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The Heretical Freeman Dyson
Posted by
Zonk
on Sat Aug 11, 2007 12:31 AM
from the is-he-a-duck-or-a-witch dept.
from the is-he-a-duck-or-a-witch dept.
dublin writes "Big-thinker Freeman Dyson has written a new essay in which he points out the need for heretics in science, and goes on to gore some sacred cows, including global climate change: 'My first heresy says that all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated ... There is no doubt that parts of the world are getting warmer, but the warming is not global ... When I listen to the public debates about climate change, I am impressed by the enormous gaps in our knowledge, the sparseness of our observations and the superficiality of our theories ... All our fashionable worries and all our prevailing dogmas will probably be obsolete in fifty years. My heresies will probably also be obsolete. It is up to [the people of 2070] to find new heresies to guide our way to a more hopeful future.'"
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News: The Global Warming Heretic 1190 comments
theodp writes "In The Civil Heretic, the NYT Magazine takes a look at how world-renowned scientist Freeman Dyson wound up opposing those who care most about global warming. Since coming out of the closet on global warming, Dyson has found himself described as 'a pompous twit,' 'a blowhard,' and 'a mad scientist.' He argues that climate change has become an obsession for 'a worldwide secular religion' known as environmentalism. Dyson has been particularly dismissive of Al Gore, calling him climate change's chief propagandist and accusing him of relying too heavily on computer-generated climate models and promoting 'lousy science' that's distracting attention from more serious and more immediate dangers to the planet."
Dyson himself wrote about the need for heretics in science not long ago.
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Heretic! (Score:5, Funny)
BURN HIM!!!!
also, first
NO! (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:Heretic! (Score:5, Insightful)
No really. Did you?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
BR>And that sounds like heresy to me! Burn him!!
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
You sound like a heretic too. I'd keep my mouth shut if I was you, or we'll burn YOU as well!
Heretic == Feedback mechanism (Score:4, Insightful)
Unfortunately science has to contend with being performed by humans. So human bias can creep in.
One of the parent posts shows this...
"All scientists by definition are aiming for heretical status every time they write a paper or perform an experiment."
That's the ideal of science, but unfortunately humans rarely live up to ideals.
That statement about "every time they write a paper" etc. also overlooks the pressure on scientists, who's career can be seriously damaged by them speaking out against current accepted ideas in science. This leads to a tendency forcing scientists to, toe the line, so to speak. We are pack animals after all and unfortunately that pack mentality creeps in. (A pack is only a pack when everyone stays in the pack. So packs form with behavioural pressures on the members of the pack, which bias them to staying in a pack). Fear is a good motivator and fear of being thrown out of the pack is something a pack animal will try hard to avoid. (Being thrown out of a pack means you are easy prey). Unfortunately pack behaviour still persists in humans.
We need heretics to stress test every idea not just in science, but also in society. Every idea needs to be continuously stress tested to find faults in it and find holes in it.
The stress testing forms the role of feedback in a system keeping it from going widely out of control. Loose feedback and the system fails by going to an extreme. (The corrupted thinking of the Taliban prove this with the extremes they went to before 911 with how they were silencing anything which could tell them they were wrong. The Nazis also proved this with again silencing anything which could tell them they were wrong. One a religious belief the other a political belief, (like so many other examples from history of extreme beliefs), yet underneath the specifics of the belief, a behaviour which leads to a system failing by going to an extreme). (A system, as in a group of people).
Unfortunately the ones who seek to be the pack leaders want people to stay in their pack. They want people to toe the line. Dissenters will be thrown out of their pack or publicly discredited or even destroyed as a warning to others to toe the line.
This pack behaviour works against science. Scientific progress can only be achieved, if people step outside of the pack. Hence they are identified and labelled as heretics.
What Freeman Dyson is saying about the need for heretics in science makes complete sense.
Our societies need heretics because without them our whole social system is a machine without feedback, so it will go wrong and run to extremes.
