14 ms·

That is an attractive position to take. It seems there are two extremes, and the truth should be in the middle somewhere. However, it seems to me you don't qui

by DCKing 11y ago

That is an attractive position to take. It seems there are two extremes, and the truth should be in the middle somewhere. However, it seems to me you don't quite appreciate how strong the case for the general picture of climate change really is. The evidence for it is so vast, coming from so many different sources, that it is really quite indisputable. That doesn't imply at all that the picture of it is complete, or that we know exactly how it works. This finding doesn't diminish the strength of other forms of evidence at all. It merely adds to our understanding of the details of climate change and the development of new insights on the details of climate change. Climate change theory isn't some young and untested field of science. People have been trying to disprove (that's what science is! that's what this study is doing!) climate change hypotheses for decades now, and what is left today is a proper scientific theory. Just because a lot of debate happens on the veracity of climate change findings doesn't mean that the proper thing to do is to take a 'nuanced' position. Not if it is not aligned with experimental evidence. It might feel counterintuitive to do in a political discussion - which is what climate change has sadly become - but when the discussion is about what's true, one should always look for the answers that are intellectually honest instead of those that are politically acceptable or 'balanced'. > the history of science is full of cases where it didn't know as much as it claimed, I don't think this is true at all. Name one such scientific consensus that was, like climate change, the result of different sources of experimental evidence, that turned out to completely wrong.

