I think I have gone on record declaring my ignorance more than any scientist alive. In my defense, I have also declared that I think I know enough to declare most alarmists as even more ignorant. In fact, they haven't figured out the most basic thing in science and that is you preface everything with a "Based on the evidence, it appears likely" or something similar. Feynman said it more eloquently than I as Ottawa Mike quoted. You don't state things as if they are fact when they are theory and some things they believe don't even rise to the level of theory IMO. When you want to push an agenda, you lie about what you don't know.
The democrats have been targeting the Koch brothers lately and it is an interesting psychological phenomena to watch how many alarmists parrot them. Sum appears to be one of their prime test subjects. Who are these billionaires he is talking about anyway? Koch brothers? He really seems to believe there is a vast right wing conspiracy out there. It obviously isn't billionaires he has a problem with, it is billionaires that don't agree with him.
OMike... Link to this or at least who said it
"It is our responsibility as scientists, knowing the great progress and great value of a satisfactory philosophy of ignorance, the great progress that is the fruit of freedom of thought, to proclaim the value of this freedom, to teach how doubt is not to be feared but welcomed and discussed, and to demand this freedom as our duty to all coming generations."
Doubt is indeed welcomed and discussed by real scientists and thus peer review process. The difference being the step of reasonable doubt and healthy skepticism and refusal to accept reality, denying being the latter
There are indeed experts and they are those who actually studied climate science, not the dodos like goddard, nova and watts who never studied climate science It isn't even clear in watts case if he even got a BA in meteorology Nova never had education in climate science and never even published a peer reviewd paper in her own field and all 3 get listed as experts by the deniers here
"Regarding the Hockey Stick of IPCC 2001 evidence now indicates, in my view, that an IPCC Lead Author working with a small cohort of scientists, misrepresented the temperature record of the past 1000 years by (a) promoting his own result as the best estimate, (b) neglecting studies that contradicted his, and (c) amputating another's result so as to eliminate conflicting data and limit any serious attempt to expose the real uncertainties of these data."
Testimony given to Congress by one of Mann's fellow chapter lead authors.
There are a number of Self-Proclained "experts" out there, but none who deserve such a designation.
Climate Science is in its infancy and Man has a long way to go before there is even a rudimentary understanding of our planet's climate and what impacts it.
that's better than relying on your lying sacks of crap over at FOX feeding you Billionaire lies all day long about climate change....
If your tooth is infected, who do you believe? a dentist - or maybe we just believe some right wing moron who knows nothing about teeth... Some dim bulb who rants about that there Fluoride in the Water!!!!
The amount of money being spent trying to disprove the existence of global climate change is about 100 times the amount being made on green tech. The industry is too new to be highly lucrative yet. Also the number of plutocrats profiting off the technology killing the planet is about 1000 times the number trying to raise awareness.
Climate science is a recognized discipline, and has actually been around over 200 years. It only gained prominence after Al Gore sounded the alarm. Kind of like how no one cared about asteroid detection until that meteor blew up over Russia.
Our planet is warming and we're responsible. This conclusion is mainstream because we've been investigating it for a century. And over that century, no one has shown a mechanism by which you can add increasing amounts of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere of a planet and not have it warm.
You are quite happy to have your conclusions drawn for you by aerospace engineers, designers of ABS braking systems, designers of computer processors, surgeons, economists, etc. What you really have is a bias. A mental disconnect that allows you to happily accept that various people in our society make various decisions on your behalf because you're not an expert.
When it comes to climate science, suddenly you have a problem. Suddenly you have an issue with people 'drawing conclusions', with advising governments, with making statements about their results. Why climate change in particular? Why aren't you saying that you're uncomfortable with, for example, the semiconductor industry roadmaps that are making decisions on the manufacturing and technologies to be implemented over the next few years on your behalf?
I'll tell you why. It's because you've decided that climatologists are wrong because you don't like their conclusions.
There are many scientists who specialize in climaten science although as with most science there is a lot of data and it can be observed in many different ways. While climate science gets a ton of media coverage there are always internal arguments going on within the scientific community about many things the majority of the world knows nothing about. Currently we have measurements that have determined in recent years that the amount or Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere has increased, whether this will dramatically change the environment we can't be sure, if there are changes we don't know exactly what they will be because in general weather patterns are very complex.
There are definitely people that are NOT experts in climate science. For example, let's take Burt Rutan, Tim Ball, and Les Woodcock. These three are denier favorites, and they have something else in common--not one of them knows how much water vapor is in the atmosphere. Personally, I think that since water vapor is the most abundant greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, that it might be considered ESSENTIAL to know how much is there--but every one of these clowns gets it wrong.
