Well, he's not using science at all, so no he wouldn't be doing the same thing he is complaining about. He's playing politics, yes. But he isn't using science to play politics.
This is where we bring Capitalism into it Yea . .a factory making a Mil a Day may seem to have more incentive to lie but a Professor making 100 Grr, who knows if he gets the wrong answer . . . his funding will be cut and that 100 Grr may go bye bye has a bit of incentive too esp in the new College world of Publish or die. Rocket River
"The best human beings were not breeding as rapidly as the inferior ones..." Sounds quite familiar... Dysgenics is a term applied by some researchers to describe the evolutionary weakening of a population of organisms relative to their environment, often due to relaxation of natural selection or the occurrence of negative selection. It is not a topic of significant scientific research, but appears occasionally in fiction and the popular media. While discussed in biology, dysgenics is a controversial term, especially when applied to humans, and is generally considered a scientific hypothesis. IDIOCRACY ANYONE?
Prof 1 : Hello there .gov and enviro groups please fund me. I know you have about 1 grant available per 100 requests. Prof 2 : Hello refinery interest groups. I want to disprove green house gas effects and global warming. I know you can pull a mil out of the loose change in your couch.
He is discussing a subject in the domain of science - the natural world and the climate, but he is using political arguments to do so.
Of course we should question everything but the problem is that there are negative implications if we don't act. As I've said before there is always the possibility that Global Warming isn't occuring that said we're engaged then in a roullette wheel of possibilities. The majority consensus scientific opinion is that it is happening so when predicting future possibilities that should be weighed more heavily than the minority opinion that it isn't. Now it is possible that the minority is right but there is nothing inherent about the minority opinion that means it should be right. Most studies and research point towards global warming happening. Anyway even if global warming isn't happening there are still many side benefits towards curbing it. Conserving energy and moving away from fossil fuels will provide huge benefits even without preventig global warming. Given those it makes sense to take steps to preven global warming even if there are still many things to be questioned about it.
crichteon isn't anti-environmentalism or saying global warming is a hoax. He's just saying that everyone is screaming that global warming is fact when that's not the case. He's criticizing the fact that everyone is jumping on this bandwagon and there's not been an application of the scientific method to saw whether or not global warming is due to man maded gases.
Actually, he is very anti-global warming. In discussing the data he often cites discredited evidence and selectively ignores evidence that doesn't fit an anti-global warming agenda. He never says that it is false, but instead he tries to convice people that the evidence is as much against as for, which is clearly not the case, by selectively selecting evidence and only discussing uncertanty in relation to the limited positive evidence he cites.
Of course there has been an application of the scientific method to the global warming. Observation: Carbon Dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gasese are noted to trap heat. Observation: The use of fossil fuels as an energy source is releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Hypothesis: The increasing level of greenhouse gases should lead to increasing temperatures. Experiment: We are running the experiment on Earth at the moment but since we can't set up a control Earth where humans don't exist or where humans aren't burning fossil fuels, outside of computer models, we are looking for correlating data. Observation: We are noticing a trend of warming temperatures in recent years compared to the last 100 years or so. This is also noticed in other signs of warming such as retreating glaciers, larger areas of drought or storminess. Observation: From ice core and tree ring samples we can identify that the amount of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases is greater now than at other times of warming. Observation: There hasn't been major periods of vulcanism that would account for a natural release of greenhouse gases. Correlations: From those observations it would seem likely that there is a relationship between increasing greenhouse gases and warmer temperatures and that those greenhouse gases are being created by human activity. While obviously this is a short summary and the climate is very complicated. This basically sums up the scientific process that has been applied to the global warming.
