor seems to be unlikely. And the compound interest effect is contributing less if, realistically, your income increases over time as you get experience and promotions - you're able to safe less in your early career, with lower pay and (often) higher expenses.
In other words you have a %2.6 chance of being a millionaire in the U.S vs a %1 in France.
Note quite. If you work both hard and at least a little smart in the US you are almost sure to become a millionaire by retirement. It would take less than 10% of median income in retirement savings over a 45 year career to reach millionaire status (in 2017 dollars). Either way for it to be nearly 3x harder to become a millionaire, which is by no means rich for a someone in the developed world, in France vs the USA is a serious problem.
Well, that seems to be dubious math to me. According to this article, median personal income was about US$ 32000/year in 2005, and has mostly gone down since then. 10% of that is US$ 32000, and summed over 45 years, gives you US$ 144000, or US$ 856000 short of the first million. You need a very good return on investment to make up that gap (and that ignores inflation).
Moreover, the basic comparison is skewed. In the US, you mostly rely on your own accumulated funds for retirement. Social security is not a big contributor for high-earners. In France, state pensions kick in at age 62, and you get full benefits after 41 years of employment or at age 67, whichever comes first. State pensions are a significant part of retirement funding, but don't show up as personal wealth. And, IIRC, basic health insurance is free for pensioners - another factual and tangible benefit not accounted for by just looking at personal wealth.
Climate change is happening, and that is of course a fact nobody is denying at this day and age.
Please see e.g. James Inhofe, the Senator with the snowball, and sadly, Chair of the US Senate Environment Committee.
I'm WAY more interested in the real work boston dynamics and others are doing in the feild of robots. I'm WAY more interested in the technology breakthroughs david sodenburg is claiming with liquid metal batteries. The EM drive is definately tickling my fancy right now as well.
I don't know why these kinds of stories pop up. I half figure the editors love science and technology the way I do...these complete tabloid toilet trash stories though about emotions and social issues are really annoying me. None of it has anything to do with hard engineering science or even point to new ideas or possibilities it's just an emotional wank/opinion fest with no content.
It's a bit naive to think that a world with robots will be just like our world, only with robots, or that a world with much better batteries will be just like our world, only with better batteries. The human and social implications and moral questions of technology are just as hard, and just as important, and just as interesting as the pure science and technology. Science Fiction learned that in the 60s.
Better robots will destroy more manufacturing jobs. Better AI will destroy more simple office jobs. To quote from Luna: New Moon: The financialised economy didn't need workers and mechanisation was driving the middle class into a race to the bottom.
Alternatively, these techniques will create wealth for all and help us liberate human creativity, as e.g. in Ian M. Bank's Culture. But thinking about which trajectory we are on is anything but boring.
A fair number of posters here despise women, and view anyone who advocates for female empowerment as an SJW who needs to be derided, trolled, threatened with rape, or any other mechanism possible to silence anyone with a vagina.
I have a hard time coming up with somebody less fitting the SJW stereotype than Hitchens. But I'm quite sure he would adopt the term with aplomb.
all day masterbating
When did Gor come into this? Not that it wouldn't, probably...
But there is another fictional reality with relevant ideas, too.
Start sending lots of birth control devices (condoms, IUDs, birth control shots, ect) to Africa...
To quote Christopher Hitchens: "[The cure to poverty is] colloquially called the empowerment of women" .
If we succeed in destroying ourselves as a species on Earth, it will probably be with a nuclear war. But even that is a situation that essentially peaked in the 1980's, and nations have taken steps to back-pedal from it since then.
Well, climate change and nuclear war are not necessarily independent. With Himalaya glaciers shrinking, water supply for India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and even China will become a lot less stable. There are 3 billion people in these countries, and 3 of the 4 states already have nuclear weapons. If they start to seriously compete for limited water resources, things may easily become very ugly. There is a reason why China is in Tibet, and why India and Pakistan are fighting a slow war over what currently is an extremely inhospitable ice desert.
And what do you think will happen to the stability of the region if a few tens of millions of (mostly Muslim) Bangladeshis will be forced to flee into India because sea level rise is going to flood significant parts of the Bengal delta, one of the most fertile and most densely populated areas of the planet?
