81–90 of 119 posts
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You may read a bit on US history and the role religious dissent played in it. It's no accident that religious freedoms are in the first amendment.
Asserting a policy of not publishing an opinion is quite different from a legislative edict to make an opinion illegal. Just because your opinion is legal does not mean I have to listen to it.
Hmm let's play "recognize the phenomenon": 1. An important truth will cause cataclysmic consequences because it's not recognized by the general populace. 2. The deeper aspects of this truth are in the possession of an elite. 3. Only the elite is qualified to speak about this truth. 4. The elite is self-selected and meets in regular councils that issue binding pronouncements. 5. The only solution is for the populace t…
That takes care of that.
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Religious dissent? Unqualified, uninformed dissent? Yes, quell the hell out of it.
You may read a bit on US history and the role religious dissent played in it. It's no accident that religious freedoms are in the first amendment.
I've always had mixed feelings regarding man-made climate change, seeing it as a marketed mainstream show. For me, this broad, somewhat blind, frightening threat is the ecological equivalent of the idea of terrorism. I can't help myself to think that there are a lot of other ecological issues, even more critical, and affecting our societies today. Water/soil pollution for instance does kill millions of people a year.…
What is that supposed to mean? That it is somehow safe just because we exhale it?
We cannot live without drinking water, but if you drink too much of it , you would die.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_intoxication
So it is possible that releasing CO2 by burning huge amounts in huge amounts in the air may be changing climate. I am not arguing that it is, but arguing against "we should not be scared because we exhale it".
>while they eat polychlorinated biphenyl and a thousand more toxic chemical compounds on a daily basis.
Sure, but they don't come close to what climate change can do. If they can be linked to mass deaths, I am sure people will get more scared of those than they are now.
Back on topic, Is the statement "It must be safe because exhale it" deserving of equal airtime?
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That's the problem with media like BBC - airing the view point becomes "subsidizing", and which opinion gets discussed and which is not becomes matter of centralized public policy instead of matter of private preference and market of ideas. Yes, this is the opposite of what journalists are supposed to do - instead of being free agents in the market of ideas, they become essentially a part of executive branch in enfor…
"which opinion gets discussed and which is not becomes matter of centralized public policy" Not really. Should they stop and give equal time to the Flat Earth Society every time they show a picture of a spherical earth? If climate deniers want to continue to get anything like equal time they should earn it, not be granted it. They were granted equal time for a long time, longer than they deserved. Now, after several…
You seem to miss the point. The point is not who deserves and who does not deserve access to the market. The point is the whole questions stated like this is a problem. Everybody should have access to the market, that's the point. If FES wants to be on idea market, let them be there. If nobody would buy their goods - their imaginary idea store would wither and fall into disuse. That's how it should be done, not by some committee that decides who gets equal share of centralized resource and who does not. You talking about "being demoted", that assumes centralized external control of who is promoted and who is demoted. Right now you laud this model because you sympathize to the point being promoted and despise the point being demoted. But this model is inherently not healthy, as it has control of what is discussed and what is not in the hands of the central power and not in the hands of the people. I was thinking people on HN would get why such centralized system is problematic, but looks like the cheerleading for their team obscures their vision.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"which opinion gets discussed and which is not becomes matter of centralized public policy" Not really. Should they stop and give equal time to the Flat Earth Society every time they show a picture of a spherical earth? If climate deniers want to continue to get anything like equal time they should earn it, not be granted it. They were granted equal time for a long time, longer than they deserved. Now, after several…
>>> Should they stop and give equal time to the Flat Earth Society You seem to miss the point. The point is not who deserves and who does not deserve access to the market. The point is the whole questions stated like this is a problem. Everybody should have access to the market, that's the point. If FES wants to be on idea market, let them be there. If nobody would buy their goods - their imaginary idea store would w…
The BBC is not "the idea market". The BBC is a participant in that market (a distributor that spends resources picking up ideas from idea suppliers, packaging them and bundling them into consumer-focussed idea-delivery products -- shows -- and delivering them to consumers.)
The issue isn't whether the climate denial should be banned from the market, the issue whether the BBC is wrong in a decision to stop stocking it.
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You may read a bit on US history and the role religious dissent played in it. It's no accident that religious freedoms are in the first amendment.
I have read US history and not once did religiously motivated dissent to scientific consensus result in the advancement of science or the advancement of any other measure of human progress.
Subtle: "climate deniers" instead of "climate change deniers".
I guess this dates me as an old guy, but it seems like there could be an interesting back story for the terminalology change from "Global Warming" to "Climate Change". Who was the group that first started advocating for this? When did it first appear in print in a scientific journal? When did it first appear in a newspaper or on a TV show? When did it first in a government or UN document? When did politicians start u…
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I have read US history and not once did religiously motivated dissent to scientific consensus result in the advancement of science or the advancement of any other measure of human progress.
Religiously motivated dissent is, by a large measure, what started what became the US, and the importance of dissent is ingrained deeply in the ideological base of the US republic. Also, you can read on abolitionist movement and their religious motivations (science was playing racial theories with gusto at that time and continued for some time even after the slavery was abolished). So your rosy picture of triumphant…
Science, on the other hand, holds provisional truth, tests, makes predictions and steadily converges.
As for slavery and racism, one would expect that social and cultural forces would be the primary drivers for beliefs about races. Only secondarily would religion and/or proto-science be used to justify those beliefs, unless or until either system developed rigorous empirical means capable of supporting or undermining those beliefs. Christians supported slavery by using biblical references to Ham's descendants being cursed to be servants. Attempts to use science to support racism and slavery were used as well, of course, but flawed in the way the practice of science itself was flawed at the time.
