http://www.space.com/28912-mistakes-people-make-when-arguing-science.html

Good article. I've got a couple more pet fallacies/mistakes to add to his list:

a) Correlation is not causation.

b) Evidence is not "proof."

c) There is no such thing as "settled science."

d) Just because some "respected scientist" says it's so, doesn't necessarily mean it's so.

and finally, OBW's Law:

e) Everyone is stupid about something. Even scientists.

 

Good article. I've got a couple more pet fallacies/mistakes to add to his list:

a) Correlation is not causation.

b) Evidence is not "proof."

c) There is no such thing as "settled science."

d) Just because some "respected scientist" says it's so, doesn't necessarily mean it's so.

and finally, OBW's Law:

e) Everyone is stupid about something. Even scientists.

I would add to that list:

f) Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence

 

I must be getting old, I forgot that one...

 

The biggest scientific controversy right now is climate change.

I wouldn't use the word scientific with climate change. To date, NO ONE as replicated ANY hypothesis done by another. All they had was a big circle jerk. Here's my data, here's my results, and here's the algorithm. See if you can "replicate" my answers.

The news was driven by a member of the eco terrorist group called greenpeace. Plying his release of studies obtained from using the FOIA requests because some universities receive public funding and must comply with FOIA requests concerning the use of that money.

In the senate, there will be two "climate" scientists one on each side of the issue, one receiving funding from the government (the climate change fanatics) and the other from private industry (not the climate change fanatics) being grilled by the senators who disagree with their opine. I believe the government should fund scientific R&D, and not play on man's credulity.

I like the two links provided by #12 and cmartinez. #12's link shows the political nature in this beast.

We had global warming between the ICE age and the Little ICE age. We are in the period, according to some experts, that preceeded the "little ice age."

I think mankind is too arrogant to think they can "change the climate". The difference between climatologists and cosmetologists is the cosmetologists can produce reproducible results.

Yes, I know that some think that HAARP did some climate damage as well as some "mind" control.

Global Warming's name change to Climate Change was to keep the government funding alive, no matter how bad the "scientists" predictive abilities may turn out.

I wonder how Oppenheimer and Fermi would have faired if the Atom Bomb was a dud.

 

I disagree.....they never get my hair right.

 

I disagree.....they never get my hair right.

Maybe it's a language issue. You speak one and they hear another.

 

Why do you have such blind faith in science?

The biggest scientific controversy right now is climate change.

The experimental evidence for this is computer modelling.

I can feed the same data into my computer and get the same results.

Did I replicate a scientific experiment?

Those models said the temp should have gone up the last 18 years.

Does this cause concern?

This is the undeniable scientific proof to control all your activity and assign responsibility for pass transgressions.

We have endangered the earth and our children, and equality and balance must be restored.

Sound familiar?

Using your example is a good way to show the problems of putting too much faith in a mathematically derived theoretical value over a actual as life happened real events. What I am referring to is like the saying of 'Theory says reality and theory are the same. Reality rarely agrees.'

For example say I take the real life daily temperature maximums for 365 days in a row that range from -21F to + 110F and do that for a number of years and came up with a longer term average that says each years average was increasing by .1F.

Sounds like a trend, BUT heres the problem for those mathematical sets. Say that from year to year 340 of those daily high temps are same, they just occurred on different days than previous years, but there are 25 of them that were the lowest the year before but now all fall between -21F and -10F opposed to them all being -21F.

Statistically the average value for the year went up but in reality the only change was that the 25 bottom lowest values were slightly higher than their previous years numbers. Nothing else in the set changed.

To further complicate things say that for every set of 365 readings that a handful of individual values from the lower half of the readings went up 1 - 3 units every year.

Thats where the climate change and warming issue falls apart. Mathematically there is a derived value that is changing but in reality the actual upper temperature values for the highest days may have never changed.
In fact if enough of the lower end values go up the upper end values could actually be lower yet the statistical average would suggest that everything got warmer even though in reality the only change may be that there were less extremely low temperature values during the winter time periods.

