Al Gore is using fear to gain political power? Take your meds. I assume that you were trying to be funny, but with nazicons defenders, one can never tell.

… if the government expert consultants said we had to get rid of cyclosporine and revert to green tea for some environmetal or health reasons, and the common people were told to “sit down and shut up- you’re no experts” when they question it.

Or maybe Thalidomide, eh?

They can question it. But if they’re not experts, don’t pretend they are, or that they know what they’re doing.

But if MerckPfizerAbbottJnJ are peddling crap in full page ads (as xxonMobilTexacoChevronBPShell have been doing) about the wonders of Thalidomide and resisting green tea despite the consensus view of scientists that green tea is more efficacious (and less dangerous) that Thalidomide, I’d say we have a problem.

I’d say you have a problem already; your evaluation of the merits of science seems skewed by your preconceived preferences, and you are over-rating the value of ‘dissent’ (and using it for purposes not of establishing facts but rather achieving certain ends). Not to mention, you seem to be rather gullible, and worse yet, think you know enough not to be fleeced. You’re wrong.

Cheers,

Comment by Arne Langsetmo — October 16, 2007 @ 8:54 pm

1. I wouldn’t put the big corp.s as “common people” either.

2. I think that a better illustration may be if the government expert consultants said we had to get rid of cyclosporine and revert to green tea for some environmetal or health reasons, and the common people were told to “sit down and shut up- you’re no experts” when they question it.

Whether they are right or wrong, we are sliding toward a government by experts and consultants, not common ordinary people.

I don’t think you can call ExxonMobilTexacoChevronBPShell “common ordinary people”.

That being said, I don’t think it’s healthy either if “common ordinary people” are choosing policies that are contrary to the proven advice of “experts”. Should we get rid of cyclosporine and substitute green herb tea if the majority of the people want that instead (hell, maybe cheaper, yaknow, and why not “let the market decide”, eh?)

Cheers,

Comment by drobert_bfm — October 16, 2007 @ 6:08 pm

Granted, I’m no climatologist, but I see that, for one example, all the major hurricane predictions have proven to be wrong. Where are all the major hurricanes that were predicted by the leading climatologists? Things have been much quieter than what we were led to expect for two hurricane seasons.

What I have heard is our State Climatologist, who DOES HAVE a good track record go on public record about his reaching a different conclusion. I heard him go into far more statistical trends and cycles over the past several hundred thousand years to demonstrate that the current warming is in agreement with previous natural cycles.

But sorry for you, richg, but you’re completely out in left field on that one. Science is not about opinion, but about evidence. Obviously, opinion comes into play, and it’s usually in the realm of opinion that the biggest scientific errors are made. But Science is on the whole self-correcting BECAUSE of its reliance on evidence.

Also, the concept of experiment is very different in different sciences. You don’t always have to isolate an example of something to test a hypothesis. In the case of the Earth, you’re correct, you can’t put it in a test tube and perform direct experiments on it. But that’s not how science is done…

Science relies essentially on predictions. A hypothesis is a prediction: I believe that if conditions X are fulfilled, the consequences will be Y. Then you devise an experiment to see if you’re correct. In the case of climate research, you build a model (a bunch of equations), based on previous observations; you run the model for times outside the initial set of observations used to build the original model, then you compare the predictions made to the actual observations. If they match well, the model is good, if not, you throw it out and try again.

It so happens that all science is essentially that. The main difference is that the climate is one of the most complex systems we study. Although the best models in use are quite complex, they still pale in comparison to the complexity of the real thing. But then again, that’s true of all models, all equations, in whatever science you wish to cite.

In the end, the proof of a model is in its predictive power. And the best models used today have proven themselves many times. To claim that they are useless because the results they give are inconvenient is not a respectable opinion.

Now, if you can come up with a model which matches observations, is at least as powerful as the best models in use today, AND disproves the forecasts of all of the best models about global warming, then you’d have a case; otherwise, go to University, learn climatology, and get to work…

Comment by richg — October 15, 2007 @ 10:02 pm

But the insinuation is there. Why Hitler? Is there not someone else, or some other event, in history from which the Dr. could have referenced?

There’s no “elite” here. Can’t have well over 90% of the community be an “elite”.

I thought it was clear I was backing off to look at a larger issue: That of public policy being dictated by “Experts”. Whether they are right or wrong, we are sliding toward a government by experts and consultants, not common ordinary people.

Overall, I do not trust a government by “certified experts”, whether left or right. That reduces the common man to simply a tool for the elite – whether under capitalism as a tool for the financial elite, or worse, under socialism for the political elite.

There’s no “elite” here. Can’t have well over 90% of the community be an “elite”.

As for people taking on the “establishment” and winning, well and fine (although I think your examples are hardly the clear-cut cases for the “little guys” being smarter than the “establishment”), but to do that, you have to show that you’re right. The OilCo ’scentists’ are faring rather poorly. For every Ramanunjan, there’s at least twenty people who have trisected the angle; ask any math perfesser.

