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Post by marchesarosa on Mar 17, 2013 15:44:38 GMT 1
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Post by marchesarosa on Mar 17, 2013 15:46:22 GMT 1
Richard Lindzen: When an issue becomes a vital part of a political agenda, as is the case with climate, then the politically desired position becomes a goal rather than a consequence of scientific research.
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Post by principled on Mar 17, 2013 16:03:46 GMT 1
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Post by marchesarosa on Mar 17, 2013 17:21:59 GMT 1
Yes, I have read it, principled. David Rose is a very accomplished writer about science matters, particularly about climate. He is far ahead of all other journalists in his understanding of the debate. The rest are happy to report squabbles and denigrate "deniers" but never delve into the contentious matters at issue between the two camps. He was one of the participants in the recent Oxford Union "conversation" which also featured Richard Lindzen and will be broadcast by Al jazeera later in the year. www.oxford-union.org/term_events/al_jazeera2The Daily Mail, sadly, because it has a reputation for being a bit of a redneck organ, is the only mainstream newspaper giving proper, balanced coverage to the global warming scam. Earlier Rose wrote this article which really put the sh*ts up the mainstream commentators. www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2217286/Global-warming-stopped-16-years-ago-reveals-Met-Office-report-quietly-released--chart-prove-it.htmlIt was immediately attacked as erroneous by the alarmists and their fellow travellers in the media but was found to be perfectly accurate and quite in line with the Met Office's data. |
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Post by alancalverd on Mar 18, 2013 0:24:22 GMT 1
"Policy-based evidence-making" has been the essence of demagoguery since the dawn of civilisation. Sometimes it turns into religion, sometimes famine, sometimes genocide. This one has turned into a massive waste of money and talent but fortunately with fewer casualties than most other crusades.
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Post by Progenitor A on Mar 18, 2013 10:30:36 GMT 1
Actully the second picture is possibly the closest to the 'scientific method', where scientist form a theory and then look for supportive (or contradictory) facts |
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Post by marchesarosa on Mar 18, 2013 13:13:55 GMT 1
I agree, nay. Simply looking at a collection of data is not the way to generate hypotheses.
A little intellectual creativity is required in selecting what needs further investigation but continuing scepticism, replication and testing is essential even when you think you are on the right lines. The resistance of the IPCC and its tame hack "scientists" to the proper testing of their hypothesis is ridiculous.
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Post by marchesarosa on Mar 18, 2013 23:37:22 GMT 1
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Post by marchesarosa on Mar 18, 2013 23:47:57 GMT 1
I just watched the film about Feynman's role in revealing the cause of the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster in 1986. I started out with a scene of Feynman defining, for a bunch of students, the Scientific method as (I think) "how things get to be known". The IPCC has been, like NASA was with covering up the cause of the Challenger disaster, overly concerned with protecting itself from the scientific method and thus failing to understand how things concerning the climate REALLY "get to be known". Sure, you start with "a guess" but if your guess does not turn out to conform to observations you have to abandon it. Tough! But, too many in the IPCC have grown accustomed to sucking at the generous teat of state funding and don't fancy admitting they were wrong after such a AWFUL lot of money has been spent on them. Reputations are on the line. The state funded scientists are as fallible as any other careerist when it comes to self-interest and reputation and when the whole of the climate-industrial complex is cheering for renewable energy to solve the problem identified by aforementioned boffins. Feynman is a hero of my mine not least because he looked, in his prime and in this photograph in particular, a lot like my first sweetheart with whom I fell in love in 1969. And I don't believe he would be an alarmist re CO2 and climate.  |
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Post by principled on Mar 19, 2013 18:12:57 GMT 1
Marchesa, I too watched the programme. I realise some of it was a dramatization, but his methodical approach unearthed much of what would otherwise have been "buried".
It is tenacious people like him who keep corporations, engineers, scientists and governments on their toes.
In my own field, one such person was Ralph Nader who wrote "Unsafe at any speed", which highlighted many of the design shortcomings in the auto industry in the 1960's. Much of what he found has parallels with what Feynman found in terms design flaws that were known about but not corrected.
See wiki summary here:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsafe_at_Any_Speed
P
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Post by alancalverd on Mar 19, 2013 19:43:53 GMT 1
Actully the second picture is possibly the closest to the 'scientific method', where scientist form a theory and then look for supportive (or contradictory) facts Not at all. There is a significant distinction to be made. Politicians, economists, priests and historians look for supportive evidence for their ex nihilo hypotheses, and if it is not found, they claim faith or personal conviction as justifying their hypotheses. The scientific method always begins with an observation of some kind, and the essence of a scientific hypothesis is its inherent disprovability. Climatological hypotheses are at least in principle disprovable, as for instance the 1970s absolutely certain conviction of an impending ice age, but as we can't actually do any experiments, disproof must await the pleasure of Nature, as in astrophysics. The bugger is string theory, which doesn't claim to be disprovable or observable but only to provide a nonpredictive model for everything. |
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