The unfortunate thing is that with the ever present pressure from the pack leaders to get people to toe the line, we face a growing danger in the years to come. The Internet provides the pack leaders with an unprecedented level of identifying and controlling dissenters. We need heretics more than ever. As soon as people can no longer speak out against other beliefs, the social system fails by going to extremes and there are no good extremes, as for every winner there are loosers. Create too many loosers and you head towards civil unrest and even wars.
We need heretics more than every to identify and prevent injustice. Yet in a world rightly fearful of terrorists, we have a world running to the other extreme of Big Brother. A world that will not allow heretics. The irony is the terrorists are run by pack leaders who want people to toe their line.
Science is getting caught up in the global battle for power over which beliefs will dominate the planet. The irony is the pack leaders "toe the line" behaviour which results in a social loss of feedback, which occurs in all societies, is ultimately the central cause of the worlds problems. And we have had this problem throughout human h
Parent
Re:Heretic! (Score:5, Funny)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
He commits, in my eyes, a common mistake of physicists, hubris. (I hold physics in highest regards, and believe physics is the most scientific field of science.)
> But I have studied the climate models and I know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Heretic! (Score:4, Interesting)
"To give an idea of how strong this enhanced cooling mechanism is, if it was operating on global warming, it would reduce estimates of future warming by over 75 percent,"
Wow, 75%. Not trivial. Oh yeah. These aren't "opinions" these are measurements. Argue that one away.
As for out of his field of expertise, the article interviews Dr. Roy Spencer, a principal research scientist in UAHuntsville's Earth System Science Center. Not exactly a guy with no understanding of, you know, climate.
Me? I'll take his advice: "I know some climate modelers will say that these results are interesting but that they probably don't apply to long-term global warming, but this represents a fundamental natural cooling process in the atmosphere. Let's see if climate models can get this part right before we rely on their long term projections."
Parent
Mod parent down (Score:5, Informative)
It was one data set that contained an error, and a fairly marginal one at that. At the cost of repeating myself, go take the corrected data [nasa.gov], plot it, and see that not much has changed. Of course, saying "the hottest year is no longer 1998, it's 1934! Its teh climate illuminati!" makes more of a headline.
You conveniently seem to forget that:
Parent
Re:Mod parent down (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.dailytech.com/NOAA+Global+Warming+Data
http://www.dailytech.com/New+Scandal+Erupts+over+
Basically, a meteorologist went out and examined a bunch of National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) (who are part of the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)) temperature sites and he found that many of the sites did not meet the criteria of the NCDC.
After the head of the NCDC got quizzed about this on the radio, the NCDC pulled their list of sites off the internet, so that nobody could go investigate the rest of them. Naturally, a stink was raised and the list was put back online. It turns out that the NCDC had started to validate their network of sites, but stopped when they realized what the results would show.
It's really a quite sordid tale.
-Trust, but verify.
Parent
Re:Heretic! (Score:5, Insightful)
Eh, you know, that's not a valid method for testing models. If you do that you only end up with models that perfectly predict historical data. Such tests say nothing about the accuracy of future predictions, especially, and in particular if they attempt to predict changes outside previously gathered data (which, by definition, due to a whole host of changes in everything from industrial particulate matter releases to ecosystem changes means pretty much any dataset apart from the one you've fitted the models against).
By using that method I could have a perl script randomly choosing factors from women hat sizes to the price of beer in Nice and the population of penguins on iceshelves until I get a perfect match with the historical data. With as little data as we have I'd bet I'd be able to churn out several dozens of models that perfectly predict history. None of which will be the least valid for the next year.
Remember last presidential election? Someone spending far too much time looking at stats realized that the outcome of the Washington Redskins home football games accurately predicted the win or loss for the incumbent since 1936. This indicated that the incumbent would lose. Despite being a perfect predictor for more than 70 years, validated against historical data, it turned out to be entirely and utterly useless for predicting the future.