Well that's how I see things from a farmers perspective that works on a degree days principle based on what falls between the upper and lower acceptable seasonal working limits rather than a statistical yearly average. Basically my winters were warmer in my model thus raising the yearly average value without the peak summer values ever going outside their normal expected limits.

 

The best data for global warming is to simply look at the warming that has taken place over the last 10,000 years. Some temperature measurements are directly taken with accurate measurements and others are taken from temperature proxies. Guess what? The two converge, and are in a great degree in agreement with predictions. 2014 is officially the warmest years on record, and despite a colder than usual six weeks in eastern North America (meanwhile western North America swealtered under record heat) the 2014-2015 winter is officially the warmest on record. All of this was predicted by the science. So, those of us who review and accept the science aren't 'blindly' following the scientists, but making our conclusions by observing the facts on the ground.

 

Over the last 10,000 years? Who recorded the temperature 10,000 years ago? What was the accuracy of their instruments? I know it's a "best guess", both in timing (10k years) and temperature. Then there is the accuracy of the weather sites. More than half of the sites have the largest error. With noise like that, you have lots of room to fudge a figure more to your liking to keep government funding flowing.

There are not enough probes to extrapolate a "global" trend.

 

Temperature proxies were used for temperature measurements 10,000 years ago (Just as I already stated) Various proxies were taken (ice cores, sediment cores, etc) and correlated. But as I said, the best evidence is how the measurements converge with recent accurate measurements. Modern instrumentation is very accurate. Anyone claiming errors exaggerate.

 

Then why does both all the proxy data and the all modern accurate data have to be altered to get the convergence?

 

Over the last 10,000 years? Who recorded the temperature 10,000 years ago? What was the accuracy of their instruments? I know it's a "best guess", both in timing (10k years) and temperature.

A fascinating and complex story:
http://www.aip.org/history/climate/cycles.htm

 

Then why does both all the proxy data and the all modern accurate data have to be altered to get the convergence?

That's a bad assumption. Various proxies are included and averaging and filtering applied. This is not inconsistent with how data is recorded and analyzed in many other fields. Here is the process used in one analysis. Note there is no 'altering' in the process.

Marcott et al. took 73 proxy data sets distributed around the globe and combined them to form an historical temperature reconstruction. Their approach differs from that of others in some important respects. First, the proxy data were already converted to temperature estimates before being combined into a reconstruction. Second, since most dates were estimated by radiocarbon dating, dates were re-computed using the most up-to-date calibration (the “Calib6.0.1″ program using the “IntCal09″ data). Third, most of their proxy data sets are ocean-based rather than land-based, making for a more representative global picture.
Fourth, since their purpose is to understand what happened in the past 11,300 years their data have a time coverage concentrated on the past rather than the present. In fact the data coverage is much better for the distant past then the last century, since all 73 proxies overlap in time during the period from 5500 to 4500 years ago (a.k.a. “BP” for “before present”, where “present” is the usual choice in such studies, the year 1950) but only 18 proxies extend all the way to the year 1940 (the final year of the reconstruction).
This is in sharp contrast to other reconstructions, for which it is usual that data coverage shrinks to ever smaller numbers of proxies the further back one goes in time; for the Marcott et al. reconstruction data coverage shrinks as one gets closer to the present. But that’s not such a problem because we already know how temperature changed in the 20th century.
The proxy data sets were aligned to match during their common period of overlap, 5500 to 4500 BP (calendar years -3550 to -2550). Then they were combined in a number of ways. The “main” method (if there is one) was to use the data to estimate gridded temperature on a 5×5 degree latitude-longitude grid, then compute an area-weighted average. The same procedure was also applied using a 30×30 degree latitude-longitude grid. They also estimated averages over latitude bands covering 10 degrees, and area-weighted averages of that. In addition, they applied RegEM (regularized expectation maximization) to infill gaps before computing the area-weighted gridded averages. They also computed a simple average of all the proxy data (without area weighting), both for the unadorned proxy data and after infilling with RegEM, giving results similar to the area-weighted averages (which argues for good geographic distribution of proxies). They also computed averages by the “jackknife,” where multiple reconstructions with randomly chosen proxies omitted are averaged.

