As always, there’s also a relevant xkcd.
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@anon62122146, @Taymon: Good citations. And good observation.
It’s not just physicists, of course. Experts in many fields have to beware of the temptation to assume that they know enough to make assertions outside that own field But physics is so basic that it’s particularly tempting to make that leap. And, ok, maybe everything can be derived from physics – but that doesn’t mean the derivation is simple or obvious, or that trying to manipulate it at that level is at all practical. In some sense, the physicist outside his area is like the doctor outside his – the basic training is the same, but the advanced techniques, and the experience to work with them while avoiding errors, aren’t.
I’m not a scientist. I’m an engineer. I generally don’t argue with tools that have been demonstrated to work until/unless I can provide a better tool and demonstrate that it’s better… and I’m very aware that “better” always has “for these specific domains” attached to it. So: If you have a better climate model, PROVE it, don’t just assert it. Everyone will be absolutely delighted if you can do so. Or publish it and let folks help you refine it.
Also remember that there’s a perception issue. People who rant on the Internet in nontechnical spaces about “they won’t let me see their data or code” are mostly cranks. @peter_jones905, you may be the exception, but the fact that you are complaining here is more likely to make us doubt you than support you.
This year the journal Science published a headline grabbing “confirmation” of the Hockey Stick but a simple Peer Review 101 plot of the input data falsified instead of supported what a co-author led NY Times reporter Revkin to describe as a “super hockey stick” and which Mike “Hide The Proxy Data Decline” Mann repeatedly celebrated on Facebook:
(A) Plotted Proxy Data: http://s17.postimg.org/mvmsorb2n/image.jpg
(B) Snoopy Dance: http://s15.postimg.org/5x1hmvhcr/Mann_Celebration2013.jpg
Marcott 2013…look it up, to discover the bizarre doublespeak nature of climate “science.”
-=NikFromNYC=-, Ph.D. in carbon chemistry (Columbia/Harvard)
Right. So your first graph shows a bunch of lines, left unlabeled for our inconvenience, but some holding more or less steady above 20° and some gradually sliding from 20° to 10° over the last ten millennia, and some fluctuating near 0° all showing a sharp jump at the end.
So you’d guess an appropriate combination, even something simple like the mean, might end up showing a long decrease and sharp jump. Which is pretty much what Mann’s graph shows, but of course we should trust it doesn’t work out, with your usual graphs-not-stats analysis. Well, sorry, but your past arguments leave you very far behind Science as far as trust and doublespeak goes.
Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.
The mind likes a strange idea as little as the body likes a strange protein and resists it with similar energy. It would not perhaps be too fanciful to say that a new idea is the most quickly acting antigen known to science.
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Lawyers. Everything. Under The Sun.
“we’re comfortable with what we know, but learn from what we don’t”
I am a physicist, and I generally like physicists, but, to be fair, we’re notorious for that for a reason. Part of if is because the way training as a physicist teaches you to wrap math around physical phenomena to model them actually does have the potential to be applied to a very wide variety of situations, but there is also a certain myopia that comes with that attitude, which I think I tend to notice more than a lot of physicists because I came to physics later in life, after a couple of other careers.
At some point I want to track down the rumor that the first edition of a particular textbook suffered an unfortunate typo on the cover, and went out the door as “UNCLEAR PHYSICS”.
You probably know the old joke about the time a mathematician, a scientist, and an engineer were sharing a hotel room, but I’m going to retell it anyway… It seems one of them had been careless with a cigarette, and some time after they’d gone to sleep the paper in the wastebasket caught fire.
The mathematician smelled smoke, woke up, saw the problem, thought about it briefly, and went back to sleep – having convinced himself that there was an elegant solution.
The physicist was next to be woken by the smoke. He saw the problem, quickly decided exactly how much water would be needed to put the fire out, got up and filled a pitcher, and went back to sleep – having provided a solution.
Finally, the engineer woke up, saw the fire (but apparently not the pitcher), got out of bed, and pissed on it.
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Thanks, BB, for leaving my main post, even though you deleted the flame war chaos.
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