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Yes, there have been mistakes and imperfect scientists working on climate change. But you can find such foibles in nearly every scientific field—and very rarely
by necubi 17y ago
Yes, there have been mistakes and imperfect scientists working on climate change. But you can find such foibles in nearly every scientific field—and very rarely do they shake the foundations.
For example: evolution. I hope we can all agree that evolution and natural selection form a stunningly successful model of the diversity found in the natural world. This is the position of virtually every biologist and is really only opposed by fundamentalist crazies. Despite this, there have been many mistakes in the history of evolution (for example, the Piltdown Man) that have served to weaken its public credible. However, despite these errors there was never anything fundamentally wrong with the underlying theory.
Scientists make mistakes, for both good reasons and bad. But to use a few isolated incidents to cast aspersions on an entire field suggests that you have already come to a conclusion and are looking for evidence, however tenuous, to support it. Your criticisms are at their heart intellectually vacuous and are not sufficient to cast down decades of research by thousands of very smart, dedicated people.
- cletus 17y ago"Making mistakes" as you call it is a white wash. Refusing to publish data, actively obstructing efforts to get that data, selective sampling and black-box "massaging" of raw data essentially invalidate any conclusion drawn from that data. The essence of the scientific process is reproducability. Anything that isn't reproducible or at least testable is worthless. Anything built on it is worthless. It's like some physicist somewhere announcing to the world "I've proven the existence of the Higgs Boson" and then refusing to tell you how he did it.
- Adam503 17y agoFail, Cletus. What it's actually like is doing the 10 to the x repeat of Newton seeing and Apple dropping an from a tree, the apple landing on the foot of a research assistant standing under the tree. The scientist says, "Ooops, I should have told my research assistant to get out from under the tree." While Cletus, Sarah Palin, and a few in denial friends go running off to Fox News and announce "I saw Jesus cancel gravity. It's a sign from God."
- cromulent 17y agoIn relation to the physicist analogy, isn't there in this case a lot of other physicists saying that they saw similar things?
- fleitz 17y agoScience is not a democracy. It's a method for deriving knowledge from observation. We need the observations to evaluate the conclusions, not a bunch of hearsay. If other scientists are seeing the same things they should provide the data and methodology so that it can be evaluated independently.
- cromulent 17y agoThat's true - science is a method for deriving knowledge from observation. So, if many scientists are observing, one scientists' secrecy and falsification does not make the other findings "worthless".
- CWuestefeld 17y agoAgree. When you drop the test tube, or accidentally misplace the decimal point, that's "a mistake". But when you intentionally and systematically subvert ethics and the scientific method, that's not "a mistake". That's evil.