Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: Bobboau on January 29, 2015, 02:24:41 pm
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http://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/survey-shows-scientists-public-odds-over-climate-gmos-more-n296231
:blah:
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Unsurprising. Scientists not only know facts, but also the reasons (or at least, a good part of the reasons) for why the facts are the way they are. The general public, on the other hand, often doesn't bother with finding that out. There are some things that "seem plausible" until you get your hands on hard data and understand the maths involved. Then, it quickly becomes obvious why the popular view is bollocks.
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Missing from the article: their definition of 'scientist.'
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It did say "U.S.-based members of the science association" and I don't know if lay people can be members of that or if you have to actually have to be an actual scientist.
If they are actually people with a degree in a science I'm impressed you can find 2% of scientists who say humans didn't evolve. If you can have someone go through all the work you have to do in order to become a scientist and still believe bull**** like that then it's not exactly surprising that people who haven't received proper scientific training believe bull**** too.
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surprised it's not higher, there are a lot of chemists, and **** even Francis Collins leader of the ****ing human genome project was a creationist, so yeah, does not shock me at all.
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this thing should be taken with a gigantic grain of salt. we are talking 5750 people talked to for the purposes of the poll and it says it was 3,748 "U.S.-based members of the science association"
unless my english is broken, member of the science association !== scientist
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surprised it's not higher, there are a lot of chemists, and **** even Francis Collins leader of the ****ing human genome project was a creationist, so yeah, does not shock me at all.
I've never understood how a chemist can have problems believing in evolution. Given how often I saw a reaction go tits up for no understandable reason they should be the biggest believers in not only evolution but also abiogenesis, which is the harder of the two concepts to understand.
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Francis Collins is most definitely not a creationist, that is a giant slander on him. He's a firm believer in Evolution, but he's also a firm believer in Christianity. There are plenty like him.
e: I mean, if Collins was a creationist, that would be a massive boon for the Creationist movement. You don't see them parading his name do you? Well, make your own conclusions over that one.
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I think it could be interesting for the forum to answer the questions. I'll start.
Safe to eat genetically modified foods? I would say yes with a nod to MP-Ryan, I remember the talk he and I had about GM food.
Favour use of animals in research? Depends on the research. For medicines and anything else important to living, I'd say yes. So girls can pretty themselves up with new makeup, no.
Safe to eat foods grown with pesticides, I'd say yes, broadly speaking.
Humans have evolved over time, yes.
Childhood vaccines such as MMR should be required, first impulse is to say yes, but really this should be something there shouldn't need to be a mandate for. It should be something everyone wants to do. And the problem with there being people on the fence or thinking it's a bad thing is if they are forced into doing it, then that can kind of make them think it's even more of a bad thing if they have to force you to do it. If I have to answer yes or no, I'll answer yes, but I would hope there would be no need to force such a thing if people were just educated enough to understand that it's the right thing to do. That still leaves your faith healers though even if you get rid of those fearing things like it causing autism or causing the very disease it's supposed to prevent.
Climate change is mostly due to human activity, yes.
Growing World population will be a major problem, yes, it will eventually if it keeps growing.
Favor building more nuclear power plants, I'd say only if renewable energy sources aren't going to cut it. I don't really have a strong opinion on it, but just one nuclear disaster does so much damage, ideally we would not have to rely on nuclear power.
Favor more offshore drilling, no opinion.
Astronauts essential for future of US Space program. I'm guessing this means astronauts vs robots going on missions? I don't really know, and neither do the public or the scientists judging by the 47-59 split. Right now a human is going to be more effective and versatile than any robot, but that could change. Especially in terms of sending a robot where a human, even in a spacesuit, can't go. Unless I have not understood the question, I don't see why we have to choose. Robots and astronauts both have their place.
Increased use of bioengineered fuel, yes, if we can.
Increased use of fracking, I don't have the facts to form an opinion on this. I see it in the news and know it's a controversial thing, but I don't know why.
Space station has been a good investment for the US, I don't have the facts for this either.
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Francis Collins is most definitely not a creationist, that is a giant slander on him. He's a firm believer in Evolution, but he's also a firm believer in Christianity. There are plenty like him.
e: I mean, if Collins was a creationist, that would be a massive boon for the Creationist movement. You don't see them parading his name do you? Well, make your own conclusions over that one.
Yeah, Collins' view is more about evolution being the tool God uses to shape life. Which is a perfectly respectable position to take.
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It did say "U.S.-based members of the science association" and I don't know if lay people can be members of that or if you have to actually have to be an actual scientist.
If they are actually people with a degree in a science I'm impressed you can find 2% of scientists who say humans didn't evolve. If you can have someone go through all the work you have to do in order to become a scientist and still believe bull**** like that then it's not exactly surprising that people who haven't received proper scientific training believe bull**** too.
In any circumstance some people just end up taking contrary opinions. Sometimes that trait of human nature is very useful to the species, sometimes it's not. I wouldn't fret too much about 2 percent, certainly not compared to how collective decisions actually get made.
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Well, that, or they're fluorine chemists. Those need to either not believe in evolution, or be determined not to let it deter them. :)
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Or maybe it's just everyone doesn't have a completely polar view of the popular "you're stupid and a worthless human being if you do/don't believe ___" topics. Science is no place for smugly superior attitudes.
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The "you're stupid and worthless, etc" part is certainly not helpful to anyone, but there is also no belief involved in whether or not you hold a scientific idea as being true or not. Science is evidence based, not belief. So if someone does not think things like evolution, the Big Bang, ~4.5GY old Earth and ~13.8GY universe, global warming, etc, are true, then they are simply wrong. It is not a matter of opinion.
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It's so ridiculously easy for confirmation bias to slip into any science you do that you have to be sure you're dealing with someone who will take the necessary steps against that. Being a YEC is a huge black mark against that. If someone is willing to completely disregard all contrary evidence in one aspect of science, there's a good chance they'll do it elsewhere.
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To be fair, I think the majority of YEC's have been presented with it for most of their life and from an early age, and they really haven't had adequate exposure to geology, astronomy, etc to be able to understand them. Even worse, they're usually presented with misconceptions or even outright lies about what these fields actually say, so it's no wonder why they think they are wrong. (How many times have you been in a conversation with a YEC and get asked absurd questions like "if humans evolved from apes why are there still apes?" or "how did everything come from nothing in the Big Bang?")?