What happened to this? http://www.nrdc.org/media/pressreleases/050428a.asp FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Press contact: Nicole St. Clair, 202-270-5125 If you are not a member of the press, please write to us at nrdcinfo@nrdc.org or see our contact page. NASA, DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY SCIENTISTS FIND "SMOKING GUN" EVIDENCE OF GLOBAL WARMING Findings Confirm Suspicions: Earth is Absorbing More Heat than it Can Handle, Human Pollution is to Blame WASHINGTON (April 28, 2005) -- New research published today in the online version of the journal Science proves beyond a reasonable doubt that heat-trapping pollution is the primary cause of global warming, and warns that significant additional warming is "already in the pipeline" to occur. In the article, "Earth's Energy Imbalance: Confirmation and Implications", scientists from NASA and the Department of Energy describe research on earth's "energy balance" -- the amount of heat absorbed by the sun versus heat emitted by the planet -- determined through precise measurements of increases in temperatures within the ocean. The researchers observed temperature increases that matched predictions of the effect of heat-trapping pollution that had been made with supercomputer-based climate models. For the earth's climate to be stable, the amount of energy received from the sun must be balanced by the amount of energy radiated from the earth back to space. But the researchers found that the earth is now absorbing more energy than it is emitting, causing global warming. Jim Hansen, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the lead author of the study, said: "This energy imbalance is the 'smoking gun' that we have been looking for. The magnitude of the imbalance agrees with what we calculated using known climate forcing agents, which are dominated by increasing human-made greenhouse gases. There can no longer be substantial doubt that human-made gases are the cause of most observed warming." An important implication of this finding is that there is already an additional 1 degree Fahrenheit of global warming in the pipeline, even if the amount of heat-trapping pollution in the atmosphere were stabilized at today's level. The researchers found that the excess energy being received by the earth is 0.85 plus or minus 0.15 watts per square meter of the earth's surface. In aggregate, this is more than one-hundred times the output of all electric power plants in the world. Daniel Lashof, science director, NRDC Climate Center, said: "While industry-funded deniers will probably continue their misinformation campaign, this study lays to rest any lingering doubts that heat-trapping pollution is responsible for global warming. There is no longer any excuse for delay in reducing global warming pollution." http://www.nrdc.org/media/pressreleases/050428a.asp
Actually, that's not the scientific method - it's statistics. Correlations may indicated codependent variables, but not causations. Science involves controled structured experiments, not statistical analysis of data in an open system with multiple variables. This is why forecasting the weather isn't a science, it's mathematics. Anyway, Crighton actually set out to write a PRO-green book, but found the evidence questionable. He's not anti-environment, he just sees correctly that no one is addressing the other side, and there's a lot of people who will suffer from blindly and dogmatically putting forth controls. The fact is most scientists and people who are feverishly anti-green house gases are just anti-industry and suspicious of anything not granola. They will tell you that we should run the world on wind and let us go back to the stone ages and we can all live in the jungle. But they will also rather have the earth go up 10 degrees before considering nuclear power. I can see his contempt for the fantical environmentalists. He's not saying we shouldn't do anything, just saying we need to be thoughtful and consider the impact to everyone when we do move forward.
The list of great science and scientists who are excluded under your definition are many. It excludes, for instance, all of Astronomy and Evolutionary Biology, and many of the great physicists like Werner Heisenberg (experiments were conducted, but not by him and most of them well after his death). I dare you to state Charles Darwin, Nicolaus Copernicus, and Albert Einstein were not scientists with a straight face. I have seen this argument before about science and the scientific. I appreciate that it is appealing at first blush, but it is linguistic slight of hand. It is often used to discredit evolution as 'false' and more recently it has been applied to global warming.
