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A Princeton geologist has endured decades of ridicule for arguing that the fifth extinction was caused not by an asteroid but by a series of colossal volcanic eruptions.
Interesting info about science, history, death, un-scientific feeds and the value of persistence.
Here's an excerpt from https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/09/dinosaur-extinction-debate/565769/:
While the majority of her peers embraced the Chicxulub asteroid as the cause of the extinction, Keller remained a maligned and, until recently, lonely voice contesting it. She argues that the mass extinction was caused not by a wrong-place-wrong-time asteroid collision but by a series of colossal volcanic eruptions in a part of western India known as the Deccan Traps—a theory that was first proposed in 1978 and then abandoned by all but a small number of scientists. Her research, undertaken with specialists around the world and featured in leading scientific journals, has forced other scientists to take a second look at their data. "Gerta uncovered many things through the years that just don't sit with the nice, simple impact story that Alvarez put together," Andrew Kerr, a geochemist at Cardiff University, told me. "She's made people think about a previously near-uniformly accepted model."
Keller's resistance has put her at the core of one of the most rancorous and longest-running controversies in science. "It's like the Thirty Years' War," says Kirk Johnson, the director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. Impacters' case-closed confidence belies decades of vicious infighting, with the two sides trading accusations of slander, sabotage, threats, discrimination, spurious data, and attempts to torpedo careers. "I've never come across anything that's been so acrimonious," Kerr says. "I'm almost speechless because of it." Keller keeps a running list of insults that other scientists have hurled at her, either behind her back or to her face. She says she's been called a "bitch" and "the most dangerous woman in the world," who "should be stoned and burned at the stake."
[...] "It has all the aspects of a really nice story," Keller says of the asteroid theory. "It's just not true." (Cole Wilson)
This dispute illuminates the messy way that science progresses, and how this idealized process, ostensibly guided by objective reason and the search for truth, is shaped by ego, power, and politics. Keller has had to endure decades of ridicule to make scientists reconsider an idea they had confidently rejected. "Gerta had to fight very much to get into the position that she is in right now," says Wolfgang Stinnesbeck, a collaborator of Keller's from Heidelberg University. "It's thanks to her that the case is not closed."
Background:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerta_Keller
(Score: 4, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday September 10 2018, @12:49AM (9 children)
Actually some of the consensus studies in climate change are VERY specific about what they're talking about and counting as consensus. The 97+% number comes from those scientists who believe climate change is happening, that it's significantly different than usual historical patterns, AND that it's primarily caused by humans.
If you exclude that last one, you get up to the 99.5+% stats.
As for why climate scientists started actually publishing papers on it, it was because people like you KEPT LYING THROUGH YOUR TEETH AND CLAIMING THERE WAS A HUGE CONTROVERSY AND LARGE NUMBERS OF DISSENTERS WHEN THERE WAS NOT.
Keep trolling though, moron. Maybe some other idiots will believe you.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 10 2018, @04:10AM (4 children)
Climate scientists are about the most biased people you could pick.
If you disagree with the orthodox opinion, your papers will not be published and you will not get tenure. All the reviewers have published papers that are orthodox, and would thus be threatened (invalidated even) if any non-orthodox theory were to succeed. Nobody can enter the set of "climate scientists" without first accepting the orthodox opinion.
A somewhat acceptable group of people would be statisticians who have looked at the data but have no other career-related connection to it. They might need to be granted anonymity even, though that causes problems too. Perhaps retired statisticians would work. Oh wait, the climate scientists are infamous for refusing to release full data.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday September 10 2018, @12:43PM (3 children)
By the logic, we should never believe the opinion of experts. All of those physicists and their darn "theory of relativity" BS -- what's up with them?? Everyone knows gravity works by tiny magical gnomes who push and pull things around.
Ah yes, the conspiracy theory version of debate. It's all a grand conspiracy.
Except the real question you should ask (if you were honest) is who has even more motivation to lie about these things. Oil companies, coal companies, all the huge businesses that depend on the public's continued ignorance of likely climate scenarios if we keep doing what we're doing -- they all have huge amounts of money invested in such things.
Meanwhile, let's just for a moment assume you're right -- and a bunch of climate scientists are willing to sell themselves out and publish lies just so they can get tenure.
Okay, then you've just proven that there's likely a significant number of climate scientists who are willing to publish things they don't actually believe just so they can make money.
You know who has lots of money? Oil companies. Coal companies. And all those other businesses. And it would really be in their best interest if they could lower those "97% consensus" numbers or whatever. So, I'm sure there are such companies who would pay a climate scientist huge amounts of money (much more than most of them earn in tenure-track positions -- despite common perception, the vast majority of faculty at higher ed institutions aren't earning huge salaries) if they could be swayed to write studies that support the petroleum industry or whatever.
So where are all of those people in the "pockets" of petroleum?? All of these climate scientists with no integrity and willing to sell their souls to get tenure, but they're not willing to earn a lot more money lying for industry? After all, it happens in a lot of other fields. We know a lot of pharma studies are bogus because they're done by scientists at pharma companies and biased in various ways. We know food studies about "X will cure cancer!" are frequently influenced by food industry lobby groups who hire their internal food scientists to do studies.
