Members banned from this thread: Cypress, evince, Micawber, ThatOwlWoman and Jade Dragon |
cancel2 2022 (08-11-2018)
cancel2 2022 (08-11-2018)
No."So essentially you are appealing to authority aka argumentum ad verecundiam which is a logical fallacy." HM
a) argumentum ad verecundiam is not merely acceptance of authority, but from an INAPPROPRIATE authority.
b) Generally as the ancients applied this, it was akin to asking a carpenter's opinion on a chemistry question. To get a sensible opinion on chemistry, ask a chemist, not a carpenter or a butcher.
c) It is not the authority of a single person that I argue.
As you have invoked ancient Latin logic standard (which I sincerely appreciate) I will remind you that:
c1) argumentum ad verecundiam is not ALWAYS false. It's merely that it's not necessarily always true.
c2) In human history, there have been multiple standards of authority. Troglodytes may have merely contended with the best fighter, the one that could impose his will on the others.
When religion came along, religion broadly, and the shaman, the religious leader became the criterion of truth, argumentum ad veracitum perhaps (not sure, I don't speak Latin).
But in ostensibly civilized (Westernized) 3rd millennium culture, the criterion of truth is science.
Whether science will be replaced in that role, I do not know. But I see no evidence of it any time soon.
c3) It's not argumentum ad verecundiam when it's not a person, but an entire suite of disciplines that are involved.
It's not merely climatology.
- It's oceanography.
- It's meteorology.
- It's chemistry.
- It's physics.
These and other disciplines corroborate the global consensus on ACC.
Interesting that you resort to argumentum ad verecundiam here. Dr. Carl Sagan's expertise was in astronomy, not ACC."Cal Sagan said scientific knowledge is best established by evidence and experiment rather than argued through authority" HM
However, I too am a Sagan fan, and enjoyed his Pulitzer Prize winning book The Dragons of Eden very much.
I don't disagree with Sagan on this fine point.
But I don't rest my position on individual authority.
The traditional dichotomy is often presented as religion or science. Science is vastly, vastly bigger than one person; even though one person here or there, Newton & Einstein for obvious examples, hone our scientific understanding.
"It should be obvious to anyone why conservatives and libertarians should be against Trump. He has no grounding in belief. No core philosophy. No morals. No loyalty. No curiosity. No empathy and no understanding. He demands personal loyalty and not loyalty to the nation. His only core belief is in his own superiority to everyone else. His only want is exercise more and more personal power." smb / purveyor of fact 18/03/18
https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/20...U2N/story.htmlMIT professor Richard Lindzen’s contrarian views about climate change, which have long provided the appearance of credibility to those who deny human activity is causing the planet to warm, have caused deep angst among his colleagues at the university’s vaunted program in atmospheres, oceans, and climate.
Now, the retired professor has spurred the rest of the program’s faculty to write a letter to President Trump rebutting Lindzen’s position that climate change doesn’t pose a threat worth addressing and informing him that their colleague doesn’t represent their views or those of the vast majority of other climate scientists.
In interviews, some of the professors accused Lindzen, who acknowledges accepting thousands of dollars from the fossil fuel industry, of “intellectual dishonesty” that has tarred their program.
Did you get that last part, Havana Loon.....?
...Lindzen, who acknowledges accepting thousands of dollars from the fossil fuel industry...
IOW, your boy is a WELL PAID OIL INDUSTRY SHILL who WHORES out his credentials to the highest bidder whose own MIT colleagues disavow their association with.
No wonder you admire him so much.
C'MON MAN!!!!
Ah, but I do." you don't know that " HM #31
And I demonstrated that I do in #24:
So please tell us HM. In what way do you believe anecdotes are numerically quantifiable?"All one need do is study the discipline of science, understand that scientific quantification is numerical" s #24
However:
even scientists can't entirely dismiss anecdote.
If a meteorologist predicts a sunny day, but while outdoors you are rained on, even if anecdotal, it's an indication the science-based prediction was in error.
If my personal observations, "anecdotes" if you prefer, contradicted ACC predictions, we could include that in the discussion.
