I reserve the right to form my own opinion of everything, and to change my opinion as I see fit, despite the opinions of others and regardless of their expertise.
Now, before you brand me a science heretic, don't you do the same?

Sounds like Adam from Mythbusters

I reject your reality and substitute my own

kv

Edit: Love that Show

 

Sounds like Adam from Mythbusters

I haven't watched the show much, but I agree that my attitude is much like Adam's.

We all have differing perceptions of reality, and there is no plumbing the depths of those differences. For example, I may choose to believe Theory Y while others believe Theory X. Theory X followers see my position as illogical, and state their reasons for their opinion. However, my opinion of their reasons may be that they are illogical, and I state the basis for my opinion. I may quote sources that refute their opinion, and they opine that my sources are flawed, to which I reply that their understanding of my sources is inadequate, etc., ad infinitum.

What it all comes down to (in my opinion,) is that men "don't know what they don't know;" thus, their (my) belief system is always based upon limited knowledge, and they (I) are (am) without a clue as to how limited their (my) knowledge really is.

 

I guess that lays a burden of responsibility on those who know better...

Like one of the Kardashians? Only difference is McCarthy is better looking.

 

Like one of the Kardashians? Only difference is McCarthy is better looking.

Oh my... now that's what I call authority...
Thanks man, I needed a laugh.

 

Brownout,

Yes, I believe the climate is changing. I see it happening every day.

What bothers me the most is statements that were morphed, to keep or get funding.

from <<http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrybe...-s-intergovernmental-panel-on-climate-change/

Political summary editing processes usually progress through a series of drafts that become increasingly media-worthy. For example, the original text of an April 2000 Third Assessment Report (TAR) draft stated: “There has been a discernible human influence on global climate.” That was followed by an October version that concluded: “It is likely that increasing concentrations of anthropogenic greenhouse gases have contributed significantly to observed warming over the past 50 years.” Then in the final official summary, the language was toughened up even more: “Most of the observed warming over the past 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations.”

What bothers me the most is statements that were morphed, to get increased funding. Yes that happened fifteen years ago, but I'm such a cynic that I think the climatologists only polished up their act. Discarding data that does not support the desired result is gundecking the public record.

from http://www.factcheck.org/2015/02/nothing-false-about-temperature-data/

If the above is the real data in the U.S. a 0.6 C change in either direction is well below the "noise" of the data. If we were talking a radio signal, it would be -16 dB S+N/N.

We are talking about billions of dollars being spent ... on sketchy research. Like I said, Fermi, Oppenheimer, and the rest of the Manhattan project people would have been raked over the political coals if their efforts didn't produce results.

We can go back and get their dire predictions from the previous decades and see how well our prestigious climatologists fared with reality. We could identify which one came the closest and then write our congressional critters stating that according to the record, xxx's estimates were the best.

Do I wish the climatologists ethics were beyond reproach? Sure. Unfortunately they are human, and receiving funding, so they just may have a self-fulfilling prophecy effect.

 

If the above is the real data in the U.S. a 0.6 C change in either direction is well below the "noise" of the data. If we were talking a radio signal, it would be -16 dB S+N/N.

Bingo! That simple mathematical comparison of supposed change Vs statistical noise was the breaking point for me changing sides from being a believer to being highly skeptical and having stayed that way ever since. When the unbiased data says we had a change of +1 +- 4 F that pretty much tells me nothing of actual significance is happening.

That and the fact that the climate has and always will be changing at any point and at any time makes it pretty hard to convince me of anything. Iv'e been on the planet for nearly 41 years now living in the same township for 37 of it and I have seen our local climate go from heavy snow in the winter and hard drought in the summer to no snow in the winter and heavy rains in the summer and back again already.

Ask my grandparents who have been in the same area for over 80 years and they too will tell you the same thing. The climate here has went one way then the other several times and so far to date none of it has been life altering to any degree. Inconvenient and hard to put up with sometimes more than others but then that sort of what nature does best anyway.

Take politics, big business, and ignorance out of the debate and there's really nothing all that noteworthy on the grand planetary scale of things. A living planet just doing what it does best. Change just like we do as we live and grow.

