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Global Warming/Climate Change Super Thread

beirnini said:
You obviously don't know any research scientists or have much of a clue about their motivations.

I occasionally have coffee with Dr Chris Essex from UWO, and his take on the climate alarmists as venal boot lickers looking for a handout tracks with many of the other observations here. I also find his impromptu lessons on statistical analysis and how it applies to climate research fascinating. It certainly helps me deconstruct the bumph being fed to the public by the media......
 
Thucydides said:
I occasionally have coffee with Dr Chris Essex from UWO, and his take on the climate alarmists as venal boot lickers looking for a handout tracks with many of the other observations here. I also find his impromptu lessons on statistical analysis and how it applies to climate research fascinating. It certainly helps me deconstruct the bumph being fed to the public by the media......
Which is all well and good for you, but none of which detracts from the points that I've raised here:

If most or all climate scientists are indeed corrupted by the "demands and expectations" of their employers, from whence is our scientific skepticism?

If most climate scientists are so venal as to "boot lick" for handouts why do they not hit up more regularly the deep-pocketed and clearly under served fossil fuel interests?

And Chris Pook, just because I've aged without trading in my rationality and experience for what appears to be crusty closemindedness does not give you liberty to presume your superiority.  I'd appreciate it if you'd stow the patronizations, if you don't mind.
 
I want to jump back in on this one and take an approach to this that many may not have considered. I believe there is a spectrum with regards to climate/carbon relationship. I recently saw an NRCS (USDA) thermal satellite re-play of the continet from Winter through to late fall, impressive.

There is no black and white causes or solutions to this mess.

Its yet another message of hope.

First to talk about carbon in the atmosphere. There is natural ways it ends up (living critters breathing, forest fires, volcanoes, dirt getting turned up by landslides, grassfire, brushfire, muslides, etc) and there is un-natural ways it gets up there (fossil fuels, wood burning for many reasons, PLOWING and FARM TILLING these are a megasource of carbone emmissions, Most forms of combustion).

We do need some carbon up in the air (plants need it to make sugar by combining Carbon molecules + Hyrdogen molecules split from Oxygen molecules inside the plant making CARBOhydrates, look up stomata). SO WHAT?

Plants store sugars in their leaves, stems and roots (arguable a better place to park the carbon) and they also exudate sugars into the soil to help form Glomalin with hyphae and spores of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi. HUH?

For each 1g of carbon stored in the soil, it holds 8g water in there as well.

Basically instead of arguing about whether we need to do something about carbon in the air (we always need some), LETS GET IT PARKED IN THE GROUND AND IN THE PLANT!!! Its useful there, natural, feeds peoples and animals, creates majestic scenery, improves water cycles, reverse desertification and is much more productive than wind turbines, enormous solar panels, cap and trade BS, carbon credits (what a load of crap that is, basically buy permission to create more pollution).

HOW armyrick, how do we do this?

As a society
-DEMAND intensive holistic rotational grazing of ruminant livestock (thats me and my gang) and rotate other livestock
-DEMAND stop plowing and tilling and encourage no-till mixed cocktail, year-round cropping systems
-ENCOURAGE everybody to grow their lawn grass and legumes LONGER and stop butchering it down to stubby useless grass
-ENCOURAGE more multi-facetted aqua-farms like Bren Smith of Green Wave who grows huge loads of kelp, mussels, oysters and scallops WHICH clean nitrogen and carbon out of the Oceans
-PLANT Clovers, vetches, alfalfa and trefoils with your grass lawns, they look beautiful and they put nitrogen back in the soil
-GROW thick gardens with companion plants and have plants growing closely packed and in succession

Do this AS A SOCIETY, you will be amazed at the results
 
Hear, Hear!! However, I think you neighbours/city council, might be a little upset about "-ENCOURAGE everybody to grow their lawn grass and legumes LONGER and stop butchering it down to stubby useless grass."
 
Rick, while you are actually talking about a realistic and useful plan (on many levels, especially controlling soil erosion and groundwater runoff), you are up against a lot of forces against you.

People like Elon Musk "save" about a ton of CO2 through the production of electric cars vs a comparable diesel car. This is worth 5 pounds sterling under EU "Cap and trade" regulations, but Tesla motors gets @4000 pounds sterling per electric car as a tax incentive. Guess he's not going to be planting more grass.

As well, the propaganda has sunk so deep that when my daughter was in grade 9, she was given an assignment on how to reduce carbon emissions in class. I showed her some sources to research and she came up with replacing plowing the soil with seed drills and multi cropping (unturned soil does not release carbon, and seed drills require less energy to pull than a plow, win-win for reducing carbon emissions). For her trouble, she was given a failing grade. since she didn't follow the party line of renewable energy, biking to work etc. The parent teacher conference was rather heated afterwards as well....

People who actually observe and look at the evidence will be on board with you, but there are a lot of people with a vested interest in milking the Global Warming industry for all the billions of tax dollars available. Planting grass and using alternative agricultural practices don't offer opportunities for graft and corruption, certainly not on that scale.
 