But I was raised in the lower Hudson River valley, where the tide varied the water level by perhaps 5' or so. There's a rock formation there which I've observed for over half a century. I know where the high water mark is on it. And it's several inches higher today than it was in the 1950's.
Does it prove ACC.
No. Not in my opinion.
BUT !!
That and other observations I've made since childhood generally seem consistent w/ ACC.
I don't consider that proof. But I do consider it corroboration, because AHD says it is.
corroborate (ke-rňb´e-rât´) verb, transitive
corroborated, corroborating, corroborates
To strengthen or support with other evidence; make more certain. See synonyms at confirm.
[Latin corroborâre, corroborât- : com-, com- + roborâre, to strengthen (from robur, robor-, strength).]
- corrob´ora´tion noun
- corrob´ora´tive (-e-râ´tîv, -er-e-tîv) adjective
- corrob´ora´tor noun
- corrob´orato´ry (-er-e-tôr´ę, -tor´ę) adjective
Excerpted from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Third Edition © 1996 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Electronic version licensed from INSO Corporation; further reproduction and distribution in accordance with the Copyright Law of the United States. All rights reserved.
"It should be obvious to anyone why conservatives and libertarians should be against Trump. He has no grounding in belief. No core philosophy. No morals. No loyalty. No curiosity. No empathy and no understanding. He demands personal loyalty and not loyalty to the nation. His only core belief is in his own superiority to everyone else. His only want is exercise more and more personal power." smb / purveyor of fact 18/03/18
Ok, let's start with sea level then, Nils-Axel Morner, a Swedish sea level expert (former president of the INQUA Commission of Sea Level Changes and Coastal Evolution) states that oceans are not rising alarmingly, even NOAA says that the sea level rise is around 1.8mm per year or less than 6 inches by the year 2100. Wow, I am shitting myself about that!
https://www.thegwpf.com/nils-axel-mo...itical-agenda/
https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sl...tml?id=170-161
Holy shit, when discussing climate it is inevitable for some idiot to bang on about funding. There should be a law for it, like Godwin's Law and the Nazis. So here we have Gonad up for a right royal shellacking!! Funny how these people never consider funding from the likes of Greenpeace, the Sierra Club or from the Obama admin to be compromising.
https://judithcurry.com/2015/02/25/c...imate-science/Dirt money?
The issue of concern of Congressman Grijalva is funding from the Koch brothers and fossil fuel companies somehow contaminating Congressional testimony from scientists invited by Republicans to testify.
The reality is that fossil fuel money is all over climate research, whether pro or con AGW. Gifts of $100M+ have been made by oil companies to Stanford and Princeton. Anthony Watts notes the prominence of oil companies in funding the American Geophysical Union. The Sierra Club and the Nature Conservancy take fossil fuel money . The UKMetOffice has stated that energy companies are major customers.
Last edited by cancel2 2022; 08-11-2018 at 05:04 AM.
HM #37
You've changed the subject from validity to consequence.
Thus you have conceded validity. That concludes my participation in this line of discussion.
Enjoy the Perseid meteor shower which can be enjoyed Saturday through Monday nights, best viewing after midnight. Look to the Northeast, to the constellation Perseus.
"It should be obvious to anyone why conservatives and libertarians should be against Trump. He has no grounding in belief. No core philosophy. No morals. No loyalty. No curiosity. No empathy and no understanding. He demands personal loyalty and not loyalty to the nation. His only core belief is in his own superiority to everyone else. His only want is exercise more and more personal power." smb / purveyor of fact 18/03/18
Idiot.... when one's "funding" as you are attempting to describe Lindzen's PAYDAY as, comes from a multi-billion dollar a year, for-profit concern like the fossil fuel industry vs getting paid for speaking engagements or accepting donations from concerned citizens, it's pretty obvious to anyone who's been around long enough to have reached adulthood, what the true intentions are behind the suppliers of the money.
The oil industry is desperate to protect it's profits. Their motive is obviously self serving.
Not the same with colleges, universities and concerned groups or individuals possibly associated with charitable foundations, donating to further research.
If you pretend to not understand the difference, your credibility on anything else is zero.
C'MON MAN!!!!
cancel2 2022 (08-11-2018)
Yes I did read it.