source99 11y ago
The theory that people will be healthier by decreasing fat and increasing carbs has led to our current obesity epidemic. I would classify the science performed that got us to this point as fulfilling your requiremen.
- npunt 11y ago
  Nutrition is an especially crude science with nothing approaching scientific theory, and a lot of disagreement. FDA recommendations like the food pyramid that recommend altering fats/carbs are the result of political consensus as much as science, and there are many counter-examples to the idea of high carbs / low fats in the diets of different peoples of the world.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- mikeash 11y ago
  What evidence was that theory based on?
  - UlyssesSKrunk 11y ago
    None. Much like the new dietary guidelines, it was based on politics, lobbying, and bribery most likely. Nutrition is inherently difficult to study, and hasn't really been taken seriously until recently.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
eslaught 11y ago
> > the history of science is full of cases where it didn't know as much as it claimed, > I don't think this is true at all. Name one such scientific consensus that was, like climate change, the result of different sources of experimental evidence, that turned out to completely wrong. Here's one: Before the discovery of Vitamin C, it was known by the British navy that lime juice prescribed to sailors on long voyages prevented scurvy. As technologies improved, voyages became shorter, which allowed someone in the navy to start sourcing less expensive limes (which happened to have less Vitamin C). Fast forward some years, and someone does an experiment. The (new) limes don't cure scurvy! So, naturally, everyone concludes that the limes-cure-scurvy thing is an old wives' tale, which they believe to now be "debunked". It's not until Vitamin C is discovered that people actually start to figure out what's going on. (I believe this is from Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, but I could be wrong. It is also documented on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scurvy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scurvy)
- DCKing 11y ago
  Nice. I wonder what it is about nutrition science that makes it so rife with these examples.
  - adventured 11y ago
    The intersection between food, biological processes in our body, and the consequences that we try to study (disease, illness, obesity, etc) - is wildly complex. It involves very large numbers of moving pieces, that all impact each other, and of which we're still struggling to fully understand any given individual piece all by itself much less all things operating at large scale in tandem. Fortunately, empirical works wonderfully when it comes to nutrition. We know in vague terms what most foods do to us, while having a limited understanding in more complete scientific terms. We're still in maybe the second inning of understanding the human body fully (eg we're still discovering in basic terms how the immune system links to the brain [1]). [1] http://io9.com/scientists-discover-a-new-link-between-the-brain-and-th-1710560159 http://io9.com/scientists-discover-a-new-link-between-the-br...
  - hodwik 11y ago
resu_nimda 11y ago
I think the idea is that we don't really know the consequences of our effects on the climate, whether they will actually be catastrphic or not. The geocentric model, the heliocentric model, keplers laws, newtons laws, the luminiferous aether...all of these were established scientific concepts that later turned out to be inaccurate. When you learn a new thing and discover a new model, the previous state of the art is necessarily wrong to some degree.
- DCKing 11y ago
  The things you mention are either not 'completely wrong' (i.e. Newton's Laws, Kepler's Laws, the heliocentric model) or not based on multiple sources of evidence (the geocentric model, luminiferous aether). I will absolutely grant that scientists for centuries have made prevailing wisdom out of untested hypotheses. I'm just pointing out that climate change is neither prevailing wisdom (of that kind) or an untested hypothesis. I'm quite sure that there's a lot more to discover in climate change akin to how there was a lot more to discover after Newton described his laws of motion. That does not mean we should commit the Nirvana fallacy and disregard our current efforts as fruitless, untrue or unhelpful when they are the complete opposite.
  - powera 11y ago
    Nobody is claiming that climate change is "completely wrong". On the other hand, the claim that rising CO2 levels are responsible for a majority of the changes in the earth's temperature could be "completely wrong". ... and in what sense is "the sun is the center of the universe" not completely wrong?
    - deciplex 11y ago
      > ... and in what sense is "the sun is the center of the universe" not completely wrong? In the sense that you can make a lot of really accurate predictions about the motion of the planets, with a heliocentric model. For that matter, you can get a lot done proceeding from the assumption that the Earth is flat because, to a reasonable approximation, Earth is flat. http://hermiene.net/essays-trans/relativity_of_wrong.html http://hermiene.net/essays-trans/relativity_of_wrong.html
zxcvcxz 11y ago
>However, it seems to me you don't quite appreciate how strong the case for the general picture of climate change really is. No one is denying climate change.
DanielBMarkham 11y ago
<rant>First, it occurs to me that a good answer for many scientists, including those in the "hard" sciences, is "I don't know." Probably should use that more often. How old is the universe? I don't know. We have these three models, however, which give us some idea... And so on. A little humility can go a long ways here. Guess what? Average Joe Citizen knows you don't know. Trying to oversell the science is not the way to go. Second, and more important, this horrible public debate is being framed in the most disingenuous terms possible. I am consistently being told that people either believe in imminent danger requiring bold political action -- or they are science deniers. Pardon me, but that's just bullshit. As the GP pointed out, there are an infinite number of intermediate positions; and no amount of hand-waving about the possible dangers is going to change that. There are a bunch of logical steps a person must take in order to support political action. Is there a change coming? Are we the cause? Is the change going to cause more harm than good? Can we control the outcome? What is the "proper" outcome? How much action is warranted by the change indicated? And so on. I could list these exhaustively, but it would be pedantic. This list is not just a bunch of rhetorical obstacles to make sure nothing happens. These are logical and discrete steps that must be looked at and evaluated. Many of them are yes/no questions, but some involve qualitative opinions or numerical differences. If any of these steps come up short, i.e., if there's going to be massive change but the change has more of a positive impact than negative? The whole shebang falls apart. That's not moving the goalposts, that's not trying to throw up a bunch of obstacles. That's just how the reasoning works out. "The climate is changing" is a trivial statement. Of course it is. "What's left today is a proper scientific theory" looks like a pretty big stretch to this layman. Even granting that somehow we have a falsifiable, reproducible (and how would that work, anyway? Got another Earth nearby?) theory, still looks like a bunch of political types at the IPCC voting on what the change will be. Voting. On the numerical result of a supposedly proper scientific theory. Show me the corresponding physics body that is voting on the mass of the proton and maybe we could get somewhere. And even then, even if there wasn't so much BS -- even assuming something as rock solid as a huge asteroid heading towards Earth -- a democracy still makes decisions by the persuasion of the voters. I've heard many a climate catastrophist talk as if the average voter is too stupid to make life or death decisions for themselves and the society they live in. If that's what they believe, then we need to start talking about the wisdom of setting up a select group of scientists as the new priestly class, able to understand the mysterious ways of the universe and make decisions about what is just and good for the rest of us. I've said it before: this is a terrible debate, full of scientists who shouldn't be advocates, politicians who are looking for the latest bandwagon to jump on, the vast morass of uniformed folks who want to look knowledgeable and the poor voter stuck in the middle of all of it.</rant> As an aside, I would really love to see some discussion about the fact that models based on Cellular Automata always tend towards runaway conditions. Anybody who's worked with such models know this, but it seems to have been left out of the discussion.
CamperBob2 11y ago
I don't think this is true at all. Name one such scientific consensus that was, like climate change, the result of different sources of experimental evidence, that turned out to completely wrong. The phlogiston theory comes to mind. Combustion was surprisingly hard for science to get a handle on. The evolution of various atomic models prior to Bohr is also a case where one "consensus" after another was overturned by new evidence. And even Einstein was reluctant to let go of the notion of a luminiferous ether. And that's just physics. I'm sure biology and anatomy/physiology experts could fill volumes with accounts of false consensuses that took a long time to reverse.
- pjbrunet 11y ago
  We're taught to think we understand. But do we? Language offers a black-and-white feeling we're clearly understanding something perfectly. That's an illusion, reinforced by years of approval at school. Language, which science depends on, is a visual art--symbols on paper. As with any visual art, the structured symbols together really convey very little, even if we agree it means something important. Pages, books, libraries, institutions, frames around frames around frames of ambiguity, approximation and interpretation.
  - nitrogen 11y ago
    The self-reinforcing successes of mathematics and experimentation, which science depends on much more than language, would seem to escape the linguistic relativism and false sense of confidence you're trying to present (if I understand your comment correctly). In general, though, personal confidence in our personal understanding is indeed a very fuzzy thing that probably does have a lot to do with popular acceptance. Eventually neuroscience will help us understand this better. But, the scientific method and mathematics together provide a way to escape the limitations of perceived correctness now. Instead of our brains judging what's correct, we have logically independent methods (science proper and math) that can make the decisions for us.
    - pjbrunet 11y ago
      Yes, as far as numbers go, there's not much ambiguity, unless it's ambiguous math on purpose, like a postulate. Which reminds me, years ago I read an entire book about zero and the evolution of numbers. I think it was http://www.amazon.com/The-Nothig-that-Is-Natural/dp/0195142373 http://www.amazon.com/The-Nothig-that-Is-Natural/dp/01951423... the part about clay tablets made an impression. If we had eight fingers, would we do octal calculations? Hehe. Anyway, thanks for the reply. For the record, I wasn't meaning to imply science is super ambiguous.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
merpnderp 11y ago
"Why didn't they discover the new number was higher right away? It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of—this history—because it's apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong—and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number close to Millikan's value they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that..." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_drop_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_drop_experiment
- wtallis 11y ago
  While wrong by a statistically significant amount, Millikan's initial value was still much less than 1% off. It's really not a good example of the scientific consensus being completely wrong, because there was no consensus until Millikan's number had been shown to be wrong.
  - wdr1 11y ago
    No offense, but I think you're missing his bigger point.
joeclark77 11y ago
If the case for global warming is so strong, why are you referring to it as "climate change"?
kabouseng 11y ago
TLDR of the children comments: "Name one such scientific consensus that was..." Asks for examples, shoots them all down with no true scotsman argument...

