Which side of the debate is more often associated with and/or active on some sort of scientific committee for a politically biased think-tank, fake grass root organization or religious group?
"Science must be protected from ideologies;"
I totally agree. Pity that you apparently believe it only is applicable whenever a well-known and well-respected climate scientist dares to wonder into a political debate and appear to have no issue whatsoever every single time the Pat Michaels, Prof Lindzens, Judith Currys do the very same, not to mention the large group of armchair experts whose blogs, articles and op-eds you appear to be addicted to.
Edit @ OM:
<< Those are good questions perhaps better suited to being asked on the main board rather than used to hijack and attempt to derail this one..>>
There is no attempt to hijack your 'question' Mike, just an honest attempt to show your hypocrisy in this matter. You complain and post 'question' after 'question' every single time a scientist you dislike dares to publicly voice his or her political opinion but have no problem whatsoever with 'skeptic scientists' doing the very same. And the list of 'skeptic scientists' and others who your side of the debate claim to be experts and who regularly engage in 'political debate' is almost endless.
- http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Hea...
- http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Cat...
- http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Fro...
- http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Ame...
- http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Lav...
- http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Com...
- http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Exx...
Surely you are not advocating that 'climate experts' can no longer speak about policy issues related to climate? Because if that were the case a whole lot of 'climate science experts' working for conservative think-tanks would suddenly be out of work.
Chem
Scientists and activits judges are a poor analogy. Take the question of abortion. I have no problem with a judge who says that the U. S. or the Canadian constitution do not protect the unborn. But when a judge says that abortion is a constitutional right, if someone actually points out to me where a constitution has the words, "Abortion is a right," is one thing if a constitution has such words, but the U. S. and the Canadian constitution have no such words.
An activist judge does not make wise interpretations of the law. They make laws, which should only be done by our elected legisative assemblies. An activist judge is a dictator, just like Hitler and Stalin.
The separation of Church and State has been mentioned, there is also a separation between the State and the Judiciary. Although, how well that is maintained is open to question.
Science should also be separate. The method of funding needs to be sorted out so that we can get the benefits that science gives us without any ideological interference.
I don't subscribe to the view that scientists lie to get funding but it is like a job interview: you need to present your case in the best possible light. When they get most of their funding from government then it will happen that they will tell government what they want to hear. Just as you do when you try to communicate with anyone. You need to speak in ways the listener is going to understand and will think relevant to themselves.
As for: "You just compared the Oregon Petition to a position paper put out by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences or the American Geophysical Union or the Royal Society of London." The Oregon Petition was (allegedly) signed by thousands of scientists. How many scientists did the institutions you mentioned consult? I believe they commented without asking any. I have yet to see any membership survey carried out by any science institution. So the six people that volunteered for the Climate Change Committee - at least two of which will be activists - just said what they wanted.
If I could be convinced that that was not the case then I might change my mind but right now it looks as if government has leaned on the institutions to make a statement so that is what they did, The only connection to science is in the name of the institution. The RS had a policy of never doing such things so what changed their minds and made them go against their long tradition?
At some point we need to return to the position where governments do what we want them to. They work for us. This seems to have been forgotten. Many people in government have lost the "service" attitude. They now just regard their time in government as a time to make contacts, do some networking, make some money and set up a future lucrative career.
(As an example, an ex UK MP was found a nice job by his mates as governor of Hong Kong when he failed to get elected. According to the article in the link, he now has 13 jobs including governor of the BBC (￡110,000 pa), advisor to BP (￡80,000 pa), EDF Energy (￡40,000 pa). This is what government has turned into at least in the UK.)
Science is no longer a back room job, science requires money (funding) so of course there will be some sort of bias to the needs of those who are funding, not only climate science, but also medical science, medical science is almost completely controlled by the pharmaceutical company's, they help medical journals, medical colleges and universities.
There is a need for an non political independent funding agency, not an easy thing, as no government would like that, they want to keep a finger in the pie.
It seems to me that humans have a psychological tendency toward religion. Every society until recent secular socialists ones have had a religion and I would argue even the secular ones often have replaced the state as the "religion." In the US, you often hear about separation of Church and State but it isn't in the Constitution. It is something that has largely been invented to try to remove and forbid the practice of religion in public. When convenient, those people often attempt to use "science" to push their agenda. Psychology has been contorted in the past to condemn those people the statists feels threatened by. Sometimes it is the Jews. Sometimes it is Christians. Sometimes it is conservatives. It can be anybody.
My wife is a second grade teacher in the state of California. After "no child left behind" and various state programs, teaching has become a secondary priority and getting funding from the state and feds has become primary. The kids learn how to take tests rather than learning the basics of science, math and English and they are tested relentlessly rather than taught. My point is that when an organization becomes dependent on funding, they tend to focus on ensuring the flow of money. Scientific organizations are no different. They learn quickly how to ensure their continued funding.