Then there is the person/organization/thing that you have been quoting in all your answers recently--claiming that scientists are making the change in TSI to be less than it really is. It's quite obvious that if you look at their numbers that they have made a couple of really boneheaded errors--they're not accounting for the cross-sectional area of the Earth (irradiance angle) or the albedo. Put those factors in, and their discrepancy goes away. Now, I would think that if you neglect things like that, you can't really be considered an expert on climate.
Then don't just love how deniers are always trotting some pithy Feynman quote out in order to prove their points? I'd be willing to bet that none of them have ever spent time reading his physics books. If they had spent as much time reading the physics books as they do reading denial propaganda, they would probably not be deniers.
Feynman is definitely one of my heroes (actually, my Ph.D. thesis starts with a quote fro Feynman), and I find it disgusting when people that have little regard for science use him for anti-science purposes. Let's see them quote from his physics books! (Be careful, though, because there is a pretty dumb error on electromagnetic shielding in one of them.)
Well, it's time for fake scientist JimZ's bi-weekly cop-out: I am lazy and ignorant therefore so is everyone else."
Only a mere 100+ Nobel Prize winners disagree, but they are Marxists because Nobel was a Swede and most Swedes are Marxist, except Lennart Bengtsson who is a staunch anti-communist like all the other staunch anti-communists who suffered under McCarthyism.
U.S. National Academy of Sciences, 2010:
http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?record...
“Climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human activities, and poses significant risks for a broad range of human and natural systems.”
http://www8.nationalacademies.org/onpine...
“Choices made now about carbon dioxide emissions reductions will affect climate change impacts experienced not just over the next few decades but also in coming centuries and millennia…Because CO2 in the atmosphere is long lived, it can effectively lock the Earth and future generations into a range of impacts, some of which could become very severe.”
http://www.physics.fsu.edu/awards/NAS/
“The Academy membership is composed of approximately 2,100 members and 380 foreign associates, of whom nearly 200 have won Nobel Prizes. Members and foreign associates of the Academy are elected in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research; election to the Academy is considered one of the highest honors that can be accorded a scientist or engineer.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_...
http://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/...
http://www.aip.org/history/climate/timel...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warm...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stern_Revie...
http://nas-sites.org/climate-change/qand...
http://www.skepticalscience.com/argument...
... or do we just trust the IP CC to draw our conclusions for us about the climate with its own "hand picked" climate scientist's scientific research?
You are free to read the research yourself. There are thousands of studies for you to catch up on. People are around the world measuring and studying and you can read their findings directly in the science journals.
The leading journal for environmental studies has long been Nature. There is now so much work being done on climate change that the publishers have spun off a specialized journal: Nature Climate Change.
http://www.nature.com/nclimate/index.htm...
The next most important journal is Science Magazine
http://www.sciencemag.org/
The rankings of importance is based on the number of citations per paper; that is, on the average number of times a paper published in the journal is cited by other research. Papers that are cited more often are the important building blocks to advanced understanding of a science area. Climate Change research papers in Nature are cited about 100 times in other research, papers in Science are cited about 90 time.
My suggestion to you is to subscribe to both and read every paper published in the past 10 years. If you don't have the understanding to follow the math, symbols, statistics and climatology then you might want to go get one or two PHDs in related science so that you can understand the published papers.
Another option if you do not have the capacity to read the studies yourself is to rely on worldwide experts to access the findings of all of those studies. That is what the IPCC assessments do, they access the research that is published and available to you.
Another source for summary is our National Academy of Science, the association and voice of America's greatest scientists -- and only America's greatest scientists. People who follow the research have compiled a Q/A to help you.
http://nas-sites.org/climate-change/qand...
So you have several choices.
1. Complete your PHD, go live in the Arctic and do your own research
2. Read the research yourself, published in the journals
3. Read the summaries that have been compiled for you, whether that be from the IPCC, National Academy of Science, Royal Society or other science academy
4. Tell everyone "uh, sientist r bad. I aint gonna reed no sience. Sientist lye about stuff"
The research is right there for anybody who wants to learn.
Some quotes from physicist Richard Feynman:
"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts."
Most people have no idea what that means.
"It is our responsibility as scientists, knowing the great progress and great value of a satisfactory philosophy of ignorance, the great progress that is the fruit of freedom of thought, to proclaim the value of this freedom, to teach how doubt is not to be feared but welcomed and discussed, and to demand this freedom as our duty to all coming generations."
This is the exact opposite of what is happening in climate science.
"Our freedom to doubt was born of a struggle against authority in the early days of science."
In climate science, we are heading backwards. We are referring to authority like the "consensus" to give us what we desire. That this is doomed to failure is likely blind to those who are on a narrow path to some ideological nirvana. It can only be maintained by enforcing authority and suppressing freedom.
Yes, it's the same guy that invented the internet, think his name is Al Gore.