Your right about being up against some tough resistance

However, best weapon is spreading of information. Every presentation I have done, I get people hooked on it and they say it all makes sense. It will take time but as long as we keep spreading this information, we will prevail.

I am very happy about the work Allan Savory and the Savory institute has been doing for years. Allan takes on the toughest critics and beats them senseless with logic. The people who try and tear apart his theories do a very poor job of it and usually have big holes in their arguments or try to cherry pick, a bad debating topic IMO.

Having been involved with this type of farm/ag planning and practicing for more than three years, it works very well but it does take hard work and has a steep learning curve.
 
How long ago and when did your daughter receive this grade? If it was recent, PM me, I will engage the school HARD. It will not be the first time and I have yet to not succeed when I engage people or organizations (except Vegans)
 
If you can't beat them with logic and evidence, then use the power of the State to silence them:

http://dailysignal.com/2016/04/11/liberal-ags-have-begun-a-war-against-the-first-amendment/

Liberal AGs Have Begun a War Against the First Amendment
Kim Holmes / @kimsmithholmes / April 11, 2016

Once the legal regime protecting free speech is gone, it can be abused by anyone, including by people who may disagree with them. (Photo: Andrew Schwartz/Newscom)
COMMENTARY BY

Portrait of Kim Holmes
Kim Holmes
@kimsmithholmes
Kim R. Holmes, a distinguished fellow at The Heritage Foundation, oversaw the think tank’s defense and foreign policy team for more than two decades. He's the author of the upcoming book, "The Closing of the Liberal Mind." Read his research.

Last week, a line was crossed in the ongoing campaign of liberals to criminalize freedom of expression. The attorney general of the U.S. Virgin Islands subpoenaed a decade of materials and work by a private advocacy group that had dared to question the orthodoxy of climate change.

The group is the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and the attorney general is Claude E. Walker, who had recently signed on to a campaign of over a dozen attorneys general to ferret out so-called climate change “deniers.” It is possible that CEI was being targeted by Walker precisely because one of its attorneys, Hans Bader, had criticized New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, who was leading the campaign.

This is all part of growing chorus of officials willing to use their powers to condemn climate change skeptics. A few weeks ago, for example, U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch had asked the FBI to look into the matter of whether climate change-denying scientists could be accused of fraud for not toeing the line.

There is no other way to characterize these moves. They are blatant attempts to bend the law—in Schneiderman’s case, by using consumer protection and securities laws—to shut down free and open research. It is but another example of the new illiberal attempt by progressive liberals to use the power of the law to intimidate and coerce those with whom they disagree.

As I explain in my new book, “The Closing of the Liberal Mind”:

Not since George Orwell’s “thoughtcrimes”—the author’s word for unapproved thoughts in his novel 1984—has there been so little regard for the dangers of controlling free speech. Not only has the bar been lowered from threatening physical violence to merely giving office, it is now up to those who allege an offense to decide whether the offense was intended. The presumption of guilt is built ideologically into the structure of the political narrative underlying the accusations.

According to this mindset, it would be a “thoughtcrime” merely to question why the real-world results of global temperature change don’t match up with predictions by computer models.

What’s going on here? The problem is that progressive liberals see too much freedom of speech as injurious to their cause. It’s not only the egregious abuses that happen regularly on college campuses. It’s increasingly mainstream liberals who are surrendering to a “yes but” strategy on freedom of expression—saying, in effect, “yes, we support it in principle, but not so much when it conflicts with our ideology.”

A case in point occurred in a column penned by Washington Post columnist David Ignatius. He’s worried that there have been many misstatements of fact that are “recklessly defamatory.” “[W]e should recognize,” he warned, “that in other countries suffering political decay and the popular rage that it engenders, free speech proved to be an instrument in the destruction of liberty.”

Referring understandingly to constitutional scholars who question the “doctrinaire logic” of freedom of speech, Ignatius is not so subtly suggesting that our free speech doctrine may be out of date. He reminds us, for example, that Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer has suggested that the rise of the internet may force a re-examination of the First Amendment.

Whatever you may think of freedom of speech, the Supreme Court has consistently ruled in its favor. And rightly so—because it knows that making exceptions of any kind is a slippery slope if there ever was one.

Perhaps Ignatius and the attorneys general are so sanguine about curtailing free speech because they think it will be used to hinder views they disagree with? But they should be careful what they wish for—or are willing to tolerate.

Once the legal regime protecting free speech is gone, it can be abused by anyone, including by people who may disagree with them.
 
