Science in general - from astronomy to zoology has a problem. The AGW fraud has called all of science into question. After ClimateGate 1.0 and 2.0 have shown the whole thing to be a complete fraud, science in general has had two huge failures: 1. Failure to clean house in the tainted climatology discipline Whitewashes kept the same villians in place. 2. Retained excessive dependence on government funding. Whitewash is not vindication. As Einstein knew, true vindication comes from convincing the skeptics. Skepticism is the soul of real science. Government funding is the driving force of the AGW fraud. If they claimed there were zero AGW, government funding would go elsewhere and the climatologists would be marginalized. AGW brought torrents of government funding. Government funding is the true cause of scientific failure.
Ffs, climategate showed nothing except that scientifically illiterate people refuse to learn scientific terms. Trick doesn't mean deceive in science, it means method, and yet people like you keep trotting out the emails with the word trick in them like you've caught scientists deceiving people. This isn't a problem for science, it's a problem for educators.
Government funding of science saves industry from having to directly bear the burden of the cost. Industry needs science to provide new breakthroughs. Very few companies are owned by the people who create new innovation. Most often companies pay innovators to use the raw data from government funded research to create new products. There are exceptions and how ever successful they may be they are rare.
Global Climate Change - NASA http://climate.nasa.gov/ Vital Signs of the Planet: Global Climate Change and Global Warming. Current news and data streams about global warming and climate change from NASA. Great post Taxcutter! I see you are getting attacked by the Usual suspects, that means you deserve a star by your name! Ha ha! The AGW thing is exactly what is wrong with science in 2012, not quite piltdown fradulent but nasty bad just the same. Additionally they left out at least one big thing AL Gore. Ha ha, seriously The AGW proponents simply write what they wanted into the reports and press releases which the usual suspects use to get more funding for Globalism projects like the carbon credit thing and other UN bull poo. All we have to do is have a look at data that goes back 400 million years. The graphs that show the heating and cooling cycle are almost sine wave cyclic. Hot cold hot cold despite what the CO2 readings were! There were ice ages when the CO2 level was 14 times higher than in the modern industrialized era. Sheesh! New NASA Data Blow Gaping Hole In Global Warming Alarmism ... news.yahoo.com/nasa-data-blow-gaping-hold-global-warming-alarm... Jul 27, 2011 New NASA Data Blow Gaping Hole In Global Warming Alarmism ... and after warming than the climate models show," Spencer said in a July 26 .www.iceagenow.com/ reva
If an increasing portion of the population is willing to ditch all of science, we're in trouble indeed. We live in a society that is dependent on science and technology. Unimaginable human suffering would ensue if all scientific achievements would be reverted in an instant. Houses, agriculture, transportation, the economy, and much more would be gone soon. Most of human civilization would vanish within years, while our villages and cities slowly decay. Even if AGW and evolution were frauds, it would be obviously foolish and self destructive to reject all of science. I am deeply worried that many people are taking the achievements of our ancestors for granted. They act as though knowledge and technology are gifts from the heavens and not the fruits of hard work. The ultimate question about our origins may be unanswerable, but the source of farms and computers is known. They are man-made. They are understandable. Dare to find out how stuff works. Dare to examine nature and ask questions. We mustn't live in a cargo cult. AGW is not a great topic for a political forum. It's complicated and messy due to the influence of many competing effects that need to be understood quantitatively to make useful statements. Concerning ClimateGate, I recommend the following videos to get some valuable context. [ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nnVQ2fROOg"]6. Climate Change -- Those hacked e-mails - YouTube[/ame] [ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXesBhYwdRo"]7. Climate Change - "Those" e-mails and science censorship - YouTube[/ame] [ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OB2prBtVFo"]Climategate mark 2 -- the quotes and the context - YouTube[/ame]
Great point. The public discourse on AGW is dominated by rhetoric and halve truths that is strategically incorporated into public dialogue for maximum effect. The scientific discourse on AGW is quite a bit different than the yarns spun into the public discourse by poseur journalists. What is truly concerning is how the demonization of academics has led large portions of our society to believe that for hire media personalities and politicians are more credible than academics and the scientific method.
How did Climategate show AGW to be a fraud? Most of the argument revolved around an email using the word "trick" and claiming that it was hidden in an email, which is funny because in science means METHOD and many scientific papers openly use trick in not only their titles but in the body of the paper itself.
To claim "The AGW fraud has called all of science into question." is the most ignorant, idiotic, irrational, illogical thing I have ever read. The denialists on this site are far beyond hope and reason.