Basically I guess I'm saying most YEC's aren't this way because they're deliberately ignorant, but rather that they just don't have the foundations and tools necessary to properly compare and contrast secular science against YEC and see which one more correctly describes reality.
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I know for the majority of lay-YEC's that is true, but if you are a scientist, you have had access to that sort of thing and you almost certainly have been exposed to the truth. There comes a point where it really becomes a case of sticking your fingers in your ears and refusing to listen. And I think that by the time you've gotten a degree in a science, you've long passed that point.
"if humans evolved from apes why are there still apes?"
I always ask them "If orange juice comes from oranges, why are there still oranges?" in response so they realise how badly flawed that question is. :p
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"how did everything come from nothing in the Big Bang?"
This one is actually a good question, though. One that the theory guys are currently working hard to answer. :) Another fallacy most "anti-science" people fall into is thinking that scientists either know everything or nothing about any given subject. You either posses deep knowledge of all mysteries of the universe, or everything you say is wrong. "I don't know (yet)" is a perfectly valid state for a scientific problem to be in, and doesn't invalidate the rest of our knowledge about it.
Indeed, I suppose that's why some find creationism and such comforting. In those approaches, we'd live in a world with much less unknowns, which some people could find preferable to (still mostly unexplored) reality. Really, one thing studying a science makes you realize is how little about the universe we actually know (and matter in it). A universe that existed for a long, but imaginable amount of time, ran by an old human with a beard sitting in the clouds, is not only much easier to grasp, but also seems much less unpredictable. While fear of unknown and uncertainty is something you won't often find in a scientists, perhaps it is possible to work in a scientific field (though likely one from the "soft" side) and still find a predictable, human-centric world preferable.
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I find it interesting that the only points anyone on this forum decided to take issue with were evolution and global warming (to a much less effect). no one here seems to want to badmouth the people who disagree with the scientists about GMOs, animal testing, pesticides (all three of these have a WIDER gap than evolution BTW), and nuclear power. I agree evolution deniers are idiots but so are all the rest of these people.
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I find it interesting that the only points anyone on this forum decided to take issue with were evolution and global warming (to a much less effect). no one here seems to want to badmouth the people who disagree with the scientists about GMOs, animal testing, pesticides (all three of these have a WIDER gap than evolution BTW), and nuclear power. I agree evolution deniers are idiots but so are all the rest of these people.
I think you go too far calling all these people idiots. How are we going to discuss the issues properly if those on the other side are dismissed as idiots? I wanted to see other points of view, which is why I threw my hat into the ring first and answered the questions.
And I'd say there's a reasonable case for people not being idiots in every case. Evolution. I really don't get it why Evolution is held up as this great litmus test of intelligence when it really has no impact on your everyday existence or capability to actually do anything short of actually working in a position directly related to evolution whether you believe in Evolution or not. Where I came from while certainly interesting is not particularly important to me, especially when put next to the question of what I'm going to do while I'm here. The thing is, since Evolution is really not relevant to your ability to live your life, I can see why people would either not deem it important to know, or default to the seemingly simpler explanation and scoff at the notion that we came from apes. Also, while Evolution was well taught to me here in England in the schools, I know how much of a contentious issue this is over in the USA where the survey was done, and how inconsistent schooling in the subject is.
Global Warming, the evidence is there that it is a thing, the receding of the polar ice caps testifies to it. But again, it's not something that's going to change your everyday existence, and many people won't have the time or energy to go looking into something that is simply not relevant to their daily lives. And they'll look at the evidence around them and see no change and dismiss it as scaremongering.
GM food. I myself am a very "if it isn't broken don't fix it" kind of person, and it's well documented the chaos and destruction mankind has caused when messing with ecosystems so I can't blame people for being cautious about this. For letting others be the guinea pigs. This also leads into pesticides. I said yes for pesticides, but based more on my faith in the high standards we have here in the UK when it comes to food that nothing dangerous is going to get through. Some pesticides are harmful, I'm just confident none of them are going to find their way onto my food. I don't care enough to read labels, but given a straight choice, I would always take organic.
Animal testing is the biggest of them all. I will never take issue with animal testing in the interests of the survival of the human race. And advancing the sciences would fall under that as well. But I regard it as a necessary evil. Just think how you'd feel if some aliens came along and scooped you up. "Oh, we're going to inject you with a lethal dose of this disease, and you're going to die slowly and screaming with us watching and recording every detail of it, but it's not for our sick pleasure or anything, your death will be helping us to find a cure." Animal testing is something I want to know is being tightly regulated to minimise the suffering of the creatures involved as much as possible, and would hope that it is done only when there is no other way. Some people don't want this suffering to take place in their name, and I can perfectly understand that.
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would you look at my thread title, me saying idiots is me being lazy on the part of my post I didn't care so much about.
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would you look at my thread title, me saying idiots is me being lazy on the part of my post I didn't care so much about.
Ah yes. I didn't notice you were the OP.
That's not me saying that makes it right or anything, but I see.
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And I'd say there's a reasonable case for people not being idiots in every case. Evolution. I really don't get it why Evolution is held up as this great litmus test of intelligence when it really has no impact on your everyday existence or capability to actually do anything short of actually working in a position directly related to evolution whether you believe in Evolution or not. Where I came from while certainly interesting is not particularly important to me, especially when put next to the question of what I'm going to do while I'm here. The thing is, since Evolution is really not relevant to your ability to live your life, I can see why people would either not deem it important to know, or default to the seemingly simpler explanation and scoff at the notion that we came from apes. Also, while Evolution was well taught to me here in England in the schools, I know how much of a contentious issue this is over in the USA where the survey was done, and how inconsistent schooling in the subject is.
The fact that it doesn't have a major impact on everyday life for lay people is exactly what makes it such a great litmus test. I'll quite happily admit that there are a great many things I don't know about when it comes to science. As a result, I leave those matter in the hands of people who are vastly more educated than me on the issue to debate. I might ask questions but I am not stupid enough to believe that my uneducated opinion on the matter carries any weight because even though I am educated in a science, that doesn't mean I know all science.