See? Validating against historical records can only _disprove_ a model and theory, it doesnt ever indicate any form of reliability for future predictions. To validate the accuracy for future predictions you need to accurately predict the future, and the more variables you have, the more models you have the more times you need to accurately predict the future before you can ascertain any level of reliability.
Compare with the old scam where some company sends you information accurately predicting the outcome of a game the next weekend, and offering to sell you the book with the method to do those accurate predictions yourself. After three weeks of getting the right prediction you buy the book.
Of course, unbeknownst to you, the were starting out with a mailing list of a thousand people, sending half the info that one team would win, the other half that the other team would win, then repeated next week with the ones who got the correct result, dividing into groups of 250 instead. The third week they've sent accurate predictions to 125 suckers who'll buy the book.
The more prediction models you make, the longer you have to verify them all to ensure that any surviving models werent just successful on random chance and shotgun theorizing.
Compare with newtonian physics where the theories were simple in form and easy to test and accurately predicted the outcome of a vast range of experiments. Yet, even after millions or billions of validations of the theory, when stepping out of the 'ordinary' bounds of those tests, the theory was not quite as accurate as even those 'future' predictions would indicate.
What it all comes down to is that current climate models simply cannot be verified as accurate predictors due to flaws in the fabric of reality, such as insufficient time, insufficient numbers of earths, insufficient reliability of underlying data, etc. For what it's worth you might as well use the hat sizes or Redskins and wonder why your model wasnt correct in 50 years, despite using all available test data.
And just to clarify my own position; I think we should quit using fossile fuels immediately, slap a shitload of taxes on their use to encourage as fast transition as possible. I motivate that by the real and verifiable millions of dead through wars and cancers and the horrendous evil following their exploitation rather than the bad science of climate change.
And as for the climate change aspect; dont put all the eggs in the climate model basket, the holes are large and newt
Parent
Am I the only one? (Score:4, Interesting)
Check out SCIFOO 2007 (A Photo Essay by George Dyson) at the bottom of the page.
I wish I were there to see all these great minds together. Am I the only one?
Heretics? (Score:5, Insightful)
Hmm, this seems like a rather easy prediction to make: that all the arguments for, and against, the current view on global warming will be obsolete in 50 years.
Unfortunately, the debate on global warming has been so politicized that I can indeed believe that any theories currently present will be obsolete in a small number of years. Has it occured to anyone else that the huge right-vs-left debate over global warming has actually repressed all of the scientific facts on global warming? I'd love to see original scientific research on the question on global warming, but it seems that everyone with an opinion on global warming is merely a pundit for either the right or the left.
Perhaps, somewhat arrogantly, I consider myself an intelligent scientist (though not a climatologist). I would love to read the research on the subject of global warming, minus the political punditry, and make my own decisions on the problem.
It isn't a right vs. left issue (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Have you tried Wikipedia? I promise you won't be disappointed!
The problem isn't global warming... (Score:4, Interesting)
Remember the case of the girl that wasn't given an MRI scan to see if she *COULD* have cancer, even when she was bleeding and had awful headaches? One month later she was dead. Why? Negligence. The same is happening to the planet. Floods here, floods there, and the people who can make a difference, don't give a damn.
It's completely fine to try out heresies in science. Say there wasn't a big bang. Say black holes don't exist. Say the Earth is flat. Say we have two moons, I couldn't care less! But right now, and specifically with global warming, we're talking about the destiny of the whole planet. The planet needs to be diagnosed, and fast. Is it ok to be an alarmist? To announce doomsday news? To scare everyone?
If it turns out that Global Warming isn't true, that we can pollute the air as much as we want without consequences, I'd be REALLY glad to be wrong! I'd celebrate! You can kill all the global warming theory supporters, including me. Fine by me. But if we're right... what will happen if the US doesn't listen? And we're running out of time [zmag.org]. Is the corporations' money worth destroying the Earth? Is it?