Neither religion nor science can claim any credit for ending slavery, that credit can only go to evolving social views. Steven Pinker argues that increased empathy for slaves and moral revulsion for slavery was catalyzed by a number of best-selling autobiographies of slaves. The growth of empathy, the rejection of slavery and gradual but steady rejection of all forms of violence in societies is well documented in his "Better Angels of Our Nature".
I think this is a dangerous precedent for media coverage of science. If there is any doubt in your mind, you never read what Feynman had to say about Millikan's experimental results for measurement of elementary charge. Some scientists cheat at science, so they can be more popular. And this is why we don't trust conclusions until after they are independently repeated. If someone were to produce real, verifiable exper…
I think there is a general misconception about what this shift in approach by the BBC means and why it is significant. Scientific debate does not unfold in the same way as political debate, where it is plausible to have two, equally valid "sides" to compare with "benefits" and "disadvantages". Scientifically defensible conclusions drawn from repeated experimentation are complex to understand, difficult to explain to…
Climate science has lots of sides in reality. There are many, many problems and the only thing that's really quite agreed upon is that we've had warming for 150 years. Yes that it's has something to do with increased levels of co2 is pretty agreed upon, but not what caused what, for example, or how much of a feedback loop it is (see further on).
Keep in mind what climate science is. Essentially it's a very, very new kind of science. We are measuring reality, using statistical "best fit" rules, and assuming they represent natural laws that will continue in perpetuity. And then, of course, mix that in with what we know to be true (e.g. locality of changes), until you arrive at something that vaguely looks like reality.
And like any science "the consensus" is "whatever works". Now keep in mind that this is not necessary works in the traditional sense. It is that, but there is some truth to the fact that climate science is getting a lot of funding within academia (one part of it is, as usual, and it's not the part improving the statistical methods)
But of course, there's lots of problems here
1) is this approach valid at all ? Getting statistical approximations of laws and treating them as holy cows ... (e.g. one could make the observation that the IPCC ARs, as far as we know, are wrong. If you go back to 1990, take AR0's "95%" values for global temperature for their best fit ... well, we're outside of that range. Same for AR1 and AR2 and pretty close to the edge for AR3, so it's not like there are no reasons to question the whole thing).
2) does statistics apply to climate variables at all ? Specifically temperature is a big problem here. (Statistics cannot be -correctly- applied to variables that don't follow the central limit theorem. Correctly is in there because most of statistics can be blindly applied to any time series, it just doesn't predict anything. There is the small issue that there was some historical work stating that statistics won't work on climate, and nobody's bothered to revisit that. Temperature is gasses does not follow the central limit theorem, so measuring the "average" temperature of a gas is not possible in the general case).
3) Even if this approach works, it doesn't predict stuff it hasn't seen before, because of how it works. This is not science that's coming from first principles (and even that has limits to how far it applies, e.g. extreme cold or heat). But climate science is worse than other sciences where this is done because the theory is really only based on the values seen. The problem here is what consists of a "new" situation ?
If temperature were to determine what is "normal" then we've been in a new situation at least a few weeks on a yearly basis for 150 years now. And likely there is some point where it really will be a new situation.
There are known problems with this approach as well, like it is considered "normal" that this theory, being based on 150 years of data, predicts unbounded warming. Given the method, I agree that this is normal, but it's also obviously wrong. No matter how far in the future, climate is never going to warm to 1000000 degrees surface temperature, even though the climate models do predict that will happen. A learned rule that has been "trained" on only-ever-warming climate keeps going up.
4) And of course, the popular explanations for climate change are wrong. Climate science DOES NOT claim that increasing CO2 exhaust will cause the athmosphere to heat, well it does, but that part is not having much effect at all.
What it really predicts is that a little bit of warming will cause more warming. E.g. little warming -> more water vapour -> more athmosphere insulation -> a little more warming. Feedback loop. Now repeat for water, methane, co2 itself (non-human co2), co, ... That, not human co2 exhaust, is what is claimed to be causing global warming.
What I also don't understand is how climate agreements are considered reasonable. Lowering co2 output will only slow down the warming, it won't stop it even if humans stopped co2 output entirely. Which brings the question : what do all these climate accords achieve ? They achieve nothing, even if they somehow magically start working. A delay of a decade at best, maybe two or three if you're wildly optimistic.
It may mean that cooling will work similarly (yes the theory does not predict cooling ever, but any sane human being knows perfectly well that the planet will cool again no matter what we de, look at the 1 million year temperature graph if you're not convinced). If it works like the warming did, then once it starts cooling a little bit (like 0.1 degrees should easily do it), that by itself will cause more cooling. So the graph will reverse at some point, and the reverse, the temperature drop, should be as unstoppable as warming has been.
5) Now the kicker is when will this reversal happen ? Historically it has been up to ~3 degrees warmer than it currently is, and then we consistently saw rapid declines of about 10 degrees ("rapid" meaning a millenium or so, but with most cooling happening in 2-3 centuries). This has happened dozens of times in the past. Problem is, we don't know what causes it. For a few cases we can point out simple things that change at the hinge point, but they never explain a 10 degree drop.
It is pretty unique that we have had a temperature rise at anything but the very last years of an interglacial. Usually when the temperature was warmer than it is now, it shot up to warmer than it is now at the end of an ice age, and then stayed high for millenia, to suddenly drop again.
But we are at the end of an interglacial. An ice age is "about" to start (again look at the 1 million year temperature graph). Now when will that happen ? Well, somewhere in the next few thousand years would expected. But if you did what climate science does, you take historical lengths of interglacials and create a 95% confidence interval, we're already in that interval (though early times, not yet at the mean, the mean is about 280 years in the future, with a standard deviation of a little over 3 centuries. But there certainly have been interglacials shorter than the current one, meaning there would be nothing remarkable in the graph if it started today).