Are Scientists Always Smart?

Engineering denial at the Olympics

“The technical officials of the FIL were able to retrace the path of the athlete and concluded there was no indication that the accident was caused by deficiencies in the track.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/olympic_games/vancouver_2010/luge/8513794.stm
After watching the video of the accident, it is pretty clear that the track design was grossly deficient – the wall wasn’t high enough. I used to be a giant slalom racer, and there is a reason why they don’t line the edges of ski hills with steel beams. Athletes make mistakes and shouldn’t pay with their lives.
Too bad Feynman isn’t around any more. He was instrumental in demonstrating NASA’s negligence in the Challenger explosion.

Tom P, let’s talk about water vapor. Are you saying that the infinitismally small % of CO2 we have in the air (0.03% of the stuff that makes up our atmosphere) of which only 14% of that is man-made CO2 emissions, has caused more water vapor? Or has just heated it up more than normal? And let’s be clear that we are talking only about the 14% of the 0.03% number and the small increase we have seen in that 14% because of increased emissions. I want you to explain to me your understanding of how this tiny, tiny % increase of man-made emissions causes AGW, and if you consider this warming to be significant (as in outside the error bars).

Thomas Sowell, eminent scholar and philosopher, latest treatise is “Intellectuals and Society” (Basic Books 2009). In the introductory chapter, Dr Sowell defines and distinguishes between intelligence and intellect as follows:
“The capacity to grasp and manipulate complex ideas is enough to define intellect and of reason itself, but not enough to encompass intelligence, which involves combining intellect with judgment and care in selecting relevant explanatory factors and in establishing empirical tests of any theory that emerges. Intelligence minus judgment equals intellect. Wisdom is the rarest quality of all — the ability to combine intellect, knowledge, experience, and judgment in a way to produce coherent understanding. Wisdom is the fulfillment of the ancient admonition, With all you’re getting, get understanding.” Wisdom requires self-discipline and an understanding of the realities of the world, including the limitations of one’s own experience and of reason itself. The opposite of intellect is dullness or slowness, but the opposite of wisdom is foolishness, which is far more dangerous.”
“George Orwell said that some ideas are so foolish that only an intellectual could believe them, for no ordinary man can be such a fool. The record of twentieth century intellectuals was especially appalling in this regard. Scarcely a mass-murdering dictator in the twentieth century was without his intellectual supporters, not simply in his own country, but also in foreign democracies, where people were free to say whatever they wished. Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler all had their admirers, defenders, and apologists among the intelligentsia in Western democratic nations, despite the fact that these dictators each ended up killing people of their own country on a scale unprecedented even by despotic regimes that preceded them.”
Irrespective of brilliance, persons who lack experience, common sense or judgment invariably satisfy the qualifications to be “foolish.” This seems to be a common trait of too many modern scientists. When they lack ethics too, the outcome is corrupt science along with all of its unacceptable accouterments.

John Whitman:
Your ages of science is missing the Medieval period; the Dark Ages ran from 450- 950 A.D. and the Medieval Period lasted from 950 to 1350 A.D. The Dark Ages were a period of fertile technological development in Europe, in which Chinese, Roman and Arab and older technologies were adapted and changed to produce a new society that was economically based on the use of artificial power from wind and water mills, especially the vertical water mills (the latter a 1st century Roman invention, that was not widely used in the Roman era for fear of displacing slave labour and leading to idle workers). You do not see the adoption of energy dependent technologies to such a high degree in China or the Middle East prior to this development in Europe, partly because irrigation and navigation were held to be more important uses of streams and rivers in these regions.
Because European population fell so dramatically in the Dark Ages due to various iterations of plague, and due to constant incursions at different times by barbarians, Mongols and Islamic forces, Europeans in the Dark Ages were focussed mostly on survival; standards of living fell massively in the 5th century. This was not conducive to scientific inquiry.
While the Roman Catholic church was focussed on the afterlife and did not encourage science, astronomy and medicine remained important disciplines, and ‘scientists’ other than Roger Bacon -all of them clergy – were involved in theoretical queries as well as practical astronomy (needed for horoscopes and setting church calendar dates). The problems that engaged them included trying to understand the nature of motion, the question of what lies outside of the universe and what is the motion of the universe, and what the heavens were made of; at the University of Bologna, human dissection (cadavers) was introduced in medical teaching in the 12th century (1100s) for the first time since it was briefly allowed during the Hellenistic period in Ancient Alexandra. An excellent source for building up your knowledge of science in this period is: The Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, Prehistory to A.D. 1450 by David C. Lindberg.

