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As we should. Climate scientists consistently underestimate the impact and speed of climate change. It's funny how the measured mass of the electron being revi
by schiffern 2y ago
As we should. Climate scientists consistently underestimate the impact and speed of climate change.
It's funny how the measured mass of the electron being revised monotonically upward is literally Feynman's textbook example to a priori detect fudged scientific data[1], but when we see climate impacts continually revised upward—decade after decade—we just smile and nod.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_drop_experiment#Millikan's_experiment_as_an_example_of_psychological_effects_in_scientific_methodology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_drop_experiment#Millikan's...
- 8bitsrule 2y agoTaken as a whole, scientists are fairly open to new evidence, but conservative about making non-orthodox claims about that evidence. Climate research is harder because it's a slow-moving phenomenon. 'People all over' are not in a position to understand that. 'People' also tend to be slow at recognizing how much different their lives are from those a century ago - because of science discoveries. Taking away all those advantages for a while would put a quick stop to most of their negativity. So what they think is not terribly significant.
- schiffern 2y agoThe problem is not epistemological conservatism in general. The problem is that in this case climate uniformity is (rather arbitrarily) assigned as the null hypothesis, which leads to systematic underestimation. This is conveniently (and, we are to believe, coincidentally) in line with political and business pressures facing science faculty, namely accusations of 'alarmism.' As for fantasizing about punishing people for observing bias in science (again using Feynman's own test) by taking away their iPads and vaccines, that's not even worth responding to, let alone an argument.