That’s good, though, right? Because it means that soon there’ll be 95% fewer climate deniers …
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[quote=“AcerPlatanoides, post:13, topic:10751”]
What is the consensus definition of the phrase ‘I hate to X, but…’[/quote]
It seems to be more or less the equivalent of “some of my best friends are Y, but …”
Or, more generally, the injuction to ignore everything before the ‘but’ seems to be fully valid here.
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To put a point on it - Climate Change is NOT “caused by people”. Scientists generally agree that it has been affected by people. The Earth has a well documented history of climate change before people existed. It is the inaccuracy of such statements that make it easy to find fault.
But, people who are 95% confident in something tend to ask fewer questions about it, right?
So I am suppose to think that this is bad because he’s compared it to the military? The alternative would be physicists who don’t even know the dominant paradigms well enough to critique them; dilettantes without the perseverance to work on problems which are actually quite hard.
Also, what the hell does this have to do with climate change?
The Earth has a long and fascinating history of climate variations, which sadly few people seem to discuss here except to try and obscure the significantly different changes happening now. But I don’t believe anyone has honestly been confused by using “climate change” to mean the current climate change, any more than they are puzzled by Audubon’s Birds leaving out Archaeopteryx.
There is a very large amount of research being done on climate change and its various details, mechanisms, and consequences. Somehow skeptics have contributed little save nitpicking, and that too-often wrong to be that helpful…akin to how creationists identified Piltdown man as a hoax but only because they called everything a hoax.
And that’s how science usually works. When theories are reasonably established you can use them as springboards to further investigations; there are fascinating questions you can’t ask while everyone is stuck re-evaluating where species come from or why gases combine in ratios. So no, your point is all but the opposite of true. If you really believe it, you know much less about scientific investigation than you pretend.
But then what’s the surprise in that? What you’ve been offering is as Cowicide says a Gish gallop, a smattering of irrelevant particulars to let you wave aside anything you like. Are people causing climate change? Did some dinosaurs have feathers? Do hamburgers cure cancer? PhD programs are too dogmatic, so there is no way to know!
It seems that not even 700+ researchers + Noam Chomsky can convince him to learn about climate change, because irony continues to be mandatory.
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The problem which you seem to not be grasping is that the notion of professionalism is at odds with critical thinking. In the same vein that you are suggesting to me that I’ve strayed from the technical problems associated with climate change, the PhD programs invite students to specifically avoid asking questions which might disturb the foundations of the theories they all work with.
Schmidt does not pose this as a hypothetical. He explains exactly how students are denied PhD’s when they stray from the technical points into the “political” …
At the end of the week the entire physics faculty gathers in a closed
meeting to decide the fate of the students. Strange as it may seem,
in most physics departments a student’s score on the test is only one
factor in the faculty’s decision as to whether or not that student has
passed the test. Students are not usually told their scores: this
gives faculty members the option of deciding that a student has failed
the test even if that student has outscored someone they are going to
pass. In arriving at their personal opinions on whether to pass or
fail a student, individual faculty members consider anything and
everything carried away from informal discussions with the student and
with others around the department.A faculty member who talks informally with a student in the hallway or
at the weekly after-colloquium reception inevitably comes away with a
feeling about whether or not that student ‘thinks like a physicist.’
The student’s political outlook can easily make a difference in the
faculty member’s assessment. For example, in the usual informal
discussion of an issue in the news, the student who rails against
technical incompetence and confines his thoughts to the search for
technical solutions within the given political framework builds a much
more credible image as a professional physicist than does the student
who emphasizes the need to alter the political framework as part of
the solution. Indeed, the latter approach falls outside the work
assignments given to professional physicists in industry and academe
and so represents thinking unlike a physicist’s.
(Jeff Schmidt, Disciplined Minds, p134)
The point being made is that professionals – including professional scientists – are not actually critical thinkers. And he explains very plainly why that is:
Professionals generally avoid the risk inherent in real critical
thinking and cannot properly be called critical thinkers. They are
simply ideologically disciplined thinkers. Real critical thinking
means uncovering and questioning social, political and moral
assumptions; applying and refining a personally developed worldview;
and calling for action that advances a personally created agenda. An
approach that backs away from any of these three components lacks the
critical spirit … Ideologically disciplined thinkers, especially the
more gung-ho ones, often give the appearance of being critical
thinkers as they go around deftly applying the official ideology and
confidently reporting their judgments. The fact that professionals
are usually more well-informed than nonprofessionals contributes to
the illusion that they are critical thinkers.
