Uh oh another one jumps ship

[trigfunctions]

Nice try again Trig

BSEE and a Certified LEED engineer/contractor ....if you don't know what LEED stands for google it!

Well Skull, if you think research scientists are getting rich off of global warming in the same way oil companies are getting rich fighting against preventing global warming, you have no idea how science works, regardless of your degree.

 

[shakeybrainsurgeon]

Well Skull, if you think research scientists are getting rich off of global warming in the same way oil companies are getting rich fighting against preventing global warming, you have no idea how science works, regardless of your degree.

It's not a matter of getting rich, it's a matter of survival. If you buck the paradigm, you get no grants and if you get no grants, it's Walmart greeter time. If you lack tenure, the loss of a grant can mean you are out on your kiester. If you can fund your lab by saying the earth is flat, you will do so and worry about whether the science is correct later.

Look at medical research. Dollars are thrown at diseases according to how politically popular they are, not according to the threat they pose. Breast cancer, for example, gets massive funding, even though it isn't the leading cause of death or disability in women. It isn't even the leading CANCER in women (lung is, by a large margin). By contrast, research into psychotic diseases, which afflict almost one percent of the population and cause massive havoc (homelessness, suicide, crime, and so on) get almost nothing (because schizophrenics make poor advocates and even poorer poster children on commercials and in fund raisers).

And in breast cancer, billions were wasted on bone marrow transplants as a form of chemotherapeutic rescue because a) the consensus of experts said it would work and b) anyone who thought otherwise was a cruel lackey of a heartless insurance company (sound vaguely familiar?). We now know that it was essentially worthless. For about 15 years the "consensus" of NIH eggheads who wrote the grant checks said that was the way to go and woe to those who disagreed. I am no atmospheric scientist, but I have seen many an iron-clad consensus of experts come and go in my own field, enough to know that no consensus is infallible.

Let's see --- there was lobotomy, which was done for decades (it seemed like a good idea at the time, too bad for those million so so saps who actually had one... by the way a Nobel was awarded for that turkey too, a REAL one, not the PEACE one)

Or how about radiating kids' heads for ringworm ... a few thousand cases of thyroid cancer came from that piece of genius.

Or the brain bypass operation of the 1970s, one of the most common operations of the decade worldwide. It was supposed to prevent strokes but, alas, it actually caused them! A consensus of brain surgeons across the globe supported that bright idea (I wrote an article about the operation for Discover a while back). Boy, was the consensus embarrassed! Oh well, hundreds of millions wasted, thousands of lives wrecked, but that's modern science!

Need I go on? Of course, PhDs are much smarter than us, so no consensus of them could be that boneheaded. or could they???

If you don't think politics, and "going with the flow" to get grants (even if you know the flow is nonsense), rules modern science, then it is you who don't know how things work. And if anyone thinks that because a 90% of experts say so, than it must be so, I have a lobotomy knife that still has a bit of an edge to it...

 

[Bryan]

Great post, and great examples.

 

[Skull]

Trig ...one day you will recieve total consciousness ...but not yet ...peel back the outer layer grasshopper ....

Getting rich is a state of mind ...remember if Bill Gates had Ophrahs money ...he would jump out a window from the 100th floor-eh!

Success is a measurement of peers!

 

[Tassie_Rohan]

It's not a matter of getting rich, it's a matter of survival. If you buck the paradigm, you get no grants and if you get no grants, it's Walmart greeter time. If you lack tenure, the loss of a grant can mean you are out on your kiester. If you can fund your lab by saying the earth is flat, you will do so and worry about whether the science is correct later.

<snip>

If you don't think politics, and "going with the flow" to get grants (even if you know the flow is nonsense), rules modern science, then it is you who don't know how things work. And if anyone thinks that because a 90% of experts say so, than it must be so, I have a lobotomy knife that still has a bit of an edge to it...

Mate - do you seriously believe some of the stuff you write?

The best thing a scientist such as myself can do is knock down someone else&#8217;s theory, or provide contradicting evidence. Without contradicting views there&#8217;s no scientific progress. Funding comes from being known and well published - and nothings better to build up the number of people who reference your papers (a number by which professional scientists are commonly judged) then offering a fresh viewpoint to a standard idea. Better yet &#8211; being an outspoken opponent to some popular idea will drive your references way up.

To get grants for programs many scientists will sell their basic science in terms of how it will effect some popular scientific topic. In terms of GW you can be as anti-global warming as you want and get funding: just state your work on mosses/ice cores/forams/etc will 'provide a more actuate view of the rate and direction of recent climate change, if any, and the actual component that could attributed to man made activity' and off you go.