The gist of it is summed up in one sentence: "The issue is this. The intense politicization of climate science makes bias more likely to be coming from political and ideological perspectives than from funding sources."
Her opinion, not fact.
As knowledgeable on climate issues as she may be, and BTW she is not one of your fellow deniers, her claim that politics and ideology trump big fat payoffs from mega corporate interests, is absurd on its face and hints that her insight into human nature might not match her understanding of academic knowledge.
C'MON MAN!!!!
She is very much, by your definition anyway, a denier, to anyone else she is a sceptic which is the only right and proper position for any good scientist. In fact she left the Georgia Institute of Technology because of all the hounding by former colleagues and the media. Here is another article that should clarify her position. Richard Lindzen and Judith Curry are pretty much in lockstep over the science and only really disagree over details. One being the value of the Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity for CO2 (ECS), which she thinks is around 1.66C and Lindzen believes it to far nearer to 1.2C or below.
https://judithcurry.com/2016/11/21/t...ar-on-science/
The real war on science
The Left has done far more than the Right to set back progress. – John Tierney
John Tierney has written a stunningly insightful piece in the City Journal Magazine: The Real War on Science. Read the whole thing. Here are some excerpts of particular relevance to climate science:
Conservatives just don’t have that much impact on science. I know that sounds strange to Democrats who decry Republican creationists and call themselves the “party of science.” But I’ve done my homework. I’ve read the Left’s indictments, including Chris Mooney’s bestseller, The Republican War on Science. I finished it with the same question about this war that I had at the outset: Where are the casualties?
Where are the scientists who lost their jobs or their funding? What vital research has been corrupted or suppressed? What scientific debate has been silenced? Yes, the book reveals that Republican creationists exist, but they don’t affect the biologists or anthropologists studying evolution. Yes, George W. Bush refused federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research, but that hardly put a stop to it (and not much changed after Barack Obama reversed the policy).
The danger from the Left does not arise from stupidity or dishonesty; those failings are bipartisan. Some surveys show that Republicans, particularly libertarians, are more scientifically literate than Democrats, but there’s plenty of ignorance all around. Both sides cherry-pick research and misrepresent evidence to support their agendas. Whoever’s in power, the White House plays politics in appointing advisory commissions and editing the executive summaries of their reports. Scientists of all ideologies exaggerate the importance of their own research and seek results that will bring them more attention and funding.
But two huge threats to science are peculiar to the Left—and they’re getting worse.The first threat is confirmation bias, the well-documented tendency of people to seek out and accept information that confirms their beliefs and prejudices.
Scientists try to avoid confirmation bias by exposing their work to peer review by critics with different views, but it’s increasingly difficult for liberals to find such critics. Academics have traditionally leaned left politically, and many fields have essentially become monocultures, especially in the social sciences, where Democrats now outnumber Republicans by at least 8 to 1. The lopsided ratio has led to another well-documented phenomenon: people’s beliefs become more extreme when they’re surrounded by like-minded colleagues. They come to assume that their opinions are not only the norm but also the truth, . . creating what Jonathan Haidt calls a “tribal-moral community” with its own “sacred values” about what’s worth studying and what’s taboo.
Conservatives have been variously pathologized as unethical, antisocial, and irrational simply because they don’t share beliefs that seem self-evident to liberals.
The combination of all these pressures from the Left has repeatedly skewed science over the past half-century. And that brings us to the second great threat from the Left: its long tradition of mixing science and politics. To conservatives, the fundamental problem with the Left is what Friedrich Hayek called the fatal conceit: the delusion that experts are wise enough to redesign society. Conservatives distrust central planners, preferring to rely on traditional institutions that protect individuals’ “natural rights” against the power of the state. Leftists have much more confidence in experts and the state.
For his part, Holdren has served for the past eight years as the science advisor to President Obama, a position from which he laments that Americans don’t take his warnings on climate change seriously. He doesn’t seem to realize that public skepticism has a lot to do with the dismal track record of himself and his fellow environmentalists. There’s always an apocalypse requiring the expansion of state power.