Cheers,

This statement: “My point in the other post was that the theory was testable and observable, and that tests and observations were made under controlled conditions. Something that cannot be done for global climate.”

The point was that we actually DID test and observe sub-atomic behaviors – it wasn’t only mathematical modeling. The application to atmospheric sciences is that we cannot truly up-scale laboratory bench-test results to an open system with so many uncontrolled variables with any certainty.

My point is that we didn’t twiddle the various parameters in the actual “Little Boy” before we used it … except on paper, using models developed from experimental data generally far from the operational parameters existing during the actual nuclear explosion. See what I’m talking about? We extrapolated from small experiments to mass behaviour, and from a regime of operational parameters near criticality (from subcritical tests to near-critical ‘piles’ to the “ticlking the tiger”) along with known physical theories and measured quantities (neutron cross section and half-life, etc.) as to what would happen in the quite different regime of supercriticality.

Which is quite similar to what is done in atmospheric modeling (the thing that Dr. Gray is so sceptical of, preferring to use statistical methods lacking a ‘deep understanding’ of the actual science fo the processes involved). But modeling works … and works well, as we can see by the fact that nowadays airplanes are almost completely designed before the first prototype is built, not to mention tons of other design work that validates the technology of modeling. IOW, we don’t need to “control” or “tweak” the parameters to understand what’s going on.

Cheers,

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2007/10/15/scistars115.xml

Comment by Shayne — October 16, 2007 @ 12:24 am

Oh, I’m capable. I just don’t accept the line of reasoning.

Would you think I wouldnt be trying to imply anything if I said “rich, like many child molesters, outwardly claims to be uncomfortable with homosexuality”

Comment by Chocolate Jesus — October 16, 2007 @ 8:04 am

Grammatically and logically that statement is not equivalent to the Gray statement.
…………….

The “conventional wisdom” has been so often been proven wrong by amateurs – for example, it took a couple of guys working at a bicycle shop to develop the aerodynamic properties of airplane propellers that are still in use today. Two guys in a garage making the first “Personal Computer” while all the computer experts were working on large mainframes and couldn’t see it. Even yesterday there was an article about professional astronomers turning to the amateurs to get a look at the vast array of galaxies, and making a startling discovery that the universe is ‘lopsided’ – a very unexpected result. (I’ll go through my browser history for the link…)

Overall, I do not trust a government by “certified experts”, whether left or right. That reduces the common man to simply a tool for the elite – whether under capitalism as a tool for the financial elite, or worse, under socialism for the political elite.

Then why bring up Hitler at all? Come on, surely if the point was not to create a subsconious association of Hitler and Gore. Why not choose someone less inflamatory who was wrong about something in the past? There are PLENTY more examples than hitler…

There was donald rumsfeld, wrong about beleiving he knew about where the WMD was, there was bush, beleiving the Niger Uranium documents were genuine.. history is replete with plenty of people who have been wrong about things..

Would you think I wouldnt be trying to imply anything if I said “rich, like many child molesters, outwardly claims to be uncomfortable with homosexuality”

Then let me say, the way you think about science, is the way Hitler thought about the Jews.

How’s that, more clear for you?

Comment by republicans hate facts — October 15, 2007 @ 11:48 pm

Oh SMACK! Great job rhf. Unfortunately I don’t think richierich is capable of understanding a thing you say.

Dude, the insinuation is there. Out of all the characters in recorded history at his disposal, he HAD to pick Hitler? There was no one else? B.S.

How about, oh, Gore believes in global warming almost as much as the British believed they could extend their control to the colonies of the New World.

Comment by republicans hate facts — October 15, 2007 @ 9:47 pm

Read it again. That’s not what he did. He said “Gore believed in global warming almost as much as Hitler believed there was something wrong with the Jews.” (cupied and pasted from the top of this thread)

His comparison is a comment on how Gore believes in global warming, similarly to how Hitler belied something else about Jews wrongly. That is not making Gore like Hitler (and I do not believe he is, either). And he did not call climate scientists Nazis at all.

This statement: My point in the other post was that the theory was testable and observable, and that tests and observations were made under controlled conditions. Something that cannot be done for global climate.

Was intended to be a continuation of this thought:

I’ll only comment on this one item, just for brevity. In the development of the nuclear science, our scientists DID set up experiments to observe whether or not their mathematical models would be either supported or disproven.

Which was in response to this:

The earth cannot be separated into various components and have each of the inputs controlled independently to see how each affect the outcome. Comment by richg — October 15, 2007 @ 6:59 pm

Yet observations and experiments and calculations can be devised to understand and explain the situation. We can’t observe the sub-atomic behaviors that lead to a nuke, yet we can/did model and understand it well enough without doing so. You really don’t understand science at all – do you? Why again are you commenting on a thread you know nothing about, and understand nothing of?

The point was that we actually DID test and observe sub-atomic behaviors – it wasn’t only mathematical modeling. The application to atmospheric sciences is that we cannot truly up-scale laboratory bench-test results to an open system with so many uncontrolled variables with any certainty.

BTW, I appreciate your more reasoned approach than I get from others here. Rich G.