Knights & Knaves Alehouse

More grist for the mill.

This one is a blog from Scientific American.

This one is an essay from The American Association for the Advancement of Science.

They're more about what is meant by consensus than they are about the science. For those keeping score, both are on the pro- side re:anthropogenic climate change.

Me? I drive fuel-efficient vehicles, consume products and energy as little as is necessary (usually), and do all these things for multiple reasons. OTOH, I have no aspiration to insist that others do the same as I.

AxeMental wrote: These companies aren't the only ones insisting human emissions aren't causing global warming.

Actually the business community is thousands of miles ahead of government on this one.

In fact, the scientific community is now being joined by a plethora of major corporations in challenging the government's stance.

http://www.usatoday.com/weather/climate ... ming_x.htm

Highly respected scientists (who have been studying this for their entire adult lives) who haven't sold out their scientific ethics (yet) to the liberal feeding frenzy, also say there is no "science" behind the claim.

Actually they are a tiny number of scientific rejects, typically found publishing their claims in paperback for sale at supermarket checkout counters ... next to the Weekly World News.

Of course, these guys will all end up unemployed for standing in the "way of green progress".

Ack, you've got it backwards. They already were unemployed, ever since the tobacco lobby scaled down its campaign in the face of general defeat, in the early 90s. They'll be unemployed again, one way or the other, but not because they stood in anyone's way.

Edgewater: "Ack, you've got it backwards. They already were unemployed, ever since the tobacco lobby scaled down its campaign in the face of general defeat, in the early 90s. They'll be unemployed again, one way or the other, but not because they stood in anyone's way."

Hell, I'm talking your average college professor taking SERIOUS heat for not concluding humans are the cause of global warming, even highschool and gradeschool teachers are feeling the heat.

For instance, at my daughters gradeschool, a little over a year ago about half of the teachers openly rejected that humans caused global warming, now, through preasure, they all claim to believe it or have shut up about it completely (and the funny thing is I get the impresssion none of them believe it, they say they do for job security, as its coming from the Teachers Union). The energy and hate behind this movement is so intense its unreal. Who ever thought in this day and age with scientific study at its peak such scare and preasure tactics could work. It's the whole "conform or be cast out", thats just not how science is supposed to evolve . This makes Ann Rands novels seem like real possibilities (the whole lets destroy all technology and live under the complete control of a government etc.)

Funny you should mention Rand... her protege Leonard Peikoff wrote an interesting book several years ago entitled The Ominous Parallels in which he details the slow switch from Locke-based democracy in the US to Hegelian-based democracy more prominent in European states.

A point he makes is that one of the markers of a developing dictatorship is the widespread use of political movements funded and directed straight from the government itself for the purposes of indoctrinating the citizens into believing irrational lines of thought (such as anthropogenic global warming), and this is more easily accomplished through a systematic "dumbing down" of the population education-wise... and there's very little argument, I think, that our education system today sucks as compared to 20-30 years ago.

It's interesting reading, and I recommend it. It certainly sheds a new light on the Al Gore/GW scenario.

More Trees, Less Global Warming, Right? -- Not Exactly

and the band played on ...

This time, the concert is courtesy of Scientific American.

More wrangling for the minds of the non-specialists, or just an interesting footnote? Who knows if the model used was even valid.

In 1968 there were two competing and incompatible theories for the biochemical function of the retina in the world of ophthalmological research. While the function of the neural part of the retina was fully understood, the way a photon was converted into a neuroelectric impulse in the photoreceptors was still an issue of controversy. Both extant theories had what seemed to be insurmountable volumes of experimental evidence to support them. Both had vocal proponents who argued continuously at meetings and through scientific journals for their particular theory for decades (you would have been hard pressed to find a retina researcher who wasn't in one of those camps). The two models had one thing in common, however, both were completely inaccurate.

In 1967 three scientists (George Wald, Haldan Hartline and Ragnar Granit) won the Nobel Prize for discovering the mechanism by which photons impacting the retina are turned into a neural signal. The results of their research accounted for all the previous (incorrectly interpreted) data, were successfully repeated by numerous colleagues and flushed about five decades (and billions of dollars) worth of previous research right down the toilet because it completely disagreed with both of the previously proposed models. All of our knowledge of retinal function today is based on their work.

The moral of the story here is that even if there were "consensus" amongst the scientific community on the causes of global warming (and there isn't), "consensus" just means an idea is popular, not that it's true. A single new fact setting conventional wisdom on its ear isn't a rarity in the history of science, it's a rule of thumb. There are numerous examples, all the way from the proposal of the heliocentric theory to the discovery of adult stem cells, of "known facts" being nothing more than "popular assumptions".

Doesn't it make some of you suspicious that so much is made of the "scientific consensus on global warming" when any good scientist should realize that consensus really tells us very little about the accuracy of a particular theory?

Reminds me of something Patton said: "if we're all thinking the same thing, then someone ain't thinking."

Or something like that. I think.

Very, very close:

"If everyone is thinking alike, someone isn't thinking."

blackprinceofmuncie wrote:Doesn't it make some of you suspicious that so much is made of the "scientific consensus on global warming" when any good scientist should realize that consensus really tells us very little about the accuracy of a particular theory?

That's why I occasionally throw some kindling into this thread, no matter from which side of the fence it originates, because I'll admit to having no clue as to whether or not the monkeyboys are affecting the global thermometer.

Personally, I'm a "where there's smoke, there's fire" kinda guy, but I also know that it may be nothing more than a stink bomb. OTOH, I think there are some other, quite compelling, long-range strategic reasons to go green.

TheRedPriest wrote:OTOH, I think there are some other, quite compelling, long-range strategic reasons to go green.

Like the fact that at some point we ARE going to run out of coal and oil?

Couldn't agree more.

Market forces will take care of coal and oil. As they become more scarce, the price will go up, forcing consumers of coal and oil to choose other fuels or to make more judicious use of fossil fuels. That is, if the State keeps its nose out of the petroleum industry (fat chance).

Necro!

http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm? ... 80767e7966

SemajTheSilent wrote:Necro!

http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm? ... 80767e7966

Wait a minute:

...the largest category (48%) are neutral papers, refusing to either accept or reject the hypothesis.

So then what are they about?

After accepting that global warming is a fact and that it's caused by humans, shouldn't the majority of papers be looking into specifics now? Maybe some of those 48% of "neutral" papers were doing just that. How would we know the difference?

They oughta poll the writers or something to find out.