So where the heck are all the climate scientists willing to do this for industry???
If you actually follow your logical argument about who has motivation to do this, what you should actually conclude is that the absence of more than a few percent of dissenting climate scientists means even with potential incentives from the petroleum industry, etc., only a very small number of climate scientists are swayed.
So either climate scientists just have a LOT more integrity than just about any other field, OR the facts are so utterly overwhelming in this case that even scientists who might be motivated by subsidies from the petrol industry, etc. can't figure out how to do it without it sounding stupid or disingenuous or whatever.
Yeah, just keep up with the conspiracy talk. It's the ultimate refuge of the conspiracy theorist when finally confronted with overwhelming proof against him -- "But, but, but -- they're hiding the real truth! We just don't have the real facts!"
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday September 10 2018, @01:11PM
Let's look at the actual reasoning here from the earlier post.
So no, magical gnomes are not the "logic". Boy, you're a bundle of irrationality today.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday September 10 2018, @01:22PM (1 child)
And on this note, let us note the remarkable absence of fossil fuel business from the propaganda war. They can afford to spend a couple of orders of magnitude more on this than they have.
Or three, all these parties have an interest in sustaining the extremely profitable affair. Please recall that the petrol industry has done quite well in these times of climate change with the key problem being too much supply.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 10 2018, @05:55PM
Go away you troll
(Score: 2) by Arik on Monday September 10 2018, @04:23AM (1 child)
"The 97+% number comes from those scientists who believe climate change is happening, that it's significantly different than usual historical patterns, AND that it's primarily caused by humans."
OK.
So here's the funny thing.
Ask me the same question, and well my first impulse is going to be to refuse to answer such a stupid question actually, and try to explain to you why it's a stupid question and you shouldn't ask it. But let's say you have me somehow limited to a yes or no answer and I have to give on, ok, fine, the answer is yes.
Ask 100 people like me the same question, and you're going to have a real high agreement. 99% or better, I should think.
But here's the important thing - you've proven nothing, your results mean nothing, you need to learn to ask better questions!
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday September 10 2018, @12:11PM
You should read up on something called "climate change consensus studies."
If you did, you might learn that these have been conducted using a wide variety of methodologies. There are at least a dozen in the past decade that have come up with a consensus number in the range around 97% (or higher). Yes, some of them have been (as you assume) a poll. Some of them have asked more specific questions. Some of them have been of "top scientists" (determined by a number of metrics), some have been broader.
Some have also been surveys of research in journals, looking for articles and authors who question various elements. They haven't all been vague misleading polls, as you assume. All these different methodologies seem to come up with rather high consensus figures. When you use a wide variety of methodologies to try to measure the answer to a question, and you keep coming up with similar high values, there might be something there.
Well, I don't know exactly who qualifies as "people like [you]", but if you ask 100 Americans the same question, only about 66% [gallup.com] say global warming is actually occurring, and only 64% say it is caused by human activities. Those numbers are actually a little higher than in recent years (when they used to hover around 50%), but it's still nowhere near "99% or better."
Meanwhile, roughly half of Congress [vice.com] doesn't agree with the figure you think 99% of reasonable people might agree with.
Those are some pretty big discrepancies. 97%+ of experts in the field agree, only about 2/3 of Americans agree, and only about 50% of Congress agrees. So much for "manufacturing consensus."
Setting aside the various research methodologies for calculating consensus I mentioned above, let's just assume we took a single naive poll, as you seem to assume. I take it your objection to this "stupid question" is that it should garner broad consensus because it doesn't make clear what the standards are. Some scientists might believe we're on a catastrophic trajectory in the next few decades, while others might believe global warming is happening and yet not think it's a major problem.
And that's true. There's lots of diversity of opinion on the magnitude of predictions. (By the way, regarding this, you should read up on something called "moving the goalposts" as it's a common rhetorical and debate strategy that deniers and conspiracy theorists adopt.)
But that's irrelevant when 1/3 of the public and 1/2 of Congress deny even the most basic concept that it's happening.
That's the real disconnect here, and the most essential one. If you could actually ask Congress and the public the same question, and get 90%+ agreement with the consensus you assume should be "99% or better, I should think," then we can start debating the nuances of climate policy, exact magnitudes, and other subtleties. But right now we have huge numbers of people (and large numbers of people in power) who refuse to believe in basic facts.
Actually, we've proven consistently that experts have a grossly different opinion on these things than those who know less. That certainly means something... because it causes us to get stuck in stupid debates like this rather than agreeing, "Yeah, it's happening..." and then moving on to more rational debate about what to do about it, how big the impact is, etc.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday September 10 2018, @06:01AM (1 child)
What I dispute that this consensus lingers once you go from the basic statement that humans have impact on climate to claims like we need to stop all greenhouse gases emissions by 2050 or we're going to suffer major harm or that a 1 C increase in near future global mean temperature will result in a 3 C increase in long term global mean temperature (the extreme side of the climate sensitivity to a doubling of greenhouse gases, 4.5 C per doubling, which supposes a great deal of unobserved feedback mechanism).
For that, we need evidence not imaginary consensus.
(Score: 3, Funny) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Monday September 10 2018, @08:54AM
Here, you dropped these:
,,,, ... ,, !