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If cooking up a sensational metric does the trick then why not? Because you turn away people. I'm a conservationist that just happens to think regardless of c

by 300bps 13y ago

If cooking up a sensational metric does the trick then why not? Because you turn away people. I'm a conservationist that just happens to think regardless of climate change that it just makes sense to preserve finite resources like fossil fuels and clean air. When you start to use bullshit to further our similar cause, then you hurt our cause when the bullshit is exposed. I actually saw the headline and excitedly clicked on it. I was excited because with all the talk of climate change I feel like I never see anything other than abstract predictions of "x degree C raise in global temperature". I thought FINALLY tell me when coastal regions of New Jersey are going to be permanently underwater. No such luck - more abstract bullshit masquerading as something it's not. You have no idea how much this hurts people's belief in climate issues.

hyperbovine 13y ago
Well, "abstract bullshit" is a bit strong; real scientific effort went into the paper and those models certainly have some predictive power. (Contrary to what you occasionally see online, it's still damn near impossible to publish bullshit in Nature or Science.) If anything they are guilty of framing their results in the most arresting manner possible, but hey, welcome to science in the 21st century. Plus, something tells me that this episode has not truly shaken your belief in climate change :-) If this paper leads a few thousand skeptics to finally embrace science, I view that as a win.
- aaronem 13y ago
  > (Contrary to what you occasionally see online, it's still damn near impossible to publish bullshit in Nature or Science.) Ahem: "An integrated encyclopedia of DNA elements in the human genome" [1], published in Nature (they published in Science too but I don't have the cite handy) -- masterfully demolished [2] by Graur et al. You might say that the ENCODE paper's authors "are guilty of framing their results in the most arresting manner possible". You might also say, inflammatory as it would probably be, that their results are "bullshit"; Graur et al. certainly seem to have taken that view, if not in such earthy fashion, and they did an excellent job of demonstrating in exhaustive detail exactly why that's so. (If you're at all familiar with the ENCODE work, but haven't read "On the Immortality of Television Sets", I strongly recommend you do so -- and that goes double if you've seen the reams of garbage in the popular science press about "the death of junk DNA".) Climate science, of course, is a much more generally contentious field than bioinformatics, and much political power attaches to it; one does not, after all, often find governments writing policy on the basis of a bioinformatics consortium's latest recommendations, while such behavior is the status quo in climate science. Were that otherwise, one wonders whether Graur and his co-authors would've found themselves unable to publish in GB&E or any recognized journal, and had to resort to doing so on a website of their own. Perhaps they could name it "Genomics Audit". As for laymen such as myself, a mere software engineer without a day's worth of tertiary education to his name, well -- all I can say is that, while evaluating the evidence for and against AGW (climate change, whatever) and developing an informed opinion of any sort requires enormous intelligence and domain knowledge, spotting propaganda does not, and neither does mistrusting propaganda once spotted. Your comment here verges upon an argument that propaganda is only evil when unvirtuously engaged in; that is, that the ends justify the means. I suggest that fallacy inheres within this line of reasoning, and that even a superficial review of the history of the 20th century suffices as demonstration. Perhaps you disagree. [1] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v489/n7414/full/nature11247.html http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v489/n7414/full/nature1... [2] http://gbe.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2013/02/20/gbe.evt028.short http://gbe.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2013/02/20/gbe.e...
- yummyfajitas 13y ago
  Bullshit does drive thinking people away. The assorted levels of BS I've seen did convince me to be far more skeptical of climate change. I assigned a high probability to the AGW hypothesis when I started grad school, but was well below 95% confident when I graduated, and have become even more skeptical since then. Bits of shadiness that have pushed me away: - When I started reading papers on climate simulation (I was also solving wave equations numerically), I started seeing wildly unjustified assumptions in climate modelling papers. In spite of the obvious flaws, the models are portrayed as highly accurate rather than merely the best than can be done on current hardware [1]. This reduced my confidence by a bit. - Odd claims about the validity of the models. GCM models + economic analysis suggests that the cheapest method of mitigating climate change is geoengineering (specifically, using human engineered pinatubo-style forcings). Yet geoengineering is dismissed as wildly unpredictable. Either GCM is an effective model, or it's not. If not, we have no counterfactual to compare to the historical record. - Climategate. That's not how science is done. Yet rather than cleaning house, double checking everything and forcing the perpetrators out in disgrace, everyone rallied around them. That feels more like politics than science. This paper is just using models and getting headlines. It's not a big deal. But throwing nonsense at people in an effort to get them to accept your claims is a bad idea, particularly when the primary argument is an argument from authority. [1] Making unrealistic assumptions and doing the best you can is just a part of science. I object only to portraying toy models as the real world.

