You know you're talking to a person with "close adherence to progressive extremist ideology" when they assume the facts are on their side and the other side is just lies. Real scientific integrity eh?
My personal backlash against this is from experience. I have been wrong. I will be wrong more in the future. Ignorance is normal. Nobody knows everything.
However, ignorance is not to be embraced. Fact checking is not a liberal agenda. It is a general path to improvement.
Probably stems from the implicit assumption that since academia leans left, that these progressives will have the needed scientific support for their policy proposals.
You know that it was two Republicans who started the bipartisan committee on climate change in the House, right? It's not a liberal issue. It's a reality that is happening NOW
Your generalizations are laughable and are only indicative of the toxic thinking that has characterized this election.
Why not? The science is far from settled. In much the same way that the media leans left, so does academia. Academia is not immune from corruption, and dare I say, academia is a worse swamp than Washington.
When 99% of the academics agree on something, you could say the science is more-or-less settled. If you disagree, the onus is on you to come up with the evidence/theory to challenge it. Just claiming that "science is far from settled" doesn't make it so; you might as well claim that the "science is far from settled" on the Earth not being flat.
I said nothing. I was just saying that if you want to go against scientific consensus, the onus is on you to provide proof! You can't just say "I disagree with them, so they must be wrong". It doesn't work that way.
This is how science works: there's a current understanding of the world; and if you want to change that, you have to come up with the counterexamples or other scientific evidence to back up your claim. You can't just stick your head in the sand and say that since I don't believe these guys, they must be wrong.
You are correct that appeal-to-authority arguments are inherently weak but it doesn't change the fact that his hand-wavy "it's not settled!" argument is even weaker.
To take your remark about doctor's a century earlier, germ theory was met with derision[1] :
> [...] Some doctors, for instance, were offended at the suggestion that they should wash their hands, feeling that their social status as gentlemen was inconsistent with the idea that their hands could be unclean.
Sometimes prevailing wisdom is discountable but sometimes it's not.
On the other hand, I think there are some facts on climate change that are hard to deny. We have actual data points of past weather patterns from various weather stations. We have observed various climate effects (glaciers disappearing, ice fields thinning, etc.).
I think it could be said that it is a fact that the Earth has warmed significantly over the past century. I think the evidence suggests that the trendline is atypical of normal patterns. I wouldn't call the trendline abnormality a fact at this point, but I think the evidence is very strong.
If someone had a conclusion was "the Earth is warming but I'm not sure humans are the cause", I would say that's fine. It recognizes the facts and strong trendlines above. It goes against consensus, but if they had some interesting data to go with their doubt, I would hope this analysis would be welcome.
"Global warming is a hoax!" type statements on the other hand tends to be completely dismissive sometimes of even the facts we have.
When any sign of disagreement with the agw cult results in swift, abrupt and pretty much permament death of ones career then it is no wonder that not many people do that.
Ive had a few chances to personally speak with some scientists and they were not 99% sure what is happening
Yeah, well, the General Theory of Relativity doesn't predict the motions of galaxies very well (without dark matter), and is not compatible with quantum mechanics. But try getting GPS to work without it.
The incompatibility of QFT and GR is a theoretical incompatibility. Practically, however, GR is perfectly compatible with quantum mechanics right to the limit of strong gravity, which can only find inside black hole event horizons (and in particular at and very near the singularity), and in the very early universe.
In GR terms, strong gravity is where the uncertainty in position of field quanta sources an impossible gravitational field; this is only measurable when the energy-density is non-negligible and that requires enormous quantum numbers. In quantum field theory terms, the (general, not just electromagnetic) charge of a particle and its energy are separate quantities except for the gravitational charge of a particle, which is its energy. Because the gravitational interaction is so weak, this only matters when particle energies are very high (on Feynman diagrams, this means more than one loop of gravitons; while gravitons are massless they do carry momentum, and thus have energy, and thus gravitational charge).
The clocks in GPS satellites all rely on quantum effects, and those effects that run faster further from the Earth than they did closer to the Earth prior to launch. GNSS applications, as well as atomic clocks on spacecraft scattered around the solar system, are ongoing tests of the validity of this prediction of GR.
It is precisely because General Relativity is an effective field theory (in the Kenneth G Wilson sense of effective) in all presently accessible regimes, and has so far survived every test -- direct and indirect -- that it is extremely hard to arrive at an explanation for the effects of gravity pointing the wrong way other than non-luminous, transparent matter rather than a different theory of gravity.
It's sad to see that climate-deniers are still pushing their agenda when the facts so plainly speak for themselves.
As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, science is rarely settled. That is what makes it science, evidence is provided and notions are challenged -- indisputable axioms are very rare. Nevertheless we can still point to the results of rigorous studies and accept that their weight is enough to arrive at a reasonable assumption that global warming is real and it's not going away.
Yes we are in a mass-extinction event, but no that is not because of climate change. Rather it is because we are destroying habitats left and right through deforestation, pollution, etc. Climate change is happening at such a slow glacial pace; I haven't seen any good data to suggest that the Climate is changing fast enough to produce harm.
Hey smokey, you seem to have a good grasp of practical blockchain applications. Was wondering if you think it is feasible to use Blockchain for organic agricultural commodities? The idea being that the transparency blockchain can bring could help more accurately price organic ag commodities, which still are undervalued at that level (no transparency in this market, still getting lumped in with regular ag commodities). Just curious, like a organic commodities exchange using blockchain for significantly faster settlement and ability to audit the identity of a commodity (quantity, quality, location/logistics). Wondering if you think blockchain could have a use in something like that?
One problem with organic produce is the shelf-life making speculation potentially tricky. I could see a role for futures and prediction markets to hedge risk and better find the market rate. Check out Augur for example https://www.augur.net/
Project much? Looks like you're the one getting all heated and angry at someone defending the social sciences and are trying to attack them. It's better not to bring emotion into discussions of science.