On the other hand, the very act of someone who knows nothing about evolution claiming that people vastly more educated on the subject must be wrong, makes them idiots. The very fact that it doesn't have a real world impact requiring a deep understanding of the issue (unless you are involved in medicine, science, or one of the other fields where it does) makes it a particularly dumb thing to take a stand on. Unlike GMOs or MMR or climate change, the actual physical effects of accepting evolution even if it turned out to actually be wrong are pretty small. So it takes a very special kind of idiot to decide that this is something that needs to be challenged.
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Or maybe it's just everyone doesn't have a completely polar view of the popular "you're stupid and a worthless human being if you do/don't believe ___" topics. Science is no place for smugly superior attitudes.
Is that the voice of reason I hear?
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Francis Collins is most definitely not a creationist, that is a giant slander on him. He's a firm believer in Evolution, but he's also a firm believer in Christianity. There are plenty like him.
e: I mean, if Collins was a creationist, that would be a massive boon for the Creationist movement. You don't see them parading his name do you? Well, make your own conclusions over that one.
Yeah, Collins' view is more about evolution being the tool God uses to shape life. Which is a perfectly respectable position to take.
That being my position for that matter.
In high school debate club, my debate partner and I ran a case that would involve using GMOs (like Golden Rice) as part of a US-based international aid program. It was tragically hilarious how opposed many people were to that. We joked that Jurassic Park must have scared everybody off the topic.
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Rather than an indicator of intelligence, I tend to view strong opinions on topics such as evolution to be an indicator of what I just decided to name a couple seconds ago as "intellectual inertia." It's not necessarily being stupid, it's reacting badly to being told you're wrong.
I think to some extent all of us know that such is a difficult thing to admit.
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It's also a well known thing that smug superior people (like me! I'm arrogant to the point of abuse sometimes) use to insult others as being stupid, and because, as Lorric correctly points out, it's absolutely irrelevant for your day to day life, they absolutely enjoy the hell of obnoxiously sticking to their beliefs as a barrier against what they perceive as an atheist secularist sinful attack on their religion, by the usage of obligatory education that insists that Life as we know it was the product of a blind process, not the beautiful hands of their god. The more they want to show to everyone how deeply religious or deeply commited to their own community they are, the more denial they will express on this kind of knowledge.
And because it's not like denying gravity (the consequences of which would be immediately clear), the price of insisting on this knowledge is exactly zero (at least in the near term).
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Rather than an indicator of intelligence, I tend to view strong opinions on topics such as evolution to be an indicator of what I just decided to name a couple seconds ago as "intellectual inertia." It's not necessarily being stupid, it's reacting badly to being told you're wrong.
I think to some extent all of us know that such is a difficult thing to admit.
there is already a name for this, confirmation bias, also stubbornness.
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My biggest issue with studies like this is not their accuracy, but the fact that they always tend to contribute to this "America is a country of idiots" thing. Do that in Italy and other western countries, and I can ensure you that the results would be similar, maybe not worse, but similar (this has been elected the most ignorant nation in Europe (http://www.cnbc.com/id/102132770), where 'ignorance' in this case means overestimating a number of social issues). Yeah, I understand that the widespread presence in the USA of creationists, anti-vaxxers and other groups whose ideas derail from the scientific consensus does have an impact on statistics, but isn't the study simply stating the obvious? Can anyone please name at least one branch of human knowledge where the opinion of experts doesn't differ from that of the general public?
By the way, I don't get to spend a lot of time in the US, but judging from what I see there, groups driven by rationality and reason (like the atheists and pro-vax) are gaining more and more importance over time.
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Yeah, if you go by percentages, America would likely have just as many idiots as any other country. It has more of them by absolute numbers, but that's just because it's so darn big. And because English is the current lingua franca and (despite the slow decline) US is a superpower, the world tends to hear about them. Also, in Europe, most backwards attitudes seem linked to the Catholic Church. America has a truckload of religious nuts, ignorant dolts and backwards conservatists (with a small "c", I'm not talking about the party here), but they are spread over a great number of vocal organizations. European countries have them, too, but they're more unified than Europe itself, mostly aligning themselves with the Church (regardless of what the Pope actually says about that sort of attitude...). We also have creationists here in Poland, just as stupid as in America, but they're seen as a part of the general "backwards religious" category. Dunno if it's that way in other countries (especially in Italy, which actually has Vatican at arm's reach).
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Disagreeing with scientists is fine. It's the reasoning that makes people sound ignorant. I hesitate to use the word stupid because ultimately I don't think that is the problem.
However speaking as a physicist myself, the public understanding of even the basics of my subject (even on a place like here, relatively educated and reasonably up to the minute on these things) is pretty poor. There is a tremendous gulf between the layman, an undergrad physicist, someone like myself at PhD level and my professors.
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and then there's Edward Witten.
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There's a lot of talk about individual geniuses in physics. Witten. Einstein. Hawking. Newton. However they always fail to acknowledge that the bulk of all research is enabled by and mostly completed through PhDs. Individually clever and inquisitive types who just want to make a mark.
I would say 70% of the output of my research university is entirely from the use of PhD students and postgrads. Behind Witten, there would have been a legion of collaborators, cross correlators, bright PhD students and others.
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“It is a blatant lie put forth in the media that makes it seem there is only a fringe of scientists who don’t buy into anthropogenic global warming.”
- U.S Government Atmospheric Scientist Stanley B. Goldenberg of the Hurricane Research Division of NOAA.
“I am appalled at the state of discord in the field of climate science…There is no observational evidence that the addition of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions have caused any temperature perturbations in the atmosphere.”
- Award-winning atmospheric scientist Dr. George T. Wolff, former member of the EPA’s Science Advisory Board, served on a committee of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and authored more than 90 peer-reviewed studies.
“The cause of these global changes is fundamentally due to the Sun and its effect on the Earth as it moves about in its orbit. Not from man-made activities.”
- Retired NASA Atmospheric Scientist Dr. William W. Vaughan
“The recent ‘panic’ to control GHG (greenhouse gas) emissions and billions of dollars being dedicated for the task has me deeply concerned that US, and other countries are spending precious global funds to stop global warming, when it is primarily being driven by natural forcing mechanisms.”
