[Bobboau]

it has to do with the reaction to the article. the fact that any consideration of "maybe this isn't right" is met with scorn and mocking making it impossible for any true critical analysis to be done.

a good example of what i'm talking about can be found in the email leaks that started this, in them there was a journal that had published something that the people writing those emails disagreed with, they then started considering if they should form an alliance of sorts and boycott said journal. how can peer review work if any journal that admits inconvenient data is subverted.

why can't skepticism simply be met with "I am fairly sure this is accurate, what do you think is wrong?" and responses to it followed up with what ever evidence is needed to convince them, and if no evidence can be found, why can't that skepticism then be respected? I never see this, all I ever see is one group mocking the other. this is not a healthy mindset for science.

[NGTM-1R]

if you lose the ability to question and independently verify based on physical evidence aren't you just trading priests for Phds?

So you admit your stance is utterly nonsensical since it exists without independent verification from the majority of the community?

I know you can't do the math or have access to the raw data yourself.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. You are making an extraordinary claim that the majority of science is wrong. You are not providing proof.

[Bobboau]

why don't I have access to the raw data?

why can't I do the math myself?

the fact that I can ask that first question is proof that I am right, at least about the part you quoted.

aside from that my position is that the major players in the field of climatology may be biased, and thus may not be acting objectively, not that they are wrong. one can be biased for good reasons, for instance overwhelming evidence, but bias can cause a feedback loop where it effects the quality of evidence thus causing further bias causing more error. if it becomes impossible for someone to question the status quo then it is impossible for one to verify the quality of the evidence.

what should be done is all data and an explanation of all methods should be made available.

[General Battuta]

why don't I have access to the raw data?

Uh I think you do. If not look around, I think a fair number of data sets are available. I doubt I'd have that much trouble finding one.

[Bobboau]

NGTM-1R seems to know I don't have access to it.

resulting data sets are readily available but the most raw source data is AFAIK usually not available, they always apply corrections and adjustments to it first at the very least.

[Nuke]

christians defend some fairly stupid **** in the bible, they go to crazy lengths to think of ways that the book that says that the earth is a disk with a dome over it could be literally factually true when it's now so absolutely obvious that the world is a sphere in a void with a layer of atmosphere over it.

why do they do this? why can they not admit even to themselves that the bible might have a few factual errors in it? the answer is simple they believe that the bible is infalable and if one part of it is wrong then all of it must be wrong, this absolutist attitude is their greatest weakness as it makes it imposable for them to change their mind or question anything that they think is supported by the bible. by losing the ability to question, they lose the ability to progress.

now, is it possible that this weakness may have infected the minds of some of the people who accept that science is the answer to all things? that they refuse to consider, even to themselves, anything that might undermine any part of current scientific understanding because if one scientific discipline has a systemic flaw then the authority of all would be put into question? wouldn't this however be the true undermining of science? to be unable to question the validity of something, to HAVE TO accept the word of some other authority figure, if you lose the ability to question and independently verify based on physical evidence aren't you just trading priests for Phds?

see this is why i refuse to call myself an atheist (i like to use the term nihilist instead). i find that a majority of atheists seem to use science as their religion. they dont actually do any science themselves, but they look upon science as a big mystical thing of great scope and then deify it. then reject the words of all other philosophies as blasphemy. atheists really shouldn't be called atheists, because most of them use science as their theology. this is very dangerous to science, because every time the most minuscule of theory is made, waves of atheists will declare it ultimate truth and turn it into a popular current, at which point it becomes difficult for scientists to revise the theory as new data comes in while maintaining credibility in the public's eye.

[Flipside]

It's not so much a matter of encouraging debate, that's not a problem at all, it's a question of presentation. The fault lay not so much at the feet of the science, in either direction, it lay at the feet of the Media and the way it chooses to present that debate.

With every scientific theory out there, there are dissenters, even the old favourites such as Newtons' theories on Gravity are constantly reviewed and challenged (see MOND, an alternative explanation to Dark Matter), there's nothing wrong with that, the problem is that people present this as a schism in the scientific world when it is actually 'business as usual'.

Now we are left in a world where scientists who think otherwise are being told by media that they will be hounded and harassed by the community if they challenge the established norm, as though this were a new thing, when in truth it stretches back to the days a meteorologist dared to notice the similarity between distant coastlines, Continental Drift wasn't accepted for a long time because the wrong type of scientist suggested it. There will always be resistance to opposition, science is designed to withstand that.

If you look at most media reports, they always 'simplify' their scientific explanations, and usually lose vital information in the telling, it's odd, because they never do that in the financial pages, whilst that is not the case here, there is a growing trend of media to take something that has been commonplace for centuries and presenting it as though it is something that is tearing the establishment apart, it's been so succesfull that many people believe this to be so, invluding scientists, who on occasion have been guilty of letting their egos over-ride their professionalism, on both sides of the debate.