Still &#8211; though a popular subject makes it easy to get funding, and many disparate groups will get on the bandwagon, the results of your science speaks for its self. If an idea is not supportable then its not going to last long. There&#8217;s a whole world of scientists who are ready to shoot you down if you try to publish tripe. As far as global warming is concerned at the current rate we need around 10-20 years more data before its completely clear if current patterns are abnormal and man made. So far - it really does look the case, and is the simplist answer to the pattern we see.

You are right in one point - If you follow science in any detail you will be aware that in the case of GW the US government actually withheld funding and tried to silence the the key scientists that initially raised this unpopular topic.

Cheers,
Rohan.

 

[Skull]

Tassie what planet are ou on? Cause if you curently request funding to buck GW you will be fired ..maybe you should go back and read the items I posted concerning this very topic. As for the US government's involvement in the GW issue the fact is James Hansen was and still is a shill for George Soros ... if you don't see the corruption in this evidence then you need to seriously re-evalute your understanding of politics and the politics of science. Aside from that you are entitled to your cheerleading for anthropogenic GW ...

As for science speaking for itself there are legions of discredited trash heaps of scientic certainty ...filled to the brim with concensus...

 

[shakeybrainsurgeon]

Tassie

You can't seriously believe that contrarian viewpoints are somehow welcomed by the funding establishments?

And I guess if you deny funding to a group you disagree with, it is called reasonable (as Gore says, why fund flat-earthers?), while denying funding to a group you agree with is called government "silencing".

I don't know why we bother arguing over this. The GW fad has already jumped the shark and no one is going to do anything about it anyway no matter how much GW advocates whine and moan: hybrid sales are down; airline travel and jet fuel consumption are going through the roof and there's no putting THAT genie back in the bottle; no one went to those stupid Gore concerts; Kyoto is dead, even in the countries that signed it; the liberal judiciaries in the EU are beginning to wake up and smell the fraud (Gore's movie must now be packaged in the UK with a disclaimer about the BS it contains, by court order); as the title of this thread suggests, more and more scientists, sensing the tide turning, are beginning to jump ship and FINALLY, the only way politicians like Hilliary Clinton can get anyone to ask about GW is to plant someone in the audience to do so, because no one really gives a **** about any of this, certainly not the general public.

Have a nice day. I am going to burn a few tires in my back yard and roast a few baby seals over them.

 

[Otter]

We could argue to we are blue/green in the face, but as with any complex subject where economics are concerned, those who want change will always lose to those who have a vested economic interest in no change. As has been pointed out numerous times, the facts are not plain and simple...therefore, FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt on both sides will abound.

GW: If we don't change, we will all die. NO-GW: If we do change, we will all be poor and who wants to live being poor?

The REALITY is what it is. The PROBABILITY that we can predict the correct trend must be weighed against the risk of getting it wrong.

Without attempting to violate the TOS, it reminds me of the logical reason behind believing in God. If you believe in GOD and you are wrong, then you live a good, moral life and its all over with. If you don't believe in GOD and you are wrong, you live in eternal suffering. If you don't believe in GOD and are right, then when you are dead, you are dead so it doesn't matter anyways. If you believe in GOD and you are correct then you have eternal salvation. So LOGICALLY, the RISK of not believing in GOD (eternal damnation vs. eternal life) is SO GREAT that we should logically believe in God.
However, there are many millions who are atheists.

Humans tend to do what is in their best self-interests in the short-term, long-term we aren't so good...guess thats why you see people that smoke, are obese, and drug/alcohol abusers.

The question to me is IF YOU ACCEPT the global temperature is increasing and that the outcome of that warming is going to be catastrophic, then regardless of whether its natural, man-made, or a combination of both -- what can we do to mitigate its damage?

 

[Warthaug]

I am well aware that climate is not weather. My point was that computer models form the basis of both hurricane predictions and GW predictions and the hurricane experience suggest that such models are not infallible.

A little late in replying again, I was visiting the almost in-laws, and they just discovered electricity...

Hurricane (and other weather) models are vastly different then climatology models. So you cannot judge one on the basis of the other. Climatology models have proven uncomfortably accurate over the last few years. Some of the more "popular" ones not only predict current and past climate here on earth, but also can be used to model the climates on other planets (i.e. venus and mars), which lends a lot of weight to the argument that the models are very robust.

And even if they are error prone, it would be pure stupidity to ignore their findings.

And taking thermometer readings for a few years, decades or even centuries will not give a reliable indicator of what will happen in the next ten or fifty years.

Nor did I ever claim so. What I was pointing out was that those empirical measurements clearly show that the world is warming, which clearly shows that the posters here saying "I don't think the world is actually warming" are full of poop.

And exactly where is the earth's "bottom" so we may stick a thermometer and get the single temp of the whole globe?

