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.