5 ms·

This is one of the problems I have with the absolute freak show that climate science/global-warming/saving-the-planet has become. It is, at a minimum, a triang

This is one of the problems I have with the absolute freak show that climate science/global-warming/saving-the-planet has become. It is, at a minimum, a triangle of bad actors with one corner being politicians --fear-based vote harvesting--, the second being business --jump on the bandwagon and print money...facilitated by politicians who want votes in exchange for fear mongering-- and, finally, religious-based detractors --using the best ignorance can offer in order to advanced humanity. You combine these three factors (and likely a few more) and the entire thing is a rotten stinking mess that exists on a binary state between religious deniers and religious zealots. What's a researcher to do? Tell the truth? Ha! Only if you want your career completely destroyed as well as never seeing even a hint of a grant. Going against these forces is a sure path to having more PhD's driving taxis. I have to say, I have become very cynical about what we call "science" these days. It seems you have to be very guarded about accepting anything you are told, because the forces at play could be beyond anyone's imagination in scale, breath and reach. The problem is that the general voting public is ill-equipped to take an intellectual stab at what they are being told, which means they are easily duped and herded like cattle in and direction that might be of benefit to the puppet masters in politics.

SubiculumCode 5y ago
Are you a scientist?
- robomartin 5y ago
  > Are you a scientist? How is that relevant to my comment?
  - SubiculumCode 5y ago
    You suggest how scientists can act, their motivations, their freedom to disagree with the status quo, or those higher up the ladder in their field etc. You suggest how scientists will lose grants if they produce inconvenient science, etc etc. So I ask again. Are you a scientist? Have you written a grant application? Have you been punished? I AM a scientist, and I have never seen this hypothetical world.
    - robomartin 5y ago
      It's a matter of your field of study. Climate change, in particular, is a minefield. I am not saying what I said in a vacuum, this came out of conversations with actual climate science researchers and scientists that I had the opportunity to meet during the course of my work in aerospace. The context was a project were we were developing various systems and payloads for both the International Space Station and, eventually, the Artemis mission to the moon. The message was quite clear: In a politically charged environment you have to be very careful not to ruffle feathers. Anything from your career to your funding could be at stake. No, you are not going to find google-searchable interviews with such folks, again, that would be professional suicide. You can find information that helps understand some of the forces at play. While not a full picture, it's enough to support the plausibility of my claim. You don't have to believer me, of course. It's your prerogative. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politicization_of_science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politicization_of_science https://www.theverge.com/2017/1/19/14258474/trump-inauguration-science-politics-climate-change-vaccines https://www.theverge.com/2017/1/19/14258474/trump-inaugurati... https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/canadian-scientists-open-about-how-their-government-silenced-science-180961942/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/canadian-scien... https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/apr/17/britains-scientists-must-not-be-gagged https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/apr/17/britai... https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/358043-epa-blocks-scientists-who-get-grants-from-advisory-boards https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/358043-epa-blo... https://www.vox.com/2015/5/15/8612113/truth-climate-change https://www.vox.com/2015/5/15/8612113/truth-climate-change https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/battle-over-science-funding-gets-fiercer-in-u-s-congress/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/battle-over-scien... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214629619309119 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221462961... etc.
      - emmelaich 5y ago
        Moreover, there is really no such single thing as "climate science"; there is atmospherical physics, chemistry, meteorology, physical oceanography marine science, biology, paleobiology, the list goes on. Use google ngrams to look for "climate science". It basically doesn't occur before around 1982.
lumost 5y ago
You know, I've seen an increasing trend towards mediocrity and outright fraud across multiple public and private institutions that reward individuals based on some power law. If the author of the most cited paper in a field is going to get all the grants, and a standard "useful" paper is going to get no continued funding - then researchers will push to make their work sensational. Eventually the professors and everyone left in the field is fighting sensational with either outright fraud or alternate funding sources. Same goes for VC funding of startups, employees at companies, and government programs. The baseline "useful" work is rotting away in favor of aiming to be the top ~5-10%.
- btilly 5y ago
  https://www.sciencealert.com/non-replicable-studies-make-the-most-impact-scientists-find https://www.sciencealert.com/non-replicable-studies-make-the... may interest you. Papers that can't replicate get cited more than papers that can. In other words if your goal is to craft a paper that draws attention, that's harder if you're being meticulous about limiting yourself to saying to what evidence shows is clearly true.
  - lumost 5y ago
    Unfortunately this will be a baseline that keeps moving. scientists compete on publications so they will make more sensationalist headlines, There will then be more sensationalist headlines to compete with forcing fraud/or irrational exuberance.
naasking 5y ago
Not sure I'm following your point. If you weigh the bad actors and financial incentives of climate change proponents against the bad actors and financial incentives on the fossil fuel side, do you think the scale tips in favour of more honesty for the fossil fuel side or climate change side? There's no doubt groupthink happens in academia on many issues, but the need to displace fossil fuels really is very important. Not just for climate change reasons, but overall human health. For instance, air pollution from fossil fuels kills tens of thousands of people every year.
- goatlover 5y ago
  Too bad everyone has been convinced nuclear is way worse because of a couple of accidents. That was a legitimate alternative that didn't need to wait for the 2010s to become an economically viable 15-20% of energy production.
- robomartin 5y ago