 

OK, here is my input, long term and short term.

Long term - Over the last 2000 years, the human race has been insane.

Short term - The barbers with tattoos, cut my hair better than the barbers without tattoos.

Hmmmm.

 

I've always been challenged to use the words experts in place of professionals. Professionals may not take offense to the fact that you just pointed out one error and an error is an error regardless.

The difference between and expert and a professional. Expert (Is a drip under pressure) very likely to give you an answer even though it's wrong and never agreeing or apologizing; even after you point it out.

A professional (Will acknowledge their errors for what they are; knowing to error is human.) and will then try to correct that for future reference.

The expert trudges on in self abided ignorance.

kv

 

I've always been challenged to use the words experts in place of professionals. Professionals may not take offense to the fact that you just pointed out one error and an error is an error regardless.

The difference between and expert and a professional. Expert (Is a drip under pressure) very likely to give you an answer even though it's wrong and never agreeing or apologizing; even after you point it out.

A professional (Will acknowledge their errors for what they are; knowing to error is human.) and will then try to correct that for future reference.

The expert trudges on in self abided ignorance.

kv

An expert is a person that knows more and more, about less and less... until he ends up knowing everything about nothing...

 

I've always been challenged to use the words experts in place of professionals. Professionals may not take offense to the fact that you just pointed out one error and an error is an error regardless.

The difference between and expert and a professional. Expert (Is a drip under pressure) very likely to give you an answer even though it's wrong and never agreeing or apologizing; even after you point it out.

A professional (Will acknowledge their errors for what they are; knowing to error is human.) and will then try to correct that for future reference.

The expert trudges on in self abided ignorance.

Then there is the other half of the problem. The persons who will keep asking the same questions over and over until they get the answer they want even if it s wrong one or they ask questions that are so dumb there is no rational answer for them or that have questions that have answers so far over their ability to grasp they can not possibly follow along.

 

Then there is the other half of the problem. The persons who will keep asking the same questions over and over until they get the answer they want even if it s wrong one or they ask questions that are so dumb there is no rational answer for them or that have questions that have answers so far over their ability to grasp they can not possibly follow along.

Thats why I hate asking questions of certain people on ETO or AAC; you might get an answer.

If I do ask out of aggravation; sometimes I'm sorry I asked and yes sometimes an answer can be like a cement truck.

First your hit in the face by the magnitude in volume and pressure and quickly sets up; now your permanently stuck in it's grip. All the while, other people are cutting you to pieces and throwing your rotting bits into the abyss.


Oh, out of curiosity is that your "Expert" or "Professional" opinion?

kv

 

as already mentioned, scientific method is sound. Problem is people, need for money and manipulative statistics.

People are concentrating on the wrong thing with climate change and our overlords are happy, while we are fighting over whether it is true or not, there is no doubts of the harmful effects of pollution on our health on global scale. Toxic run offs, destruction of our water resources etc etc. Those are of much bigger concern to us both short and long-term than if global temp is rising or falling and what is causing it.

My favourite example of flawed science is yearly flu vaccines...

http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-pers...s-raises-questions-about-flu-vaccine-efficacy

"Applying very strict criteria to filter out potential bias and confounding, a US research team sifted more than 5,000 studies and found only 31 that they felt provided reliable evidence about the efficacy and effectiveness of flu vaccines. The findings were published online today by Lancet Infectious Diseases."

follow the money!

 

Oh, out of curiosity is that your "Expert" or "Professional" opinion?

That is my experienced opinion. I do not consider myself to be an expert or professional being I can actually adapt and change to new information as it presents its validity.