 

This has been a really good discussion and I have found it really interesting. One of the earliest posts mentioned that if you can independently repeat an experiment then a scientific fact has been found. There have been frauds and results fudged for a long time which is understandable since scientists are human and they have egos and need to feed their families just like all of us. But putting that aside the thing that bothers me is that physical results always contain errors. So we are left with trying to define "close enough" to qualify as a repeat result. That used to be easier when Newton was getting hit on the head by the proverbial apple. But now days science is relying more and more on statistics to define close enough. As JoeJester points out a couple posts back most people don't really understand statistics. I took a class or two and taught math too but can't claim to be an expert. Originally the folks at CERN declared that they had verified the Higgs Boson actually exists. Did they have one in a bottle to show? No, they determined that the signal they had measured had a 1 in 3.5 million chance of not being from a real Higgs. That's based on the so called 5 sigma threshold. More recently a CERN physicist has raised concern about this not being a strict enough criteria. How am I to judge? As soon as politicians get involved my immediate reaction is to not believe there results. Too much self interest in their arguments. BTW the CERN collider has been upgraded so it can refine their results but it is currently broken due to an intermittent short. Sound familiar? Sympathies to those trying to troubleshoot this beast: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/short-circuit-delays-restart-of-the-large-hadron-collider/

 

What bothers me the most is statements that were morphed, to keep or get funding.

Let me see if I have this straight. The TAR draft was edited before publishing, and you think there is something wrong with that. Have you ever written a report? Did you publish your first draft, or did you edit and polish it before publishing? Now here the researchers are being called out for doing what is proper and correct; draft, edit and polish a report before making it public. Anyone who wants to publish a good paper would follow exactly the same procedure. In addition, I'm sure the draft was reviewed and the final draft reflects comments and suggestions from the reviewers. I can see no evil "conspiracy" lurking here. And how do you know the changes were to get funding? Can you explain exactly how big an increase in funding resulted form the changes? Who authorized the increase? How was the increase distributed? My guess is you're injecting your favorite argument without knowing the motivation behind the changes. The changes could be to make the statement more clear, more direct, more accurate... Lots of reasons they would change the wording, but what didn't change is the meaning. All version are saying the same thing; that warming is likely caused by man-made CO2 in the atmosphere. That fact didn't change from one version to the others. At MOST, they changed one word from discernible to most. But that hardly qualifies as a scandal. If this is what critics have, then they have basically nothings.

And how do you get -16 db S/N? What are the raw numbers you used in your calculation? You surely didn't get that from the graphs you showed. You can't possible extract raw numbers from them, given you can't tell any difference at all in the values from almost zero to +/- 1 C for most of the domain. Again, I believe your fudge the numbers. Poor analysis work like that is what really leads me to disbelieve the critics.

And so, your whole argument is that since researchers are paid, then they are corrupt. Are only researchers who work for free to be believed? So, are all paid researchers corrupt, or does that only apply to climate researchers? It must be only for climate researchers, because I never hear the same standard applied to physicists, economists, mathematicians, sociologists, meteorologists, biologists, paleontologists, archaeologists, neurologists, etc. That is, unless they express support for the science of Climate Change/AGW, then those individuals and only those individuals are charged with being corrupted by money.

However, I can demonstrate how critics are paid directly for publishing work critical of science. Harvard-Smithsonian engineer Willie Soon is a leading anti Climate Change blogger. His paper that charges IPCC scientists with using flawed measurements and purposely misrepresenting data to falsely show increasing temperature has become the hallmark work for many other skeptics to cite for their 'proof' of the supposed widespread flawed science. Now we learned that he receives money from the oil and gas industry, Exon, Mobile, American Petroleum, to the tune of > 1 million $$$, a fact that he never disclosed. If the scientists were only in it for the money, the other side pays very, very well. They wouldn't need to do any real science, just write critical blogs and get their payday. Why rely on grant money when the largess flows from industry. Another example; Sen James Inhoff, noted Climate Change deniner who receives millions in campaign funds from oil and gas to 'influence' his opinions. No climate science consortium has politicians on their payroll.

 

What bothers me the most is statements that were morphed, to get increased funding. Yes that happened fifteen years ago, but I'm such a cynic that I think the climatologists only polished up their act. Discarding data that does not support the desired result is gundecking the public record.

from http://www.factcheck.org/2015/02/nothing-false-about-temperature-data/

If the above is the real data in the U.S. a 0.6 C change in either direction is well below the "noise" of the data. If we were talking a radio signal, it would be -16 dB S+N/N.

If the above is the real data in the U.S. a 0.6 C change in either direction is well below the "noise" of the data. If we were talking a radio signal, it would be -16 dB S+N/N.

These are not temperature data, there should be NO signal!

