Quote:
Originally Posted by mm4
No actually you're not well aware of how science works or you wouldn't have wasted a collective hour arguing in this thread about how AGW 'Climate scientists' outnumber those who are skeptical of the so-called science until I pointed out to you that it's not a popularity contest.
As with any discipline, 'scientists' are on bell curves of competence, and depth of thought. History of Science is filled with Marc Hausers, Walter Freemans, Paul Ehrlichs,....
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/journals/1186/
Except so-called climate scientist's models never work. The more frequent and severe hurricanes predicted year over year--publicized for several consecutive years in the 90s--never happened. Not only did their frequency and severity decline but they've been at their lowest number in 30 to 40 years. Florida has gone 10 years now without one. They also didn't predict that the eastern seaboard of the U.S. has had far-cooler than avg. summers, including this one, in five contiguous seasons.
That those "models" never worked--and common sensically wouldn't--isn't fringe opinion. You'd know this if you weren't dependent on Joy Behar and Whoopi Goldberg and other popular culture opinion-makers for your Climate religion.
You're continually oblivious to the fact that, far from "Climate science touches on a lot of areas," in actuality the new cross-discipline doesn't exist without those "other areas" coming together to discuss it, to collaborate, to contribute, and to disagree.
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1. You don't get it. I didn't waste time; I'm trying to explain to you that the people who actually know what they are talking about don't support your view. You pointed out (without saying so directly) that less than half a percent of people in an organization of physicists disagree while trying to make it look like 160 was a large number. Your strategy was to say, "Hey, 160 people disagree!" I pointed out that 160 out of 47000 is not a large number. I also pointed out that these 160 are
not climate scientists. This is ridiculous.
The point is not that we vote on things in science. The point is that there are mountains upon mountains of research on this topic, and the findings are overwhelmingly in favor of the idea that we humans are causing the climate to change. Period.
2. If scientists were chosen uniformly at random from the general population, your bell curve imagery wouldn't be quite so misleading. They're not, though. Scientists are, in general, a lot smarter than average people, because schools filter out those who are better suited for less intellectually demanding fields, like politics. Thus, the mean of the distribution of scientific competence is much higher than you're trying to imply that it is.
Basically, you're trying to make the argument that the average scientist isn't so smart, nyah nyah, so why do we listen to the scientific consensus, anyway? Strangely, you don't make that argument when we're talking about any other scientific field. You only bring it up if it's something your favorite political talking heads don't like, like environmental policy.
3. Your attempted popular science garbage is hardly worth my time. Weather and climate aren't the same thing; I'm an expert in a different field, and even I know that.
See, I'm trained to spot ridiculously quackery like what you push. The fact that the local weather doesn't follow the pattern some thought it might have followed (weather events are, by the way, notoriously hard to predict, even in aggregate) doesn't change the fact that we actually
have observed many of the scarier predictions of these models playing out. Global average temperatures have been rising -- no one denies this. (Of course, you can find localized counterexamples, but that's utterly meaningless, since any random system operates with noise in the data.) Sea levels have been rising. Those facts don't go away just because Florida didn't get a couple extra hurricanes. These observations have been substantiated to the point where people have very precise predictions about how much we can expect global averages to increase over time over several decades.
This stuff involves a lot of math. It speaks my language. Learn some math and you can read the papers for yourself.
I don't know who those pop culture icons you mentioned are, though I think Goldberg was an actress a couple of decades ago. I don't know why I'd ever care about her opinion on science, since she's in a completely unrelated field.
4. You're back to trying to paint your cabal of 160 as relevant when you talk about interdisciplinary fields. You don't get it.
When I was in grad school, I focused on a somewhat interdisciplinary field. (I won't tell you which one, because I'd like to keep some privacy, and you wouldn't understand it, anyway.) Great. That doesn't mean any just anyone from any of the subfields close to it could understand my research. In fact, most of my friends, even those whose expertise and training were very similar to mine, recoiled in horror when I showed them my work, because understanding my particular field requires highly specialized training.
I'll put it this way. A climate scientist needs to know something about physics. Not everything, but something. That
in no way implies that most physicists know anything about climate science. At all. You can't go up to someone who spends ten hours every day studying atomic physics and expect to get an expert opinion on a different field, even if that other field involves some physics (probably atmospheric physics).
Heck,
I learned some physics for some of the work I did in the past, but that doesn't mean I could, for instance, give a college lecture on astrophysics. (For one thing, I learned about QM, not astrophysics.)
At the higest levels -- and everyone involved in research is at the absolute highest level -- people must specialize. Interdisciplinary fields require that much more specialization, because you have to learn bits of each of the involved disciplines, and you have to learn the tricky interactions between them. People with credentials had to earn their titles the hard way; every last working climate scientist had to fight through at least half a decade of graduate school, which included a harrowing battery of exams by leading experts in order to determine if they were worthy of entering a PhD program, followed by years of arduous research guided by an expert mentor and culminating in a defense in front of a panel of the best of the best in the field. Each and every working climate scientist had to prove to such a group of experts that he or she had contributed something new and relevant to the field.
That's just to get the PhD. To have any hope of being a scientist after that point, you have to be better than 90% of the people who made it that far.
It's
not easy to become a scientist. It's not right of you to dismiss them as cranks, particularly when you know
nothing of what is invovled in becoming a climate scientist or of what the work entails. You're almost certainly not qualified to read the research yourself.
On the other side of the equation, you have internet posters and Fox News talking heads with bachelor's degrees in political science.
No one can force you to show respect to those people who just happened to work a lot harder than you did, of course, but there's a reason I listen to the IPCC before I listen to those who only want to deny actual science.