In the end, it's all about money. Science isn't relevant, unfortunately.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
frankly, no, it's not ok. not when your talking about making far reaching economic fuckups that will hurt people who can least afford it. not when there's still HUGE holes in the hypothesis that man made c02 is warming the planet.
you people KEEP talking about science, yet you apply very little to you model of global climate. fuck, you can't even fix a y2k bug in your model software and you expect us to listen to you?
Re:Heretics? (Score:4, Insightful)
Are humans capable of producing more CO2 per decade than say, a single volcanic eruption?
Does the amount of organisms capable of removing CO2 from the atmosphere increase as this new atmosphere provides an environment closer to the optimum for them?
Does the increase of CO2 (which is far denser than oxygen or nitrogen) at relatively LOW altitudes (because of this density) have ANY effect on the upper atmosphere? In fact, is heat really retained at ALL by a thin surface layer of CO2?
The "facts" are not as clear cut as you would like them to be. Of course it's easy if you only listen to what you WANT to hear.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes. Humans put out well over 100 times as much CO2 as all volcanic activity combined.
>> Does the amount of organisms capable of removing CO2 from the atmosphere increase as this new atmosphere provides an environment closer to the optimum for them?
It depends. There are limits to the number of organisms from other things like nutrients, hence projects to do things like dump extra iron in the ocean. Ot
Here's the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
So sorry, but I remain unconvinced and a site like realclimate.org does nothing to change that. What I need is what I consider to be good, unbiased research. So far, I've had real trouble finding it. Things that sounded reasonable in the new bite fall apart when you read the actual journal article and investigate it a bit.
If you've reviewed the data and find it to be clear and convincing, that's great, but don't assume everyone has to agree with you, or that a person who doesn't is an idiot.
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Re:Here's the problem (Score:4, Insightful)
I am confused here. Which of the statements made by the grandparent do you think are incorrect? Are you claiming that human activity does not release more carbon dioxide than volcanic activity? Or are you just denigrating the source, in the hope that nobody will notice your total failure to address the facts themselves?
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Re:Here's the problem (Score:5, Informative)
Now, it might be reasoned that the Earth is warming naturally and that humans can't possibly effect such a change on the environment. If you believe this, I have a bridge in Minnesota to sell you. Have you been to China lately? There, in an attempt to rapidly industrialize, they have churned up so much dust and smoke so as to make most of the air unbreathable. When on travels north from Beijing to Badaling (where the Great Wall is up in the mountains), the smog is so bad it makes LA at rush hour look like heaven.
The examples I have listed above are all things which have not happened in the last several thousand years (esp. the one about the ski areas :-) ) In some cases, one must go back tens of thousands of years to see such large scale changes in the environment. It may be that it's part of the natural cycle. However pundits on this side of the issue have yet to prove that they understand the ice age any better than those on the side of climate change. However, climate scientists *have* shown that increased CO2 can lead to warming in all kinds of closed systems, and the rapid industrialization of the world is contributing to the CO2 that's out there.
In short, if you don't trust the computer models which nobody sees as perfect, don't bury your head in the sand. Look around with your own eyes and you will see that there's tons of other evidence that the world is changing.
Parent
Re:Heretics? (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes. T.M.Gerlach (1991, American Geophysical Union) notes that human-made CO2 has dwarfed the estimated global release of CO2 from volcanoes by at least 150 times. The small amount of global warming caused by eruption-generated greenhouse gases is offset by the far greater amount of global cooling caused by eruption-generated particles in the stratosphere (the haze effect). Greenhouse warming of the earth has been particularly evident since 1980. Without the cooling influence of such eruptions as El Chichon (1982) and Mt. Pinatubo (1991), greenhouse warming would have been more pronounced. As those eruption-generated particles leave the stratosphere, the haze effect will diminish, and the original greenhouse effect will be more pronounced.
Yes, but not enough to counter our influence. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/09/0409
Yes and yes.
For example, if most of your talking points come from conservative "think tanks" rather than planetary climatologists. Please cite your assertions and be sure that all come from scientific journals and the like as opposed to the aforementioned think tanks or political pundits.
