An excellent response here:
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/finance/andrewlilico/100027585/...
BBC staff ordered to stop giving equal airtime to climate deniers
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Re: BBC staff ordered to stop giving equal airtime to climate deniers
#102Hmm 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…
7. Steps leading to said truth can be reproduced That takes care of that.
This has got to be the stupidest claim in here. What the fuck. But maybe I'm wrong. So ok, so you've made a claim. Do tell how I can reproduce climate change ? I do not have a spare planet to fuck around with.
Just so we're clear what will not be accepted as an answer : here is an experiment as to how the greenhouse effect behaves in a gas volume. You see a greenhouse effect starting at zero concentration. 90% of the effect is visiable at 300ppm. 95% of the effect is visible at 350ppm. (co2 forcing is exponentially decreasing, and levels off at around 350ppm to eventually converge (at 100%, or 1000000ppm) to about 6% higher than it is at 350ppm) [1]
And yet athmosphere temperature is not behaving like this at all. Warming is accelerating, not slowing down (350ppm was reached in 1990, currently at 415-420). Yet warming is accelerating. Given that this is pretty much the only experiment you can do without a spare planet, and it obviously is very different from observed behavior, this will not be accepted.
So do tell : how to reproduce climate change ?
Alternatively: what is the conclusion if "steps leading to said truth" cannot, in fact, be reproduced ?
[1] IPCC AR3, Chapter 6: Radiative Forcing of Climate Change. (section 6.3.4) Total Well-Mixed Greenhouse Gas Forcing Estimate
Re: BBC staff ordered to stop giving equal airtime to climate deniers
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've known a few people who have actually suggested that we start doing this. People think athiesm is far too prominent, but I think we live in a time in history that will be viewed as more dogmatic than any other. "Science" is no longer a method of discovery. It's now a new God.
Crichton said it best, https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/~scranmer/SPD/crichton.html
Crichton was an anti-science loon who, coincidentally, believed in spoon bending. Good fiction writer, though.
Re: BBC staff ordered to stop giving equal airtime to climate deniers
#104Funny thing. Everyone here compares climate denial to other left wing bugaboos: 'creationism' 'ancient science' 'earth is the center of the universe' So why not compare to things where the left wing is wrong? Why not say, "if we're not going to give equal time to one thing where science is settled (climate change), we also shouldn't give equal time to..." 1. Economic fact: Minimum wage hurts low earners 2. Economic f…
I've seen argument and published studies against (1) so you're not off to a good start. These are clearly not points of view that would get 97% of economists agreeing on, are they? Also, economics is not a science.
Plenty of blogs say climate science is not a science. Climate scientists say otherwise.
Plenty of blogs say economics is not a science. Climate scientists say otherwise.
What exactly differentiates one statement from the other ? Aside from the fact that one is popular opinion and the other is not (although that's debatable and differs by person and by region).
Re: BBC staff ordered to stop giving equal airtime to climate deniers
#105I 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…
> Silencing the ongoing debate, even if one side or the other is obviously delusional, is completely contrary to the spirit of science. A news outfit does not have the power to silence scientific debate. Real, productive scientific debate does not occur in 5-minute talk show segments. That's just entertainment. Scientific debate occurs in less glamorous venues, such as conferences, journals, and labs. And it involves…
News influences politics. Politics influences public policy. Public policy influences funding. Funding influences research. Research influences news.
A news outlet does have the power to silence debate. Ask any "true Scotsman" libertarian (viz. not Paulians or Tea Partiers) during any election season. Ask Occupy Whatever about why no one actually addressed their grievances. Ask any number of people with legitimate but unheard issues why 24-hour news channels will choose to report deeply on shallow topics rather than broadly on a wider variety. Rupert Murdoch and Sumner Redstone haven't accumulated vast media empires because they want your voice to be heard by more people.
The actual scientific debate is not going to appear on air. The news segments would simply get people interested in learning more and contributing in some way. If you shut the consensus contrarians down now, you may be stifling future climate efforts, because the research industry has to continually struggle for funding for anything that does not have a direct and obvious military application. Any mention of science on radio or on television or in popular fiction is an advertisement for more science. The crackpots and loons give the scientific establishment an acceptable target to talk down to that will not offend the general public. That informs the public while recruiting them emotionally.
It is a rhetorical tactic, essentially making a strawman of an actual person, and not true argument, but I'm not certain rational, scientific personalities realize that the majority of research is ultimately funded by folks who couldn't tell the difference between a beaker and an Erlenmeyer flask if you make them watch Breaking Bad from start to finish. Someone has to be the pitchman for legit, non-politicized research. Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson and Michio Kaku and Stephen Hawking can't be the only science celebrities.