The worst part is, when scientists refute claims levelled against them, people automatically assume they are simply covering their own asses, which isn't impossible, but certainly isn't definite either, but to assume these concerns are being ignored entirely is possibly a fault on the part of the reader, the act of peer review is alive and well.

Edit: Look at it this way, if we sit around and do nothing whilst we wait to be 'absolutely 100% certain' scientifically, we will never get there, we aren't '100% absolutely certain' that the Moon goes around the Earth. Like most Democratic systems, it's better to go with the majority opinion (which is, in essence, the soul and centre of science) and assume a positive effect unless new data reveals otherwise, otherwise, I can see some alien archeologists having a damn good laugh at us in the distant future if we sit around twiddling our thumbs because we weren't completely sure it was going to happen.

[Mongoose]

With every scientific theory out there, there are dissenters, even the old favourites such as Newtons' theories on Gravity are constantly reviewed and challenged (see MOND, an alternative explanation to Dark Matter)

Not to get off-topic, but I hadn't heard of MOND specifically before you mentioned it, though I've kind of idly wondered something similar in the past.  It certainly seems like a far more elegant solution to the rotation problem than gobs of matter we've never been able to detect in any form to me...not that said elegance means anything, but it's at least worth considering.

[redsniper]

No no, I saw the article. What I'm getting at is, if this author is so untrustworthy, how do we know the letter is genuine? Is any other news source corroborating this?

you lie about his untrustworthiness, now I don't have to deal with anything you say. see how easy saying "he is a lier" is? if you have some evidence that this was totally imaginary please present it until then you are using the same method as Scientology for repelling criticism.

Alright, calm the **** down. I don't know anything about the article author or the letter's author. I was merely musing that it's possible the letter could be made up if the article's author is a shady character as some of the other posters in the thread seemed to be saying. I doubt it is actually and I'm sure we'll see other sources saying the same thing.

What I definitely did NOT mean to say is "hurrr durrr anyone who decries global warming is a lier." But thanks for deciding everything I say is invalid now based on your own misinterpretation of my post, that's cool. Jesus man, it's not like I killed your dog or banged your mom or something.

I'm not going to ask for an apology or anything pompous like that, nor get sucked into a pissing match. Just wanted to take one post to defend myself a bit.

[Klaustrophobia]

No no, I saw the article. What I'm getting at is, if this author is so untrustworthy, how do we know the letter is genuine? Is any other news source corroborating this?

you lie about his untrustworthiness, now I don't have to deal with anything you say. see how easy saying "he is a lier" is? if you have some evidence that this was totally imaginary please present it until then you are using the same method as Scientology for repelling criticism.

Alright, calm the **** down. I don't know anything about the article author or the letter's author. I was merely musing that it's possible the letter could be made up if the article's author is a shady character as some of the other posters in the thread seemed to be saying. I doubt it is actually and I'm sure we'll see other sources saying the same thing.

What I definitely did NOT mean to say is "hurrr durrr anyone who decries global warming is a lier." But thanks for deciding everything I say is invalid now based on your own misinterpretation of my post, that's cool. Jesus man, it's not like I killed your dog or banged your mom or something.

I'm not going to ask for an apology or anything pompous like that, nor get sucked into a pissing match. Just wanted to take one post to defend myself a bit.

i'm afraid it's you who has misinterpreted bob's post.  he wasn't literally calling you a liar, he said that to make a point about how calling someone a liar out of the blue has exactly NO credibility.  quotes around that part might have helped.

i feel the need to say this again.  from my astrophysics professor, who knows an regularly converses with the physicists in the department who work on climatology:
"The media keeps saying there is a consensus among scientists on man-made global warming.  And they are right.  There are about 100 or so who all agree.  But there's also a consortium of 30,000 who disagree."

i know i'm going to catch hell for this, but i'm still seeing a lot of the "everyone knows it's true, you must be an idiot to oppose what all the scientists agree on," the last part of that being completely false.

[Flipside]

Actually, 50% of being a scientist is trying to find a reason to disagree with what all the scientists agree on

The thing is, you'll find a far higher consensus of scientists saying that Global Warming is happening than you will find saying that we caused it. It's at times like that I'm reminded of two children fighting in a playground, and when broken up by the teacher, they start arguing about who started it when the real concern was the fact they were fighting in the first place.

Edit: The way I see it, it's like sky-diving. Sky-divers always carry two parachutes, the main and the emergency. For 99% of the time, the emergency chute is a complete waste of money and space, except for that 1% of the time when the main chute fails to deploy, then it's worth more than all the gold on the planet.