  No. There is no honesty anywhere, that is my point. > the need to displace fossil fuels really is very important. Why? I don't necessarily disagree. But reality isn't a problem managed through a single variable. The things you list are not singularly caused by fossil fuels. In fact, a very solid argument could be put forth about just how much uglier things might be without fossil fuels. Here's the basic math someone would have to do before making the assertion that the elimination of fossil fuels --as a single causally-connected variable-- would make things better: The simplest (well, not so simple) calculation is that, while we might eliminate fossil fuels we do not eliminate the need for the energy they provide. In other words, in rough terms, you still have to explain how we would generate, harness, create, transport and distribute a certain amount of energy per unit time (hour, day, week, month, year, whatever). In fact, I think we can, in historical terms, state that energy requirements increase over time, they do not decrease. The next element of the story is how we are going to replace the massive number of byproducts of fossil fuels that modern life pretty much depends on. We know that making complex hydrocarbons any other way is in a range between highly inefficient (which would increase the aforementioned energy requirement) and impossible. My point --in stressing that reality is a rather complex multivariate problem-- is that, while it would be nice to think of a desirable reality without fossil fuels, in the real reality (just go with it) this is much more of an aspirational thing than an attainable objective. The same is the case with electric vehicles. I have yet to see someone do the math on the total daily energy requirement of the installed fossil-fuel based vehicle fleet and explain how on earth (literally) we are going to generate that much energy without causing even more problems. Our current electrical grid is designed for current energy requirements (and power requirement, which is equally important). The current system, in any country I know of, doesn't magically have an extra 100% in power/energy generation capacity to support every vehicle going electric. Reality: A multivariate problem. You push here and it pulls there. Not so simple. > For instance, air pollution from fossil fuels kills tens of thousands of people every year. Fair enough. Containerships, as a simple example, burn bunker fuel, one of the nastiest things you can burn. They are singularly responsible for more pollution along certain vectors than the entirety of the ground transportation industry. And yet we do nothing about it. Why? I can only guess. Part of it has got to be a case of "well, what we have works". The other issue --which I think is very real-- is that bunker fuel is, quite literally, the bottom of the barrel. It is what is left after you extract everything else from petroleum. So, next Monday we stop using bunker fuel everywhere in the world. No problem. Right? Wrong. You see, all the other oil byproducts are still needed. Which means that the bottom of the barrel...the bunker fuel...would still be produced in absolutely massive quantities. Except now we are not using it, because we want to clean-up the planet. Wait a minute. What do we do with it? Well, we likely have to bury the stuff, dump it somewhere, make huge mountain-sized piles out of it. We would now use massive amounts of fuel (yes, everything is "massive") to run the machines that have to haul and manipulate this stuff. We also have to devote massive (sorry) resources, land and ecosystems to burying what we are not using. Where it goes from there I cannot even guess. Once again, reality isn't a single variable problem. Bunker fuel == bad? Yes, no, maybe, hard to say. Because the alternative could be worse, far worse. This is precisely what I don't see treated fairly these days. Imagine a politician taking the time and making the effort to fully analyze and understand the bunker fuel ecosystem and also taking the time to present this analysis to the voting public. Good luck. It is far easier to say "bunker fuel == bad", get votes, stay in office and move on. It's easy to show how horrible the stuff is (and it is!). It is impossible to show how much worse things could be if we don't fully understand what reality looks without it. I'll overstay my welcome and give another example from real life. A number of years ago a well-intentioned yet mathematically-challenged "science" teacher at my kid's school showed the kids this gut wrenching video animation that pretty much says humans are a pile of shit destroying the planet. The thing is a close as you can get to an ignorant politically-motivated pile of lies. She was receptive to having a conversation. I asked if we could go through a simple exercise where we would try to understand what our small town would look like if we did not use the products of evil industrialized society. Petroleum is a favorite, of course. I won't bore you with the details. Before we got done we had destroyed every forest in sight, had piles of human excrement the size of mountains, all possible fields where you could grow something in the region were dead, sources of water were polluted (human waste and other by products of inefficient source for everything) and more. At the extreme we were using horses to get around, etc. A town of a few tens of thousands of people relying on horses has a serious manure problem. We would burn trees for heat and cooking, etc. As we extrapolated this from a town of tens of thousands to cities with millions and regions with tens to hundreds of millions of people, it became very obvious that modern life (or more accurately, modern population levels) would quickly become unsustainable if we demanded that humanity abandon how we got here and embrace everything "natural" an "sustainable". She was certainly surprised to understand the scale of the problem. Once you start thinking at scale --planetary scale-- "natural" and "sustainable" quickly end-up with razed forests, depleted marine life, polluted water sources and a sky blackened with thick pollution. Not to end on a depressing note. Yes, we are doing better, have been so for decades. We just have to be careful that we don't reduce reality to single variable problems, because that isn't reality, it's a fantasy, and a dangerous one at that. Climate change is one of those. It is hard to find truth that is being discussed with honesty in the mainstream.
Hammershaft 5y ago
Have you considered the flipside, which has much more evidence for it, that denialism is being promoted by institutions and speakers who are by proxy funded by the fossil fuel industry, which is one of the largest industries on earth? I really reccomend, if you want a level headed, conservative, independent look at the issue that you check out some of these videos by Potholer54, a retired geologist and science reporter. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEylCS6-hBE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEylCS6-hBE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEylCS6-hBE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEylCS6-hBE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D99qI42KGB0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D99qI42KGB0
- robomartin 5y ago
  It is almost guaranteed this is actually happening. What should this be a surprise?