More on "settled science". I find the reported outcome very disappointing, since science is a powerful tool when used correctly, but economics teaches us that people follow incentives, and this trend is strongly self reinforcing.
(Part 1)
http://www.firstthings.com/article/2016/05/scientific-regress

SCIENTIFIC REGRESS
by William A. Wilson
May 2016

The problem with ­science is that so much of it simply isn’t. Last summer, the Open Science Collaboration announced that it had tried to replicate one hundred published psychology experiments sampled from three of the most prestigious journals in the field. Scientific claims rest on the idea that experiments repeated under nearly identical conditions ought to yield approximately the same results, but until very recently, very few had bothered to check in a systematic way whether this was actually the case. The OSC was the biggest attempt yet to check a field’s results, and the most shocking. In many cases, they had used original experimental materials, and sometimes even performed the experiments under the guidance of the original researchers. Of the studies that had originally reported positive results, an astonishing 65 percent failed to show statistical significance on replication, and many of the remainder showed greatly reduced effect sizes.

Their findings made the news, and quickly became a club with which to bash the social sciences. But the problem isn’t just with psychology. There’s an ­unspoken rule in the pharmaceutical industry that half of all academic biomedical research will ultimately prove false, and in 2011 a group of researchers at Bayer decided to test it. Looking at sixty-seven recent drug discovery projects based on preclinical cancer biology research, they found that in more than 75 percent of cases the published data did not match up with their in-house attempts to replicate. These were not studies published in fly-by-night oncology journals, but blockbuster research featured in Science, Nature, Cell, and the like. The Bayer researchers were drowning in bad studies, and it was to this, in part, that they attributed the mysteriously declining yields of drug pipelines. Perhaps so many of these new drugs fail to have an effect because the basic research on which their development was based isn’t valid.

When a study fails to replicate, there are two possible interpretations. The first is that, unbeknownst to the investigators, there was a real difference in experimental setup between the original investigation and the failed replication. These are colloquially referred to as “wallpaper effects,” the joke being that the experiment was affected by the color of the wallpaper in the room. This is the happiest possible explanation for failure to reproduce: It means that both experiments have revealed facts about the universe, and we now have the opportunity to learn what the difference was between them and to incorporate a new and subtler distinction into our theories.

The other interpretation is that the original finding was false. Unfortunately, an ingenious statistical argument shows that this second interpretation is far more likely. First articulated by John Ioannidis, a professor at Stanford University’s School of Medicine, this argument proceeds by a simple application of Bayesian statistics. Suppose that there are a hundred and one stones in a certain field. One of them has a diamond inside it, and, luckily, you have a diamond-detecting device that advertises 99 percent accuracy. After an hour or so of moving the device around, examining each stone in turn, suddenly alarms flash and sirens wail while the device is pointed at a promising-looking stone. What is the probability that the stone contains a diamond?

Most would say that if the device advertises 99 percent accuracy, then there is a 99 percent chance that the device is correctly discerning a diamond, and a 1 percent chance that it has given a false positive reading. But consider: Of the one hundred and one stones in the field, only one is truly a diamond. Granted, our machine has a very high probability of correctly declaring it to be a diamond. But there are many more diamond-free stones, and while the machine only has a 1 percent chance of falsely declaring each of them to be a diamond, there are a hundred of them. So if we were to wave the detector over every stone in the field, it would, on average, sound twice—once for the real diamond, and once when a false reading was triggered by a stone. If we know only that the alarm has sounded, these two possibilities are roughly equally probable, giving us an approximately 50 percent chance that the stone really contains a diamond.

This is a simplified version of the argument that Ioannidis applies to the process of science itself. The stones in the field are the set of all possible testable hypotheses, the diamond is a hypothesized connection or effect that happens to be true, and the diamond-detecting device is the scientific method. A tremendous amount depends on the proportion of possible hypotheses which turn out to be true, and on the accuracy with which an experiment can discern truth from falsehood. Ioannidis shows that for a wide variety of scientific settings and fields, the values of these two parameters are not at all favorable.

For instance, consider a team of molecular biologists investigating whether a mutation in one of the countless thousands of human genes is linked to an increased risk of Alzheimer’s. The probability of a randomly selected mutation in a randomly selected gene having precisely that effect is quite low, so just as with the stones in the field, a positive finding is more likely than not to be spurious—unless the experiment is unbelievably successful at sorting the wheat from the chaff. Indeed, Ioannidis finds that in many cases, approaching even 50 percent true positives requires unimaginable accuracy. Hence the eye-catching title of his paper: “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.”

What about accuracy? Here, too, the news is not good. First, it is a de facto standard in many fields to use one in twenty as an acceptable cutoff for the rate of false positives. To the naive ear, that may sound promising: Surely it means that just 5 percent of scientific studies report a false positive? But this is precisely the same mistake as thinking that a stone has a 99 percent chance of containing a ­diamond just because the detector has sounded. What it really means is that for each of the countless false hypo­theses that are contemplated by researchers, we accept a 5 percent chance that it will be falsely counted as true—a decision with a considerably more deleterious effect on the proportion of correct studies.