- Climatologist and Paloeclimate researcher Dr. Diane Douglas
“Temperature measurements show that the [climate model-predicted mid-troposphere] hot zone is non-existent. This is more than sufficient to invalidate global climate models and projections made with them.”
- UN IPCC Scientist Dr. Steven M. Japar, a PhD atmospheric chemist who was part of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Second (1995) and Third (2001) Assessment Reports, and has authored 83 peer-reviewed publications and in the areas of climate change, atmospheric chemistry, air pollutions and vehicle emissions.
“Unfortunately, Climate Science has become Political Science…It is tragic that some perhaps well-meaning but politically motivated scientists who should know better have whipped up a global frenzy about a phenomena which is statistically questionable at best.”
-Princeton University Physicist Dr. Robert H. Austin
"My own belief concerning anthropogenic climate change is that the models do not realistically simulate the climate system because there are many very important sub-grid scale processes that the models either replicate poorly or completely omit. Furthermore, some scientists have manipulated the observed data to justify their model results. In doing so, they neither explain what they have modified in the observations, nor explain how they did it. They have resisted making their work transparent so that it can be replicated independently by other scientists. This is clearly contrary to how science should be done. Thus there is no rational justification for using climate model forecasts to determine public policy."
-Dr. John S. Theon, Retired senior NASA atmospheric scientist
"Warming fears are the “worst scientific scandal in history…When people come to know what the truth is, they will feel deceived by science and scientists.”
- former UN IPCC Japanese Scientist Dr. Kiminori Itoh
(http://2-ps.googleusercontent.com/xk/EE6I3Peu9SaPzfsTuiEsBNjN4w/www.powerlineblog.com/i1.wp.com/www.powerlineblog.com/admin/ed-assets/2015/01/xgisp220temperaturesince1070020bp20with20co220from20epica20domec1.gif,qresize=578,P2C472.pagespeed.ic.ugQtjXE0z5bTqFjcNvLE.png)
Just FYI, when the messiah climate of prophet for profit, Al Gore, left congress in '02, he was worth ~$2M. 13 yrs later, he's now at ~$300M. Go figure...
The social engineering involved in combating "global warming" fuels my skepticism of the celebrities espousing it. People &/or governments are willing to manipulate the data to produce a desired outcome for effect, which seems to be about control. The ends always justify the means...
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Firestorm in 3.....2.....
:warp:
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No real point in a firestorm. Wheelspin just demonstrated the exact point I made about evolution for a different subject. It's exactly this attitude that makes the anti-vaxxer movement so popular.
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Wheelspin, why are you using a single local temperature dataset (GISP2) to make a point about global average temperature?
This is a thing I see a lot of people who don't accept scientific consensus on climate change do, and to me it just emphasizes how readily people seem to feel capable of forming opinions about a subject that they don't actually study rigorously. When temperature is analyzed with a global perspective, one finds that those earlier warm periods are a lot less significant than the warming we are experiencing today. Which is a good clue that the current warming is also quite fundamentally different in character than those earlier ones. This one is caused by a change in the thermodynamic properties of the atmosphere, and the physics behind it is remarkably simple compared to some other physics we could be talking about.
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There's a lot of talk about individual geniuses in physics. Witten. Einstein. Hawking. Newton. However they always fail to acknowledge that the bulk of all research is enabled by and mostly completed through PhDs. Individually clever and inquisitive types who just want to make a mark.
I would say 70% of the output of my research university is entirely from the use of PhD students and postgrads. Behind Witten, there would have been a legion of collaborators, cross correlators, bright PhD students and others.
Without question! I was only following your escalating of a genius ladder. At some point the sheer complexity of theory must be ( I say "must be" because I don't even have the capacity to see it myself) so unbelievable that it takes a genius of Witten's or Hawkings' size to make some sense of all the hard work all of the PhDs working on the subject matters do. Fortunately there are plenty of them.
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No real point in a firestorm. Wheelspin just demonstrated the exact point I made about evolution for a different subject. It's exactly this attitude that makes the anti-vaxxer movement so popular.
But he quoted 8 people who say it's not real. Surely that trumps the hundreds of others who say it is, and the many, many studies done that confirm it!
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If you really want to be baited into that discussion, I think sarcasm won't really be helpful here, it plays exactly into the mindset that I was talking about, those who believe in X behaving in a condescending, sarcastic way towards those who are skeptical, those who are skeptical behaving in a defiant pose against what they perceive to be either the Big Lie or just The Great Sheeple Belief.
Regarding the Global Warming debate, I wished people could focus on discussing political actions that could be shared with people who are more skeptical about the stuff for purely pragmatical reasons. Even if some people might disagree that Global Warming is real and dangerous, surely we could avoid the "Toxoplasma Of Rage" theory here and agree in certain actions that converge both towards combating climate change and other values (like pollution, economics, technology, etc.). Raising the standards of gasoline use in cars, for instance, could be argued for both CC and improving the economics of oil imports; investing in smart grids will create better conditions for solar power for individual houses but also waste a lot less energy and improve the economy (solar power for each household has lots of libertarian interest for the possibility of making people more independent of the big government and whatnot).
Surely hundreds of small alliances like these could be made in order to advance ideas and policies that will contribute to ameliorate the conditions that are the source of the fear of Climate Change. Why waste time in these futile battles instead?
We all know why of course, and I posted an article here about this last month.
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No real point in a firestorm. Wheelspin just demonstrated the exact point I made about evolution for a different subject. It's exactly this attitude that makes the anti-vaxxer movement so popular.
But he quoted 8 people who say it's not real. Surely that trumps the hundreds of other who say it is, and the many, many studies done that confirm it!
Hold on Aesaar.
Right or wrong is not determined through superior numbers. If every person on the planet were to say the sky was orange, that wouldn't make them right. (Don't post a picture of an orange sky. :) )
Science isn't always right. If no one listened to the detractors when science was proven to be wrong, science would stay wrong forever.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm going to go with the superior numbers of scientists who say global climate change is down to human activity, but it should never be something that cannot be challenged and re-analysed, especially if there are actual scientists doing it.
Wheelspin did not use these quotes to argue that this means therefore the majority is wrong. Merely to express that he is sceptical. Since when did being sceptical rather than blindly accepting things become a bad thing? I'm going with the majority, but climate change hasn't just been a series of smooth, accurate predictions by scientists, and I'm not going to close my mind to the possibility there could be serious issues with the currently held mainstream view even when I believe the mainstream view is likely to be at least broadly correct.
