News that makes you say WTF! (15 Viewers)

Trequartista

Trequartista

Fuoriclasse
#2,241
Jul 1, 2010
26,336
#2,241
swag said:
It sounds like what Red cited from the NY Times: belief above all else.

Climate change is far, far away from my pet topic. Science is. So I hate when rank amateurs go around citing opinion pieces of either gas & oil industry wonks or agenda-driven academic nut jobs in either case, and all it takes is a few people who hear what they want to hear and it's gospel. Even if that's gospel a labelled "Opinion" piece in Forbes or citations from the Daily Mail.

Surely, if you follow the topic, you must be aware of the infamous "Escalator" debunk argument where you choose short term trends from a limited data set, ignore the error bars, presume absolutes, and generalize for the longer term. This is why peer review is important: these are exactly the sort of statistical gymnastics and fallacies that get rooted out. Whether you're trying to figure out the efficacy of transplanting islet cells in diabetics -- or if to weed out the sky-is-falling Apocalypse fantasies and the oil & gas magnates who want to cash out on options and hit retirement before anyone catches on.

The problem with going for an individual opinion here or there without checks or balances is that you have the sushi boat approach: you just choose the things you want and ignore the rest. That's not science at all. Better if you just play with the data yourself in those cases, e.g.: here's Chicago O'Hare:
http://weatherspark.com/#!climate;a...rt;ctum=0;cth=800;ctmy=10;ctsy=1978;ctey=2010
Just looking at that alone doesn't really suggest a major cooling trend when I look at the reported weather data for a number of cities over the past 50 years. Click on some of the cities in blue that show downward trends, and you'll see how easy it is to pick a data set that fits your beliefs.

I'd trust that before I trust a lone gunman opinion.
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And you don't think that scientists who publish alarmist papers are not agenda driven? They get their funding out of that climax so it benefits them to come out with these conclusions.

Almost all the money in climate science come from governments, not from the oil and gas industries.

I hear what you are saying and I don't have this opinion due to a few articles. I have it because I smell something fishy and inconsistent, especially since all or nearly all of the IPCC's predictions have been inaccurate.
 

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swag

swag

L'autista
Administrator
#2,242
Sep 23, 2003
83,476
#2,242
Trequartista said:
And you don't think that scientists who publish alarmist papers are not agenda driven? They get their funding out of that climax so it benefits them to come out with these conclusions.
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It's like you bolded my quote, but yet still never read it. What did you think I meant by "agenda-driven academic nut jobs"?

Almost all the money in climate science come from governments, not from the oil and gas industries.
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Is that surprising? Do you think the best expose on police abuse would come from the police chief?

I hear what you are saying and I don't have this opinion due to a few articles. I have it because I smell something fishy and inconsistent, especially since all or nearly all of the IPCC's predictions have been inaccurate.
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It's good that you're questioning things. But to be truly of a scientific approach, you even have to question the things you agree with for bias, agendas, who's behind them, what are their competencies, etc.

Coming purely from a guy who used to work at academic labs, it sucks to see that there's been a handful of overzealous scientific types who got caught red-handed trying to inflate outcomes and conclusions. Because an unscrupulous few end up calling everyone in the field into question. But that's probably not unexpected given what we've seen from the priesthood to mayors to politicians to teachers, etc. Scientists are human and capable of stupidities and bias like anyone else.

The difference is we've actually caught a number of them red-handed. That's where the peer-review part is a savior. It's about weeding out the bad, because there are bad in every field of society. The fact that they were caught, and not covered up, is cause for some minimal level of optimism.

Because a much worse reaction than just weeding out the abusers would be to cast all of science into doubt, throw it out the window, and let everyone make up their own with a big shoulder shrug. We may as well go back to living in caves if that's the answer.
 
Trequartista

Trequartista

Fuoriclasse
#2,243
Jul 1, 2010
26,336
#2,243
swag said:
It's like you bolded my quote, but yet still never read it. What did you think I meant by "agenda-driven academic nut jobs"?



Is that surprising? Do you think the best expose on police abuse would come from the police chief?



It's good that you're questioning things. But to be truly of a scientific approach, you even have to question the things you agree with for bias, agendas, who's behind them, what are their competencies, etc.

Coming purely from a guy who used to work at academic labs, it sucks to see that there's been a handful of overzealous scientific types who got caught red-handed trying to inflate outcomes and conclusions. Because an unscrupulous few end up calling everyone in the field into question. But that's probably not unexpected given what we've seen from the priesthood to mayors to politicians to teachers, etc. Scientists are human and capable of stupidities and bias like anyone else.

The difference is we've actually caught a number of them red-handed. That's where the peer-review part is a savior. It's about weeding out the bad, because there are bad in every field of society. The fact that they were caught, and not covered up, is cause for some minimal level of optimism.
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I mostly agree with you here, I'm just tired of the nonsensical doom mongering.

What is/was you scientific field?
 
swag

swag

L'autista
Administrator
#2,244
Sep 23, 2003
83,476
#2,244
Trequartista said:
I mostly agree with you here, I'm just tired of the nonsensical doom mongering.

What is/was you scientific field?
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A couple of areas: I've worked in high-energy particle physics at Stanford (as a software developer working with physicists) and bioengineering (primarily neuroscience and neuropharmacology) at UC Berkeley/UCSF as a PhD grad student (I realized the PhD route was not for me after all :D).
 

Hust

Senior Member
Hustini
#2,259
May 29, 2005
93,357
#2,259
But at the end you see Pelosi shuffle across the bottom of the screen? :lol:

That's your San Fran girl, yo.

Coffee date. Don't forget.
 
swag

swag

L'autista
Administrator
#2,260
Sep 23, 2003
83,476
#2,260
So James Brady survives a gunshot wound to the head in a Reagan assassination attempt 30 years ago, but not a gunshot that his family now claims was "natural causes"??
 
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