Posted by
Steve on Wednesday, February 07, 2007 8:15:11 PM
The report by the UN is coming under attack by people who actually know something. The core of the UN report is a survey that supports the idea that there is pressure in the work place to force people to be against Global Warming. The questions were worded such that people that were pressured to toe the global warming line answered yes to the questions. This artificially raised the numbers of scientists who felt pressured at work over global warming. I feel that pressure every day. If my true feelings were known, I would have no chance at a full-time position within the college.
As time goes on and people examine the "science" that went into the global warming claims, the claims fall apart. There is no scientific evidence to support global warming that is caused by man. The temperature of the earth has gone up 1 degree in 100 years. There has been no increase in the last 15 years. What evidence would suggest that there will be a big increase in the next 100 years. We discussed this issue in my class last night. My students saw that we predict the future by looking at the past. In looking at the immediate past, there is no evidence to suggest a big increase in the next 100 years.We could take the 1 degree Fahrenheit rise and project a 1 degree rise into the future. We might even say that things will be much worse than they are today. That might call for a 2 degree rise in temperature. The UN is projecting between 4.5 and 6.5 degrees Celsius rise ( about 10+ degrees Fahrenheit). That is a ridiculous projection. The person that made the projection just pulled the number out of the air.
But, look at it from a funding source's point of view. You have two scientists come to you with a plan to study the possible effects of global warming. One projects an increase of 1 degree Fahrenheit. The second projects an increase of 10 degrees Fahrenheit. Who are you going to fund? You will fund the one who projects the bigger increase. Why, because that will give you a bigger bang for your buck. If you fund the 1 degree project and it solves global warming, you solved something that is not very dangerous. If you fund the 10 degree project, you can solve a big problem with your money. That is how the funding sources look at the issue.
What does this mean for you and me. It means that bad science gets into the literature. The scientists that make wildly inaccurate projections will get funding and then published. That puts their stupid ideas into scientific journals and because they have these big grants, nobody questions their validity. The good science does not get published in the big journals and so gets put into the back water of scientific thought. Bad science gets reinforced and supported. Good science relegated to second level or third level journals if they get published at all. The black listing of the good scientists by bad ones goes on all the time. My brother is fighting this right now. Not on global warming, but it is still a good science/bad science argument.
What can be done? The only way is to debunk the bad science. That can only be done by recognizing the good science and laughing at the bad science. That is a slow process as you have to do it one issue at a time. If you get lucky, you can pick off a big time bad scientist. But, that would be difficult to do. It will be a long slow fight to get good science back to the front burner. It can be done, but funding sources will have to look for good science, not just the biggest bang. If funding starts to go to serious scientists instead of the quacks, the science community will turn around in a hurry. Unfortunately, most of the funding sources lean left and they are not interested in the science. They are interested in the politics of the science. That is how they fund their projects. My brother is running up against this. Even though his politics are quite in line with theirs, his science is real science. He is not willing to compromise on the truth. That has cost him money for project funding.
Things are starting to turn around. Five years ago, the UN report would have been taken in hook, line and sinker. Now, people are questioning it and it is falling apart. There is hope for the future. I hope to live to see the day where real science is respected again. I am so tired of junk science ruling the day.