(Jeff Schmidt, Disciplined Minds, p41)
This really strikes at a very deep question about the role of education in society: Do we educate people to fit into the occupations which they will eventually end up in? Or, do we teach people how to be critical of the information they will be exposed to throughout their lives?
What Jeff is suggesting is that the PhD program focuses almost exclusively upon the former rather than the latter. And the implication is that certain questions will simply never get asked.
So, what does it actually mean when we say that most scientists agree about a particular theory, if what we’ve actually done is trained them to refuse to question a whole host of foundational assumptions and hypotheses? Well, I think what we can say is that, given that our conception of the universe is basically on track, then this model is the best option.
And that’s where we would appear to run into problems, actually. After all, we have major problems with our scientific framework. Not only can we only apparently see 4% of the universe, but we’ve got a major problem either with Relativity or quantum mechanics. Presumably, that 96% which we still don’t understand does stuff of importance; in fact, even if we don’t know anything else about it, we do know that. To simply suggest, “Well, this is climatology … It has nothing to do with astrophysics …”, you’re basically getting really, really sloppy at this point with this 95% certainty.
After all, you don’t even know what that 96% is, and you’re formulating a proposition that it necessarily does not have any meaning within the context of climatology. Nature does not tend to work like that. Nature is not broken up into disciplines. It’s one thing. That 96% uncertainty about the larger universe doesn’t hit a wall at the edge of the Earth’s atmosphere simply because that’s where one discipline ends and another begins. The idea that we are 95% confident in our climate models, based upon a framework which can identify 4% of the universe is something that I would expect to see in a Douglas Adams book.
If someone wants to “uncover and question social, political and moral assumptions; apply and refine a personally developed worldview; and call for action that advances a personally created agenda” perhaps they should not be in a field that mostly cares about things like how subatomic particles interact.
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Questioning, critiquing, and applying logical thought most definitely do not require that you disagree with a stated position. If facts and logic fall support an assertion, critical thinking would lead you to, at least tentatively, agree. However, if there are holes or unanswered questions, then critiquing and questioning can lead to a more nuanced or deeper understanding. Heck, I can’t go more than a few months without reading about an article referring to a scientific paper that questions assumptions or understandings of gravity, something which most non-scientists trust so completely as to not even consider questioning it.
The reason that the environmental sciences fields are so active and vocal right now is not that scientists are tripping over themselves to agree the loudest or most forcefully, but that there are real, critical impacts of climate change on humans and humans, with very strong evidence, have direct and indirect effects on how the climate changes.
Little is more rewarded in academia than proving a prevailing view wrong through thorough and convincing evidence and argumentation. Yes, it’s harder to go against the pack, even in academia, but the rewards are much greater than in going along. Anyone who thinks that academia tries to stamp out dissent has very little exposure to academia and academicians.
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Anyone who suggests that professors do not protect their theories as if they are children has very little exposure to dissenters.
Something very important to both relativity and quantum mechanics is the correspondence principle. It says that whatever peculiar results they might give at very large or small scales and energies, we know they can’t change the answers for the familiar objects for which traditional physics already provides a very well verified description.
So sure, one might suppose all sorts of compositions for the 96% dark matter you bring up, or even that it doesn’t exist because gravity works substantially different than we expect. But if your theory gives different outcomes for a baseball game than Newtonian physics, we already know you are wrong.
Anyone who understands this can see that bringing up dark matter and unified physics models is a terrible red herring. As I’ve said before, climate science is based on, tested against, and continuously refined by observations made on earth and its close environment. If it works, new physics won’t change that any more than it will the baseball game.
So no, this is just one more excuse to wave aside anything you like. Does smoking cause cancer? We don’t know what 96% of matter is made of and nature is not broken into discrete disciplines, so there could be so many confounding possibilities, there is no way to know! Well, sorry, but there is and we do.
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I’m pretty sure @HannesAlfven doesn’t care about climate change except insofar as it’s a lead in to talk about Jeff Schmidt, author of Disciplined Minds.
…
You know, it’s funny that you never see those two in the same place.
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I don’t know. It seems to me like Jeff Schmidt might well have a legitimate point, and none of the quotes from his book that I’ve seen presented so far would lead me to believe that he’s a crank, which is much more than I can say for Hannes Alfven (the one posting here, not his late namesake).