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You're right. Greater numbers doesn't necessarily mean correct. But then again, neither do credentials. WheelSpin quoted 8 people, and assumed that because they had credentials, what they were saying was true. Apparently, their explanation for why the science on global warming is wrong doesn't matter enough to be included or linked to in his post.
Karajorma is completely right. It's the exact same "logic" anti-vaxxers use. "I don't know **** about the subject matter, but X said this, so it must be true!"
Global warming is pretty intensively scrutinised, but people like WheelSpin have decided that it's less likely to be real than that there's some sort of global conspiracy to keep the truth from the public in order to further some crazy moneymaking scheme. Again, a lot like anti-vaxxers.
Global conspiracy is apparently more plausible to some people than the science actually being sound.
I'm not well-educated enough on the topic to comment on the specifics of global warming. I'm just pointing out that his, er, "argument" is complete crap.
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You're right. Greater numbers doesn't necessarily mean correct. But then again, neither do credentials. WheelSpin quoted 8 people, and assumed that because they had credentials, what they were saying was true. Apparently, their explanation for why the science on global warming is wrong doesn't matter enough to be included or linked to in his post.
Karajorma is completely right. It's the exact same "logic" anti-vaxxers use. "I don't know **** about the subject matter, but X said this, so it must be true!"
You might be right. I guess we'll have to wait and see if Wheelspin comes back to know for sure. I also very much agree about credentials alone not being enough to mean correct.
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Right or wrong is not determined through superior numbers. If every person on the planet were to say the sky was orange, that wouldn't make them right. (Don't post a picture of an orange sky. :) )
They are, or at least they should be if you're a layperson. If every single scientist on the planet told me the sky is orange, I'd have no other choice but to accept that. Science has a better track record than my eyesight.
Science isn't always right. If no one listened to the detractors when science was proven to be wrong, science would stay wrong forever.
When science is wrong it's usually other scientists who prove it wrong.
If a scientific theory you as a layperson don't believe in is proven wrong by a scientist, I doesn't mean you were right. You were still just as wrong for not believing the best explanation we had.
My point is, if you like to keep yourself informed and have opinions on controversial topics, feel free to do so. Go read a science blog and what physicists A and B say about string theory, and conclude that the "it's a waste of time" camp seems to be the more reasonable one. Just don't take yourself seriously.
If on the other hand you conclude 90% of scientists don't know what they're talking about, then you are simply wrong, and no one can ever prove you right.
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They are, or at least they should be if you're a layperson. If every single scientist on the planet told me the sky is orange, I'd have no other choice but to accept that. Science has a better track record than my eyesight.
And the whole planet would be wrong. The track record of science btw is the reason I trust in science.
When science is wrong it's usually other scientists who prove it wrong.
If a scientific theory you as a layperson don't believe in is proven wrong by a scientist, I doesn't mean you were right. You were still just as wrong for not believing the best explanation we had.
This is what I meant, other scientists. I cannot follow you though to a belief you were wrong not to follow the high number of scientists even if the high number of scientists were proven to be wrong. Yes, the smart money is on the majority of the scientific community to be correct, but you were not wrong.
I'm not sure how relevant this is, but there was once a question on Who Wants to be a Millionaire, one of the easy ones, I think it was the £500 question, either that or the £1000 one. But this question was not easy. I didn't know the answer to the question and neither did the player. They asked the audience, and I would have done too. And got about 80% on one answer and 20% on another. The 80% seemed like the one to guess if you didn't know the answer, because it was something everyone knew what it was, while the other three options were obscure things. So how do 20% go for this obscure thing while no one goes for the other two obscure things? I worked out that with an answer that seemed obvious for a guess, that surely if it was the correct answer it would garner close to 100% of the votes. Despite that, there was this 20% minority on another answer, and the 20% were right. The player went with the 80% and went home with nothing while I'd have gone with the 20% and stayed in the game.
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Regarding the Global Warming debate, I wished people could focus on discussing political actions that could be shared with people who are more skeptical about the stuff for purely pragmatical reasons. Even if some people might disagree that Global Warming is real and dangerous, surely we could avoid the "Toxoplasma Of Rage" theory here and agree in certain actions that converge both towards combating climate change and other values (like pollution, economics, technology, etc.). Raising the standards of gasoline use in cars, for instance, could be argued for both CC and improving the economics of oil imports; investing in smart grids will create better conditions for solar power for individual houses but also waste a lot less energy and improve the economy (solar power for each household has lots of libertarian interest for the possibility of making people more independent of the big government and whatnot).
While that's not a bad idea, I doubt it would be enough to combat the effects of global warming. It's a step in the right direction but it's going to give people the false feeling that they've already done their part to stop global warming and that no further action is required.
Not to mention that if you tried it, you'd have seen the FUD pushed in a different direction. Pushing for more solar instead would have resulted in a huge number of articles about the poisonous materials in solar panels and how they were bad for the environment.
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If every single scientist on the planet told me the sky is orange, I'd have no other choice but to accept that. Science has a better track record than my eyesight.
Funny thing, the true color of the sky isn't actually blue. :) It's more of a mixture of blue-indigo-violet, but our eyes are so insensitive to violet wavelengths that it just looks blue.
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And the whole planet would be wrong.
Yes, that's a risk you're taking when you trust the majority of scientists: if they're wrong, you'll have believed the wrong thing with them.
But considering your ignorance and their track record, that's the least risky option, and therefore the most sensible one. As a layperson, you have no better option than to trust them.
It's like looking left and right before crossing the road. There's nothing guaranteeing you won't get hit by lightning midway, but it's still the best way to do it. Sure as hell better then say, trying to fly over the road by running into it while flapping your arms.
That's why I say that disagreeing with the scientific consensus, even if it's wrong, doesn't make you right. You just arrived to what accidentally turned out to be true by completely wrong reasoning. But surely that doesn't count as "being right": if I ask you what 64/16 is, and you answer "well it's obviously 4, just cancel the sixes!" you are just as wrong as if you were to say 7 or 20 or 721 (and actually more wrong than a kid who got 3.9 by following a correct algorithm and a bit misremembered multiplication table).