Honestly. I'd love to see your evidence that calls global warming into question. I will read it and give it an honestly critical eye. I only ask that you cite your sources.
Parent
Re:Heretics? (Score:5, Informative)
Oh? Really? Well, here are some responses then.
From New analysis counters claims that solar activity is linked to global warming [guardian.co.uk]:
When asked to comment on this later finding, the show's producer, Martin Durkin, refused.
A statement [antarctica.ac.uk] from the British Antarctic Survey says:
Further evidence is presented here [findarticles.com] that the show intentionally mislabelled and distorted data. In addition to the "NASA" distortion above (which the producer admitted was "a fluff") there are others:
The 1991 data comes from Friis-Christensen who has tried, several times, to prove the solar theory, but each time the theories have been debunked [guardian.co.uk]. For example, the journal Eos noted that Friis-Christensen's 1991 theories were based on "incorrect handling of the physical data". Later work seems to suffer from the same problems. Regardless, Friis-Christensen released a statement [folk.uio.no] noting his concerns with usage of data, stating:
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Re:Heretics? (Score:5, Insightful)
Bottom line, if this is the end of an ice age, or mankind screwing up the earth it doesn't matter. Scientists need to find a way to MAINTAIN the 'sweet' spot that humans need for survival.
This is no longer about who's fault it is, nor saving the earth, this is about saving a large population of people.
1) If mankind is 'adding' to the problem, we need to stop accelerating it.
2) If mankind has nothing to do with it, we need to find a way to artificially slow it down.
Here are the ramifications of either scenario, the caps are melting. Yes, this is FACT, no matter how much people want to bitch about whose fault it is.
The shelf that dropped off a couple of years ago at the South Pole was a dramatic indicator.
The fact that Greenland is 'becoming' green again is another major problem.
The fact that US subs at the north pole have measured the ice thickness go from 10s of meters, where they couldn't surface, to under 1 meter where they can surface should be enough evidence to scare the hell out of people.
So after you two and people like you get worrying about who's fault all of this is, it is time to get together and work on a solution. An asteroid collision would not be manmade, but if one comes hurling at the earth, we would need to take action to deflect it. And this is the same freaking thing. PERIOD.
All this recent bitching about whether the temperatures are going up 5 degrees or only 2 degrees DOESN'T MAKE A FREAKING DIFFERENCE, they are going up, or the caps would not be melting.
What happens when the caps melt? Well first the ocean streams are messed up as fresh water is added in large amounts to crucial areas that salinization are needed to return heavy water back to the equator. In effect Europe and parts of North America freeze over.
The second problem is even if the streams in the ocean somehow keep working as needed to keep mankind alive, sea levels WILL continue to RAISE. This means bye, bye Miami, most of New York City, the Netherlands, and a large portion of Asia areas and islands.
And we are only talking a meter or two difference to affect 100s of millions of people on the coastlines everywhere.
So go back to your bitching about who is at fault, while the rest of the scientific community tries to find solutions to save your ass.
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Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
you'd be very hard pressed to fine untainted research on global climate. how about YOU go out and provide us a link if it's so easy?
Re:Heretics? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
He's right. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Agreed. That's why (good) scientists learn to think critically. Forget "famous" magazines, peer review, past research, etc. The bottom line is always - what supports these claims and DOES IT MAKE SENSE.
Heretics, Bjørn Lomborg and flame wars (Score:4, Insightful)
I guess maybe Lomborg has done some good things, started some good things, but all in all he did nothing good for the global warming debate but make it less scientific and more political. Then again he is actually a statistician with a lot of knowledge about economics and little real knowledge about geology etc.
My point is just that people like Lomborg tend to make something that was before something that could be debated scientifically in open forums like these something that starts a flame war almost right away as soon as it is brought up.
I am not sure this makes the science that we really need to be done well any better, what should have been arguments about scientific evidence ends up in economic and political arguments which never really lead to any good.
