Europe’s heatwave is the hottest and most humid ever

[Spinny]

1 hour ago, SteamyTea said:

There are bad scientists, but they tend to be caught out early on, and very really get published.

I'd say that comment is quite wrong about science, research and academia today. It is a highly competitive environment with much pressure to publish and be cited. Asia churns out PhDs by the million, and even in the UK 1st class degrees are handed out like confetti. And much pressure to obtain research funding. Funding which typically comes from funding bodies, or from industry. As far as publication is concerned there are a plethora of journals and the key to publication (as to winning funding) is often to produce work supporting the fashionable narratives of the time. There are masses of papers published that are complete garbage and have been generated using AI engines and the like. Many examples of the corruption of the peer review process, and the active censoring of 'inconvenient' papers by editors.

 

If you read this you will understand what Cargo Cult Science actually refers to https://hackneybooks.co.uk/books/56/662/CargoCultScience.html

 

It's practice certainly isn't limited to the social sciences. So called 'Climate science' is rife with examples. Many 'climate scientists' attracted to the field because of it's copious funding and the attraction of saving the world from the 'obvious evils of other men' practice Cargo Cult Science. They build and run climate models into which they programme quantified relationships between one factor and another, and various parameters. They then adjust their parameters until they get an output that matches their historical data series. Then they run the model on and proclaim they have done science and if we stop cows farting and shut down the oil industry the world will be saved. It is I am afraid as horseshit as Neil Ferguson's epidemiological models. Real science involves experiments. In experiments you isolate variables and remove confounders and very carefully test  hypotheses, you make specific predictions and test them. It is pretty difficult to do that with climate, and largely people don't even try, yet they proclaim they know the impact of man made CO2 is the sole culprit in climate change. It is a good fear story - it appeals greatly to those of certain politics - and like the mass psychosis we saw during covid - works pretty well when repeated ad nausium through mass media.

 

Anthropogenic climate change is just a theory, uncertain, doubtful - scientifically unproven. 

 

[SimonD]

23 minutes ago, Spinny said:

If you read this you will understand what Cargo Cult Science actually refers to https://hackneybooks.co.uk/books/56/662/CargoCultScience.html

But the existence of Cargo Cult Science doesn't prove anything about environmental change, nor whether the science is right, or going in the right or wrong direction.

Here's another physicist's perspective, which doesn't question the underlying science (but she does regularly question a lot about the current world of physics and science):
 

 

[SteamyTea]

2 hours ago, SimonD said:

No, it isn't. It's based in complexity, which physics seriously struggles with and the reductionist approach it has long held so dear really doesn't cope.

I am going to have to get back later as we are opening early, and finishing late today. Something to do with a game.

But just to say that reductionism works very well. When the unexpected happens, it is generally found what caused it by reducing the components even more.

[SimonD]

25 minutes ago, SteamyTea said:

But just to say that reductionism works very well. When the unexpected happens, it is generally found what caused it by reducing the components even more.

I didn't say that it didn't. It's just that science has to recognise when the lense through which it is looking is inadequate - which is part of the philosophy of science. Saying that reductionism always yields the truth ignores the fact that a single component can be quite different when it is viewed in isolation as a constituent part compared to when it is in dynamic relation to many other, different, dynamic constituent parts. Therefore, what you claim to be truth or even real, from one perspective isn't from the other. 

[Spinny]

2 hours ago, SimonD said:

the existence of Cargo Cult Science doesn't prove anything about environmental change, nor whether the science is right, or going in the right or wrong direction.

Yes of course.

However we see characteristics of Cargo Cult science in 'Climate Science' and the narrative that has been built. The reality is that the whole thing is very uncertain.

I disagree with things Hossenfelder says. There are multiple elements here:

Climate Change - yes it is always changing, and yes on some timescale - most likely tens or hundereds of thousands of years it is a threat to mankind.

Emergency - absolutely not

Anthropogenic - highly uncertain and I think unlikely - mankind could impoverish itself for absolutely no gain whatsoever. I think many people now doubt and disbelieve the hugely over simplified mickey mouse greenhouse theory and chicken licken the sky is falling in nonsense.

Controllable - extremely deluded hubris. people think mankind can control everything and everything is down to mankind. It is poppycock. For all our technological gains, man cannot control the climate any more than they can stop earthquakes or sunspots or remotely understand the spread of viruses. People suggesting we mess with a climate system we don't understand are off their head nuts.

Immensely Costly - yes of course, but it is not just people not wanting to give up the good life. Why, for what, just because some people cry wolf. Where are the melted ice caps, where are th higher sea levels - barrier reef is doing fine, polar bears are so numerous they need to be culled. People see the lies now. That is why people like Gates and Blair are backing off. They know people are not going to bow down to climate tyranny based on clear falsehoods.

 

Yes there are big questions over sustainability in general over millenia and the eventual exhaustion of fossil fuels, but equally huge hope from fusion power, huge hope and threats from man made proteins etc.

 

Energy diversity yes good, energy efficiency yes good, insulated homes yes good. But evangelising virtue waving saviours of mankind offering simplistic solutions while enriching and empowering themselves need to be stopped.

[Spinny]

Come on England ⚽

[JohnMo]

Must be a couple of months since this conversation happened, may a couple of weeks - Sorry another boring is climate change real or fake thread.

 

Fact, politics moves the truth to fit their own agenda, same as others on social media, most wouldn't know fact from fiction and say black was white if it suits the narrative they want.

 

Another simple fact, glaciers get smaller at an ever increasing rate, so it not getting colder.

 

Another is CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere pretty much starts increasing at the start of the industrial revolution and has kept increasing since then. Prior to this moment in time, CO2 was at a relatively consistent level - so made made or natural, I vote man made.

3 hours ago, Spinny said:

Anthropogenic climate change is just a theory, uncertain, doubtful - scientifically unproven

So not sure I buy your view of the world.

Edited 44 minutes ago by JohnMo