Beam me to Planet Gore !
Posted on 02/14/2011 7:19:05 AM PST by Ernest_at_the_Beach
Below is the O so apt resignation of Steven J. Welcenbach from the American Chemical Society (ACS). In it he describes how the largest scientific society in the world has become a non-scientific activist group bowing to political pressure and ignoring it’s members objections. Such is his ire and dismay, he is not only pulling his membership but vows to do all he can to make sure ACS does not receive public money. He suggests that many former members will form a new society that rigorously follows the scientific method (hear hear).
It’s time to start talking about that new society. What would we call this international coalition of scientists who demand the highest standards of reasoning, who expect that the society would be there to serve it’s members, not just serve the aspirations of the committee members, or grant-seeking-associates? What would be written into it’s constitution? Any large entity is a target for people seeking power or seeking to use science for their own purposes. How do we stop that decay?
Where is this science association that would never dream of uttering an ad hom, or argument from authority, and would never declare that the “debate is over” and grovel before the false prophets of science? Where is the association that would outspokenly condemn any scientist who hides data, makes logical errors, and resorts to name-calling to silence the critics?
Art Robinson wrote about the how the control of the quest for knowledge itself has been usurped from individuals and private industry and taken over by the government. I discussed his excellent article in The Truth Shall Set You Free.
How soon can we start?
Jo
PS: (Thanks to Bob Carter for passing it on).
(Excerpt) Read more at joannenova.com.au ...
Cut off funding for corrupt Government selective research...i.e. the power grab known as “The Global Warming Hoax” and other such efforts.
bttt
Only a bachelor's degree?! So if a guy with three doctorates tells me he's full of shit, who do I believe? God, this gets confusing!
****************************EXCERPTS**************************************
Joanne Nova:
February 15th, 2011 at 12:09 am
Steve, rather than a society of any specific discipline, I’m thinking of something generically science. It could develop subgroups, but more important than anything else is simply to be guardians of The Method. To stand up for logic and reason and the hunt for the Truth, above all else. To rise above the corrupting influences (is that possible?). To stop science being used as a tool against the people (by it’s misapplication, misappropriation, through lies by omission, or monopsonistic funding.)
I’m afraid that noadays the only rigorous scientists you’ll find are the ones with rigor mortis.
The others seem to be a species of Jelly Bears.
It seems to me that we’ve managed to create a modern era “Dark Ages”. The “secular” folks in government have managed to use funding to dogmatically control the efforts and results of researchers. (I quote secular, because they are religious, the follow the religion of global warming).
As a key piece of evidence, I present the once proud, once amazing, NASA. A scientific agency of great note, that has been reduced to a global warming shill and muslim outreach organization.
The Met Office link-buries the CET ( CET is Central England Temperature--352 years long )
The Klamath issues have been permeated with bad science. So many regulations use “the best advailable science,” so green interest groups rush in and commission their own study that amazingly arrives at conclusions that support their view. Advocacy science runs rampant with American Rivers, CalTrout and the local tribes.
We have a lonstanding groundwater study done by one of the world’s foremost scientists on groundwater. He is located at U.C. Davis and just testified as an expert in front of a CA Senate sub-committee. The BIA has funded the Karuk tribe to do their own study. Typically, these are then gamed to produce results to be used in court.
A few years back, the National Academy of Science did some studies that were poorly done for our area. They assumed that by visiting one valley, they covered both. One is volcanic with a glacial, spring fed driven system, the other alluvial with a snow pack melt driven system. They are not alike. Even the experts can mess up.
Messed up ...or a convenient error?
Where is the science association that would never take a dime in government or foundation money?
“..I’m thinking of something generically science. It could develop subgroups, but more important than anything else is simply to be guardians of The Method. To stand up for logic and reason and the hunt for the Truth, above all else. To rise above the corrupting influences (is that possible?). To stop science being used as a tool against the people (by it’s misapplication, misappropriation, through lies by omission, or monopsonistic funding.” ~ JoNova
She sounds as if she’s channeling Michael Crichton:
“...we need to get environmentalism out of the sphere of religion. We need to stop the mythic fantasies, and we need to stop the doomsday predictions. We need to start doing hard science instead. ... How will we manage to get environmentalism out of the clutches of religion, and back to a scientific discipline?
There’s a simple answer: we must institute far more stringent requirements for what constitutes knowledge in the environmental realm. I am thoroughly sick of the politization of so-called facts that simply aren’t true.
It isn’t that these “facts” are exaggerations of an underlying truth. Nor is it that certain organizations are spinning their case to present it in the strongest way.