This is the most brilliant example of confirmation bias I have ever seen! You appear to have found a plot of something with no trend, so you assume it is temperature. Go and read the article that these plots come from http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2011JD016187/full
and you will discover that the caption to the figure reads:

Figure 8.
Magnitude and timing of shifts identified by the pairwise homogenization algorithm for (a) non-U.S. stations and (b) stations in the U.S. Bias corrections to USHCN stations are applied to maximum and minimum monthly temperature with subsequent averaging to produce monthly mean temperature

Homogenization is the statistical process they apply to raw temperature records to correct for artificial offsets to readings, e.g. moving the station, encroaching buildings etc.. This attracts criticism as it is always possible to cherry pick the results and show half a dozen weather stations that it adds a warming trend to. What they are showing in this picture is that their process of homogenization has no obvious bias!

These are not temperature records, they are corrections applied to temperature records. The picture shows the corrections are unbiased.

It's not BINGO, it's not even your first number.

 

...One of the earliest posts mentioned that if you can independently repeat an experiment then a scientific fact has been found...

That was me, actually... and I agree with all of what you've just said. But what's missing is... well... it's what's missing ... When Newton developed his theory of physics and gravitation (preceded in a more primitive way by Galileo) everyone knew that it wasn't perfect... In particular there already was measurable evidence showing anomalies regarding the orbit of Mercury. And it wasn't until Einstein came along that his new and improved theory of relativity explained gravity and space-time in far greater detail than Newton that the Mercury anomaly was explained... And yet there still are anomalies out there that cannot be explained by either general relativity or quantum physics either...

No one has all the time in the world available to verify every single scientific claim, or to replicate every experiment to check all theories or "laws" out there... In the end we all have to recognize some basic form of authority in the process of learning things, or we'd never get anywhere.
But even recognized authority needs to be challenged every once in a while... or our wisdom, knowledge and understanding would become stagnant and pointless... I can't help but think of the last two books of the Dune series by Frank Herbert.

Unfortunately most of us suck when it comes to practicing the science of personal improvement.

In Max Plank's words:
"A scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."

Human understanding is always growing, changing and evolving... that's what I wanted to explore when I started this thread.

Good night to you all

 

The crux of the problem is man's ego. He refuses to accept his own limitations, and continues to try to separate "facts" from "opinions," when they are indistinguishable by a finite mind.

 

The crux of the problem is man's ego. He refuses to accept his own limitations, and continues to try to separate "facts" from "opinions," when they are indistinguishable by a finite mind.

And the frame of reference a person has when they interpret data. For example, we had two sales people look at the same opportunity - one said, "nobody uses this product in their process, no opportunity here", the next sales person says, "nobody uses this product in their process yet, huge opportunity here."

 

Brownout,

Editing it one thing. The escalation from "discernible human influence" to "anthropogenic greenhouse gases have contributed significantly" to "is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations" sounds like it's more agenda/funding influenced.

I don't have access to the three drafts to get the "Paul Harvey."

You may be able to demonstrate those "critics" of this are paid by the opposition, and yet, those in favor are paid via government funding and a politico who has an agenda as well. I can recall Senator Robert Byrd stating that as "chair" of the Senate Finance Committee, he alone will decide where the majority of the funding goes. Just because funding is passed by the Legislature, the Executive requested that funding and will distribute that funding. The political animal trading votes is common. I've seen instances of a Senator getting an agency twice as much money then requested and then follow the money to ensure it all went business' in their state.

This is nothing new and it's been told about a position with the "sole source" Apollo program contractor whose main function was to tract every dollar spent by congressional district, so when the testimony is required, they can "demonstrate" that every congressional district got some funding from the program.

For the record, I am not affiliated, nor receive any funding from anyone concerning this issue. It is my opinion based on all I've read from various sources.

 

I'm still waiting for you to show me how money has influenced the numbers or published research. All you've been able to do is repeat innuendo, which is neither evidence not proof of anything. All professionals get paid; that's the definition of being professional. And yet, we don't repeatedly charge other professionals (without evidence or proof) of being corrupt by virtue of getting paid for what they do. And I guess you missed the part in your article where volunteer organizations review and approve the data and analysis. Volunteer means not getting paid, by any source including government, industry or other private funds. Add to that the vast number of university scientists and graduate students/research assistance who conduct their research and/or review and write countless articles, who are paid very little for their efforts. What motivates them? Might it be to do good science? That is a much better possibility, especially considering that the oil and gas industry pays very well, and if they were only money motivated, they could surely tap into the riches being paid out. And if they get tired of working for peanuts, there are good paying jobs in industry where they could make a much better living and not need to be involved in the research at all. For example, I have friends who work in the oil industry in Houston, whom I've known for over 30 years, and they can easily knock down six figures. Why on earth would anyone need to work long hours and make up false data when they could simply join the industry and live well?