by DCKing 11y ago

source99 11y ago

The theory that people will be healthier by decreasing fat and increasing carbs has led to our current obesity epidemic. I would classify the science performed that got us to this point as fulfilling your requiremen.

npunt 11y ago
Nutrition is an especially crude science with nothing approaching scientific theory, and a lot of disagreement. FDA recommendations like the food pyramid that recommend altering fats/carbs are the result of political consensus as much as science, and there are many counter-examples to the idea of high carbs / low fats in the diets of different peoples of the world.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
mikeash 11y ago
What evidence was that theory based on?
- UlyssesSKrunk 11y ago
  None. Much like the new dietary guidelines, it was based on politics, lobbying, and bribery most likely. Nutrition is inherently difficult to study, and hasn't really been taken seriously until recently.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

eslaught 11y ago

> > the history of science is full of cases where it didn't know as much as it claimed, > I don't think this is true at all. Name one such scientific consensus that was, like climate change, the result of different sources of experimental evidence, that turned out to completely wrong. Here's one: Before the discovery of Vitamin C, it was known by the British navy that lime juice prescribed to sailors on long voyages prevented scurvy. As technologies improved, voyages became shorter, which allowed someone in the navy to start sourcing less expensive limes (which happened to have less Vitamin C). Fast forward some years, and someone does an experiment. The (new) limes don't cure scurvy! So, naturally, everyone concludes that the limes-cure-scurvy thing is an old wives' tale, which they believe to now be "debunked". It's not until Vitamin C is discovered that people actually start to figure out what's going on. (I believe this is from Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, but I could be wrong. It is also documented on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scurvy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scurvy)