Even if your reasons were something like "well 10% of scientists working in this field says the rest is wrong, and their arguments are really good, I'm going to go argue with people on internet forums about it, and base my real-life decisions on their finding" and they turn out to be right, you weren't. The idea that you were better equipped to reason about those arguments than the scientific community is ludicrous.
@watsisname: see, I told you my eyesight sucks!
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Wheelspin, why are you using a single local temperature dataset (GISP2) to make a point about global average temperature?
This is a thing I see a lot of people who don't accept scientific consensus on climate change do, and to me it just emphasizes how readily people seem to feel capable of forming opinions about a subject that they don't actually study rigorously. When temperature is analyzed with a global perspective, one finds that those earlier warm periods are a lot less significant than the warming we are experiencing today. Which is a good clue that the current warming is also quite fundamentally different in character than those earlier ones. This one is caused by a change in the thermodynamic properties of the atmosphere, and the physics behind it is remarkably simple compared to some other physics we could be talking about.
I posted 1 chart as an example. This isn't an exegesis on climate change, nor am I claiming to be an authority on the subject. None the less, my skepticism of the agenda makes me skeptical of the anthropogenic assertion. And there is too much political agenda associated with this issue to ignore.
Why are there skeptics within scientific circles? More specifically, what is the reasoned response to their critique? I find it more than troubling that skepticism is so derided, to the point of ad hominem (eg.implying association with "anti-vaxxors", etc., etc.).
Arguing in favor of efficiency for its own sake would probably be viewed favorably by the public at large, irregardless of political stance. Because ultimately, the desired effect is to reduce energy (specifically fossil fuel) consumption - yes?
To be fair, I'll ask, what rigor have you applied to the subject? Are you a climatologist?
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Regarding the Global Warming debate, I wished people could focus on discussing political actions that could be shared with people who are more skeptical about the stuff for purely pragmatical reasons. Even if some people might disagree that Global Warming is real and dangerous, surely we could avoid the "Toxoplasma Of Rage" theory here and agree in certain actions that converge both towards combating climate change and other values (like pollution, economics, technology, etc.). Raising the standards of gasoline use in cars, for instance, could be argued for both CC and improving the economics of oil imports; investing in smart grids will create better conditions for solar power for individual houses but also waste a lot less energy and improve the economy (solar power for each household has lots of libertarian interest for the possibility of making people more independent of the big government and whatnot).
While that's not a bad idea, I doubt it would be enough to combat the effects of global warming. It's a step in the right direction but it's going to give people the false feeling that they've already done their part to stop global warming and that no further action is required.
Not to mention that if you tried it, you'd have seen the FUD pushed in a different direction. Pushing for more solar instead would have resulted in a huge number of articles about the poisonous materials in solar panels and how they were bad for the environment.
I get what you're saying, but is throwing punches to walls really the best alternative? Push for those things where you'll find allies while trying to convince everyone else of your ideas. Calling everyone stupid and "deniers" and so on will only get **** worse. The antivaxx movement is proof of this. Just the other day Bill Maher was throwing a temper tantrum like "I'm not against vaccines in general, but some of them are ya know stupid like these flu shots that only have 28% effectiveness". The best response to this is not to treat these people like holocaust deniers, but to show them in polite terms why they are wrong. Treat them as people, not enemies, and good things can follow. IDK, I've slept very little these past few days, I might be saying piles of **** here.
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I posted 1 chart as an example. This isn't an exegesis on climate change, nor am I claiming to be an authority on the subject. None the less, my skepticism of the agenda makes me skeptical of the anthropogenic assertion. And there is too much political agenda associated with this issue to ignore.
Why are there skeptics within scientific circles? More specifically, what is the reasoned response to their critique? I find it more than troubling that skepticism is so derided, to the point of ad hominem (eg.implying association with "anti-vaxxors", etc., etc.).
Arguing in favor of efficiency for its own sake would probably be viewed favorably by the public at large, irregardless of political stance. Because ultimately, the desired effect is to reduce energy (specifically fossil fuel) consumption - yes?
To be fair, I'll ask, what rigor have you applied to the subject? Are you a climatologist?
This is very self aware, and I sympathize with you a lot here. Read this thing I found in the internets that explains why certain subjects become so controversial, when perhaps they shouldn't be at all (http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/), and you'll probably get a feel of the "meta" issue here. It's as if we just love the controversies, the dramas, the soap operas that are driven. There are lot of actors in all of these situations that behave like absolute assholes because it actually benefits them, and they might use these "causes" as shield of their psychopathic or narcissistic actions as if saying "I know I'm behaving like a complete douchebag and doing all sorts of unethical bull****, but it's for the Good Cause (x), and I have to battle these monstruous beings that came literally from Mordor so you understand".
But I also think it's healthy to separate these issues. Irrespectively of the worth of certain people and certain kinds of political movements, we should nevertheless try to distance ourselves from all the sarcasm, all the soap opera, all the drama and from time to time to look at what the numerous evidences are telling us. Having said this, I think that being on the rebellious skeptical side is not necessarily a bad thing. Society does need a bit of that. Trying to bully everyone into submission because THE CONSENSUS! has not proven effective. Informing the public, interestingly, also didn't. Here's a video of C0nc0rdance that summarizes the unexpected result of knowledge being correlated against profession of "belief" in global warming, showing rather that it divides much more in political and social lines:
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Re: Wheelspin
My academic focus is in astrophysics, which includes the same foundational physics (spectroscopy and thermodynamics) that is important for understanding what global warming is and how it works. I have also taken graduate courses on atmospheric science and climate specifically, and I follow journal articles and reports in the field fairly closely, so I do feel that I have a good understanding of the subject. However, I am still not a practicing climatologist, and therefore when it comes to the more technical details I base my conclusions by the work of those who do practice it for a living. I think that at this point there is no reasonable doubt that global warming is occurring and that human activities are the primary driver of it right now, and the volume of research supporting this conclusion is hugely impressive.