Time and time again, I've followed up on this accusation and that accusation about how data was falsified, only to find those who make the accusations are the ones making things up. A good example of this truth comes straight from your earlier post showing no bias in temperature corrections. These numbers were reviewed by two different independent panels, both of which stated that no manipulation to misrepresent the data occurred. Yet, anti-science bloggers (such as Mr. Soon who I mentioned above, who also received more than 1 million dollars from oil and gas) continue to cherry pick and present very few data points to make it appear that the scientists are changing the data to create an illusion of warming. It's wrong, it's dishonest, it's unethical and it's bought and paid for. As this clearly illustrated, the anti-science cannot be trusted, as they have no problem deliberately publishing deceitful and misleading data. Yeah, follow the money... from oil and gas to dishonest anti-science authors.

 

To those who believe the argument that government funding of science is responsible for the scientists telling us that we cannot responsibly continue burning fossil fuels, ask yourself the following:

1. What government would want this answer? What scientist? There is clearly a Nobel prize for any scientist that discovers the mechanism (if it exists) that makes it safe to continue to burn fossil fuels at our current scale, at least some scientists would be tempted to go for this prize.

2. The same message was given to the Clinton administration, the Bush administration and the Obama administration. If the scientists were following the govt, they clearly weren't getting the message.

3. What is in it for scientific bodies like NASA and the National Academy of Science to participate in a fraud on the American people? Do you really think so little of your top scientists that you believe they would? Where are the the stories of dissent within the National Academy, the mass resignations? Their position is clear:
http://nas-sites.org/americasclimat...te-change/climate-change-evidence-and-causes/

4. What evidence is there that the scientific system can be massively corrupted in this way? (I will accept that money does corrupt it a bit in the pharmaceutical industry, but it is self correcting when there is significant public interest).

5. If money can buy the science you would expect to see it operating in reverse, the fossil fuel industry would massively out-spend the government in producing science that supported the burning of fossil fuels. The koch brothers and others would literally make it rain gold in nerdtown!

An interesting illustration of science and funding in action is the Berkeley Earth project http://berkeleyearth.org/. This was set up by a skeptical scientist Richard Mueller (a professor of physics at Berkeley), who doubted that the warming signature existed in the millions of weather records around the world. He raised funds from a range of sources, about a third came from the Koch brothers, to reanalyse the data in an open source manner. He came up with a warming curve almost identical to that from NASA and East Anglia. He was no longer a skeptic.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/30/o...imate-change-skeptic.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1
Later stages of his project were not funded by the Koch brothers. http://berkeleyearth.org/funders

 

The argument will be political theater soon as the funding of both sides of the issue will be on display in the Senate.

If one believes in the premise that non-government funding is more likely to be biased than government funding is only fooling themselves. The number of pristine players (without bias) are few.

The historical record shows that climate is cyclic. Local records show it's cyclic. Government records show it's cyclic. Why was the name changed from "Global Warming" to "Climate Change"? Could it be the polarization of the phrase? Everything happens for a reason. Why would there be government funding to research Global Warming in a cooling phase of this cycle?

The cynical side of me is firmly entrenched that "politics" drove the name change. The human side of me is firmly entrenched in the cyclic nature of the climate.

On the issue of private funding, just like you, the Koch brothers can fund whatever research they choose. Where they put their money is their business. Are you saying there are no private funds in the non-skeptic camp? Should they not be treated the same as the skeptic camp?

Does Kert Davies get a free pass or do you think he is pursuing an agenda?

 

Would the participants in this discussion please steer away from politics and stick to discussing science?

 

Would the participants in this discussion please steer away from politics and stick to discussing science?

And also, it would be nice to go back to the original topic.

 

Why would there be government funding to research Global Warming in a cooling phase of this cycle?

Here's you cooling cycle.

 

Here's you cooling cycle.

And here is the rest of the scientific story that gets conveniently overlooked every time. Co2 is FOLLOWING not LEADING the temperature changes.


I didn't feel like posting dozens individual links ranging over every possible data source so I am just posting the search link and letting you read from there. The concept is not skeptical science but well documented environmental and climatological fact.

CO2 follows temperature.
https://www.google.com/search?q=co2 levels follow temperature&oq=co2 level follow temp&aqs=chrome.1.69i57j0.13778j0j7&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=93&ie=UTF-8

CO2 temperature correlation.

https://www.google.com/search?q=co2...q=co2+temperature+correlation&revid=579013355

Assorted graphs and pretty pictures for those who can't read or understand written data well.

https://www.google.com/search?q=co2..._sm=93&ie=UTF-8#q=co2+vs+temperature&tbm=shop