Global Climate Change Camp

twseel wrote: The problem with all this 'science is a scam' stuff is that these scientists did nothing but professionally analyze publicly known data, and you could do exactly the same work and check their figures if you want to and think you are able too in a reliable way. Or do you not trust the thermometers used?

 

It is not hard to trust the thermometers more than their users. Even in our little country where the professionally analyzed data are being manipulated when they are inconvenient or not usable to impose a doctrine. The temperatures in De Bilt, from 1 January 1901 to 31 August 1951, have been "homogenized" with a difference up to 2 degrees or so in summertime. This is total crap, there were no reasons to believe that the circumstances changed on 1 September 1951 according to the metadata. It is said that the data used for the Paris Agreement have also been adjusted to fit the needs of the political agenda.

Opportunistic pseudo-science is widely practised these days.

The thermometer was relocated in 1951 and new extra climate measuring tools were added to correct for very local deviances and make the temperature measurements more representative of the average temperature of the air in the whole region, and thus more valuable and useful. The older data were then corrected with the average deviation they found from the pure temp measurements in these new combined data, knowing from other sources that those climatalocal factors had been constant. This way the correction makes the older data less detailed than the newer but it does make the trend over these two data sets combined way more reliable. Also, they've been doing this since well before climate change was a popular issue.

Criticism of science and particularly science reporting (and understanding) is often very justified, but putting something alternative in its place convincingly is very hard. Ultimately if we want to make up our own mind rather than blindly believing in "authorities" we'd need to read the literature, separate the credible from the crap and ultimately do our own experiments. Oh, and we shouldn't forget that observations and results are one thing and interpretation quite another, and that while we may wonder about the supposed "objectivity" of science we ourselves cannot be objective either because there's no observation without observer and therefore without observer's perspective and bias.

I have worked in science for a long time and my impression is that while people like siLLy puPPy surely have a point and nothing should be just believed uncritically, I hardly can be more easily convinced by the likes of Rupert Sheldrake or people doing 90 minutes videos telling us it's all a scam and the truth is out there to be found for those who are just open minded enough to... ditch some supposed authorities for some others. Things that can be observed are often hugely complex and contradictory, all is influenced by personal or group interests, very true that, but being prepared to watch a 90 minutes video or spending 10 years at university or even half a lifetime will not get anyone to the "true bottom of things"; I'm rather with those scientists who at the age of 85 start their presentations with "I have worked on XXX through most of my research career and the main thing I have learnt is how little I understand about all this. Here is a round-up of my most recent level of ignorance." These guys exist and listening to them we can learn the most. And maybe also that science itself will hopefully always have some of those who question the supposedly established consensus and go different ways. And the power of science is really the amount of informed chaos and controversy it hosts, and for this reason I still will stick with it for a bit longer.

It is in fact true that science also hosts some tendencies to suppress controversy, and this is what we have to fight (for which reason I'll probably give siLLy puPPy's podcasts a try if I'm told where to find them)  rather than switching one "see the truth" religion for another.