The Glade 4.0

Ienan:

You know was well as I do that Peer-Review is an increasingly flawed check on academic research and publications.

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While there are some people who do that DE, it is not accurate to say that all HIGW advocates do that as you imply.

Why do you believe that Khross?

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"It is true that democracy undermines freedom when voters believe they can live off of others' productivity, when they modify the commandment: 'Thou shalt not steal, except by majority vote.' The politics of plunder is no doubt destructive of both morality and the division of labor."

If you look Nitefox, there is a better article about Gore and his testimony in front of a Congressional panel and the questions about his personal investments in the firms and technologies he is pushing forward with the government.

Before someone asks, Gore is the General Investments Manager of and a partner in Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, one of Fisker Automotive's investors.

Other than being a "multi-million dollar" investment, I can't specifically say how much KPCB has invested in relation to any other investors -- Fisker Automotive is a private venture. The KPCB investment was specifically for a joint venture with Quantum Technologies, though, which is publically traded. There might be some SEC filings that would shed more light on that.

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

I don't entirely agree. I think for issues that have a political edge, it is becoming "increasingly flawed." But I still think the system works rather well for most scientific research. That's the reason I added my stipulation about "consensus."

I disagree. I have not encountered any HIGW advocates who say "It's not certain, but I think that HIGW is the case". Instead, I see a constant barrage of "HIGW is true and we need to implement these regulations now!". I don't see any arguments in favor of it that aren't aimed at getting regulation.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Well now you've encountered one.

And really, it comes down to the scientific method. There are no "facts" in science the old saying goes. So while I believe that HIGW exists, and believe that most of the science points to it, it's still at the end of the day our best understanding of the situation, based on imperfect data.

I think that might be some of the confusion. Monty's rabid commentary aside, it's usually assumed when talking about any scientific conclusions that they are all theories. Hell, even tho gravity is very accepted and taken for granted, it is still a theory.

Because publishing is political (in the small "p", not the government, sense of the word). This is especially the case when it comes to the humanities and social sciences. You have to play by certain rules, cop to certain "theories" and frameworks, etc; or you don't get published.

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That is something to which I will agree. I think the social sciences and humanities are more prone to politics (again in the small "p" sense) due to the fact they are based more on interpretative thought. I think the physical sciences have a better process in place for collecting data and interpreting the data is more straightforward. Here's a simplistic example. If I collect data on contamination of keyboards and my hypothesis is that most of the keyboards are contaminated, then the data will either support the hypothesis or reject my hypothesis. I do have some room to play with the word most, but a good scientist would make a tighter hypothesis than I just did in this fictional example. I'm not saying it doesn't happen in the physical sciences either. I'm just saying it isn't as prevalent.

Ienan:

I see trends in physical science publishing you might not, simply because the physical sciences are important to my research, despite me being in a more interpretive field. However, you are right in your assessment for the most part: data driven research has less political influence.

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I agree, however I submit that has always been the case, and is nothing new.

Do you feel that the level of politics involved has increased recently? Making some assumptions, I would think that is somewhat cyclical and has probably been up and down over the centuries.

There is nothing "rabid" what so ever about my commentary, and I am insulted at the implication that it might be. Every major scientific organization *on the planet* stands behind my position. Every single one of them. Every objection to that science has been either debunked, or has been shown to be motivated and funded by parties with a vested interest in avoiding regulation. Something being a Theory does not mean it's not a reality. Pick up your pen and drop it 1000 times. Tell me that gravity does not affect the pen. A theory is the best understanding of the subject at hand we currently have.

The case for HIGCC has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt. We take the lives of our citizens based on less compelling evidence than what exists for global warming. We go to war and take tens of thousands of lives based on less compelling evidence than what exists to support HIGCC. People on this board believe in dieties and support legislation based on the teachings of said diety with *significantly* less evidence than what supports global warming. People on this board take absolute faith in an economic theory that has never actually even been tested in the real world than in HIGCC. It's preposterous.

If you are looking for rabidity, you need look no further than the people that ignore the overwhelming consensus in favor of the unsupported nipping at the margins from people with a vested, financial interest in the status quo.

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It feels like all the people who want limited government really just want government limited to Republicans.
---The Daily Show

No it hasn't.

If it had, we wouldn't be arguing about it.

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Holy shitsnacks!

When either of the underlined statements become true, you might have a basis for complaint.