It seems to me that complaints about "separation of state and science" tend to be a lot like complaints about "activist judges". You only have a problem when the scientists and judges are saying something that you don't want to hear.
I'd bet you have no problem basing our construction policies at least in part on what scientists say about the structural properties of materials. You probably don't mind doctors speaking out about how to avoid epidemic diseases. You want scientists to be the ones deciding what new drugs are safe to sell. It's only when the scientists say things like "we need to stop using coal and oil" that you get tetchy.
Whoa. You just compared the Oregon Petition to a position paper put out by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences or the American Geophysical Union or the Royal Society of London. I cannot believe you just did that. Honestly. I went back to re-read that and you did. You did.
I've asked you this before, but are you clinically insane? Because I can't see how anyone with a properly functioning cerebral cortex would equate the OP with any of the ones I mentioned. It's like saying that an article in Weekly World News calling the Loch Ness monster real trumps a definitive study published in Nature of side-scan sonar images of Loch Ness showing nothing larger than a salmon lives there.
What has happened is not the injection of science into politics, but the injection of politics into science. Once science started to produce results that indicated regulations were necessary to protect public welfare (which started with pollutants and tobacco, not with climate, by the way), and it became obvious this would hurt corporate profits, corporations started funding anti-science. But without science guiding policy, governance might as well be done by Ouija Board, and things like air and water quality would look like what has happened in China.
Of course, you are insane so none of this will make any sense to you, or get twisted up until it's like you think the Moon is sending you messages from the cloud people on Titan.
“Thus a pseudoscientific theory becomes part of the official creed which to a greater or lesser degree directs everybody’s action. Or the widespread dislike of the industrial civilization and a romantic yearning for country life … expressing not merely ultimate values but a whole host of beliefs about cause and effect which, once they have become ideals directing the activity of the whole community, must not be questioned."
—F. A. Hayek (1944). “The Road to Serfdom”
Yeah – it is making the separation of the state and public from scientific knowledge even greater. Just as creationists’ lies have successfully co-opted biological science into a religion in the minds of superstitious people, AGW Deniers’ lies have successfully framed science as a political exercise.
As long as Republicans hold offices they are effectively separating science and state, since it seems to be a fundamental principle of the Republican Party these days to be anti-science and promote ignorance.
We would all be better off if dodos like Inhofe were replaced by scientists.
There's a lot of money at stake in science. Why wouldn't science lie to obtain it. Money is power. Power to do whatever they want. Government (the "State" as you have put it) influence on monetary issues doesn't matter anymore. Just write a law and it is permanently inscribed in the law. Government "has to" pay its debts, therefore money is secured through environmental law to these so-called science endeavors.
It was nothing for the U.S. Government to give the UN $100 billion in this past year. It wasn't in their pocket, but they gave it anyway. Climate science is paid for with borrowed money from Governments. You couldn't convince an alarmist that all of his science isn't paid for legally so why try?
25 years of the IPCC is enough. Time to stop the 'money pit".
The science is this :
The cumulative effect of the warm AMO and PDO added heat to the atmosphere, so temps rose from the late 1970s to around 2000. After the air absorbed the heat, it leveled off, the PDO flipped, and we started trending down. The Pacific is much larger than the Atlantic, but the Atlantic turned warm in the mid-1990s so it is still not fully on board with the cooling. But when it does turn, chances are global temps will respond as one would expect knowing the heat capacity of the ocean is 1000 times that of the atmosphere.
The "trace gas" CO2 does not affect temperatures very much at all. It only helps in maintaining the warmth created by the Sun's radiation energy. Energy in = energy out. No energy can be added or taken away.
Enough with the political influences and get back to real scientific investigations.
"Science can stand on its own feet and does not need any help from rationalists, secular humanists, Marxists and similar religious movements; and... non-scientific cultures, procedures and assumptions can also stand on their own feet and should be allowed to do so... Science must be protected from ideologies; and societies, especially democratic societies, must be protected from science...
In a democracy scientific institutions, research programmes, and suggestions must therefore be subjected to public control, there must be a separation of state and science just as there is a separation between state and religious institutions, and science should be taught as one view among many and not as the one and only road to truth and reality."
— Feyerabend, Against Method
"The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded. Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific technological elite."
— Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961
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Some have fought long and hard to separate the church and the state. You can look up the reasons for that on your own if you wish (or don't already know). The above two quotes caution about science and the state.
Does is appear to you that today science has replaced the church and we are again faced with same challenges as church and state? Has caution been heeded or ignored?
Many scientists driven by greed have embraced politicians as their 'Johns'.
It's all about taxpayer money for pre-determined research findings/services.
Take the $$handouts away.....and AGW disappears.
it's not a problem in other sciences. why is this an issue?
