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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: 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.