The key to keeping the price of energy low is to always be ready to increase production. Putting it off for five years would put us five years behind the curve. Look for Obama's order to be replaced by late 2017.
The key to keeping the perceived price of energy low is to externalise a large part of the cost - e.g. the health costs of particulate emissions from burning coal and petrol, the cost of nuclear wast processing and insurance against nuclear accidents, the cost of military intervention to keep oil-rich regions under control, and yes, the cost of climate change. We should really find a way to internalise these costs, so that the consumer price of energy reflects the real cost to society, and we avoid a tragedy of the commons.
Well-operating markets are great tools for optimisation. But in order for them to serve the community, we must set them up to work appropriately. Otherwise the market will gladly optimise the destruction of "free" shared resources.
Powell counted 69406 to 4
Bullshit. There aren't that many climate researchers in the world. And Stephan, I have a bit of hate for you right now for making me read this stupid piece of shit just so I could refute your argument. Here's the problem right in the methodology:
To find the number of recent articles that reject AGW, I used the following method: [...]
Notice that the author does not actually count climate research papers, doesn't actually find authors who refute or affirm AGW or other climate change theory, and doesn't actually count climate researchers. Waste of my time.
You do understand that by casting a wide net, Powell increases the chance of finding sceptical papers, right?
As for the number of climate scientists, we can do a simple Fermi approximation. There are apparently around 40000 universities in the world (which jibes nicely with a bit over 400 universities for approximately 80 million inhabitants in Germany). Going with the German sample, about 1/4 to 3/4 of these are research universities (depending on your definition) - so call it 20000. Assuming that half of these do climate research and that the average research group has 10 people, we are at 100000 climate scientists just at universities - without counting NASA (which spends approximately US$ 2e9 on Earth sciences - that should pay about 10000 people alone) or NOAA (with a nearly US$ 5e9 budget - another 25000 people) or Max Planck Institutes in Germany or JAXA in Japan, or any of the corresponding organisations in other states. Now neither NASA not NOAA is all scientists, but it should be clear that 69000 is not an implausible number of climate scientists.
I first wanted to say thank you for holding your scientific position here in the face of ignorant objections.
AthanasiusKircher, this sort of research is as profoundly unscientific as it comes (including the stuff you quote from Cook et al). And your comments are just as bad. For example, consensus about what? Notice that the alleged 97% consensus is relatively accurate when the claim is that there is global warming. It goes down once you add that the global warming is human-induced. And then it goes down much further when the claim is that the impact is catastrophic or severe over the next 50 to 100 years to 41%. 41% is a bit less than 97%, right? I suspect you will find similar divided opinion on the matter of whether immediate mitigation efforts are required right now. James L. Powell's 99.99% paper is ridiculous and you can see that just by looking through the methodology. It doesn't measure what it claims to measure. You can't get more damning than that. Yet once again, we have these slashdot posts talking about scientific positions and holding the line in the face of "ignorant objections".
You may not like Powell, but he is entirely clear about his methodologies, about how he measures what he measures, and about what data he used. You can certainly disagree with his conclusion, but if you want to be taken serious, you should actually do the work of re-doing the analysis with the same transparency and provide a clear argument for your different interpretation (if it still differs - "Powell is totally wrong, the consensus is only 99.3%" ;--).
I think we are now into infinite regression territory. Everybody who is scientifically literate and looks at the primary literature (and by than I don't mean propaganda blogs) can easily determine the prevailing position. And with a bit of experience in reviewing it's also easy to see the quality (rare) and scope (narrow) of the very few disagreeing publications. But that apparently is not good enough, and we get nit-picking from people who don't like the consensus. What we don't see are significant publications providing alternative explanations.
So now we have meta-analyses, where people go to great length to analyse papers, to count positions, to interview scientists, and to publish their findings in the peer-reviewed literature. But that apparently is not good enough either, and we get nit-picking from people who don't like the consensus. What we don't see are significant academic publications showing that there is indeed no consensus - the best we get is the occasional opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal or the 17 year old fraudulent Oregon Petition.
What's next? Meta-meta studies? Meta-meta-meta-studies? As far as I can tell, the opposition to the consensus is largely immune to rational arguments - "global warming is a hoax invented by the Chinese" is one of the more prominent stupidities in this field.