scienceofdoom (01:44:18) :
George Turner (21:59:27) :
You cite measurements of downward radiation. Were those measurements taken during the day or at night? Your link doesn’t say, and the answer is extremely critical to your argument.
-This was from the article CO2 – An Insignificant Trace Gas? Part Six – Visualization.
It’s nice to see someone else referencing the Evans and Puckrin paper. I first came across it quite some time ago and have tried to raise it for discussion in several comment threads over the last year, without much success. Most people can’t seem to get past the authors attempts to screw themselves into the floor trying to put an AGW spin on measurements that actually seem to offer the best contradiction of the AGW hypothesis that I’ve seen.
Although they did detect an increase in downwelling longwave radiation attributable to CO2, their measurements suggest that almost all of it occurred in the cold dry air of the Canadian winter, which I would think most Canadians would not see as a bad thing. Living in Minnesota myself, I know that I don’t. The model they used to construct their profile of DLW for the preindustrial past seems to do a fairly accurate job for most of the nonH2O greenhouse gases, but can’t come within the broad side of a barn for H2O. The variations in the H2O contribution, both seasonal and interannual, dwarf not only the incremental changes in all the others, but their overall contribution as well. In fact for the winter which showed the greatest increase in DLW from CO2, the total DLW was below their preindustrial model because the H2O element was over estimated by more than 5 times the increase from CO2. In the warm moist air of summer the CO2 contribution is almost completely suppressed [less than 4% of the total] which would seem to indicate that in Tropical and Subtropical latitudes where temps and humidity are generally higher than Canadian summers year round CO2’s contribution to the greenhouse effect is negligible, if not in total at least in any incremental change.
What I’ve found most interesting is that this experimental technique would seem to offer a clear path to quantifying once and for all the contributions of the various atmospheric gases to greenhouse warming, yet having done several fairly deep Google rummages over the last year, I haven’t come across any efforts to broadly replicate this work, which was done over a decade ago. Evidently no one has been willing to come up with the grant money to fund such a project. I wonder why that is?

Apropos.

I don’t think we can easily dismiss the IPCC as being stupid. Sure, the majority of scientists can be wrong on an issue, but mostly they are not.
But I do think there are reasons why we shouldn’t be over-pessimistic about global warming: http://howisearth.wordpress.com/2010/02/04/geoengineering-climate-change/

Filipe (02:10:23) :
There were good reasons to reject Wegener’s work. How could any one accept tidal forces making continents plough through the oceans? There were two things missing from Wegener’s work: measures of relative continental motion and a plausible mechanism. Having to deal with creationists and a few crackpots over this same issue I’m very disappointed to see this in this blog. This is a very bad post.
So wegner being proved correct means nothing to you?

I am glad to see that Geoff Sherrington (02:04:26) raised the memory of Professor Warren S Carey. I think the record will show that Carey was one of the earlier scientists to give credence to Wegener’s work. What Geoff does not mention is the sequitur to the concept of drifting continents followed by Carey, which is “an expanding earth”. This was the how he explained so-called subduction, as questioned by Chris Schoneveld (09:33:38).
In his book “Expanding Earth” (1976, Elsevier) he observed that the continents did not fit precisely as suggested by Wegener on a present day-sized earth, but they would fit much better on a smaller diameter globe. Some of his observations and questions stand today, others have been answered or refuted by subsequent investigations.
But memorable (to me) is the statement towards the end of his book: he asks — why does the earth expand? His frank answer was that he did not know, but he stood by his empiricism.
The idea of an expanding earth is now a generally rejected hypothesis, but … is the current paradigm of continental drift another consensus science?

For George Turner:
Commenting on the downward longwave radiation in CO2 – An Insignificant Trace Gas? Part Six – Visualization, George wrote:

..More than half of what we receive from the sun is already in the IR, so a daytime measurement is just measuring spectral lines by shining a light source through a gas. Anyone could do that in a lab with just air. The energy measured is just solar energy..

There’s an interesting fact about radiation that everyone should know – to do with Planck’s blackbody radiation theory..
Solar radiation has its peak at 0.5um wavelength and 99% of its energy is below 4um in wavelength.
Terrestrial radiation – that emitted up from the surface of the earth – has its peak around 10um and 99.9% of this radiation is above 4um in wavelength.
You can see this graphically at CO2 – An Insignificant Trace Gas? Part One
Therefore, it is very easy to distinguish energy radiated from the sun from energy radiated from the earth.
And if we were to look specifically at the proportion of solar energy above 14um (e.g. for CO2), it is 0.02%.
This is why downwards longwave radiation at the earth’s surface demonstrates the absorption and re-emission of the earth’s radiation by “greenhouse” gases including CO2 and CH4.

Good provokative subject. In how many areas must a person be to be an
expert? When Einstein was driving around the campus, I read, not a hedge was safe Have often wondered if some of the people acknowledged as genius didn’t
have some weak spots. In other words, if his mind was in the clouds, were his feet touching the ground? I feel sure there were some who would qualify.
ANOTHER OXYMORON: ACADEMIC INTEGRITY- FOR THE WHITEWASH OF DR MICHAEL MANN.