Not at all-—what more and more groups are doing is putting out is lies, pure and simple. Falsehoods that they know to be false.
This trend began with the DDT campaign, and it persists to this day. At this moment, the EPA is hopelessly politcized. In the wake of Carol Browner, it is probably better to shut it down and start over.
What we need is .. an organization that will be ruthless about acquiring verifiable results, that will ___fund identical research projects to more than one group___, and that will make everybody in this field get honest fast.
Because in the end, science offers us the only way out of politics. And if we allow science to become politcized, then we are lost.
We will enter the Internet version of the dark ages, an era of shifting fears and wild prejudices, transmitted to people who don’t know any better. That’s not a good future for the human race. That’s our past.
So it’s time to abandon the religion of environmentalism, and return to the science of environmentalism, and base our public policy decisions firmly on that. ~ Michael Crichton Environmentalism as Religion - Here: http://www.crichton-official.com/speeches/index.html
bttt
Scientists are the new high-priests of the religion of “science”. Bow down and worship!
Scientists are the new high-priests of the religion of “science”. Bow down and worship!
***Yes they are. That’s why I have been adding the keyword “scientism” on appropriate articles.
A subject near and dear to my heart. These people need all the support they can get from wherever they can get it. After decades of junk science mostly bought and paid for with the taxpayer’s dime, it’s about time. The Scientific Community’s® Egypt???
Have a great day!
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Long past time.
However, imho, won’t happen.
The globalists will insure compliance with their agenda on the part of all orgs on earth . . . short of authentic supernaturally protected groups of scattered Christians here and there.
Recognizing science is simple. If it cannot be disproven (falsified) by experiment or observation, then it is not science. Statements like: “Global Warming will mean the end of snow . . . just kidding, make that more snow and colder weather” and the comparable “Global Warming will mean more hurricanes . . . oops we meant fewer hurricanes” are proof that this is not what real scientists used to take pride in. Liberals, parasitic dependence on government, and moral relativism have even degraded science. It’s sad.
Cut off funding for JUNK science projects, i.e. the study of medieval-style magical **** like string theory, “black holes(TM)”, the “big bang(TM)”, “dark matter(TM)”, “dark energy(TM)”, and the other hobgoblins of little minds we keep reading about. Also cut off funding for space agencies with no balls (Germany would have had human feet on Mars no later than 1990 had they won WW-II), and cut off funding for space programs and people who believe that germs are important but cities are not i.e. the studious ignoring and covering up of major findings involving Mars orbit and lander probes.
The scientists who haven’t been bought and sold have a *lot* of power. I’ve observed core resistance groups derail efforts of larger, ostensibly more powerful groups.
I had not seen that graphic before {{{SNORT}}}...
Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.
But, especially sad for persons of science.
Driving Sunkenciv ...past his mulit-ping threshold... is good....
LOL...That is a new one for me!
The last thing we need is another scientific society. There are too many already, and like the letter that is the subject of this thread, scientists have demonstrated that they are perfectly adept at calling their societies to account when they wander from the path of running a learned society to shilling for the latest political fad. For instance, the present President of the American Physical Society is Barry Barish and the President Elect is Bob Byer. These two are excellent scientists. A former President Cherry Murray was a disaster and started a witch hunt to find the leaker of the society email list when she started to get petitions to drop her dogma about global wariming. She was held to account and denounced by the membership. The folks running the petition were among the most prestigious members of the APS.
The members of the ACS are likewise on the whole excellent scientists. Of course leadership positions in any society attract those with a certain political bent, and it is not hard for them to wander from the purpose of the society if they lose their way. But I believe that on the whole these societies, at least in the physical sciences, are as honest as humans can be.
The problem is that somehow envuironmental studies became a discipline separate from chemistry or physics or geology or biology or oceanography, and wandered into an interdisciplinary discipline that was and had no discipline at all. Starting from a foundation in each of these branches of knowledge combined with a bunch of courses on environmental policy it is almost impossible to become a disciplined scientist. Evniron 1 + chem 1 + Phys1 + bio 1 + rocks of jocks does not make you a laboratory scientist.
There has been some excellent scientific work in this area, and it is almost all done by PhD chemists or physicists or geologists or some such. It just takes that level of training and specialization to master a technique that can provide new insights and knowledge.