The bottom line is that HIGW

IS
NOT
PROVEN
TO
ANY
REASONABLE
LEVEL

Period. End of debate. It doesn't matter how much you claim otherwise, that's all there is to it. Your Appeal to Motive fallacy reasoning against those who point out problems with it is just evidence of exactly how rabid the advocacy of this theory is. It can't debunk anything without making the assumption that HIGW is correct in the first place to do the "debunking!"

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Every single scientist on the planet agress with me! ...except the ones that I've dismissed because they don't agree with me. But they don't count. Because they're obviously stupid or corrupt. How do I know that? Well, they must be stupid or corrupt. Otherwise they would agree with me!

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

You are demonstrating the same lack of understanding of the scientific definition of the word "theory" that creationists have.

We do not have enough information to truly construct a theory on the topic. Part of the problem is that climatology appears to be taught in the life sciences, which means the physical laws used in the actual science are not adequately taught to them in their core curriculum.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Climate change is the new religion.

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A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. ~ John Stuart Mill

I don't want to dredge the thread on previous Glade, but a lot of you either never read my science thread or never did any unique research to understand it. So here I go again: You do NOT prove anything in modern scientific thought, you disprove all the other theories (which is impossible since there are an infinite number of alternate theories). So nothing can ever be proven as a result. It only has a certain degree of relative truth, which is based in probability.

Montegue as well is demonstrating fallacies with the gravity thing, again. *sigh* And Aizle isn't describing correctly what a theory is. Theories and laws are interesting things, and both require a substantial amount of evidence to support them.

And Corolinth, that has nothing to do with it. Climatologists know better, as do most biologists. It's a political hot potato, and the scientific process breaks down because opinion and political theory trump the science behind it. This usually happens when politicians get a hold of an issue.

Ienan:

Well, to be honest, part of the problem is that most people think "theory" is the Humanities and Social Science sense is synonymous with "theory" in the Hard Science sense. It's rather curious actually, because it's the failing of a very specific set of educators.

Social Constructivism, for instance, is a social science theory. It's largely based in the commentary and observation of writers like Fanon, Foucault, Guevara (shudder), Kristeva, and Camus. But, it's not exactly easy to falsify or verify in any scientific sense. It's an observational best-guess at how individuality develops within social hegemonies.

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Says nobody of consequence or academic or professional authority on the matter. You don't have the support of even the IPCC on this matter. That's your position, primarily because you don't understand the subject enough to engage in logical debate; you can't win any arguments on the subject and want to poison the discussion. You just dogmatically state the same thing over and over again in hopes it somehow makes you "win." You're just making yourself look foolish on the subject, you're not actually engaging in civilized discourse.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

I'm curious where you feel that I'm being incorrect.

Yes, actually. I've witness peer review and conference boards deny legitimate and insightful scholarship solely because it fails to address or encompass certainly politically correct social theories on an increasing basis. The pendulum has shifted to favor certain political frameworks more so than solid hermeneutic essays and formalist critiques.

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Fair enough. Let's look at your post.


Your description of a theory is a really a hypothesis. A scientific conclusion is just one of many steps in the scientific process. A theory is an observable phenomenon that has a large body of evidence that supports said hypothesis and rejects many of the alternate hypotheses. A key element of a theory is the reproduction of experimental data using a highly related (preferably the same) procedure, which is a significant flaw in HIGCC. Since HIGCC data uses sophsicated computer models that predict (which is a major flaw since using predictive models require assumptions), it's nearly impossible to reproduce results. It's also difficult to reproduce temperature results since the variability (an element to avoid in scientific research) is great. Another great flaw of HIGCC is that it's difficult to observe. You can certainly observe climate change, but concluding it's due to humans would require more evidence that's hard to obtain due to the number of variables in an open environment, such as the Earth.

Gravitation is a theory, but the force of gravity is not. Gravity exists. It could cease to exist tomorrow or it may be a combination of other forces as we may find later. Both theories and laws embody gravitation. By the way, just because something is a theory doesn't make it any less true than a scientific law. A scientific law is just a way to describe a mechanism, generally through mathematical principles but it could also be verbal, that must apply under the same conditions everytime. Also, instead of using deductive reasoning as you do with theories, laws require inductive reasoning, which is why they're often backed by mathematical proofs. Laws can be disproven as well and indeed they have been or limited to certain conditions only. For instance, many of Newton's Laws have been limited to certain conditions, such as low gravitation, at low velocities, etc.