The very fact you ask that question shows that you don't know squat about how scientists approach these problems. Which makes one wonder why you're putting yourself forward as some sort of expert. This is pretty basic stuff.

There isn't a "bottom"; instead we use thousands of separate measurements, spread around the globe, to determine the average temperature. Today the entirety of the earth surface is measured, via satellites.

Maybe Cleveland, but I'm not sure. Are you talking lower atmosphere, upper atmosphere, sea temps, land temps? How are you averaging? Do you know that vast areas of the globe have no reliable temperature measuements, even now, let alone fifty years ago?

Climatology is the study of climate over large regions over long periods.

No, it isn't. Climatology is the study of the earths climate. The period of time is not a part of it, although specific fields (i.e. paeloclimatology) do exist dealing with specific time periods.

As you point out, what happens locally from year to year or month to month is weather.

And the year-to-year pattern determines the local climate, and averaged over the whole earth, you get the earths net climate.

So why are we relying on climatologists to tell us what will happen between now and, say, 2050, or 2100, a virtual nanosecond in terms of climate evolution?

For the same reason that we trust engineers, and not doctors, to build bridges - they're the experts in their field. Maybe you need to re-read the definition of "climate", as you've created your own definition witch bears no resemblance to realty.

At the end of the day climatologists study climate (and climate includes weather patterns, among other things). They study it from the level of intra-year variation right through to the trends overlying the entire history of the earth. They are the experts, and they - not oil companies, not special interest groups, not economists, nor politicians, are the ones we should be listening to.

Saying what will happen twenty years from now sounds suspiciously like weather and not like climate.

Firstly, you have seriously mixed up the definition of climate and weather. Also, climate determines weather, so broad predictions can be made on weather *patterns* based on changes in regional climate.

But hey, what do I know?

Not the definition of "climate".

the "Brownian" fluctuation of temperature and climate over such miniscule (climate wise) time scales renders the astoundingly confident predictions of GW advocates suspect.

Temperature fluctuations over time are not Brownian in nature, nor are they random, meaning they can be accounted for by climatological models. Day-to-day temps cannot, but once again that's weather, not climate, and therefore irrelevent to the discussion.

The pro-GW scientists are virtually guaranteeing the future climate evolution over a period of less than a century!.

And every measurement to date supports their conclusions. Which means they are probably right. From rapid warming in the arctic, to drying of parts of Africa, to the changes in precipitations patterns observed in my own home town, all agree with what the climatological models predict.

And that's the point you seem to be missing - the short term predictions are coming true, and since the long-term predication are based on the same model this means that there is a high and building degree of confidence in the accuracy of those models.

Yes, I mean "no room for doubt, checkmate, game over, Elvis has left the building, if I'm lying I'm dying" certainty. Don't any of you GW fans have a problem with this at all?

No. Its called the scientific process. When global warming was first proposed in the 1970's it was laughed at by all serious scientists. In the 1980's data built to the point where the theory moved from being a laughable fringe element to a supportable theory. Since then the evidence has grown and grown, to the point where the evidence has swayed thousands upon thousands of scientists.

Do you trust ANY egghead who is that certain of their future predictions?

Given that those "eggheads" (a very insulting term, btw) have over a hundred thousand scientific papers which they use to support their conclusions, I'd have to say that I'd trust them infinitely more times then I would trust someone like you - who makes claims based on strawman arguments, ignorance, and insults.

Example: if the world's hurricane experts all predicted that a hurricane will wipe out Miami totally next year and recommended that the all corporations located there move their operations out of the city permanently, including their employees, or else face financial ruin...would the corporations do it, or would they think these guys have been so wrong so many times before?

Gee, yet another strawman. Why don't you try disproving global warming, instead of misdirecting us towards this other BS?

Of course, the track record of climatologists is...oh wait, THEY HAVE NO TRACK RECORD (unless we count their prediction of global cooling in the 1970s).

Oh wait, they have an excellent track record. Of course, having spent your life trying to ignore this data, I guess we can forgive you apparent ignorance of the subject:

ScienceDirect - Global and Planetary Change : Global warming and active-layer thickness: results from transient general circulation models
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0888-8892(199209)6%3A3%3C409%3AUMMTME%3E2.0.CO%3B2-A
GLOBAL WARMING:Global Climate Data and Models: A Reconciliation -- Hansen et al. 281 (5379): 930 -- Science
ScienceDirect - Journal of Hydrology : The effects of climate change due to global warming on river flows in Great Britain
ScienceDirect - Ecological Modelling : Global estimation of crop productivity and the impacts of global warming by GIS and EPIC integration
SpringerLink Home - Main
http://ams.allenpress.com/amsonline/?request=get-abstract&doi=10.1175/1520-0442(2004)017%3C3477:IOCWOS%3E2.0.CO;2
http://www.met.tamu.edu/people/faculty/north/pdf/(105)GoodyA&North98.pdf
SpringerLink Home - Main
AFS Online Journals - Journal -

There is nearly 2000 more articles, all dealing with the accuracy of the predictions to date.

