Clever bloke says global warming is a sack of arse

[anonymous-user]

turbobloke said:

After all "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it" (Upton Sinclair)

So perhaps if we remove from the equation all scientists whose salary, tenure, career, reputation and the rest depend on manmadeup warming junkscience, and then compare the views of the disinterested remainder, what would the result be like?

Turbobloke i'm clearly no scientist but i'm interested in science and have a little knowledge of the history of science and the key figures who have made it. I know there have been some unsavoury characters and some murky periods but i'm not aware of a time where a huge number ( probably a large majority) of scientists and leading figures and respected organisations have supported a theory they knew to be untrue just to get funding. It seems a bit unlikely that all these boffins would publish papers they don't believe just to get money and to support governments trying to make money themselves.

On the other hand they might all be wrong and the minority will be proven correct. That's probably a more likely scenario than a large scale deception among a section of the scientific community to increase funding.

As I said before though, in most other scientific theories that haven't been proven 100%, people on here would be quite happy to go with the majority scientific view, rather than assume there was some motive behind the scientists that would make them publish and peer review work that they thought was untrue.

Edited by el stovey on Wednesday 13th October 18:15

[FunkyGibbon]

I think the point here is that driver for all this research is motivated by policy and not science. It should be the other way round.

Funding is for "proving the case of CO2 in climate change" as I believe was the tenant of the original IPCC report.

Not "find out why the climate is changing" which would be an eminently more sensible approach.

The sensibility of the science has long left the lab.

[TuxRacer]

el stovey said:

turbobloke said:

After all "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it" (Upton Sinclair)

It seems a bit unlikely that all these boffins would publish papers they don't believe just to get money and to support governments trying to make money themselves.

I don't think it's as simple as them publishing something they don't believe, as TB intimates.

[Globulator]

el stovey said:

Still the vast majority of PH scientists apparently hold 'non MMGW' views. Whilst it would appear that outside here the consensus is different.

Appearances can be deceptive.
The 'consensus' outside is the views of a small group of noisy and influential people.
The reality is that the vast majority of scientists are too smart to be taken in by lies, broken statistics, opaque methods, shoddy data and bad pseudoscience.

Edited by Globulator on Wednesday 13th October 20:59

[turbobloke]

FunkyGibbon said:

I think the point here is that driver for all this research is motivated by policy and not science. It should be the other way round.

Funding is for "proving the case of CO2 in climate change" as I believe was the tenant of the original IPCC report.

Not "find out why the climate is changing" which would be an eminently more sensible approach.

The sensibility of the science has long left the lab.

Exactly right.

The IPCC is first and foremost a political advocacy outfit. Its written policy is to amend the science sections to fit with the Summary for Policymakers, also the wrong way round.

Some may go further particularly after reading 'Spinning the Climate' as written by an IPCC Expert Reviewer.

[Jasandjules]

el stovey said:

As I said before though, in most other scientific theories that haven't been proven 100%, people on here would be quite happy to go with the majority scientific view, rather than assume there was some motive behind the scientists that would make them publish and peer review work that they thought was untrue.

In other scientific theories there is usually some evidence to support it. That makes it a lot easier to go along with.

And when you say majority, I think you need to qualify that to "the majority whose salary depends upon MMGW" and even then, they often qualify it - as is happening more and more it seems.

[kiteless]

Globulator said:

The reality is that the vast majority of scientists are too smart to be taken in by lies, broken statistics, opaque methods, shoddy data and bad pseudoscience.

Two quotes that spring to mind:

American Physical Society said:

Here as elsewhere the IPCC assigns a 90% confidence interval to “very likely”, rather than the customary 95% (two standard deviations). There is no good statistical basis for any such quantification, for the object to which it is applied is, in the formal sense, chaotic. The climate is “a complex, non-linear, chaotic object” that defies long-run prediction of its future states (IPCC, 2001), unless the initial state of its millions of variables is known to a precision that is in practice unattainable, as Lorenz (1963; and see Giorgi, 2005) concluded in the celebrated paper that founded chaos theory –
“Prediction of the sufficiently distant future is impossible by any method, unless the present conditions are known exactly. In view of the inevitable inaccuracy and incompleteness of weather observations, precise, very-long-range weather forecasting would seem to be non-existent.”.

And

Professor of Atmospheric Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Richard Lindzen said:

The notion of a static, unchanging climate is foreign to the history of the earth or any other planet with a fluid envelope. The fact that the developed world went into hysterics over changes in global mean temperature of a few tenths of a degree will astound future generations.Such hysteria simply represents the scientific illiteracy of much of the public, and the susceptibility of the public to the Goebbelian substitution of repetition for truth