President Obama promotes his green agenda by announcing that “the debate is settled,” and he denounces “climate deniers” by claiming that 97 percent of scientists believe that global warming is dangerous. His statements are false. While the greenhouse effect is undeniably real, and while most scientists agree that there has been a rise in global temperatures caused in some part by human emissions of carbon dioxide, no one knows how much more warming will occur this century or whether it will be dangerous.
The long-term risks are certainly worth studying, but no matter whose predictions you trust, climate science provides no justification for Obama’s green agenda—or anyone else’s agenda. Even if it were somehow proved that high-end estimates for future global warming are accurate, that wouldn’t imply that Greens have the right practical solution for reducing carbon emissions—or that we even need to reduce those emissions. Policies for dealing with global warming vary according to political beliefs, economic assumptions, social priorities, and moral principles. Would regulating carbon dioxide stifle economic growth and give too much power to the state? Is it moral to impose sacrifices on poor people to keep temperatures a little cooler for their descendants, who will presumably be many times richer? Are there more important problems to address first? These aren’t questions with scientifically correct answers.
Yet many climate researchers are passing off their political opinions as science, just as Obama does, and they’re even using that absurdly unscientific term “denier” as if they were priests guarding some eternal truth. Science advances by continually challenging and testing hypotheses, but the modern Left has become obsessed with silencing heretics. In a letter to Attorney General Loretta Lynch last year, 20 climate scientists urged her to use federal racketeering laws to prosecute corporations and think tanks that have “deceived the American people about the risks of climate change.” Similar assaults on free speech are endorsed in the Democratic Party’s 2016 platform, which calls for prosecution of companies that make “misleading” statements about “the scientific reality of climate change.”
The most vocal critics of climate dogma are a half-dozen think tanks that together spend less than $15 million annually on environmental issues. The half-dozen major green groups spend more than $500 million, and the federal government spends $10 billion on climate research and technology to reduce emissions. Add it up, and it’s clear that scientists face tremendous pressure to support the “consensus” on reducing carbon emissions, as Judith Curry, a climatologist at Georgia Tech, testified last year at a Senate hearing.
“This pressure comes not only from politicians but also from federal funding agencies, universities and professional societies, and scientists themselves who are green activists,” Curry said. “This advocacy extends to the professional societies that publish journals and organize conferences. Policy advocacy, combined with understating the uncertainties, risks destroying science’s reputation for honesty and objectivity—without which scientists become regarded as merely another lobbyist group.”
To preserve their integrity, scientists should avoid politics and embrace the skeptical rigor that their profession requires. They need to start welcoming conservatives and others who will spot their biases and violate their taboos. Making these changes won’t be easy, but the first step is simple: stop pretending that the threats to science are coming from the Right. Look in the other direction—or in the mirror.
Last edited by cancel2 2022; 08-11-2018 at 07:08 AM.
Please do not presume to instruct me, a scientist, on scientific method."that's how science works." HM #40
Quite the contrary. I contributed multiple times to this and other topics IN HOPE of being challenged. It's OK HM. I suppose you at least tried."you dislike being challenged" HM #40
You challenged* in this thread, I presented my perspective, and in short order you conceded my point.
That's not incidental to my participation. It's why I participate."sea level rise is around 1.8mm per year or less than 6 inches by the year 2100." HM #37
It may also be worth noting that Earth's climate has undergone substantial changes in its ~billion year history.
Proof that 3rd millennium climate change is substantially anthropogenic is scant.
What we do know is that we're adding Carbon to the atmosphere by the ton, and that while natural gas might seem a cleaner burning fuel than coal, fracking as currently practiced in the U.S. includes an enormous amount of spillage.
And that spillage of gas, dumping it into the atmosphere has environmental consequences.
It's a vast and complex eco-system.
But insulting science isn't going to diminish harm somehow.
* Not in the sense of being difficult, but merely in taking an alternate perspective.
"It should be obvious to anyone why conservatives and libertarians should be against Trump. He has no grounding in belief. No core philosophy. No morals. No loyalty. No curiosity. No empathy and no understanding. He demands personal loyalty and not loyalty to the nation. His only core belief is in his own superiority to everyone else. His only want is exercise more and more personal power." smb / purveyor of fact 18/03/18
Bookmarks