Paradoxically, the situation is actually made worse by the fact that a promising connection is often studied by several independent teams. To see why, suppose that three groups of researchers are studying a phenomenon, and when all the data are analyzed, one group announces that it has discovered a connection, but the other two find nothing of note. Assuming that all the tests involved have a high statistical power, the lone positive finding is almost certainly the spurious one. However, when it comes time to report these findings, what happens? The teams that found a negative result may not even bother to write up their non-discovery. After all, a report that a fanciful connection probably isn’t true is not the stuff of which scientific prizes, grant money, and tenure decisions are made.

And even if they did write it up, it probably wouldn’t be accepted for publication. Journals are in competition with one another for attention and “impact factor,” and are always more eager to report a new, exciting finding than a killjoy failure to find an association. In fact, both of these effects can be quantified. Since the majority of all investigated hypotheses are false, if positive and negative evidence were written up and accepted for publication in equal proportions, then the majority of articles in scientific journals should report no findings. When tallies are actually made, though, the precise opposite turns out to be true: Nearly every published scientific article reports the presence of an association. There must be massive bias at work.

Ioannidis’s argument would be potent even if all scientists were angels motivated by the best of intentions, but when the human element is considered, the picture becomes truly dismal. Scientists have long been aware of something euphemistically called the “experimenter effect”: the curious fact that when a phenomenon is investigated by a researcher who happens to believe in the phenomenon, it is far more likely to be detected. Much of the effect can likely be explained by researchers unconsciously giving hints or suggestions to their human or animal subjects, perhaps in something as subtle as body language or tone of voice. Even those with the best of intentions have been caught fudging measurements, or making small errors in rounding or in statistical analysis that happen to give a more favorable result. Very often, this is just the result of an honest statistical error that leads to a desirable outcome, and therefore it isn’t checked as deliberately as it might have been had it pointed in the opposite direction.

But, and there is no putting it nicely, deliberate fraud is far more widespread than the scientific establishment is generally willing to admit. One way we know that there’s a great deal of fraud occurring is that if you phrase your question the right way, ­scientists will confess to it. In a survey of two thousand research psychologists conducted in 2011, over half of those surveyed admitted outright to selectively reporting those experiments which gave the result they were after. Then the investigators asked respondents anonymously to estimate how many of their fellow scientists had engaged in fraudulent behavior, and promised them that the more accurate their guesses, the larger a contribution would be made to the charity of their choice. Through several rounds of anonymous guessing, refined using the number of scientists who would admit their own fraud and other indirect measurements, the investigators concluded that around 10 percent of research psychologists have engaged in outright falsification of data, and more than half have engaged in less brazen but still fraudulent behavior such as reporting that a result was statistically significant when it was not, or deciding between two different data analysis techniques after looking at the results of each and choosing the more favorable.

Many forms of statistical falsification are devilishly difficult to catch, or close enough to a genuine judgment call to provide plausible deniability. Data analysis is very much an art, and one that affords even its most scrupulous practitioners a wide degree of latitude. Which of these two statistical tests, both applicable to this situation, should be used? Should a subpopulation of the research sample with some common criterion be picked out and reanalyzed as if it were the totality? Which of the hundreds of coincident factors measured should be controlled for, and how? The same freedom that empowers a statistician to pick a true signal out of the noise also enables a dishonest scientist to manufacture nearly any result he or she wishes. Cajoling statistical significance where in reality there is none, a practice commonly known as “p-hacking,” is particularly easy to accomplish and difficult to detect on a case-by-case basis. And since the vast majority of studies still do not report their raw data along with their findings, there is often nothing to re-analyze and check even if there were volunteers with the time and inclination to do so.

One creative attempt to estimate how widespread such dishonesty really is involves comparisons between fields of varying “hardness.” The author, Daniele Fanelli, theorized that the farther from physics one gets, the more freedom creeps into one’s experimental methodology, and the fewer constraints there are on a scientist’s conscious and unconscious biases. If all scientists were constantly attempting to influence the results of their analyses, but had more opportunities to do so the “softer” the science, then we might expect that the social sciences have more papers that confirm a sought-after hypothesis than do the physical sciences, with medicine and biology somewhere in the middle. This is exactly what the study discovered: A paper in psychology or psychiatry is about five times as likely to report a positive result as one in astrophysics. This is not necessarily evidence that psychologists are all consciously or unconsciously manipulating their data—it could also be evidence of massive publication bias—but either way, the result is disturbing.

Speaking of physics, how do things go with this hardest of all hard sciences? Better than elsewhere, it would appear, and it’s unsurprising that those who claim all is well in the world of science reach so reliably and so insistently for examples from physics, preferably of the most theoretical sort. Folk histories of physics combine borrowed mathematical luster and Whiggish triumphalism in a way that journalists seem powerless to resist. The outcomes of physics experiments and astronomical observations seem so matter-of-fact, so concretely and immediately connected to underlying reality, that they might let us gingerly sidestep all of these issues concerning motivated or sloppy analysis and interpretation. “E pur si muove,” Galileo is said to have remarked, and one can almost hear in his sigh the hopes of a hundred science journalists for whom it would be all too convenient if Nature were always willing to tell us whose theory is more correct.