Are there dissenting views, even among scientists who work in this or related fields? Certainly. But if you look closely into published literature, you do not see very much of it. The general public seems to think that there is a great deal more confusion and debate amongst climate scientists than there actually is, and I think this is largely a consequence of how popular media presents it. The debate about whether it is real or what is to blame is primarily at a popular level, and much of it is spectacularly full of misconceptions in the same manner as what you will find in debate about evolution or YEC. You yourself fell victim to such a misconception, when you used GISP2 data with the implied intent of showing that current warming isn't significant relative to earlier ones. I explained to you why that connection is wrong to make, because of course regional climate changes are more apparent in a local dataset than a global one, yet here we are interested in an effect that is happening on a global scale. On a global scale, regional climate changes smooth out, but the present warming does not. Hence the "hockey-stick graph" that I imagine everyone here has seen at least once. This graph is what you should be using if you want to speak of global climatology.
And that^ is what I would call a reasoned response to a popular-level "critique" of climate science. Now certainly there are critiques that are not so fundamentally flawed, and these are indeed taken very seriously in academic circles. Climate scientists are in a constant state of reviewing and critiquing each other's work, and all of this happens through publications and symposiums. And I should add that there is a lot of uncertainty and unknowns in climate science which is debated here. But it is not in the sense of whether or not it is real, or what is causing it -- those questions have already been resolved very thoroughly. Questions now are much more fine focus, involving specific aspects of phenomena that participate in the relationship between global warming and climate change. What I like to say to explain this is that global warming (the change in planet's radiation balance caused by atmospheric parameters) is very simple, but climate change (the consequences of global warming on local and regional weather, feedback effects, changes in sources and sinks of greenhouse effective gases, etc), is enormously complicated.
Lastly you ask what the desired goal to minimize global warming and its effects. No, it is not simply to reduce energy usage. That would be ludicrously contradictory to the goal of a growing world economy. Furthermore, planetary temperature is not determined by how much energy we use. What matters is solar insolation, and how much greenhouse gas resides in the atmosphere. So if we want to limit warming, we have to limit how much CO2 is added to the atmosphere, or increase how rapidly it is taken back out of it. There are thus a great variety of strategies which can help us:
-Improving the efficiency of our energy usage. (Good strategy, but there exist practical limitations to how much and how rapidly we can do it.)
-Replacing our methods of producing energy to cleaner/renewable sources. (IMO a very wise course of action for many reasons.)
-Sequestering greenhouse gases. (Generally the more expensive strategy, some also with high potential risks, but many people are working on it.)
-Directly reducing insolation of the Earth (probably harder, more expensive, and risky.)
Ultimately I think the solution is going to end up being some combination of all of these.
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t many people are working on it.)
-Directly reducing insolation of the Earth (probably harder, more expensive, and risky.)
IIRC this is not true. It's actually one of the most cheap effective measures that have been proposed (climate engineering). What is so scary about it is precisely how amazingly easy and possible it is to enact it if we so desired. It's a kind of a Pandora Box that could bring in itself enormous dangers (we could just absolutely **** up and create a nightmare for all the planet, it could re-emerge as a kind of a weapon against countries, etc., etc.). It's the kind of overly ambitious proposals that are on the table but that everyone tries to ignore, as if it is a kind of a deal with the devil. And probably for a damn good reason.
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Well it depends how you want to do it of course. Most of the methods I've found to be remotely reasonable are also very hard to pull off. But in another sense, we are actually already doing it, unintentionally. Burning fossil fuels puts aerosols into the atmosphere which have a negative forcing at the surface, thus counterbalancing some of the warming. That's how easy it is to affect the planet's radiation balance, in either direction, and I agree this is pretty scary.
This aerosol forcing is also somewhat unfortunate because, if we simply cut emissions, the CO2 will remain in the atmosphere for a lot longer than the aerosols, and so for the short term temperatures would actually rise further.
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Even if your reasons were something like "well 10% of scientists working in this field says the rest is wrong, and their arguments are really good, I'm going to go argue with people on internet forums about it, and base my real-life decisions on their finding" and they turn out to be right, you weren't. The idea that you were better equipped to reason about those arguments than the scientific community is ludicrous.
I agree with the rest of your post. But if you were swayed by arguments that turned out to be correct arguments, then weren't you correct? I get what you're saying and I've already agreed the smart money is on the majority of scientists rather than the faction, but if you thought the faction was right and then the faction then turned out to be right, you're right too. If you still don't agree, then I guess we'll have to agree to disagree on this one.
I'd also like to add that I hope people can be nice to Wheelspin, and not load him down with baggage like comparisons to anti-vaxxers and flat out global climate change deniers. It takes guts to go against the grain, but ideally it wouldn't need to in a place where we just talk about things.
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That's the thing, that's been the typical behavior until now, and we now know how much absolutely ineffective that was. If you can't behave empathically for purely humane reasons, at least consider how glaringly innefectual this jackass attitude of IM GONNA DEBUNK YOU TO SMITHEREENS NAU has been all these years.
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That's the thing, that's been the typical behavior until now, and we now know how much absolutely ineffective that was. If you can't behave empathically for purely humane reasons, at least consider how glaringly innefectual this jackass attitude of IM GONNA DEBUNK YOU TO SMITHEREENS NAU has been all these years.
Yes.
It puzzles me because in all my time here I've never once seen it be effective in changing someone's view, nor can I see how it would be. Though I bet it does shut some people up as it's not worth the hassle, and if that's your goal it's more understandable. But even then, I don't think it's very successful.
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I imagine that acting like a jackass would be an ineffectual way to engage with someone regardless of what the topic of discussion is. I'd also like to point out how common it is for people involved in polarized discussions to get heated and start acting like jackasses. It's hard to avoid. :)
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WHAT ARE YOU TALKING AB
Oh right. :D
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Re: Wheelspin
My academic focus is in astrophysics, which includes the same foundational physics (spectroscopy and thermodynamics) that is important for understanding what global warming is and how it works. I have also taken graduate courses on atmospheric science and climate specifically, and I follow journal articles and reports in the field fairly closely, so I do feel that I have a good understanding of the subject. However, I am still not a practicing climatologist, and therefore when it comes to the more technical details I base my conclusions by the work of those who do practice it for a living. I think that at this point there is no reasonable doubt that global warming is occurring and that human activities are the primary driver of it right now, and the volume of research supporting this conclusion is hugely impressive.