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Actual snort occurred. Good thing I wasn’t drinking my coffee.
13 disdain laden comments in and calling -other people- out for defending theories like children.
That’s a regular Tom Swifty, he opined, childishly.
You’re making an important point here, and I think this is where people generally go wrong: They assume that our current framework for how the universe works lacks any possible competitors. It’s clear that the conventional theories are more developed than any other, but that’s not what we care about here: What we want to know is if there are there any alternative frameworks which society can decide to elaborate such that they can eventually compete with the current one?
To be clear, in terms of astrophysics, this belief that we cannot develop a competing framework was arrived at through a half-century effort to completely ignore critical debates (started, in part, by a Nobel laureate) over the models we use to understand interstellar space. 99% of what we see with our telescopes is identified within the introductions of most astrophysical textbooks as being matter in the plasma state, and yet we still don’t teach our astrophysics students (to this day) that a very important debate has been raging over how to model these cosmic plasmas. This debate continues on to today, but – curiously – mostly outside of the walls of our universities.
There are red flags all over this story for those who have a very basic understanding of electromagnetism, for not only do the cosmic plasma models seriously differ from the laboratory observations for plasmas, but those differences are highly “political” in nature. Down here on Earth, it is generally accepted that where we see a magnetic field, that there exists an electric current cause associated with it. This is a completely fundamental principle in electronics.
It is only in the highly speculative disciplines of astrophysics and cosmology – two of the most observationally and experimentally challenged disciplines known to man – that suggestions that the magnetic fields we see in interstellar space might have an electric current cause are not only ignored, but oftentimes even ridiculed as ludicrous. What is suggested instead is that these interstellar magnetic fields, which are now observed to pervade most of the space we can see, are leftovers from some former event, such as the Big Bang – leftover “fossils” frozen in place.
This is the same framework which both astrophysicists and climatologists base all of their models upon. To be clear, it’s a very tenuous foundation to base the rest of science upon. And without this notion of “professionalism”, people are ill-equipped to understand why it is that professional scientists do not explore this longstanding controversy in greater depth.
Okay, let’s explore the implications of everything I’ve stated up to this point.
Plasmas are gases which possess some percentage of unbound charged particles. Gases tend to be subject to the gravitational force, but plasmas tend to be electromagnetic phenomena which with only 1% ionization can begin to ignore gravity (!). A plasma will exist in a dark mode until some charge density, at which point it will enter into a glow mode (like a fluorescent light), where it emits a diffuse light. With higher charge density, it will go into arc mode (like an arc welder). Notice that where we use plasmas, there is always a power switch nearby …
So, what does this all have to do with climate change?
If you recall, there was an episode of Mr Wizard where he cooked a hot dog by plugging it into the wall. It turns out that the solar “wind” is not actually a “wind” at all. It’s a stream of charged particles, a plasma, which is buffeted by cosmic rays coming from the opposite direction (the edge of the heliosphere, alternatively called the heliopause). Those who are closely paying attention to the electrodynamics of this system are trying to warn the public that not only is this plasma’s interaction with our atmosphere turning out to be more complex that was initially imagined, but the amounts of electric energies being dumped into our planet’s atmosphere are really quite enormous.
From http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2012/22mar_saber/
NASA-funded researchers say the solar storms of March 8th through 10th
dumped enough energy in Earth’s upper atmosphere to power every
residence in New York City for two years … “This was the biggest
dose of heat we’ve received from a solar storm since 2005,” says
Martin Mlynczak of NASA Langley Research Center. “It was a big event,
and shows how solar activity can directly affect our planet.”
This form of heating is scientifically called “electric joule heating”, and the current climate models do not properly take it into consideration. From “Possible reasons for underestimating Joule heating in global models: E-field variability, spatial resolution and vertical velocity” …
It is important to understand Joule heating because it can
significantly change the temperature structure, atmosphere composition
and electron density, and hence, influences satellite drag. It is
thought that many coupled ionosphere-thermosphere models underestimate
Joule heating because the spatial and temporal variability of the
ionospheric electric field is not totally captured within global
models.[…]
High latitude Joule heating is one of the most significant energy
deposition processes from the magnetosphere into the
ionosphere-thermosphere system. During the January 1997 magnetic cloud
event, 47% of the solar wind energy was deposited in the form of Joule
heating, while 22% was in the form of particle heating [Lu et al.,
1998]. During a typical storm, more than half of the energy is
deposited through Joule heating [Sharber et al., 1998]. Joule heating
has significant consequences in the thermosphere and ionosphere.