And yet the flight to physics rather gives the game away, since measured any way you like—volume of papers, number of working researchers, total amount of funding—deductive, theory-building physics in the mold of Newton and Lagrange, Maxwell and Einstein, is a tiny fraction of modern science as a whole. In fact, it also makes up a tiny fraction of modern physics. Far more common is the delicate and subtle art of scouring inconceivably vast volumes of noise with advanced software and mathematical tools in search of the faintest signal of some hypothesized but never before observed phenomenon, whether an astrophysical event or the decay of a subatomic particle. This sort of work is difficult and beautiful in its own way, but it is not at all self-evident in the manner of a falling apple or an elliptical planetary orbit, and it is very sensitive to the same sorts of accidental contamination, deliberate fraud, and unconscious bias as the medical and social-scientific studies we have discussed. Two of the most vaunted physics results of the past few years—the announced discovery of both cosmic inflation and gravitational waves at the BICEP2 experiment in Antarctica, and the supposed discovery of superluminal neutrinos at the Swiss-Italian border—have now been retracted, with far less fanfare than when they were first published.

Many defenders of the scientific establishment will admit to this problem, then offer hymns to the self-correcting nature of the scientific method. Yes, the path is rocky, they say, but peer review, competition between researchers, and the comforting fact that there is an objective reality out there whose test every theory must withstand or fail, all conspire to mean that sloppiness, bad luck, and even fraud are exposed and swept away by the advances of the field.

So the dogma goes. But these claims are rarely treated like hypotheses to be tested. Partisans of the new scientism are fond of recounting the “Sokal hoax”—physicist Alan Sokal submitted a paper heavy on jargon but full of false and meaningless statements to the postmodern cultural studies journal Social Text, which accepted and published it without quibble—but are unlikely to mention a similar experiment conducted on reviewers of the prestigious British Medical Journal. The experimenters deliberately modified a paper to include eight different major errors in study design, methodology, data analysis, and interpretation of results, and not a single one of the 221 reviewers who participated caught all of the errors. On average, they caught fewer than two—and, unbelievably, these results held up even in the subset of reviewers who had been specifically warned that they were participating in a study and that there might be something a little odd in the paper that they were reviewing. In all, only 30 percent of reviewers recommended that the intentionally flawed paper be rejected.

If peer review is good at anything, it appears to be keeping unpopular ideas from being published. Consider the finding of another (yes, another) of these replicability studies, this time from a group of cancer researchers. In addition to reaching the now unsurprising conclusion that only a dismal 11 percent of the preclinical cancer research they examined could be validated after the fact, the authors identified another horrifying pattern: The “bad” papers that failed to replicate were, on average, cited far more often than the papers that did! As the authors put it, “some non-reproducible preclinical papers had spawned an entire field, with hundreds of secondary publications that expanded on elements of the original observation, but did not actually seek to confirm or falsify its fundamental basis.”

What they do not mention is that once an entire field has been created—with careers, funding, appointments, and prestige all premised upon an experimental result which was utterly false due either to fraud or to plain bad luck—pointing this fact out is not likely to be very popular. Peer review switches from merely useless to actively harmful. It may be ineffective at keeping papers with analytic or methodological flaws from being published, but it can be deadly effective at suppressing criticism of a dominant research paradigm. Even if a critic is able to get his work published, pointing out that the house you’ve built together is situated over a chasm will not endear him to his colleagues or, more importantly, to his mentors and patrons.
 
Part 2

Older scientists contribute to the propagation of scientific fields in ways that go beyond educating and mentoring a new generation. In many fields, it’s common for an established and respected researcher to serve as “senior author” on a bright young star’s first few publications, lending his prestige and credibility to the result, and signaling to reviewers that he stands behind it. In the natural sciences and medicine, senior scientists are frequently the controllers of laboratory resources—which these days include not just scientific instruments, but dedicated staffs of grant proposal writers and regulatory compliance experts—without which a young scientist has no hope of accomplishing significant research. Older scientists control access to scientific prestige by serving on the editorial boards of major journals and on university tenure-review committees. Finally, the government bodies that award the vast majority of scientific funding are either staffed or advised by distinguished practitioners in the field.

All of which makes it rather more bothersome that older scientists are the most likely to be invested in the regnant research paradigm, whatever it is, even if it’s based on an old experiment that has never successfully been replicated. The quantum physicist Max Planck famously quipped: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” Planck may have been too optimistic. A recent paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research studied what happens to scientific subfields when star researchers die suddenly and at the peak of their abilities, and finds that while there is considerable evidence that young researchers are reluctant to challenge scientific superstars, a sudden and unexpected death does not significantly improve the situation, particularly when “key collaborators of the star are in a position to channel resources (such as editorial goodwill or funding) to insiders.”