On heresy. (Score:5, Insightful)
The question is, is Dyson being an Einstein, or a Bozo? For my money, on climate change, I'm going with the latter.
Re:On heresy. (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, with all due respect for Dyson and his past work, I'm inclined to agree here. First, I read his essay and he doesn't seem to have any real arguments, backed by real numbers. He's basically arguing from personal incredulity [wikipedia.org], and explaining at length how that makes him a heretic, and therefore right. Second, I was at one of his talks quite recently (he was promoting one of his books), and somebody in the audience asked him about Dawkins' The God Delusion (just published). Dyson almost exploded; his (very volubly expounded) thesis was that Dawkins does immeasurable harm to science, and, if I understood him correctly, he almost said that one can't be an atheist and a scientist. I was quite surprised, so I went and did a Google search on Dyson; I found a number of things, among which this [edge.org]. So, sadly, I believe Dyson has suffered a bad attack of the Brain Eater in his old age.
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Re:On heresy. (Score:4, Informative)
Sigh. Here we go again. No, he wasn't. [skeptically.org] Here's a quote that should clarify Einstein's opinion: It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. This quote (also others, and more detail) can be found at the site linked above. And, if you cared to read Dyson's actual speech from the link in my initial post, you could have seen that his theology is very different from Einstein's.
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Re:On heresy. (Score:5, Insightful)
He's not trying to dispute what's going on with Climate Change, or even that we're partially responsible. Instead he's saying there may be much better ways to deal with it than the current proposed economic approaches. I'll take his input over a hundred McIntyres' worth, for as long as we can still get it, given that he's 80. I'm not convinced about his finding an upside in the possible wetting of the Sahara, but any single one of his points is better argued than all the GW-skeptic points I've yet read on the subject in slashdot.
In the past Dyson's proven to be a lot closer to Einstein than Bozo the Clown and I think he deserves some slack on this one. For the role of genius moonlighting as clown, I think Roger Penrose has my vote for 'Emperor's New Mind', where he let his personal desires and beliefs overcome the pointers and evidence of evolutionary biology, chaos theory, and complexity theory. But I don't think Dyson's fallen off his pedestal yet, even if his balance looks shaky at times.
Parent
"There is no doubt that parts of the world... (Score:5, Insightful)
Doesn't that quote suggest he's just been confused by the term global warming and doesn't understand the basic issue at all? I'm convinced it's because of people like him that the popular term was modified to "Climate Change". It's about the energy the heat adds to the system, not the fact that it gets warm everywhere. It could well get colder in a lot of places, all it does is make things more extreme. Like pushing a swing just that little bit harder, it might go up higher but unless you move it's the back swing that will have you not fathering any children.
His conclusion says it all (Score:5, Insightful)
Ultimately what he attacks is being stuck in an ideology, and that heresies are essential for science. He isn't claiming that his heresies are true - just that scientists are too stuck in an ideology to even give them proper attention.
The climate change denial movement (Score:4, Informative)
Point, Counterpoint (Score:4, Informative)
The recent warmth has been greatest over North America and Eurasia between 40 and 70N. - NOAA
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/globalwarming
I don't know enough about the human involvement part yet to disagree with him (though I've been looking into it, and the research is compelling enough to keep me reading). But I have pored over the numbers on the temperature record, and when he says it is inconclusive, he is mistaken. I think he has not looked at the data very thoroughly, and that this fact is quickly demonstrated by his inaccurate statement that the effect has been greatest in the arctic.
More data here:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/globalwarming
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/mpp/freedata.html [noaa.gov]
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/globalwarming/pale
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/ [uea.ac.uk]
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/ [uea.ac.uk]
Re:We need more people like him (Score:5, Funny)
I wear my eyepatch and parrot every day. What do YOU do to prevent global warming?
