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The Unstoppable Momentum of Outdated Science

rogerpielkejr.substack.com

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Re: The Unstoppable Momentum of Outdated Science

#71

Post by aspaceman »

bigiain wrote: post #42
ChuckMcM wrote: post #19

This is a good read, although somewhat depressing. When you have a topic that has been weaponized politically, as climate change has, people who use that weapon actively work against information they perceive would make the weapon less effective. The author sums it up as follows: ---- from the article: According to Rayner, in such a context we should expect to see reactions to uncomfortable knowledge that include: de…

The entire opening of the article discussing 2020 papers erroneously using skin cancer data in breast cancer research papers which was a known error for at least 13 years - makes the point very strongly that " ... but these studies/experiments have shown that understanding to be incorrect. Now we believe this." happens much slower than perhaps people expect. I understand science "is expected to be wrong" sometimes, b…

13 years for turnaround on bad results isn’t abysmal in my view. Science is hard and will take a long time.

Getting people used to that seems impossible though.

Re: The Unstoppable Momentum of Outdated Science

#72

Post by julienchastang »

Note that Roger A. Pielke Jr. is a political science professor not an atmospheric scientist and has, in the past, been involved in a number of climate science controversies. The analogy to outdated breast cancer research feels like a straw man. Anyway, I cannot claim that he is wrong, but I would regard this piece with some skepticism.

Re: The Unstoppable Momentum of Outdated Science

#73

Post by bopbeepboop »

Sebb767 wrote: post #45
rbanffy wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now we must imagine what the impact on policies would be to prematurely say we managed to cut emissions more effectively than predicted.

But what's the alternative? Ignoring the fact that our data is based on wrong assumptions? Act as if nothing has changed? Sure, this is not good in the short time. But this is already a smoking gun for climate change deniers; if we were to put this under the rug for another decade, it would become a smoking nuke. And imagine the impact of that .

[dead]

Re: The Unstoppable Momentum of Outdated Science

#74

Post by sien »

adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #64
sien wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the article : "For instance, O’Neill and colleagues find that “many studies” use scenarios that are “unlikely.” In fact, in their literature review such “unlikely” scenarios comprise more than 20% of all scenario applications from 2014 to 2019. They also call for “re-examining the assumptions underlying” the high-end emissions scenarios that are favored in physical climate research, impact studies and economic a…

This sounds like good science being done. When you are trying to predict something like carbon emissions, standard practice is to run a few different scenarios. If you run 5 models, one with predicted CO2, and the others with higher and lower values, of course some of your scenarios will be unlikely. You're doing that on purpose so that you have a ability to see how wide the range of possible results is even with unc…

From the article:

"Correspondingly, the authors “recommend establishing a process for regular updates” to the scenarios and recommend that key variables in the scenarios “be updated now to be consistent with new historical data.”"

So the author is explicitly saying different scenarios should be used, just that they should be updated regularly.

Re: The Unstoppable Momentum of Outdated Science

#75

Post by perrygeo »

The emission scenarios were developed decades ago and are proving to be over-estimates. The author interprets that as outdated science which is a rather pessimistic view.

I interpret it differently: Scientists make a spread of climate predictions and their potential consequences. Those listening mustered significant market/public/government pressure and ... it worked. We pushed the outcome towards the low end of the predictions. This is good news and demonstrates the efficacy of political action based on science.

If those predictions are correct, between RCP2.6 and RCP4.5 is not a bad place to be. Climate change is still locked in but life on earth has a chance of adapting to it without major upheaval. RCP8.5 otoh, if it were to happen, we'd be screwed.

Re: The Unstoppable Momentum of Outdated Science

#76

Post by d110af5ccf »

dayiel wrote: post #67
bigiain wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The entire opening of the article discussing 2020 papers erroneously using skin cancer data in breast cancer research papers which was a known error for at least 13 years - makes the point very strongly that " ... but these studies/experiments have shown that understanding to be incorrect. Now we believe this." happens much slower than perhaps people expect. I understand science "is expected to be wrong" sometimes, b…

Actually, the cell line issue might not be so bad or rather all cell line work is much worse than you all imagine. No cell lines actually resemble the real tissue in gene expression if you say, do an rna screen and see what actuallg gets expressed. They are changed by line establishing process, use of various media, number of passages aka how long they’ve been in culture from thawing a line till the test (cant be too…

I agree with the sentiment expressed here.