DCKing 11y ago
Nice. I wonder what it is about nutrition science that makes it so rife with these examples.
- adventured 11y ago
  The intersection between food, biological processes in our body, and the consequences that we try to study (disease, illness, obesity, etc) - is wildly complex. It involves very large numbers of moving pieces, that all impact each other, and of which we're still struggling to fully understand any given individual piece all by itself much less all things operating at large scale in tandem. Fortunately, empirical works wonderfully when it comes to nutrition. We know in vague terms what most foods do to us, while having a limited understanding in more complete scientific terms. We're still in maybe the second inning of understanding the human body fully (eg we're still discovering in basic terms how the immune system links to the brain [1]). [1] http://io9.com/scientists-discover-a-new-link-between-the-brain-and-th-1710560159 http://io9.com/scientists-discover-a-new-link-between-the-br...
- hodwik 11y ago

resu_nimda 11y ago

I think the idea is that we don't really know the consequences of our effects on the climate, whether they will actually be catastrphic or not. The geocentric model, the heliocentric model, keplers laws, newtons laws, the luminiferous aether...all of these were established scientific concepts that later turned out to be inaccurate. When you learn a new thing and discover a new model, the previous state of the art is necessarily wrong to some degree.

DCKing 11y ago
The things you mention are either not 'completely wrong' (i.e. Newton's Laws, Kepler's Laws, the heliocentric model) or not based on multiple sources of evidence (the geocentric model, luminiferous aether). I will absolutely grant that scientists for centuries have made prevailing wisdom out of untested hypotheses. I'm just pointing out that climate change is neither prevailing wisdom (of that kind) or an untested hypothesis. I'm quite sure that there's a lot more to discover in climate change akin to how there was a lot more to discover after Newton described his laws of motion. That does not mean we should commit the Nirvana fallacy and disregard our current efforts as fruitless, untrue or unhelpful when they are the complete opposite.
- powera 11y ago
  Nobody is claiming that climate change is "completely wrong". On the other hand, the claim that rising CO2 levels are responsible for a majority of the changes in the earth's temperature could be "completely wrong". ... and in what sense is "the sun is the center of the universe" not completely wrong?
  - deciplex 11y ago
    > ... and in what sense is "the sun is the center of the universe" not completely wrong? In the sense that you can make a lot of really accurate predictions about the motion of the planets, with a heliocentric model. For that matter, you can get a lot done proceeding from the assumption that the Earth is flat because, to a reasonable approximation, Earth is flat. http://hermiene.net/essays-trans/relativity_of_wrong.html http://hermiene.net/essays-trans/relativity_of_wrong.html

zxcvcxz 11y ago

>However, it seems to me you don't quite appreciate how strong the case for the general picture of climate change really is. No one is denying climate change.

