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According to our dear friends over at Wired, we are losing the war on science. This interview with Shawn Otto, author of The War on Science [no-script hostile] ranges from the American presidential election to Albert Einstein:
His new book The War on Science explores ways that citizens can fight back against a creeping tide of anti-science nonsense promulgated by everyone from postmodern academics to greedy oil companies to nature-loving hippies. An important step is to make journalists understand that science and opinion should not be given equal weight.
"The purpose of a free press in a democracy is to hold the powerful accountable to the evidence," Otto says. "Journalists have really lost sight of that purpose, of their entire reason for being."
Fair enough. But things have gotten worse?
He fears that the war on science will only intensify once Donald Trump takes office in January. "I'm very concerned, as is the rest of the global scientific community," Otto says.
As a personal aside, I find it unlikely that the public, those who executed Socrates, burned the Library of Alexandria, and imprisoned Antoinio Gramsci, could fall for such a diaphanous fraud as the Republican attack on science! People back then were truly and profoundly stupid. But people today have the internet, and facebook, and a total misunderstanding of science, politics, ethics, and math. So, this will not end well? Help me, Soylentils, give me hope.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 09 2016, @01:10AM
The culture war is deepening. I've spent a lot of time in online political debates, and nobody is going to change their mind. They view climate change as a gov't-backed conspiracy. The collected data is allegedly from tainted instruments and processed in tainted computers to produce tainted reports.
Perhaps we should agree to an amiable split of the country instead of have tumultuous elections, DC stalemate, and re-do/undo of red/blue legislation in a see-saw pattern. It's wasteful, unproductive, and one side gets really pissed.
The most logical split would either be 3 sections: West Coast, Central/South, and East Coast; or a 2-way split with an upside-down "U" shape.
The bottom line is that Lincoln made a Yuuuuge mistake. Shouldda lettem' go.
An alternative is to rework the Constitution to encourage more centrist representatives. Gerrymandering, for one, would have to be outlawed. But overhauling the Constitution would be very difficult to pull off.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 09 2016, @01:46AM
Honestly, that's a copout.
There really hasn't been a period in the country's history that hasn't been contentious. It has always been bitter compromises all the way through. Fuck, even the constitution was a compromise.
At some point both the left and the right will have to take inventory of what really matters and begrudgingly fashion a peace from the rest. There is actually more in common than isn't. It's just loudmouths on either side fanning the flames.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 09 2016, @05:21PM
Some argue it's periodic and that it peaks roughly every 6 decades, but that's not good either.
The 70's and 80's had some degree of compromise in DC that we don't see much of anymore.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 09 2016, @02:34AM
Should the Northeast succession be called YankExit or YankYank?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday December 09 2016, @03:46PM
The culture war is deepening. I've spent a lot of time in online political debates, and nobody is going to change their mind. They view climate change as a gov't-backed conspiracy. The collected data is allegedly from tainted instruments and processed in tainted computers to produce tainted reports.
What again is the error bars on the long term global mean temperature sensitivity of a doubling of CO2? Why it's a factor of three, from 1.5 C per doubling to 4.5 C per doubling. And most of the supposed long term sensitivity is from positive feedback mechanisms that haven't yet been properly observed in nature. Funny how certain supporters are of global warming and its supposed dire effects, when they can't even get the most important parameter of climate research today to an accuracy and precision to justify their certainty. The science is tainted in this case, even if you choose to ignore it.
The solution here is to run the clock some more. Future data can't be manipulated in the same way that the past can. If there really is such strong positive feedback mechanisms we will eventually see them. And if there isn't, no one will be able to hide that.
This supposed "War on Science" is always something that someone else does. It's time to recognize that any time stakes get high enough, manipulation of science and research will happen.
Perhaps we should agree to an amiable split of the country instead of have tumultuous elections, DC stalemate, and re-do/undo of red/blue legislation in a see-saw pattern. It's wasteful, unproductive, and one side gets really pissed.
This see-saw pattern would continue. Every democratic country on Earth and quite a few that aren't, have this pattern. There's always a divergence of interests and politics will always center around those divergences of interests.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 09 2016, @07:56PM
You can see what is going on here [sciencemag.org]. For climate sensitivity, they use the equation (# 3 in that paper):
The only variables here are f and σ_f, where if is completely determined by the slope of the linear regression. That leaves σ_f as the only thing that could possibly be changed to narrow the climate sensitivity range. What is that? It is the residual standard error on the regression used to get ΔR/ΔT. This is a property of the data, it is not like estimating the slope of the line where you can narrow it by collecting more. Expecting someone to increase the precision of this makes no more sense than expecting them to decrease the standard deviation of human height.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday December 09 2016, @09:20PM
Expecting someone to increase the precision of this makes no more sense than expecting them to decrease the standard deviation of human height.
To the contrary, standard error shrinks as the square root of the number of data points. The analogy is that you aren't calculating the standard deviation of human height, but mean human height. This is a reduction of the statistical uncertainties of the approach.
That leaves σ_f as the only thing that could possibly be changed to narrow the climate sensitivity range. What is that? It is the residual standard error on the regression used to get ΔR/ΔT.
No, it isn't. You already stated what σ_f is:
sum of uncertainties from all the component feedback processes
While I'm not into the assumptions that the paper has made here, it remains that with more data from the future and more time elapsed we can shrink this sum through a resulting reduction in the physical uncertainties.
So you have both a reduction in statistical uncertainty from more data points, and a more considerable reduction in uncertainty of the feedback mechanisms. And I don't buy that long term feedbacks will stay hidden forever. For example, in practice we've experienced what would be roughly 1.5 C increase per doubling starting from around the beginning of the Industrial Age. At the mean IPCC estimate of 3 C per doubling, that means the current net heating (which is around 0.8C) will eventually be matched by an additional 0.8 C. According to current estimates, we're going to see another 0.3 C increase in warming from short term effects of future increases in CO2 plus some part of the 1.1 C gap from these delayed positive feedback mechanisms.
If more extreme predictions like 4.5 C per doubling hold, then we're looking at a 2.2 C gap and probably will start to see a huge climb in temperature. That will settle the matter quickly, should it occur.
But my bet is that we'll see that the positive feedback mechanisms have been grossly exaggerated with 2 C per doubling being about where things settle out.
So I think a couple decades of future data will settle this argument. It's the one things that climate researchers can't manipulate in advance or fit an erroneous model to.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 09 2016, @10:27PM
Nope, here is some R (sigma is residual standard error):
Results:
You can see changing the number of datapoints has no effect, only the sd of the distribution we are sampling from.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday December 10 2016, @05:54PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 13 2016, @04:40PM
I admit it is confusing. You will have to work it out for yourself. Follow that paper and get some historical radiative forcing and average temperatures. Plot one vs the other and see where the uncertainty comes from. That σ_f is not uncertainty about estimating the slope like you are thinking. It is a measure of the spread around the line.
If there were a 1-to-1 relationship between historical radiative forcings and average temperatures, then σ_f would go to zero and the estimate of climate sensitivity would be very precise. But this won't happen, since there are other factors that cause lags, energy sinks, etc. The search for a more precise estimate of climate sensitivity by collecting more and more data and fitting a linear model is a huge joke.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 09 2016, @08:30PM
In the end, I think you're right.
Any of these discussions just ends with either side being despised. It is less a split than damnatio memoriae. Surely one side will obliterate the other.