[Flipside]

With every scientific theory out there, there are dissenters, even the old favourites such as Newtons' theories on Gravity are constantly reviewed and challenged (see MOND, an alternative explanation to Dark Matter)

Not to get off-topic, but I hadn't heard of MOND specifically before you mentioned it, though I've kind of idly wondered something similar in the past.  It certainly seems like a far more elegant solution to the rotation problem than gobs of matter we've never been able to detect in any form to me...not that said elegance means anything, but it's at least worth considering.

Strangely enough, this is an indication of the problem. NASA love dark matter, they've spent Billions on equipment to look for it, and if another theory comes along that makes the money spent seem like a waste to the layman (it isn't a waste, the 'side-effect' discoveries were worth the effort either way) it would lose NASA even more funding power in front of the Senate. Because of that, MOND is kept very low key, and ignored by a large body of respected science, not because there are massive flaws in it, but because it might be embarassing. That's the point where Ego starts to damage Science, but, admittedly, for an understandable reason.

The thing is Media treats science as though it were politics, in politics if you turn around and say 'Well, that was wrong!' after spending hundreds of millions dollars on a project, you are a bad politician, however, if Science spends hundeds of millions of dollars and ends up proving a theory wrong, that's actually progress, but it is difficult to justify from a political perspective, like religion, once Science gets too tangled up with Government, there are...complications.

[General Battuta]

Actually, I'm pretty sure MOND gets ignored because its massively flawed and has not been experimentally substantiated. It's good to have alternative models, MOND got a lot of coverage a while back, but it's never managed to strike an solid blows.

[Flipside]

There were some questions raised over the 'Bullet Cluster' readings some time back that people were claiming shot down the MOND theory, but you might want to check out the paper 'Can MOND take a Bullet' by Angus, Farnaey and Zhao. They used several measuring techniques and surmised that MOND was just as capable to describing the abnormalities as Dark Matter was.

Once again, there's political pressure here, if every time we encountered a stumbling block in Dark Matter theory we had assumed it was useless, it would never have got off the ground, but MOND is unpopular, a lot of highly funded organisations want it to be wrong. It still might be, I'm perfectly open to that possibility, but whilst the details need to be honed, as far as I'm aware MOND is still a contender for an alternative theory.

[General Battuta]

MOND has had fair treatment and it hasn't produced. There's a difference between that and some kind of intentional suppression.

MOND has a massive hurdle to overcome in that it needs to replicate all the experimental findings of General Relativity and then move on to produce a cosmological model which matches our real universe as perfectly as the Lambda-CDM model does. So far it hasn't.

[Flipside]

It's all theory, that's what I'm saying. The real risk here is putting the cart before the horse, the worst step science could take would be to assume that because something doesn't match what we think is true, it must, therefore, be untrue.

As I said before, there's work to do, but if you look back 15 years on the Dark Matter model, and you'd be in a similar situation, it's only through years of adjustment that we've defined a model of the Universe based on Dark Matter theory, not the opposite, if MOND had been thought of first, I wonder if the position would be reversed, and we'd be discussing that fact that Dark Matter can't be right, because it doesn't produce the same numbers as MOND.

MOND has had, possibly, a decade to produce results, I've been hearing about Dark Matter for about 3 decades, and for a lot of that, that theory produced no results either, so I'd be inclined to leave things just a little longer before writing it off.

Edit : Look at it this way, we spent a long time believing the Sun went round the Earth, we had maths that worked for that model, we even calculated a complex system for the regression of planets. The maths fitted, the model fitted, there was only one minute flaw, the entire model was based on a false premise.

Edit 2 : And even wierder is that I could take those incorrect calculations, based on an incorrect model and get correct answers from them with regards to where the Sun is going to rise etc.

[Bobboau]

and yet it still 'worked' is the funny part.

[NGTM-1R]

It's all theory, that's what I'm saying.

Twenty demerits for using an argument straight out of a creationist playbook.

[Flipside]

It's all theory, that's what I'm saying.

Twenty demerits for using an argument straight out of a creationist playbook.

Don't be stupid, Science is 100% theory, that doesn't make it a creationist argument, it makes it Science. The pathetic thing is people trying to use that fact to insert any fairy tale that takes their fancy into the gaps without testable evidence. As I said right from the start, I'm willing to accept that MOND is wrong, but the whole concept that it must be wrong because it doesn't fit a model that we created can lead to problems, as per my example with the pre-Gallilean model of the Solar System.

[Flipside]

and yet it still 'worked' is the funny part.

Number-wise it DID work, the fact that every assumption made about the model was wrong is immaterial, it worked for thousands of years despite being wrong.

Edit: The Mayans, the Egyptians, even the ancient Celts all assumed the Sun went round the Earth, and yet managed to build incredibly accurate measuring devices for telling when the Sun would rise and set etc, even despite a fundamental flaw in the theory.