In the idealized Popperian view of scientific progress, new theories are proposed to explain new evidence that contradicts the predictions of old theories. The heretical philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend, on the other hand, claimed that new theories frequently contradict the best available evidence—at least at first. Often, the old observations were inaccurate or irrelevant, and it was the invention of a new theory that stimulated experimentalists to go hunting for new observational techniques to test it. But the success of this “unofficial” process depends on a blithe disregard for evidence while the vulnerable young theory weathers an initial storm of skepticism. Yet if Feyerabend is correct, and an unpopular new theory can ignore or reject experimental data long enough to get its footing, how much longer can an old and creaky theory, buttressed by the reputations and influence and political power of hundreds of established practitioners, continue to hang in the air even when the results upon which it is premised are exposed as false?

The hagiographies of science are full of paeans to the self-correcting, self-healing nature of the enterprise. But if raw results are so often false, the filtering mechanisms so ineffective, and the self-correcting mechanisms so compromised and slow, then science’s approach to truth may not even be monotonic. That is, past theories, now “refuted” by evidence and replaced with new approaches, may be closer to the truth than what we think now. Such regress has happened before: In the nineteenth century, the (correct) vitamin C deficiency theory of scurvy was replaced by the false belief that scurvy was caused by proximity to spoiled foods. Many ancient astronomers believed the heliocentric model of the solar system before it was supplanted by the geocentric theory of Ptolemy. The Whiggish view of scientific history is so dominant today that this possibility is spoken of only in hushed whispers, but ours is a world in which things once known can be lost and buried.

And even if self-correction does occur and theories move strictly along a lifecycle from less to more accurate, what if the unremitting flood of new, mostly false, results pours in faster? Too fast for the sclerotic, compromised truth-discerning mechanisms of science to operate? The result could be a growing body of true theories completely overwhelmed by an ever-larger thicket of baseless theories, such that the proportion of true scientific beliefs shrinks even while the absolute number of them continues to rise. Borges’s Library of Babel contained every true book that could ever be written, but it was useless because it also contained every false book, and both true and false were lost within an ocean of nonsense.

Which brings us to the odd moment in which we live. At the same time as an ever more bloated scientific bureaucracy churns out masses of research results, the majority of which are likely outright false, scientists themselves are lauded as heroes and science is upheld as the only legitimate basis for policy-making. There’s reason to believe that these phenomena are linked. When a formerly ascetic discipline suddenly attains a measure of influence, it is bound to be flooded by opportunists and charlatans, whether it’s the National Academy of Science or the monastery of Cluny.

This comparison is not as outrageous as it seems: Like monasticism, science is an enterprise with a superhuman aim whose achievement is forever beyond the capacities of the flawed humans who aspire toward it. The best scientists know that they must practice a sort of mortification of the ego and cultivate a dispassion that allows them to report their findings, even when those findings might mean the dashing of hopes, the drying up of financial resources, and the loss of professional prestige. It should be no surprise that even after outgrowing the monasteries, the practice of science has attracted souls driven to seek the truth regardless of personal cost and despite, for most of its history, a distinct lack of financial or status reward. Now, however, science and especially science bureaucracy is a career, and one amenable to social climbing. Careers attract careerists, in Feyerabend’s words: “devoid of ideas, full of fear, intent on producing some paltry result so that they can add to the flood of inane papers that now constitutes ‘scientific progress’ in many areas.”

If science was unprepared for the influx of careerists, it was even less prepared for the blossoming of the Cult of Science. The Cult is related to the phenomenon described as “scientism”; both have a tendency to treat the body of scientific knowledge as a holy book or an a-religious revelation that offers simple and decisive resolutions to deep questions. But it adds to this a pinch of glib frivolity and a dash of unembarrassed ignorance. Its rhetorical tics include a forced enthusiasm (a search on Twitter for the hashtag “#sciencedancing” speaks volumes) and a penchant for profanity. Here in Silicon Valley, one can scarcely go a day without seeing a t-shirt reading “Science: It works, b—es!” The hero of the recent popular movie The Martian boasts that he will “science the sh— out of” a situation. One of the largest groups on Facebook is titled “I f—ing love Science!” (a name which, combined with the group’s penchant for posting scarcely any actual scientific material but a lot of pictures of natural phenomena, has prompted more than one actual scientist of my acquaintance to mutter under her breath, “What you truly love is pictures”). Some of the Cult’s leaders like to play dress-up as scientists—Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson are two particularly prominent examples— but hardly any of them have contributed any research results of note. Rather, Cult leadership trends heavily in the direction of educators, popularizers, and journalists.