SubiculumCode 5y ago

Are you a scientist?

robomartin 5y ago
> Are you a scientist? How is that relevant to my comment?
- SubiculumCode 5y ago
  You suggest how scientists can act, their motivations, their freedom to disagree with the status quo, or those higher up the ladder in their field etc. You suggest how scientists will lose grants if they produce inconvenient science, etc etc. So I ask again. Are you a scientist? Have you written a grant application? Have you been punished? I AM a scientist, and I have never seen this hypothetical world.
  - robomartin 5y ago
    It's a matter of your field of study. Climate change, in particular, is a minefield. I am not saying what I said in a vacuum, this came out of conversations with actual climate science researchers and scientists that I had the opportunity to meet during the course of my work in aerospace. The context was a project were we were developing various systems and payloads for both the International Space Station and, eventually, the Artemis mission to the moon. The message was quite clear: In a politically charged environment you have to be very careful not to ruffle feathers. Anything from your career to your funding could be at stake. No, you are not going to find google-searchable interviews with such folks, again, that would be professional suicide. You can find information that helps understand some of the forces at play. While not a full picture, it's enough to support the plausibility of my claim. You don't have to believer me, of course. It's your prerogative. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politicization_of_science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politicization_of_science https://www.theverge.com/2017/1/19/14258474/trump-inauguration-science-politics-climate-change-vaccines https://www.theverge.com/2017/1/19/14258474/trump-inaugurati... https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/canadian-scientists-open-about-how-their-government-silenced-science-180961942/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/canadian-scien... https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/apr/17/britains-scientists-must-not-be-gagged https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/apr/17/britai... https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/358043-epa-blocks-scientists-who-get-grants-from-advisory-boards https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/358043-epa-blo... https://www.vox.com/2015/5/15/8612113/truth-climate-change https://www.vox.com/2015/5/15/8612113/truth-climate-change https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/battle-over-science-funding-gets-fiercer-in-u-s-congress/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/battle-over-scien... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214629619309119 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221462961... etc.
    - emmelaich 5y ago
      Moreover, there is really no such single thing as "climate science"; there is atmospherical physics, chemistry, meteorology, physical oceanography marine science, biology, paleobiology, the list goes on. Use google ngrams to look for "climate science". It basically doesn't occur before around 1982.