Without some sense of awareness that there has been an ongoing debate over how to model cosmic plasmas, electric joule heating seems like an unlikely avenue for investigation for climate change. The worldview – our scientific framework – suggests a mechanical-gravitational-magnetic universe where the magnetic fields do not imply electric currents. Where electric currents are observed in space, they are assumed to be byproducts of those movers-and-shakers (second-order effects). The notion that the Earth might be electrically connected to the Sun, which in turn might be electrically connected to the galaxy, which are in turn electrically connected to one another, is an idea which our scientific framework basically rules out – not through some process of empirical science, but simply be decree and assumption.
In the world of professional science, the question just never gets asked. Remember: Questioning the framework itself is considered an act of politics. It will get you booted from the PhD program if you dare attempt it as a grad student, and it might dramatically shorten your career if you attempt it as a novice scientist.
And, to be clear, electric joule heating is not necessarily the point. The larger message here which I want to convey is that this 95% confidence really means very little when we are manufacturing PhD’s who are not permitted to question the scientific framework.
We really need to fix this, guys. Our PhD system is broken, and until it is fixed, our scientists will not be asking all of the questions that they need to be asking in order to create an actual 95% certainty.
And yet we know it doesn’t matter that much. Because our observations are what they are, and our climate models give reasonably good agreement with them, both on past data and in terms of predicting the changes we are now seeing. And yes, people do get funding to question them; they simply haven’t managed to come up with anything substantial. So taking electric heating into account might improve their accuracy, but we already know it won’t change the main results, the same way we know it doesn’t change the outcome of baseball games.
And yet through this possible limitation to accuracy, you try to pull a conclusion that we should assume what we have now is completely wrong, and definitely not take any actions on emissions based on purely assumed economic effects - because, you know, those you can take without question. Regardless of astrophysics, it’s a total nonsense argument.
And really, since you don’t seem to understand simple things like that, it doesn’t inspire a lot of trust in all the handwaving you give about how modern astrophysics could be completely wrong. PhD programs are too dogmatic so there is no way to know! Sure, sure. You know, outsiders are sometimes important in paradigm shifts, but they still earn their place through better agreement with observations; so far as global warming goes you are only coming up with distractions and excuses to ignore them.
You can stop being disingenuous. PhD programs are broken in a number of ways, there are lots of things we don’t know about the universe, and at the same time there is very real support and meaningful agreement on climate change and its consequences. Trying to cast doubt on the latter by questioning if the former lets us know anything is dishonest, especially if you aren’t willing to apply that same level of scrutiny to other ideas, as you’ve shown.
Arguing that way doesn’t fool or convince anyone.
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If I were in the US coal industry, I’d be inclined to do just that. Shut down every coal-fired power plant in the country for say, two weeks.
Nuke plants too, because, you know, scary.
Then re-open the dialogue. “How ya feelin’ about those greenhouse gases 'bout now, son??”
It’s not feasible to argue any more that the planet is not warming, or that humans aren’t at least partly the cause. The scientific findings here should be considered final.
Now whether the projections call for minimal effects, or major discomfort, or outright catastrophe…that’s still very much up for legitimate debate, as far as I can tell.
And the question of what to do about it, how to evaluate the costs and benefits of various actions (or of no action) - that’s in the realm of economics and politics on a global scale. In that arena, the most brilliant climatologist on earth has exactly the same right to vote (with dollars or with a ballot) as has you or I.
But, if you read only the next paragraph in the paper, it will tell you in very plain terms that the question remains open because the data is not being taken …
While Joule heating has been investigated utilizing measurements
obtained by satellites [Rich et al., 1987; Heelis and Coley, 1988;
Kelley et al., 1991; Gary et al., 1995; Lu¨hr et al., 2004] and
ground-based radars, [Banks et al., 1981; Kamide and Kroehl, 1987; de
La Beaujardie´re et al., 1991; Thayer et al., 1995; Thayer, 1998], it
is currently impossible for observations to give a precise
specification of global Joule heating due to the difficulty of
observing conductivity, electric field and neutral wind simultaneously
at all locations. Furthermore, these contributing variables respond
independently to specific sources of energy.
Aren’t you simply being dismissive?