> Reading those papers is like reading house ads, scientists kind of learn to cut through bs

In addition to recognizing general BS, in any given field the papers come with an enormous block of implicit fine print. An important part of being an expert in a particular field is knowing what that fine print is.

Re: The Unstoppable Momentum of Outdated Science

#77

Post by d110af5ccf »

aspaceman wrote: post #71
bigiain wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The entire opening of the article discussing 2020 papers erroneously using skin cancer data in breast cancer research papers which was a known error for at least 13 years - makes the point very strongly that " ... but these studies/experiments have shown that understanding to be incorrect. Now we believe this." happens much slower than perhaps people expect. I understand science "is expected to be wrong" sometimes, b…

13 years for turnaround on bad results isn’t abysmal in my view. Science is hard and will take a long time. Getting people used to that seems impossible though.

And this, of course, is why double blind clinical trials are so incredibly important.

Re: The Unstoppable Momentum of Outdated Science

#78

Post by d110af5ccf »

em-bee wrote: post #38
quercusa wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's something quite like this in US law. If you are citing a case in a legal brief, you need to make sure it hasn't been overturned along the way, so you 'Shepardize' it. From Wikipedia [0]: Shepard's Citations is a citator used in United States legal research that provides a list of all the authorities citing a particular case, statute, or other legal authority. The verb Shepardizing refers to the process of con…

this sounds like a good approach. right now every citation is an endoresement, and the choice is to support a publication or to ignore it. there should be a way to make a negative citation, that allows you to declare that the referenced publication is contradicting. as a result there would be two citation counts for each publication. like upvotes and downvotes. i believe contradicting citations do happen now, but the…

> right now every citation is an endoresement

This is a valid point, but it's important to note that it only applies when using aggregate citation counts as a rough proxy for importance within a field. That's useful for prioritizing what to read but not for assessing the validity of any given result (of which there are often quite a few, at least in the life sciences).

Within a given paper, it's not at all uncommon for the authors to explicitly call out some detail from another study as being incorrect in their view. That doesn't mean that they necessarily agree or disagree with the rest of the cited work though.

What I'm getting at here is that negative citations would likely be far too coarse to be useful in practice. It's relatively rare that a paper outright disagrees with an entire work.

Re: The Unstoppable Momentum of Outdated Science

#79

Post by thrwoeriu23423 »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #19

This is a good read, although somewhat depressing. When you have a topic that has been weaponized politically, as climate change has, people who use that weapon actively work against information they perceive would make the weapon less effective. The author sums it up as follows: ---- from the article: According to Rayner, in such a context we should expect to see reactions to uncomfortable knowledge that include: de…

> Not enough people understand that science is expected to be wrong.

The propaganda for making Science the new-religion is far too advanced sadly - even the classic development of heliocentric model is so riddled with misinformation that it's hard to have much hope for much else.

The effect of all this is that it brings to the fore all the forgotten protestant templates in the form of the vitriolic "anti-science" and "pro-science" communities. One fringe punishes any criticism of the establishment view viciously (the epidemiologists & medical experts who weren't for lockdowns comes to mind), and the other takes this as evidence for "science" being compromised.

The Anglo-Saxon world is too far gone IMO. I hope this atleast allows the peripheral colonial vassals like India to finally break free from their destructive clutches... but even that seems unlikely now.

Re: The Unstoppable Momentum of Outdated Science

#80

Post by weakfish »

momirlan wrote: post #56
marshmallow_12 wrote: post #5

It's been a long time since i've read anything so well written that was so devoid of any pertinent points. I'm only reading that page, but the only thing i've come away with is that breast cancer research is flawed, somehow, by what seems to be the most egregious lack of anything that approaches professional standards on the part of researchers. Oh, and a graph with different lines drawn on it with a large space betw…

go to bed before you burn too many neurons

Please keep this sort of antagonizing off of HN.
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