DanielBMarkham 11y ago

<rant>First, it occurs to me that a good answer for many scientists, including those in the "hard" sciences, is "I don't know." Probably should use that more often. How old is the universe? I don't know. We have these three models, however, which give us some idea... And so on. A little humility can go a long ways here. Guess what? Average Joe Citizen knows you don't know. Trying to oversell the science is not the way to go. Second, and more important, this horrible public debate is being framed in the most disingenuous terms possible. I am consistently being told that people either believe in imminent danger requiring bold political action -- or they are science deniers. Pardon me, but that's just bullshit. As the GP pointed out, there are an infinite number of intermediate positions; and no amount of hand-waving about the possible dangers is going to change that. There are a bunch of logical steps a person must take in order to support political action. Is there a change coming? Are we the cause? Is the change going to cause more harm than good? Can we control the outcome? What is the "proper" outcome? How much action is warranted by the change indicated? And so on. I could list these exhaustively, but it would be pedantic. This list is not just a bunch of rhetorical obstacles to make sure nothing happens. These are logical and discrete steps that must be looked at and evaluated. Many of them are yes/no questions, but some involve qualitative opinions or numerical differences. If any of these steps come up short, i.e., if there's going to be massive change but the change has more of a positive impact than negative? The whole shebang falls apart. That's not moving the goalposts, that's not trying to throw up a bunch of obstacles. That's just how the reasoning works out. "The climate is changing" is a trivial statement. Of course it is. "What's left today is a proper scientific theory" looks like a pretty big stretch to this layman. Even granting that somehow we have a falsifiable, reproducible (and how would that work, anyway? Got another Earth nearby?) theory, still looks like a bunch of political types at the IPCC voting on what the change will be. Voting. On the numerical result of a supposedly proper scientific theory. Show me the corresponding physics body that is voting on the mass of the proton and maybe we could get somewhere. And even then, even if there wasn't so much BS -- even assuming something as rock solid as a huge asteroid heading towards Earth -- a democracy still makes decisions by the persuasion of the voters. I've heard many a climate catastrophist talk as if the average voter is too stupid to make life or death decisions for themselves and the society they live in. If that's what they believe, then we need to start talking about the wisdom of setting up a select group of scientists as the new priestly class, able to understand the mysterious ways of the universe and make decisions about what is just and good for the rest of us. I've said it before: this is a terrible debate, full of scientists who shouldn't be advocates, politicians who are looking for the latest bandwagon to jump on, the vast morass of uniformed folks who want to look knowledgeable and the poor voter stuck in the middle of all of it.</rant> As an aside, I would really love to see some discussion about the fact that models based on Cellular Automata always tend towards runaway conditions. Anybody who's worked with such models know this, but it seems to have been left out of the discussion.

CamperBob2 11y ago

I don't think this is true at all. Name one such scientific consensus that was, like climate change, the result of different sources of experimental evidence, that turned out to completely wrong. The phlogiston theory comes to mind. Combustion was surprisingly hard for science to get a handle on. The evolution of various atomic models prior to Bohr is also a case where one "consensus" after another was overturned by new evidence. And even Einstein was reluctant to let go of the notion of a luminiferous ether. And that's just physics. I'm sure biology and anatomy/physiology experts could fill volumes with accounts of false consensuses that took a long time to reverse.

pjbrunet 11y ago
We're taught to think we understand. But do we? Language offers a black-and-white feeling we're clearly understanding something perfectly. That's an illusion, reinforced by years of approval at school. Language, which science depends on, is a visual art--symbols on paper. As with any visual art, the structured symbols together really convey very little, even if we agree it means something important. Pages, books, libraries, institutions, frames around frames around frames of ambiguity, approximation and interpretation.
- nitrogen 11y ago
  The self-reinforcing successes of mathematics and experimentation, which science depends on much more than language, would seem to escape the linguistic relativism and false sense of confidence you're trying to present (if I understand your comment correctly). In general, though, personal confidence in our personal understanding is indeed a very fuzzy thing that probably does have a lot to do with popular acceptance. Eventually neuroscience will help us understand this better. But, the scientific method and mathematics together provide a way to escape the limitations of perceived correctness now. Instead of our brains judging what's correct, we have logically independent methods (science proper and math) that can make the decisions for us.
  - pjbrunet 11y ago
    Yes, as far as numbers go, there's not much ambiguity, unless it's ambiguous math on purpose, like a postulate. Which reminds me, years ago I read an entire book about zero and the evolution of numbers. I think it was http://www.amazon.com/The-Nothig-that-Is-Natural/dp/0195142373 http://www.amazon.com/The-Nothig-that-Is-Natural/dp/01951423... the part about clay tablets made an impression. If we had eight fingers, would we do octal calculations? Hehe. Anyway, thanks for the reply. For the record, I wasn't meaning to imply science is super ambiguous.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

merpnderp 11y ago

"Why didn't they discover the new number was higher right away? It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of—this history—because it's apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong—and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number close to Millikan's value they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that..." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_drop_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_drop_experiment

wtallis 11y ago
While wrong by a statistically significant amount, Millikan's initial value was still much less than 1% off. It's really not a good example of the scientific consensus being completely wrong, because there was no consensus until Millikan's number had been shown to be wrong.
- wdr1 11y ago
  No offense, but I think you're missing his bigger point.

joeclark77 11y ago

If the case for global warming is so strong, why are you referring to it as "climate change"?

kabouseng 11y ago

TLDR of the children comments: "Name one such scientific consensus that was..." Asks for examples, shoots them all down with no true scotsman argument...