I may be a throwback to the Cold War era, but all the recent studies on global warming makes a good old fashioned scientist cringe! Look at all the emails brought to light, doctored facts etc. It makes me nuts! When I was in school thirty years ago, we learned we are coming out of an Ice Age (in geologic years), and we should expect warming trends in certain areas over the next few thousand years. Now, these scientists are taking that info and trying to use it to regulate us! Now don't get me wrong, I do think we can do more to be energy efficient and that's a good thing but I don't want some government scientist driving a Prius going home to his McMansion with his 100 inch plasma telling me what light bulbs I can use. And yes, unfortunately most science these days is done by governments and our tax dollars. Hardly any companies fund R&D labs anymore like they used to (IBM, GE etc). It's all paid for by the government. Most scientists today have to grovel at someones feet to get funding and if those feet are the governments what do you think will be funded? Their pet projects of course!
The so-called "Climategate" affair doesn't meet the hopes of the denialists so they conveniently forget the facts. The Parliamentary report clears it up.
So are you claiming a world wide conspiracy? I am confident that BOM, CRU, PIK among others are not funded by "our" tax dollar. Also show me where the government requires any study to conclude that humans are responsible for warming as a prerequisite for funding. As a matter of fact, any scientist who disproves AGW will become more famous than all the scientists currently doing research.
Science has a problem with the Antiscience cabal of luddites, religionists, and paid shills of big Business. " ...Heartland, a nominally Libertarian “think tank”, is one of the loudest voices in the climate-change denial choir, yet its prepared statement contained, among threats and hedged denial, this appeal to the better angels of our nature: “…honest disagreement should never be used to justify the criminal acts and fraud that occurred in the past 24 hours,” the statement said. “As a matter of common decency and journalistic ethics, we ask everyone in the climate change debate to sit back and think about what just happened.” Yes, let’s think of what just happened – and why stop 24 hours ago (or, more accurately, 48 hours ago at this point)? Why not go back a decade or even two? Or a century? Or longer? Let’s think of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which aggregates research from thousands of scientists and then summarizes it in conservative assessment reports that have been vetted hundreds of times over before being released to the public. Let’s think of the people who attack the IPCC – people who have no qualms about pulling isolated sentences out of early drafts of thousand-page documents and then using them to try and discredit an entire body of research... " http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevezwick/2012/02/16/what-happened-at-heartland/
Oh yeah. Arctic ice is melting because of fraud. So if climate science has indeed been vindicated, we should be able to find a lot of former skeptics. Former skeptics, like this guy. Or, former skeptics like this guy. Or this former skeptic and prominent Republican. And this former skeptic. Here's a Canadian former skeptic. Or, we can roll the video for this former skeptic from the Weather Channel: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=gwMrpRdHjkQ This former skeptic is a conservative Republican from Utah: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=vDNXuX6D60U And this former skeptic is an admiral and Chief Oceanographer of the US Navy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=T3dcc0mV-n4 Oddly enough, you won't read anything about any of these guys on WUWT. If all of climate science stopped dead tomorrow, the world would still be warming, the Arctic would still be melting, insurance rates for weather-related disasters would still be increasing, and we would still be responsible.
Science..like any other endeavor, has it's oddball whacker nutjobs. Those guys that believe that the universe began as a large ball of earwax. They have the math to 'prove it' and they'll take that 'proof' to someone that wants to believe the same, for 'research funding'. That doesn't make it good science...just some weird thing that managed to get funded.
I take exception to the much-repeated claim that the scientists are in the pocket of the funding agencies, and maintaing the fiction of AGW is the only way to stay on the money train. This completely ignores two things: scientists, in particular ones working in unsexy fields like climate science, do not lead wealthy, glamorous lives. For the most part they work at Universities or for various governments and they struggle to for grant money that comes in multiples of tens of thousands of dollars, none of which is theirs to spend except on the research they've proposed. Some may have tenure but they certainly don't earn the kind of money that members of, say, the medical or legal faculties earn. Because of their earning power in the private sector these academics are extremely well paid, yet they seem able to resist any grand conspiracies that will keep the paychecks rolling in. So on one side there are countless poorly paid academics. And on the other are a small number of very vocal opponents backed by a bunch of billionaires who make their money in the energy industry. The lobbyists are the ones on the gravy train here, not the academics. The money behind them is the only reason such a small number can make so much noise.
