Current Events — HabitableZone

Current Events » in reply to Ok, lets recap...

The NASA study does not say that AGW is false.
TB — (archived)

It says the Antarctic is gaining land ice. Try and focus.

I calculated my 20 percent number from Table 1 here. If you have another source, let me know.

You people are the only ones using the word "conspiracy," and as always, grossly misusing it.

It does not require a "conspiracy" to have funding sources and other influences tilt results. It just requires natural selection.

Scientists that produce results confirming AGW are routinely rewarded, both with grants, publication, and approval. Scientists producing results in the other direction? See for yourself. What's happening to Zwally right now? The AGW community is pouring down on this one study like antibodies on a germ.

It's not a "conspiracy." It's a filter. This subject is heavily politicized, and the filtration is more intense than for many other subjects. Some subjects have such enormous political baggage that it's worth a scientist's career to study them at all.

A scientist doesn't have to consciously cheat or lie to stay on the right side of the tracks. He just has to pursue one line of thinking over another one, one area of study instead of another, or with no malice at all, be more attracted to one adjustment method over another. Scientists are as human as anyone else. Maybe all it takes is for one view to be more likely to be published by "peer review" than another.

Sometimes it's a little more blatant. The climatologist e-mail controversy a while back, for example. Ted Scambos, a scientist at the NSIDC, asked that Zwally's study not be publicized. Is that a good thing?

If you have the right opinions, you'll be one of the good guys. You might be on TV, or get your own college climate department, like the scientist I wrote about some time ago. No conspiracy or evil scientists required. Just human behavior, and reinforcement of one view over another.

It's the same reason almost all the faculty at our universities are liberal. Nobody's kicking conservatives out at the gate. It's just easier to survive in the system if you are.

The data being "publicly available" isn't much help. I bogged down pretty thoroughly in Zwally's paper, and the statistical jiggering required to declare that you can measure a planet's temperature within fractional degrees occupies many pages of equations in papers on that subject. One assumption tossed in there can shift everything one way or another. I consider it significant that all the adjustments seem to tip things in only one direction.

I make the point yet again that you have no trouble dismissing any science even remotely funded by industry as deliberate lies. That "conspiracy" seems plausible enough to you.

The funding comparison chart I posted in the "following the money" thread is what it is. Sorry.

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