Nasa shoots down global warming alarmistsFollow

It's irritating because I always read lagaga with a french accent and whenever he adds a D to the end of someone's name it turns it into a weird name conjugation, verb, thing..."Hey bro! Lets go down to the bar and get totally Jophed!"

....

Am I the only one with that last problem?

You know this due to your extensive stint as an okra farmer? Or did you learn this in your 1 month of teaching kindergarten?

Shut it, Eeks!

Tare and I determined that "Jophed" means "Totally sexified".

Which explains why the Man-Seeking-Man uses it all the time

LOL you're right LOL.

Any scientist can be "in it for the money". I'm not sure why you think otherwise.




That applies equally to someone who has a PhD and works for an oil company as it does for someone with a PhD and does research at a university. Again, I'm unsure why you think this is magically different based on the job someone lands after they get their degree.




If you're ignoring them because the person is working for a corporation rather than because you looked at the science itself, then you are the one being biased.




Of course they do. Why do you think otherwise?



And the results and recognition of your study determines future funding. The guy teaching and doing government funded research has exactly the same relative interest in the outcome as the guy working for a corporation. One may make more than the other, but relative to the salary they can obtain, there is just as much likelihood of biased interests affecting their work. If you do research at a university it's because that's the job you landed. That job is just as important to you as it is if you're working for a corporation. And if you get the sense that the folks dangling the funding in front of you want to hear certain answers in return for that funding you're going to be just as likely to lean the results in that direction.




Lol! Well, since you framed the question in such an unbiased manner... :)



Does it even occur to you that merely by choosing what areas of research to fund, the government influences the results? If you can get an extra 100k for research if you can find a way to tie it into global warming, you don't think that's going to make a whole hell of a lot of researchers magically figure out ways that global warming is affecting whatever it is their particular area of study is? You get that this is where the "consensus" we keep hearing about comes from, right? It's a volume of scientists who have all tied their areas of study into a set of climate models which make specific assumptions about human effects on climate. In many (most?) cases, the models themselves aren't tested as part of their research, but are simply assumed to be true.


It's horribly bad science. It has been bad science since day one. Don't get me wrong, the models they're using are legitimate theoretical models. The preponderance of research based on the assumption those models are correct is where the science goes wrong. Each participant isn't doing anything "wrong" because his science starts with a clearly stated assumption of relevant factors (of which the ACC client models are one). He's good scientifically in that regard, but everyone knows that no one will pay attention to the fact that those assumptions were made in the beginning. Heck. I've pointed this out in multiple papers written about ACC and folks on this forum just ignore it. Even when the paper clearly states that coupled climate models were used to derive the results, that fact just kinda washes right over the brains of the readers and they assume that the results are "true" and "proven", when in fact they are the results of a "what if" statement. If those models are true, then this would be the expected result. That's how science works.



The problem for those ACC models is that the results haven't matched the real world. In science, you hypothesize about what would happen if your operating models/theories/whatever are correct. Then, you test to see if the results actually happen. It's that last step that keeps missing. That's why the NASA data is increasingly relevant (along with pretty much all global climate data collected in the last decade). Those data do not show the results that were predicted by scientists using those climate models. Good science demands that we conclude that those models are not accurate and adjust them. Unfortunately, politics has gotten in the way of good science. It'll get there eventually though. Given the ingrained nature of the issue itself and how strongly some people have placed their reputations on it, it'll probably take yet another decade before the issue finally gets dropped as a bad case of a guess gone horribly wrong.


It's not about who's paying for the science. There's potential for bias all the time. It ought to be about not running too far ahead of the science in the first place and always looking at the real world to see if it matches the predictions. But in this case, the political benefits of those models being true were too useful, so the politicians ran with it and the whole world followed.

Edited, Jul 29th 2011 4:51pm by gbaji

The tundra AND the ocean. It is actually the ocean that is the scary bit:

In other news, Oak Ridge is looking for a climatologist. Here's your chance, varus.

It also counts as a textbook if you're in a Texas high school biology class.