Are there dissenting views, even among scientists who work in this or related fields? Certainly. But if you look closely into published literature, you do not see very much of it. The general public seems to think that there is a great deal more confusion and debate amongst climate scientists than there actually is, and I think this is largely a consequence of how popular media presents it. The debate about whether it is real or what is to blame is primarily at a popular level, and much of it is spectacularly full of misconceptions in the same manner as what you will find in debate about evolution or YEC. You yourself fell victim to such a misconception, when you used GISP2 data with the implied intent of showing that current warming isn't significant relative to earlier ones. I explained to you why that connection is wrong to make, because of course regional climate changes are more apparent in a local dataset than a global one, yet here we are interested in an effect that is happening on a global scale. On a global scale, regional climate changes smooth out, but the present warming does not. Hence the "hockey-stick graph" that I imagine everyone here has seen at least once. This graph is what you should be using if you want to speak of global climatology.
And that^ is what I would call a reasoned response to a popular-level "critique" of climate science. Now certainly there are critiques that are not so fundamentally flawed, and these are indeed taken very seriously in academic circles. Climate scientists are in a constant state of reviewing and critiquing each other's work, and all of this happens through publications and symposiums. And I should add that there is a lot of uncertainty and unknowns in climate science which is debated here. But it is not in the sense of whether or not it is real, or what is causing it -- those questions have already been resolved very thoroughly. Questions now are much more fine focus, involving specific aspects of phenomena that participate in the relationship between global warming and climate change. What I like to say to explain this is that global warming (the change in planet's radiation balance caused by atmospheric parameters) is very simple, but climate change (the consequences of global warming on local and regional weather, feedback effects, changes in sources and sinks of greenhouse effective gases, etc), is enormously complicated.
Lastly you ask what the desired goal to minimize global warming and its effects. No, it is not simply to reduce energy usage. That would be ludicrously contradictory to the goal of a growing world economy. Furthermore, planetary temperature is not determined by how much energy we use. What matters is solar insolation, and how much greenhouse gas resides in the atmosphere. So if we want to limit warming, we have to limit how much CO2 is added to the atmosphere, or increase how rapidly it is taken back out of it. There are thus a great variety of strategies which can help us:
-Improving the efficiency of our energy usage. (Good strategy, but there exist practical limitations to how much and how rapidly we can do it.)
-Replacing our methods of producing energy to cleaner/renewable sources. (IMO a very wise course of action for many reasons.)
-Sequestering greenhouse gases. (Generally the more expensive strategy, some also with high potential risks, but many people are working on it.)
-Directly reducing insolation of the Earth (probably harder, more expensive, and risky.)
Ultimately I think the solution is going to end up being some combination of all of these.
Hello fellow physicsy person :)
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Why are there skeptics within scientific circles? More specifically, what is the reasoned response to their critique? I find it more than troubling that skepticism is so derided, to the point of ad hominem (eg.implying association with "anti-vaxxors", etc., etc.).
The thing is that the anti-vaxxors would claim that they are sceptics too. They can also produce a few scientists and doctors who have the same view they have. Hell the whole MMR nonsense started over a paper in a no less distinguished journal than The Lancet. The same mistakes they make, are made by people who are sceptical about climate change. It's just that it's so much more obvious that the anti-vaxxers are wrong.
Scepticism is fine, it's an important part of science. The problem with scepticism comes when people insist that the sceptics must be right, not because of the science, but because they don't like the message from the other side. When you include comments about how much money Al Gore has (Politician is corrupt! What a shock!) you detract from any attempt to claim that your opinion is based on science rather than simply listening to the wrong people.
To be fair, I'll ask, what rigor have you applied to the subject? Are you a climatologist?
Let me ask that right back. On what scientific basis have you decided that there is anything to be sceptical about this issue and not some other scientific subject?
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I agree with the rest of your post. But if you were swayed by arguments that turned out to be correct arguments, then weren't you correct? I get what you're saying and I've already agreed the smart money is on the majority of scientists rather than the faction, but if you thought the faction was right and then the faction then turned out to be right, you're right too. If you still don't agree, then I guess we'll have to agree to disagree on this one.
You're free to feel smug about guessing who was right, but I won't call you right for believing some arguments you didn't actually understand, and disbelieving others you logically shouldn't have. If you did actually understand the arguments involved, then great, but then you aren't a layperson either.
Obviously "I was right" has different meanings, and if something you said turns out to be true, you can try saying that phrase, but I'm free to respond with "no you weren't, you just had a lucky guess". There's no sense arguing semantics however, so just to reiterate what my stance is: you're can have an opinion on a scientific debate (I love having opinions on scientific debates!), but as soon as you take yourself seriously, you're wrong. Of course I'm saying this more absolutely than I think it is, there's nuance and conceivable exceptions and stuff, but I think it's generally a very good rule.
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Indeed.
It's a more detailed version of the "Even a broken watch is correct twice a day" saying. The watch isn't correct by any measure which makes it actually useful as a watch.
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I agree with the rest of your post. But if you were swayed by arguments that turned out to be correct arguments, then weren't you correct? I get what you're saying and I've already agreed the smart money is on the majority of scientists rather than the faction, but if you thought the faction was right and then the faction then turned out to be right, you're right too. If you still don't agree, then I guess we'll have to agree to disagree on this one.
You're free to feel smug about guessing who was right, but I won't call you right for believing some arguments you didn't actually understand, and disbelieving others you logically shouldn't have. If you did actually understand the arguments involved, then great, but then you aren't a layperson either.
Obviously "I was right" has different meanings, and if something you said turns out to be true, you can try saying that phrase, but I'm free to respond with "no you weren't, you just had a lucky guess". There's no sense arguing semantics however, so just to reiterate what my stance is: you're can have an opinion on a scientific debate (I love having opinions on scientific debates!), but as soon as you take yourself seriously, you're wrong. Of course I'm saying this more absolutely than I think it is, there's nuance and conceivable exceptions and stuff, but I think it's generally a very good rule.
We're probably on the same page with this, since you put in about understanding the argument, which was what I was clinging onto, that someone might be able to understand the argument without being a scientist. You seem to be suggesting there'd be a middle ground for such people and I can go with that, along with exceptions and stuff. It was that you seemed rigid that there were no exceptions, and now I know you're not, I think we think basically the same on this.
Nice talking to you. :)