At its best, science is a human enterprise with a superhuman aim: the discovery of regularities in the order of nature, and the discerning of the consequences of those regularities. We’ve seen example after example of how the human element of this enterprise harms and damages its progress, through incompetence, fraud, selfishness, prejudice, or the simple combination of an honest oversight or slip with plain bad luck. These failings need not hobble the scientific enterprise broadly conceived, but only if scientists are hyper-aware of and endlessly vigilant about the errors of their colleagues . . . and of themselves. When cultural trends attempt to render science a sort of religion-less clericalism, scientists are apt to forget that they are made of the same crooked timber as the rest of humanity and will necessarily imperil the work that they do. The greatest friends of the Cult of Science are the worst enemies of science’s actual practice.

William A. Wilson is a software engineer in the San Francisco Bay Area.
 
A law actually is being broken here, only by the US State Prosecutors and environmental groups: conspiracy to deprive people of civil rights

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-exxonmobil-states-idUSKCN0XC2U2

U.S. state prosecutors met with climate groups as Exxon probes expanded
HOUSTON | BY TERRY WADE

A coalition of U.S. state attorneys general received guidance from well-known climate scientists and environmental lawyers in March as some of them opened investigations into Exxon Mobil for allegedly misleading the public about climate change risks, documents seen by Reuters showed.

Peter Frumhoff of the Union of Concerned Scientists, which has urged action on climate change, and Matt Pawa, who litigated against Exxon in a global warming case, were listed as presenters at a March 29 meeting of more than a dozen state prosecutors, according to emails between the offices of attorneys general in New York and Vermont.

The previously unknown level of coordination with outside advisers offered a glimpse behind the scenes in an increasingly pitched battle between Exxon and environmental groups.

Exxon has said it has been unfairly singled out and that climate activists are conspiring to rally public opinion against it.

Environmental groups are pushing in court, at the U.S. Securities and ExchangeCommission and in the offices of pension funds to demand more accountability on climate issues from big oil companies.

Shortly after the March 29 private meeting, 17 attorneys general and former Vice President Al Gore announced that they would work as a coalition to push for more aggressive action on climate change. The statement did not reference conversations with outside groups.

Participating in the meeting and in the statement were 15 state prosecutors plus two more from the District of Columbia and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

The attorneys general from Massachusetts and the U.S. Virgin Islands said they would start climate-related investigations against Exxon, adding to probes underway in New York and California.

The documents also suggested that the state attorneys general are at least pondering using the powerful anti-racketeering RICO law if a company is shown to have mislead the public over climate change.

State lawyers are already investigating possible violations of securities and consumer protection laws.

Some of the state lawyers at the meeting considered inviting Sharon Eubanks, a former Department of Justice official who successfully sued tobacco companies under RICO, winning a multi-billion dollar settlement, according to the emails. Eubanks said she did not attend the meeting.

Frumhoff confirmed that he was at the meeting. Pawa declined to comment. The New York attorney general's office said it routinely collaborates with other states and receives input from outside organizations but only pursues cases based on their merits and the law. Vermont's office did not immediately comment.

The emails were obtained through open records requests filed by the Energy & Environment Legal Institute, a free-market think tank with ties to the Competitive Enterprise Institute, whose website says it opposes U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regulation of greenhouse gas emissions.

The Energy & Environment Legal Institute gave Reuters access to the documents.

State prosecutors have opened probes into Exxon based on reports last year by Inside Climate News and the Columbia Journalism School that said the company's in-house scientists had flagged concerns about climate change decades ago, only to have them doubted or contradicted by executives.

Exxon, which said it now believes the threat of climate change is real and warrants action, has said those stories "wrongly suggested that we had reached definitive conclusions about the risks of climate change decades before the world's experts and while climate science was in an early stage of development."

Inside Climate News and Columbia have stood by their reports.

In addition to the inquiries by states, Exxon faces pressure from investors concerned with sustainability to disclose more about the risks climate change poses to its business.

Lee Wasserman, a director of the Rockefeller Family Fund, which has urged divestment from fossil fuels, said coordinating around climate issues is healthy.

"In America, when civic associations come together to address pressing societal concerns, that is considered a good thing - not a conspiracy," Wasserman said.

(Reporting By Terry Wade; Editing by Eric Effron and Fiona Ortiz)
 
One of my clients is a well known fire behavior specialist. Being a scientist, she finds this stuff very interesting and notes that, because of climate change, within a couple of decades the fire behavior in our boreal forest will approach that of Australia (i.e., abso-friggin-lootely insane), where she did a lot of her research.

She also referred to the emergence of the 'Canadian Savannah', essentially the result of continuous fires burning for centuries and creating a giant swath of grassland across the (once) boreal forest.

Cool
 
tomahawk6 said:
I dont believe in so called climate change,rather its mother nature at work starting fires with lightning.Its how she renews the land.
It's not a question of 'belief'. It's science.
 
RocketRichard said:
It's not a question of 'belief'. It's science.

Actually, it is a bit of both.  The Great Fire of 1922, well before all this Climate Change Conspiracy started, is listed as one of the top ten worst natural disasters in Canadian history.  Previously, there was The Great Fire of 1916.  In less than ten years, most of Northern Ontario and Northeastern Quebec had been laid waste to fire.  It is a natural occurrence.  Science has studied it, but to blame man for climate change is getting a bit much.
 