lumost 5y ago

You know, I've seen an increasing trend towards mediocrity and outright fraud across multiple public and private institutions that reward individuals based on some power law. If the author of the most cited paper in a field is going to get all the grants, and a standard "useful" paper is going to get no continued funding - then researchers will push to make their work sensational. Eventually the professors and everyone left in the field is fighting sensational with either outright fraud or alternate funding sources. Same goes for VC funding of startups, employees at companies, and government programs. The baseline "useful" work is rotting away in favor of aiming to be the top ~5-10%.

btilly 5y ago
https://www.sciencealert.com/non-replicable-studies-make-the-most-impact-scientists-find https://www.sciencealert.com/non-replicable-studies-make-the... may interest you. Papers that can't replicate get cited more than papers that can. In other words if your goal is to craft a paper that draws attention, that's harder if you're being meticulous about limiting yourself to saying to what evidence shows is clearly true.
- lumost 5y ago
  Unfortunately this will be a baseline that keeps moving. scientists compete on publications so they will make more sensationalist headlines, There will then be more sensationalist headlines to compete with forcing fraud/or irrational exuberance.

naasking 5y ago

Not sure I'm following your point. If you weigh the bad actors and financial incentives of climate change proponents against the bad actors and financial incentives on the fossil fuel side, do you think the scale tips in favour of more honesty for the fossil fuel side or climate change side? There's no doubt groupthink happens in academia on many issues, but the need to displace fossil fuels really is very important. Not just for climate change reasons, but overall human health. For instance, air pollution from fossil fuels kills tens of thousands of people every year.