The latest analysis among actually publishing scientists [sagepub.com] (by James Powell [wikipedia.org]) finds "above 99.99%", or what he calls "virtual unanimity".
In other words, a crap study. There aren't that many climate researchers in the world to maintain a 10,000 to 1 ratio over the publishing skeptics by probably two orders of magnitude.
Powell counted 69406 to 4, and apparently the referees and editors at the Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society agreed. The full paper including the methodology is online, as are the data sets.
Former climate sceptic Richard Muller [wikipedia.org] got funded by the Koch brothers, and, with his team, did a completely independent reconstruction of the temperature record of the last.
He wasn't a skeptic: that was propaganda and you fell for it.
Global Warming Bombshell (by Richard Muller) sure sounds very sceptical about the Hockey Stick.
But disproving an establish theory is real science, and real science has no place in this debate! All we need is Al Gore.
97%? You must mean 97% of a cherry picked group of 74 people, quite a few of whom lack actual backgrounds in climate or meteorological science.
Well, there are several sources for the ca. 97%, but they seem to have been too conservative (in the non-political sense of the term). The latest analysis among actually publishing scientists (by James Powell) finds "above 99.99%", or what he calls "virtual unanimity". The fact that several studies with different methodologies all find support in the high 95+% is a nice example of consilience, and that usually is takes as very strong evidence for a fact.
Of course an alternative explanation is that all the scientists, all the editors, and all the scientific organisations are conspiring to keep THE TRUTH from us, with only a small number of heroic conservative think tanks and fossil fuel companies desperately trying to defend it. You take your pick...
Sadly, you are very wrong. One of the biggest problems ot the scientific fields of today is precisely that debunking existing theories achieves literally nothing for the people doing the debunking.
Scientist careers today live and die by citations - how often their published work is cited by others. The problem is that published works that debunk an existing theory get cited several orders of magnitute LESS than the work they are trying to debunk. Worse yet, among people who actually read the "works of disproval", the majority only slightly change their opinion of the work being criticized.
So no, in the current environment it is highly improfitable and illogical for a scientist to engage in anything but original work (or work that at least looks original).
"Debunking" is a very soft term. But if you look e.g. at "Unidentified curved bacilli on gastric epithelium in active chronic gastritis" (by Warren and Marshall), which identified a bacterial cause for most peptic ulcers, and followup-paper "Prospective double-blind trial of duodenal ulcer relapse after eradication of Campylobacter pylori", "debunking" the prevailing theory that fatty diets and stress are the primary causes of ulcers, they received over 4000 and over 1000 citations, respectively. That is more than many scientists collect in a lifetime.
Or, too look more closely, "Proxy climatic and environmental changes of the past 1000 years" by Soon and Baliunas received 190 citations, despite being utter crap. That's apparently more than any other paper by Willie Soon, and in particular more than any of the papers on astrophysics he ever wrote.
If you want to see the oppositions disproval, then you Need to fund their research equally, just like the researchers received the massive funding for their work who actually started off with assumption that greenhouse-gas-caused climate change exists and is caused by humans.
The ones who assume work doesn't prove the foundation of their research is true though, they just further developed the theory, which doesn't receive adequate funding for critical truth analysis.
LOL. For any scientist, disproving an established theory is a dream come true. This is the stuff to make careers. And it's not as if people haven't tried. Former climate sceptic Richard Muller got funded by the Koch brothers, and, with his team, did a completely independent reconstruction of the temperature record of the last. Of course, he came up with essentially the same results NASA, NOAA, and the HadCRUT team had previously found, and, as a good scientist, changed his position in response to the data.
Of course, we don't fund science by desired result, but by the importance of the questions asked and the plausibility that progress towards an answer can be made. Assuming equal quality of grant applications, if 97% of working scientist hold one broad position, you would expect 97% of funding to go to this group. And, from what I have seen of so-called "sceptic" science, "equal quality" would be a long stretch...
Its not a fallacy to make such an association as its directly relavant to the subject matter of how academia handles theories that question estabilished beliefs. Further Ignaz Seemelweis DID have evidence to back up his claim; Additionaly Darwin did not have as easy a time of it as you seem to be suggesting.