by 300bps 13y ago

hyperbovine 13y ago

Well, "abstract bullshit" is a bit strong; real scientific effort went into the paper and those models certainly have some predictive power. (Contrary to what you occasionally see online, it's still damn near impossible to publish bullshit in Nature or Science.) If anything they are guilty of framing their results in the most arresting manner possible, but hey, welcome to science in the 21st century. Plus, something tells me that this episode has not truly shaken your belief in climate change :-) If this paper leads a few thousand skeptics to finally embrace science, I view that as a win.

aaronem 13y ago
> (Contrary to what you occasionally see online, it's still damn near impossible to publish bullshit in Nature or Science.) Ahem: "An integrated encyclopedia of DNA elements in the human genome" [1], published in Nature (they published in Science too but I don't have the cite handy) -- masterfully demolished [2] by Graur et al. You might say that the ENCODE paper's authors "are guilty of framing their results in the most arresting manner possible". You might also say, inflammatory as it would probably be, that their results are "bullshit"; Graur et al. certainly seem to have taken that view, if not in such earthy fashion, and they did an excellent job of demonstrating in exhaustive detail exactly why that's so. (If you're at all familiar with the ENCODE work, but haven't read "On the Immortality of Television Sets", I strongly recommend you do so -- and that goes double if you've seen the reams of garbage in the popular science press about "the death of junk DNA".) Climate science, of course, is a much more generally contentious field than bioinformatics, and much political power attaches to it; one does not, after all, often find governments writing policy on the basis of a bioinformatics consortium's latest recommendations, while such behavior is the status quo in climate science. Were that otherwise, one wonders whether Graur and his co-authors would've found themselves unable to publish in GB&E or any recognized journal, and had to resort to doing so on a website of their own. Perhaps they could name it "Genomics Audit". As for laymen such as myself, a mere software engineer without a day's worth of tertiary education to his name, well -- all I can say is that, while evaluating the evidence for and against AGW (climate change, whatever) and developing an informed opinion of any sort requires enormous intelligence and domain knowledge, spotting propaganda does not, and neither does mistrusting propaganda once spotted. Your comment here verges upon an argument that propaganda is only evil when unvirtuously engaged in; that is, that the ends justify the means. I suggest that fallacy inheres within this line of reasoning, and that even a superficial review of the history of the 20th century suffices as demonstration. Perhaps you disagree. [1] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v489/n7414/full/nature11247.html http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v489/n7414/full/nature1... [2] http://gbe.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2013/02/20/gbe.evt028.short http://gbe.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2013/02/20/gbe.e...
yummyfajitas 13y ago
Bullshit does drive thinking people away. The assorted levels of BS I've seen did convince me to be far more skeptical of climate change. I assigned a high probability to the AGW hypothesis when I started grad school, but was well below 95% confident when I graduated, and have become even more skeptical since then. Bits of shadiness that have pushed me away: - When I started reading papers on climate simulation (I was also solving wave equations numerically), I started seeing wildly unjustified assumptions in climate modelling papers. In spite of the obvious flaws, the models are portrayed as highly accurate rather than merely the best than can be done on current hardware [1]. This reduced my confidence by a bit. - Odd claims about the validity of the models. GCM models + economic analysis suggests that the cheapest method of mitigating climate change is geoengineering (specifically, using human engineered pinatubo-style forcings). Yet geoengineering is dismissed as wildly unpredictable. Either GCM is an effective model, or it's not. If not, we have no counterfactual to compare to the historical record. - Climategate. That's not how science is done. Yet rather than cleaning house, double checking everything and forcing the perpetrators out in disgrace, everyone rallied around them. That feels more like politics than science. This paper is just using models and getting headlines. It's not a big deal. But throwing nonsense at people in an effort to get them to accept your claims is a bad idea, particularly when the primary argument is an argument from authority. [1] Making unrealistic assumptions and doing the best you can is just a part of science. I object only to portraying toy models as the real world.