goatlover 5y ago
Too bad everyone has been convinced nuclear is way worse because of a couple of accidents. That was a legitimate alternative that didn't need to wait for the 2010s to become an economically viable 15-20% of energy production.
robomartin 5y ago
No. There is no honesty anywhere, that is my point. > the need to displace fossil fuels really is very important. Why? I don't necessarily disagree. But reality isn't a problem managed through a single variable. The things you list are not singularly caused by fossil fuels. In fact, a very solid argument could be put forth about just how much uglier things might be without fossil fuels. Here's the basic math someone would have to do before making the assertion that the elimination of fossil fuels --as a single causally-connected variable-- would make things better: The simplest (well, not so simple) calculation is that, while we might eliminate fossil fuels we do not eliminate the need for the energy they provide. In other words, in rough terms, you still have to explain how we would generate, harness, create, transport and distribute a certain amount of energy per unit time (hour, day, week, month, year, whatever). In fact, I think we can, in historical terms, state that energy requirements increase over time, they do not decrease. The next element of the story is how we are going to replace the massive number of byproducts of fossil fuels that modern life pretty much depends on. We know that making complex hydrocarbons any other way is in a range between highly inefficient (which would increase the aforementioned energy requirement) and impossible. My point --in stressing that reality is a rather complex multivariate problem-- is that, while it would be nice to think of a desirable reality without fossil fuels, in the real reality (just go with it) this is much more of an aspirational thing than an attainable objective. The same is the case with electric vehicles. I have yet to see someone do the math on the total daily energy requirement of the installed fossil-fuel based vehicle fleet and explain how on earth (literally) we are going to generate that much energy without causing even more problems. Our current electrical grid is designed for current energy requirements (and power requirement, which is equally important). The current system, in any country I know of, doesn't magically have an extra 100% in power/energy generation capacity to support every vehicle going electric. Reality: A multivariate problem. You push here and it pulls there. Not so simple. > For instance, air pollution from fossil fuels kills tens of thousands of people every year. Fair enough. Containerships, as a simple example, burn bunker fuel, one of the nastiest things you can burn. They are singularly responsible for more pollution along certain vectors than the entirety of the ground transportation industry. And yet we do nothing about it. Why? I can only guess. Part of it has got to be a case of "well, what we have works". The other issue --which I think is very real-- is that bunker fuel is, quite literally, the bottom of the barrel. It is what is left after you extract everything else from petroleum. So, next Monday we stop using bunker fuel everywhere in the world. No problem. Right? Wrong. You see, all the other oil byproducts are still needed. Which means that the bottom of the barrel...the bunker fuel...would still be produced in absolutely massive quantities. Except now we are not using it, because we want to clean-up the planet. Wait a minute. What do we do with it? Well, we likely have to bury the stuff, dump it somewhere, make huge mountain-sized piles out of it. We would now use massive amounts of fuel (yes, everything is "massive") to run the machines that have to haul and manipulate this stuff. We also have to devote massive (sorry) resources, land and ecosystems to burying what we are not using. Where it goes from there I cannot even guess. Once again, reality isn't a single variable problem. Bunker fuel == bad? Yes, no, maybe, hard to say. Because the alternative could be worse, far worse. This is precisely what I don't see treated fairly these days. Imagine a politician taking the time and making the effort to fully analyze and understand the bunker fuel ecosystem and also taking the time to present this analysis to the voting public. Good luck. It is far easier to say "bunker fuel == bad", get votes, stay in office and move on. It's easy to show how horrible the stuff is (and it is!). It is impossible to show how much worse things could be if we don't fully understand what reality looks without it. I'll overstay my welcome and give another example from real life. A number of years ago a well-intentioned yet mathematically-challenged "science" teacher at my kid's school showed the kids this gut wrenching video animation that pretty much says humans are a pile of shit destroying the planet. The thing is a close as you can get to an ignorant politically-motivated pile of lies. She was receptive to having a conversation. I asked if we could go through a simple exercise where we would try to understand what our small town would look like if we did not use the products of evil industrialized society. Petroleum is a favorite, of course. I won't bore you with the details. Before we got done we had destroyed every forest in sight, had piles of human excrement the size of mountains, all possible fields where you could grow something in the region were dead, sources of water were polluted (human waste and other by products of inefficient source for everything) and more. At the extreme we were using horses to get around, etc. A town of a few tens of thousands of people relying on horses has a serious manure problem. We would burn trees for heat and cooking, etc. As we extrapolated this from a town of tens of thousands to cities with millions and regions with tens to hundreds of millions of people, it became very obvious that modern life (or more accurately, modern population levels) would quickly become unsustainable if we demanded that humanity abandon how we got here and embrace everything "natural" an "sustainable". She was certainly surprised to understand the scale of the problem. Once you start thinking at scale --planetary scale-- "natural" and "sustainable" quickly end-up with razed forests, depleted marine life, polluted water sources and a sky blackened with thick pollution. Not to end on a depressing note. Yes, we are doing better, have been so for decades. We just have to be careful that we don't reduce reality to single variable problems, because that isn't reality, it's a fantasy, and a dangerous one at that. Climate change is one of those. It is hard to find truth that is being discussed with honesty in the mainstream.

Hammershaft 5y ago

Have you considered the flipside, which has much more evidence for it, that denialism is being promoted by institutions and speakers who are by proxy funded by the fossil fuel industry, which is one of the largest industries on earth? I really reccomend, if you want a level headed, conservative, independent look at the issue that you check out some of these videos by Potholer54, a retired geologist and science reporter. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEylCS6-hBE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEylCS6-hBE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEylCS6-hBE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEylCS6-hBE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D99qI42KGB0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D99qI42KGB0

robomartin 5y ago
It is almost guaranteed this is actually happening. What should this be a surprise?