Voting is closed

Well there you have it folks, using anger to incite the vote is one of the oldest political tricks in the book.

It’s the freaking “weblog awards” not something important like local dogcatcher. It’s exactly this sort of passive-aggressive melodrama — where you’re constantly on the look-out for the slightest transgression of arbitrary civility so you can shout “Gotcha!” and declare some sort of victory in the argument — that PZ is railing against in that post.

cookie — I am not sure why so many are bothering to entertain Nichole the troll…
Target practice?

not here to debate the science. here to debate the prudency of debating the science in a public forum.

Did you ever watch the Television program called “Connections”? It showed how a large number of apparently unrelated developments, discoveries, and viewpoints led to a chain of events resulting in major discoveries that changed our world.
Many or the industrial age’s great discoveries were developed by people who had no formal education in the field, but were active life time learners in the technology of the day. Some were kitchen table experimenters, some were well educated clerics or from the wealthy elite, others were entirely self taught.
In spite of that they built bridges, devised ways to bore tunnels under rivers, perfected and invented new machines. Sometimes they did that by asking the questions that the formally educated knew there was no need to ask. Sometimes like Einstein they looked at things in a new way by asking questions framed in a new context.
Sometimes the most effective peer review, is to try to answer the question of a novice who is not contaminated by the biases of the day. I know that I have learned many things answering questions from students I was teaching. In many cases I found that you don’t really understand a question unless I can explain it to someone who is not skilled in the art, in a technically accurate but clear manner.
The Wright brothers developed the powered airplane by doing good engineering and experimentation, with no formal education in engineering or the sciences yet they solved aerodynamic problems that others could not, by a methodical process of experimentation. (ie the scientific method)
One of the things I find most disturbing about the recent trend in climate change debate, is the very dangerous assumption that if you do not have a degree in a specific field, you cannot possibly understand or contribute to the discussion.
Continental drift was discounted by the Peer reviewed journals and experts in the field when it was first proposed. The same can be said of other major discoveries.
The process of debating the subject drives all of us to investigate for our selves to the limits of our understanding and education the arguments. In the process we assemble a puzzle of little pieces.
For example in many of these comments I discover sources that I would never stumble across in a 100 years of web surfing. As a group, we comb through information and bring what appears to be useful or at least thought provoking to a central location where others of similar interest might find it and examine it. Sometimes a reference gets shot full of logical holes, other times it spurs a contribution from an unexpected point of view that leads people off in a new and interesting direction.
At the very worst it is intellectually stimulating, and educational. At the best even the non-technical contributors might through an off hand comment or observation, lead one of the other investigators to a new line of investigation they had not thought of before or a new way of looking at old data.
More importantly, it leads to an informed citizen who is better able to evaluate information in the public domain and that ultimately leads to a better democracy as a more informed public tends to make better decisions on issues.
If you delve into a little history of science and technology, most of the principles we take for granted today, were dismissed as nonsense by the most highly educated specialists of the day when they were first proposed. Likewise there have been some major “discoveries” that sounded good until people started asking questions, and have faded away as quickly as they appeared.
Sometimes the things we believe are “proven” are more a case of getting the right answer for the wrong reasons. The resulting blind spot to examination frequently leads to long delays in progress as the formally educated are indoctrinated to ignore small inconsistencies or paradoxes and blindly pursue dead end research as they refuse to step back and ask them selves “what do I really know?”, and “what are my assumptions that may or may not be valid?”.
An axiom I picked up years ago, is “do not hold an idea responsible for its source, judge it on its merits”.
Many years ago I worked in an office machine repair job. We had a machine that suddenly stopped working and was driving the tech nuts, as everything checked out but it would not work. He spent hours measuring resistances, checking fuses, tracing wires. He forgot to ask himself what he really knew. He knew there was power at the wall socket, so he assumed that power was getting to the circuits of the machine, and proceed to troubleshoot all the major systems. Finally someone asked him, “did you check that there was power at the power supply?”. His answer was that he had checked the power plug and he had power.
The problem was, he was drawing a false conclusion based on that bit of data. When he finally agreed to test the power at the other end of the power cord he found it was dead. Someone had tripped over the power cord and had jerked one connection loose inside the power plug.
Many of us feel the hypothesis that CO2 is the driver of global climate and temperature is like that test of the power at the wall plug.
Yes CO2 is a green house gas, and if you assume that if you double CO2 and that the green house warming you attribute to CO2 also doubles, lots of bad things will happen.
BUT — what if the physics do not support that assumption? What about the possibility that CO2 has already contributed almost all the warming it is physically possible to provide, and has already nearly closed its IR absorption window. If that is true the whole premise of CO2 driven global warming falls apart.
What if CO2 increase is a trailing indicator of temperature rise rather than the cause of temperature rise?
What if the sun has some to this point unknown means of transferring energy to the earth other than its direct irradiation ? Perhaps the buffeting of the earths magnetic field by the solar wind pumps large electrical currents into the earth and its atmosphere? What if its somehow modifies the absorption of the radiation it gives off by effecting cloud formation ?
Larry

@ur momisugly Roger Sowell
Climate v. Weather
Weather is a data point.