You really do want as many actual researchers in front of the cameras as you can get, so you can find out who can both defend a thesis before their peers and effectively convey understanding to laymen. You want people to be able to name more professional theorists and researchers than Kardashians. It doesn't advance the body of knowledge, but it helps pay for salaries and equipment, and helps fill the education pipeline to keep retirement and emigration from endangering ongoing work.
Re: BBC staff ordered to stop giving equal airtime to climate deniers
#106I 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…
The other side is not being completely blackballed, they just get less airtime. Also, some of the dissenters on this particular issue have a vested economic interest in their dissent, and are not really looking for truth.
Everyone has a vested economic interest in his own career.
Every industry has participants who are just in it for the money. But that doesn't mean some of those people are not also passionate about research and scientific integrity. On television, truth doesn't matter. All that matters is whether you can command people's attention.
Just like advertisements for prescription medication, the goal is not a direct sale. The goal is to convince the viewer to learn more from someone well educated in the field. And then get their money.
My hypothesis is that opportunities to challenge establishment thought increase as new sources of funding flow into an industry. For software, more funding means more startup failures, and more disruptive tech that somehow avoided failure. For research, more new funding means less reliance on the university hierarchy or government grant proposals, and enough new publications that not even Elsevier could possibly swallow all of them.
Re: BBC staff ordered to stop giving equal airtime to climate deniers
#107Were every network to start doing what the BBC is, their unfounded opinions would cease to be heard, Bill Nye wouldn’t have to keep debating them, and maybe, just maybe, they’d all just go away. Not bloody likely. Now you've just put them in the same group as the other conspiracy theorists, and given them the additional (legitimate) ammo that "the establishment is censoring them". Confirmation bias is a hell of a dru…
For any given fringe view that the media properly marginalizes, some people will go on believing it. But that doesn't mean the number of believers (or undecided people) will stay the same. It's quite possible, and in my view probable, that reducing airtime from fringe views will substantially reduce the number of people who hold or lean towards those views.
You're at least partly right, but I would argue the conspiracy types are already well acquainted with "alternative" news sources (infowars, Coast to Coast, random bloggers...).
Additionally, (and this is just a personal feeling), but something about top-down "reducing airtime from fringe views" feels very wrong. Who decides what a "fringe view" is? By that rubric, Creationism is perfectly legitimate since it's widely held.
I think we'd all be better served, morally as well as practically, by letting the loons be loons and let people make their own decisions rather then trying to explicitly control who gets airtime. Bring on the denier and let them get annihilated in a debate against someone who knows what they're talking about. This has the benefit of not invoking censorship boogeymen (which may or may not actually exist) and doesn't hand over the "we're being oppressed" card to them.
Re: BBC staff ordered to stop giving equal airtime to climate deniers
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
There's a paper by Alan Robock titled "Internally and Externally Caused Climate Change", published in the journal of the American Meteorology Society in June 1978, and an earlier paper, "Climate Change Over the Polar Ocean" by Vowinckel and Orvig, published in Meteorology in January 1966, and, best yet, an even earlier paper, "The Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climatic Change", by Plass, published by Johns Hopkins Univers…
Here's a Google n-gram of the two terms:
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=climate+change...
...I wonder if there is a similar tool for other types of publications besides books.
Re: BBC staff ordered to stop giving equal airtime to climate deniers
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you think equal time should be given to all opinions on scientific issues that are not backed by evidence? Should we teach Christian creationism next to evolution? Should we teach about the balance of humors next to germ theory?
A rather grubby device for argument! What kind of evidence do you think is provided by a stasis in warming (no one is now denying this stasis!) when all the climate models predict warming? Models provide zero evidence; they only offer predictions. And they have all failed. No one suggests there has been no warming at all and a measure of this will reasonably be due to CO2 emitted by man. The argument is about the ext…
Eh, seriously?
"By 2030, the benefits of these three sets of sector policies would include 94,000 premature deaths avoided annually and GDP growth of $1.8 trillion-$2.6 trillion per year," according to the report. "The policies would avoid 8.5 gigatons of CO2-equivalent and almost 16 billion kilowatt-hours of energy saved, roughly equivalent to taking 2 billion cars off the road. Together, these implementing these policies could represent about 30 percent of the total reduction needed in 2030 to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius."
http://biomassmagazine.com/articles/10643/world-bank-climate...