Time for a new rigorous Association of Scientists

JoNova ^ | February 14th, 2011 | Joanne

[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).

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks Ernest, it's a multi-list pingworthy topic.

· join · view topics · view or post blog · bookmark · post new topic · subscribe ·

Google news searches: exoplanet · exosolar · extrasolar ·

[SunkenCiv]

· GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother, and Ernest_at_the_Beach · · join list or digest · view topics · view or post blog · bookmark · post a topic · subscribe ·
	Antiquity Journal  & archive  Archaeologica  Archaeology  Archaeology Channel  BAR  Bronze Age Forum  Discover  Dogpile  Eurekalert  Google  LiveScience  Mirabilis.ca  Nat Geographic  PhysOrg  Science Daily  Science News  Texas AM  Yahoo  Excerpt, or Link only?	Thanks Ernest, it's a multi-list pingworthy topic. To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list.
· History topic · history keyword · archaeology keyword · paleontology keyword · · Science topic · science keyword · Books/Literature topic · pages keyword ·

[Quix]

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.

[Pollster1]

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.

[wendy1946]

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.

[Silentgypsy]

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.

[ForGod'sSake]

I had not seen that graphic before {{{SNORT}}}...

[colorado tanker]

The alarmists seem oblivious to how much damage they could do to the reputation of science in the mind of the public by forcing the major organizations to go along with AGW theory.

[Pharmboy]

Excellent...and you've finally driven SunkenCiv past his mulit-ping threshold! But no surprise here, as this group like so many others follows Conquest's Second Law of politics:

Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.

But, especially sad for persons of science.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

ROFL~!!!

Driving Sunkenciv ...past his mulit-ping threshold... is good....

Conquest's Second Law of politics

LOL...That is a new one for me!

[AndyJackson]

The scientists who haven’t been bought and sold have a *lot* of power.

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.

[AndyJackson]

we must institute far more stringent requirements for what constitutes knowledge in the environmental realm

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.

[Matchett-PI]

You’re right! bttt

[Matchett-PI]

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

[Matchett-PI]

“...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

[AndyJackson]

Excellent. Your post deserves a sunken civ ping

[Matchett-PI]

Thank you! bttt

[SunkenCiv]

---

One for the Fancy Footwork Ping List!

---

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks!

[cycjec]

At long last, the decline of ACS and C&E News is being
discussed. This has been really painful to see.