George Wallace said:
Actually, it is a bit of both.  The Great Fire of 1922, well before all this Climate Change Conspiracy started, is listed as one of the top ten worst natural disasters in Canadian history.  Previously, there was The Great Fire of 1916.  In less than ten years, most of Northern Ontario and Northeastern Quebec had been laid waste to fire.  It is a natural occurrence.  Science has studied it, but to blame man for climate change is getting a bit much.
We can agree to disagree.
 
It is actually science.

But here is the real, currently accepted as correct, scientific knowledge of wildfires in Boreal forests (i.e. just about everything north of Chicago's latitude):

Naturally occurring wildfires (due to lightning) are part of the natural renewal cycle of the Boreal forests (i.e. it's the same in Siberia). Without man's intervention - which started around the 1800 - these forest fires destroyed and renewed about 3 to 5 % of the surface of the forest every year.  The natives had long ago learned to protect their summering grounds and villages by actually doing controlled burns around them early in the season.

And T6: We actually have more water bombers in Canada than are held in the USA. For some reason, in the US, you prefer to employ helicopters with buckets. It is all irrelevant anyway. Such fires burning themselves out is the norm for large ones. Most forest fires are extinguished in early stages nowadays, but every year, there are two or three that cannot be stopped and must be let to die of "natural" death - sometimes as a result of snow in the fall, but most other time by careful work of the fire fighting service slowly managing and directing the edges of the fire so it runs itself into a natural fire wall, such as a large river, lake or rocky mountain or combination of these. It's hard work that can take weeks, if not months.
 
RocketRichard said:
It's not a question of 'belief'. It's science.

It's bad science, bad politics, and bad religion. Man-made "climate change" is the biggest fraud ever to be perpetrated upon the human race. There's a whole thread regarding that elsewhere on here anyway.
 
Here are some facts for the TREE HUGGERS, CLIMATE CHANGE CONSPIRACY/THEOROISTS, GREEN PEACE and other so called "scientists with no Degrees on the Subject" to mull over.

From Shawn Bevins:

Karmic my ass...ignorant idiots.The climate-tards, treehuggers, green-peacers and fork-tongued activist politicians and their misguided and deceiving ways strike again... The wildfires have absolutely NOTHING to do with climate change. They are due to millions of acres of dead lodgepole and jack pine that were killed by the naturally occuring Mountain Pine Beetle. During the 90's Provincial Biologists in BC had the chance to stop the Mountain Pine Beetle by clear cutting and burning Beetle mitigation zones in the initially infected areas which happened to be in a National Park, but those attempts were thwarted by tree-huggers blocking roads, threatening and using violence and chaining themselves to the trees.

It wasn't politically correct to build Pine Beetle mitigation areas by clear cutting and burning in a National Park and so instead they let the beetle run it's course and destroy millions upon millions of acres of boreal forest. Drought and El Nino are weather patterns that are natural occurrences and both are part of the environment and climate influencers of Western Canada as are wildfires. Our ridiculously asinine, weak and limp-wristed political response to a Naturally occurring disaster in waiting makes me physically ill. We should all be outraged at the levels of lies and deception used by these criminals but instead we eagerly gobble up their bullshit and blame "man-made climate change" because the "experts" know best. They call the shots from their ivory towers and their concrete jungle refuges.. The solution to the Kootenay 1934 Pine Beetle outbreak was this and I quote: "nothing has yet been found that will kill beetles as effectively and as cheaply as fire" It took courage to make the decision then but It worked and they avoided a disaster...

Pine Beetles have killed millions of acres of standing wood on both sides of the border. Since 2012 the leading edge of Beetle infestation has now moved east of Fort Mac. The trees may be green but they are most certainly dead, it can take up to three years before the tree actually looks dead. The Colorado fires that destroyed 360 homes, Slave Lake where a town was turned into a pile of ashes were a direct result of the same...If you look at this Mountain Pine Beetle distribution map you can clearly define where the fires are burning now and the high risk areas for future fires...Those trees are like gasoline waiting to be lit. These fires are the direct result of irresponsible mismanagement and politically correct leftwing Governments caving to their social justice warrior/ radical activist voter base. They and they alone should bear the cross of this horrific tragedy because ultimately it's because of them that this epidemic has been allowed to spread. I am so tired of the lies... #albertastrong

13178006_10154042841595211_7388242331944150861_n.jpg


It would appear that indeed some of this catastrophe was man-made.  Man-made due to the orchestrations of fanatics from Green Peace and other 'Environmentalist' fringe groups who have prevented the eradication or restriction of "PESTS" that were defoliating the boreal forests creating fuel for wild fires.  So, don't blame the Oil Industry; BLAME the ENVIRONMENTALISTS, the fanatics who have prevented SAFE Forestry practices.
 
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