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:We need more people like him (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:We need more people like him (Score:5, Insightful)
1) The fact that the models may be wrong only means we have to lean *harder* on carbon output. We now know from the ice core records that the climate is not metastable and can in fact shift rapidly when you push it like we are *right now*. The fact that the models aren't perfect doesn't *decrease* the risk it *increases* it. If you're driving on a road where a bridge may have collapsed (e.g. let's say you're in the US on an interstate and the president is a Republican
2) The business with top soil is amusing but hardly very useful. There's lots of complicated data about topsoil out there (go google young man...) but pretty much all of it suggests that we're loosing megatons of it in the US. In the rest of the world we're loosing it much faster. So what's Freeman's suggestion? Increase topsoil. Really helpful that one. By saying "saying that the problems are grossly exaggerated" he's going to get the giant corrupt corp. agribusiness interests of the world to change all their short-term profit-oriented processes to increase topsoil? No. They'll point to the "what me worry?" part of his article and ignore the rest just like the parent.
I hope we get really lucky and somehow there's some hidden feedback loop in the climate that bails us out. Cause the way every off the reservation comment by some cranky old scientist gets played up by the media means there's no way in hell we're gonna get out of this by rational planning
One final word:
When you're a sociopath waiting for marriage don't enter into the equation, if you know what I mean...
Parent
Re:What bothers me about global warming... (Score:5, Insightful)
Procedure doesn't work: Death
Procedure isn't attempted: Death
Obviously in a case like that, even a 10% chance is worth taking.
What if it's a new foot anti-fungal with a 10% chance of causing death? You'll find the 90% confidence somewhat lacking (I hope).
Parent
Re:I am so glad he wrote this (Score:4, Insightful)
He is not arguing from incredulity, he is stating that the models don't take important factors into account because they are extremely hard to model, or we have never measured them and therefore don't have a dataset to put into a model.
The models as he states do a great job with fluid dynamics, but they suck at clouds, dust (probably smoke from forest fires and volcanoes too), and anything else that doesn't fit in a fluid dynamics world... which is quite a lot really. And I'm sure you'll come back with "well, if we wait to see if the models are right or not, it'll be too late, so we have to ACT NOW!" That is the default response from any global warming nazi when challenged with "why don't we try to really figure out whats happening before we spend trillions of dollars fixing a problem that might not exist?"
I swear you environmentalists are crazy. What you are proposing would be like you go to the doctor, you have a slight fever, he does a single test that is incorrect 50% of the time, and then recommends you spend $1,000,000 to get a liver transplant, kidney transplants, heart transplant, bone marrow transplant, and just for fun, chemo cause it might be cancer too. Or, maybe you should just take a Tylenol and call him in the morning? But no, if we wait for just 10 minutes and think about it, and try to get a better diagnosis, well if the first diagnosis is right then you'll be dead, so better just go with that!
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Really? None of the climate models have ever accounted for plants absorbing carbon? Do you know anything about what is or isn't in
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually you need to prove it way beyond that (Score:5, Insightful)
Real science, proper science, is going for proof to a very high standard. I'll quote Richard Feynman since he said it very well:
"It's a kind of scientific integrity,
a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of
utter honesty--a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if
you're doing an experiment, you should report everything that you
think might make it invalid--not only what you think is right about
it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and
things you thought of that you've eliminated by some other
experiment, and how they worked--to make sure the other fellow can
tell they have been eliminated.
Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be
given, if you know them. You must do the best you can--if you know
anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong--to explain it. If you
make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then
you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well
as those that agree with it. There is also a more subtle problem.
When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate
theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that
those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea
for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else
come out right, in addition.
In summary, the idea is to try to give all of the information to
help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the
information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or
another."
If you want to argue for a much lower standard, ok, but understand that isn't good science, that's pseudoscience. Pseudoscience is where you have some experiments, maybe contrived maybe not, to support your claims and that's all. You don't try to prove them false, in fact you ignore any contrary evidence. Instead you rely heavily on personal testimony and showing how many people agree with you (a large consensus). You don't go for strong evidence, you go for strong persuasion.
You can do that if you like, but please don't confuse it with good science.
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