What has this crowd of obscure atmosphere wonks done in the past to inspire such confidence in you people?

Let see:
1) 100,000+ scientific publications (hardly "obscure")
2) over 40 separate climatological models, all predicting similar results
3) accurate prediction of current trends
4) accurate modeling of paeloclimate, the climate of other planets, and our existing climate
5) thousands of these experts all making the same claims

And one cannot help note that you're best "evidence" so far has been to call these people names. What's the matter - can't deal with the actual evidence?

People don't trust their doctors,

I trust mine, impeccably.

their lawyers,

Does anyone? When your job is lying and twisting facts it doesn't exactly build confidence in you.

their preachers,

I'm not touching this one with a 100' pole....

their spouses,

I trust my "almost" spouse. Too bad you don't trust yours.

their police,

I trust mine.

their elected officials,

See my comment on lawyers

their insurance guy,

See my comment on lawyers.

their plumber

I trust mine, but good/honest ones aren't the easiest thing to find.

or their dentist,

I trust mine.

but a climatologist speaks and it's Moses reborn. I don't get it.

I do. I trust experts who have proven track records. Among the climatologists promoting global warming we have Nobel-prize winners, Howard Hughes fellows, members of the national academy, royal society, and so forth. Together, they have published over 100,000+ scientific studies, 40+ climatological models, launched over 12 satellites, and processed an astounding amount of data.

And despite the THOUSANDS of people involved in this research, and despite the THOUSANDS of different methods used, and despite the fact that some use models, some use empirical data, and others laboratory experimentation, THEY ALL GET THE SAME RESULTS.

The simple fact that thousands of scientists, using different data sets, different methods of data collections, and different methods of analysis, all see the same trend, and the same dangers. This lends a lot of weight to the conclusion they have reached.

The big question is how can people like yourself, in the face of this enormous amount of data, claim that these individuals are full of hot air. One really has to wonder how you can make these kinds of claims when you lack even the simple knowledge of the definition of "climate".

Bryan

 

[Warthaug]

This is strange coming from a scientic person. As far as I understood the above are just theories - not laws.

Maybe someone already covered this already. If so, I apologize for the duplication.

You are mixing up common verses scientific usage of the term "theory". Scientifically speaking a theory is the greatest degree of scientific certainty that exists. So if something reaches the level of "theory" in science that's as "high" as it'll ever get. The main three (from lowest degree of certainty to highest):


Hypothesis: fancy way of saying "question". A hypothesis is simply a scientific question. Usually we try and base our hypotheses on existing data and concepts, so they usually make the level of an educated guess, bit even so its an unproven concept.

Law: An observation which is always true. Arguably, law, data, and observation can be used interchangeably. The important thing about a law is that there is no explanation, it is simply a statement of fact.

For example, newtons second law says "every action has an equal and opposite reaction". It does not tell you why. For that you have to move to atom theory and theories dealing with forces.


Theory: The best scientific description of a natural phenomena. Before a hypothesis can be elevated to a theory it must achieve four things:

1) Be based on all existing data. So to develop a theory you must explain all relevant data, and cannot ignore any which conflicts with your model.

2) The theory must be testable. Which means that based on the theory you must be able to design experiments which you can then conduct to test the theory.

3) The theory must be predictive. Which means that not only does the theory allow you to design experiments, but they theory also accurately predicts the results of those experiments.

4) The theory must be falsifiable. Which means that if it is wrong you must be able to demonstrate such.


So as you can see it takes a lot to be a theory. And if something reaches the level of theory you can be damned sure that a lot of scientists, and a lot of data, support it.

I don't really understand it much - way over my head - but I recently saw a documentary about current thinking that strongly suggested that time does NOT behave in the predicted way. The suggestion was.....heaven forbid.....that Einstein might have got it wrong.
I just Googled to have a look and for starters found this:
E=mc2 is Wrong - Einstein's Special Relativity Fundamentally Flawed

A bunch of pseudo-science babble. Nothing major of Einsteins work has been disproven, and the variations in the speed of light, etc, do not invalidate his work as most of his theroms deals with speed of light in a vacuum and not under the rather odd conditions used in those experiments.

It is worth mentioning that E=mc² is not 100% true - it only holds true for objects at rest. But Einstein was well aware of that, and his thoery of general relativity takes into account motion.

Bryan