You’re right! bttt
Proof that you’re right:
Here’s the view on global warming of the paramount living physicist:
“... all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated. Here I am opposing the holy brotherhood of climate model experts and the crowd of deluded citizens who believe the numbers predicted by the computer models. Of course, they say, I have no degree in meteorology and I am therefore not qualified to speak. But I have studied the climate models and I know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in. The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That is why the climate model experts end up believing their own models.”.... Freeman Dyson, (8/8/07) http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/dysonf07/dysonf07_index.html
<>
Kerry Emmanuel, an MIT meteorologist admits as much:
“Computer modeling of global climate is perhaps the most complex endeavor ever undertaken by mankind. A typical climate model consists of millions of lines of computer instructions designed to simulate an enormous range of physical phenomena, including the flow of the atmosphere and oceans, condensation and precipitation of water inside clouds, the transfer of solar and terrestrial radiation through the atmosphere, including its partial absorption and reflection by the surface, by clouds and by the atmosphere itself, the convective transport of heat, water, and atmospheric constituents by turbulent convection currents, and vast numbers of other processes.
There are by now a few dozen such models in the world, but they are not entirely independent of one another, often sharing common pieces of computer code and common ancestors.
Although the equations representing the physical and chemical processes in the climate system are well known, they cannot be solved exactly.
It is computationally impossible to keep track of every molecule of air and ocean, and to make the task viable, the two fluids must be divided up into manageable chunks. The smaller and more numerous these chunks, the more accurate the result, but with today’s computers the smallest we can make these chunks in the atmosphere is around 100 miles in the horizontal and a few hundred yards in the vertical, and a bit smaller in the ocean. The problem here is that many important processes are much smaller than these scales.
For example, cumulus clouds in the atmosphere are critical for transferring heat and water upward and downward, but they are typically only a few miles across and so cannot be simulated by the climate models.
Instead, their effects must be represented in terms of the quantities like wind and temperature that pertain to the whole computational chunk in question.
The representation of these important but unresolved processes is an art form known by the awful term parameterization, and it involves numbers, or parameters, that must be tuned to get the parameterizations to work in an optimal way.
Because of the need for such artifices, a typical climate model has many tunable parameters, and this is one of many reasons that such models are only approximations to reality. Changing the values of the parameters or the way the various processes are parameterized can change not only the climate simulated by the model, but the sensitivity of the model’s climate to, say, greenhouse-gas increases.
How, then, can we go about tuning the parameters of a climate model in such a way as to make it a reasonable facsimile of reality? Here important lessons can be learned from our experience with those close cousins of climate models, weather-prediction models. These are almost as complicated and must also parameterize key physical processes, but because the atmosphere is measured in many places and quite frequently, we can test the model against reality several times per day and keep adjusting its parameters (that is, tuning it) until it performs as well as it can.
But with climate, there are precious few tests. One obvious hurdle the model must pass is to be able to replicate the current climate, including key aspects of its variability, such as weather systems and El Niño. It must also be able to simulate the seasons in a reasonable way: the summers must not be too hot or the winters too cold, for example.
Beyond a few simple checks such as these, there are not too many ways to test the model, and projections of future climates must necessarily involve a degree of faith.
The amount of uncertainty in such projections can be estimated to some extent by comparing forecasts made by many different models, with their different parameterizations (and, very likely, different sets of coding errors). We operate under the faith that the real climate will fall among the projections made with the various models..” ~ Kerry Emmanuel
More:
“The evolution of the scientific debate about anthropogenic [man-caused] climate change illustrates both the value of skepticism and the pitfalls of partisanship.” “ Scientists are most effective when they provide sound, impartial advice, but _____their reputation for impartiality is severely compromised by the shocking lack of political diversity among American academics, who suffer from the kind of group-think that develops in cloistered cultures_____. Until this profound and well documented intellectual homogeneity changes, scientists will be suspected of constituting a leftist think tank.” “On the left, an argument emerged urging fellow scientists to deliberately exaggerate their findings so as to galvanize an apathetic public...” “Conservatives have usually been strong supporters of nuclear power. .. Had it not been for green opposition, the United States today might derive most of its electricity from nuclear power, as does France; thus the environmentalists must accept a large measure of responsibility for today’s most critical environmental problem.” ~ Kerry Emmanuel http://bostonreview.net/BR32.1/emanuel.html
bttt
“...it is almost all done by PhD chemists or physicists or geologists or some such...” ~ AndyJackson
Speakiing of GEOLOGISTS, here is a recent rant from a geologist friend of mine:
http://themigrantmind.blogspot.com/2011/02/war-is-peace-freedom-is-slavery-warming.html
Excellent. Your post deserves a sunken civ ping
Thank you! bttt
One for the Fancy Footwork Ping List!
Thanks!
At long last, the decline of ACS and C&E News is being
discussed. This has been really painful to see.
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