You seem to be the one guilty of such a fallacy by associating those who make correct claims with those who make incorrect claims when both have been rejected by academia. Look under the heading of "Guilt by association as an ad hominem fallacy" from the article you refered to. As it is a fallacy to treat the two sets as equivalent it is wrong to excuse missing important correct theories because other people make wild theories.
Well, the case of Semmelweis is not that simple. For one, his observations were correct - hand-washing of hospital staff with a solution of calcium hypochlorite did reduce incidence of puerperal fever -, but his theory that this was due to "cadaverous matter" was wrong, and he got lucky that his cleansing agent was antibacterial. It took until Pasteur and Koch came up with the modern germ theory of disease that the mechanism was reasonably understood. Also, Semmelweis became embroiled in the political fallout of the 1848 revolutions, which slowed down the scientific discourse. And despite this, it only took about 20 years until Lister developed antiseptic techniques that were widely accepted. Pons and Fleischmann gave their press conference in 1989, now 27 years ago, and that in an age when communication takes days to seconds, not months, to cross the globe.
As you yourself seem to acknowledge, it takes significant time and evidence until a theory reaches scientific acceptance. A new, competing, theory needs to be at least similarly compelling to be accepted. Scientist are naturally sceptic. To quote Sagan again: "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" - a sentiment shared by Laplace and Hume. The vast majority of claims that would overturn accepted scientific theories are complete crap. Of those that are serious and not obvious nonsense, most are still wrong. That's why the onus is on the proponent to demonstrate that they understand the field they work in, and that they have carefully considered other options and potential errors before people start spending resources on new claims.
Wrong Chandrasekhar. The guy you're looking for is https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...
Yes, you're right. No idea how that happened - I think I pasted the link directly. Must have clicked in the wrong place somewhere. I was referring to Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar of 1.4 solar masses...
Through the last 200+ years, scientists have had the cycle of someone saying they're wrong, they resist it, then it's proven right, and they look like stubborn and very unscientific idiots then repeat the cycle. I think the poster boy for this is Ignaz Semmelweis. The scientific community dismissed his results out of pride, and thousands died as a result.
This is just a variant of the Galileo Gambit. Yes, over the last 200 years there have been several instances where "science" (as in the majority of scientists) has been sceptical to accept paradigm-changing new claims. Semmelweis is one example, as is Alfred Wegener with his idea of continental drift. But for every genius causing a major shift in scientific opinion, there have been legions of bozos proposing perpetuum mobiles, morphic fields, magnetic water cures, electric universes, and other crap. And on the other hand, many earth-shattering new theories like relativity (both versions) and evolution have been rather quickly accepted, because they were presented with convincing arguments and testable hypotheses. As Sagan said: they also laughed at Bozo the Clown...
Notice how in this article he name-drops Chandrasekhar to bolster the reputation of Lewis Larsen and thus the so-called "Widom-Larsen theory" without explicitly endorsing it or claiming it explains the purported experimental evidence.
Damnit One! Ruining it for everyone.
That doesn't make any sense. One person leaving his car at a supercharger too long is ruining it for who? The others who leave their car at the supercharger too long?
Everybody else who needs to charge their car, maybe while on the way to stop a new fracking bore hole near the San Andreas rift, or to stop Dr. Evil from testing his new device under Yellowstone, or maybe just of a way to perform brain surgery on the child that will in 20 years defend the planet against the Bugs from Outer Space.
Your absolutely irrational. His real estate empire is big enough that it can't be divested in a meaningful time frame, and to attempt so would seriously damage that part of the real estate market.
Of course he could get rid of his empire - he could sell it for 10 cents on the dollar to some non-profit, which slowly sells of the assets. If he is really worth 10 billion, that would leave him one billion - or, assuming he retires in 2020, and manages to stay alive another 50 years ("the greatest age ever seen"), 20 million a year just from the capital, without any profits from investment. If he gets a return of 2 percent, that's 20 million a year forever - or more per year than a typical well-educated, well-employed software-engineer makes in a lifetime.
If he doesn't sell, either he's greedy, or he know it's not worth remotely what he claims.