Man, this is a crappy excerpt. I never realized that Crichton had so little command of rhetoric. Crichton's way of stating, "I am comparing apples to oranges" as clearly as possible. His whole argument is only valid if eugenics can serve as a reasonable analogy for anthropomorphic global warming. But here, he only manages to highlight a critical difference between the two. Unless, of course, one assumes that there is "no scientific basis" for the existance of AGW, which would simply be untrue. Certainly there is a lot of public "concern" over global warming, as there should be. Global warming poses very large problems for the future of all humans. The political momentum for change in public policy has increased as the case for the existance of AGW has grown stronger and stronger. The greatest irony in all of this is that if laypeople and policymakers did simply follow the findings of scientists, as Crichton advocates, the political controversy would be nonexistant and we could finally begin to make progress in reducing atmospheric CO2. Does anyone really think that this is analogous to today's political climate? If someone comes out with a solid scientific paper which suggests that AGW may not exist, they will "dissappear" like in Nazi Germany? Does anyone actually think that such papers are being written and then discarded by scientists who fear rocking the boat? If not, how do you explain the dearth of peer-reviewed papers arguing against the existance of AGW? This really doesn't contribute to Crichton's argument, either, as the current administration has taken many measures to muddle the issue of AGW and to bolster climate change skeptics. Likewise, the media has reported on this issue in such a way that the public remains divided on the existance of AGW even while the vast majority of scientists have reached a consensus.
Now you are just being silly. How am I saying they are not scientists? My whole point is that your meterologists aren't anywhere near guys like Einstein. My definition is exactly what they are...you're just saying that as a weak attempt to spin this debate. Nice try. All of these guys (unlike your meterologists) developed scientific theory based on the scientific method. While they may have leveraged statistics in their theroy, none of them depended on "correlations" to try as a basis of fact. Any scientist who states global warming is now a certainity isn't really a scientist..because the very nature of science is not to state something without recognizing the uncertainity. Even Hesienberg understood this, and which is why he came up with his famous principle. Global Warming thus far is an excercise in statistical modeling of the most complex thermodynamic open system we deal with. People suspect that the rise in temperature is due to human activity, but no one knows to what extent or how far it will go. The models are just models, and no one knows how accurate they are. We can't even get an accurate forecast for next week, and you want to predict the temperature in 100 years and call that science???? Sounds more like voodoo economics to me.
You're right. Nothing is science can ever be "proven". Therefore, we should never act on scientific evidence, ever, even if it shows that something like manmade global warming is almost certainly occuring. Seriously any scientist who doesn't think that the case for the existence of AGW is strong enough to warrant action is in a very small minority. Predicting the weather is different than predicting changes in climate, by the way. Noone is trying to predict the odds of rain on any particular day 50 years from now.
This genuinely gave me an lol moment because it is so absurd. Perhaps you should take a look at the uncertantity principal, which is in fact all about statistical modeling and extrapolation, and was created absent of much evidence at all. I won't try and engage in a debate on this subject, given your predilections for argument for argument's sake. I don't intend to be condescending, but I also don't intend to retread over the same ground for 20 pages as you repeat yourself ad infinitum and ignore everything I am writing again, either. If someone else thinks you are making good sense and would like to take up the torch, I will be glad to show both the significant known and measured data regarding the climate as well as the numerous occasions where other sciences operate based on computer modeling and/or extrapolation. But for now, I will just say that I think ample evidence exists that your positions on this subject are logical constructs devoid of substance.
This may have been his point but I REALLY disagree with it. The level of science literacy in the United States is SO low that only a very small percentage of the population can actually look at the material, question it intelligently and make an informed decision. Non-scientists don't really have much choice other than to listen to the guy in the lab coat. Or at least listen to what 90% of the guys in the lab coats agree on.
Burning fossil fuel is like lighting up a big match on the Earth, and green house gases are like a coat that smothers the Earth.
Otto has already responded with some of what I was going to reply to but to add to his response there are many aspects of science where it is impossible to set up a controlled experiment and scientifically you rely upon correlations of independent data to test a hypothesis. For instance its impossible to set up a controlled experiment dealing with the totality of Evolution, the Big Bang or Continental Drift as you would need to set up a control that covers the time frame of evolution, the size of the Earth, and the time and size of the Universe. Even though no experimental control has been set up on those there is enough theoretical and correlated data to support those as legitimate scientific theories.
