Also, as I have pointed out in another thread: As for the dissenters who are actual real scientists active and publishing in the field (which eliminates many of them who get into the media limelight), most of them have been treated very well by their colleagues in the scientific community. In fact, I would say their colleagues have bent over backwards to include them.
“Skeptic” Richard Lindzen has served as a lead author in the IPCC process and was chosen to be on the National Academy of Sciences panel that was convened in 2001 to answer questions on global warming from the Bush Administration. (And, this is despite the fact that Lindzen has been doing everything possible to alienate himself from his fellow scientists, writing very strident pieces in venues like the Wall Street Journal op-ed page containing poor scientific claims that he would never be silly enough to actually make in the refereed literature.)
“Skeptic” John Christy was part of the panel that wrote the first synthesis and assessment report of the U.S. Climate Change Science Program.
However, scientists are human and do sometimes tend to get testy after a while when they come up again and again against discredited or misleading arguments presented by people who in some cases probably know better and in other cases don’t.
As a crackerjack newsman Limbaugh must have checked medical sources thoroughly before he accused Michael J. Fox of manipulating his medicine and exaggerating his Parkinson symptoms on the ad that Fox did.
Which differs significantly from your original claim of consensus as unanimity. I assume your attempts to impugn the admirable clarity and brevity of the August Random House with the proletarian I’m-ok-you’re-ok, solipsistic moral relativity of the American Heritage Dictionary (which I used in the sixth grade during Mrs. Beaver’s class,) are simply a red herring to obfuscate your earlier consensus/unanimous equivalency gambit.
He did no such thing. He simply read from an interview that Fox did where Fox admitted that he went off his medication before testifying to congress so congress could see the full effects of the disease. Fox was quite open about it in that context, and Limbaugh wondered whether that was the case with the ad as well.
Were I to type “scientific consensus” into your preferred dictionary, Scylla, what definitions would be given in the links provided? And, were I to click on “Encyclopedia”, what explanation of the term would be presented? One would hope your opinion of the admirability of the esteemed organisation in question would not change.
Oddly enough, it would give you a link to Wikipedia about “global warming” for which the term appears to have been specifically generated (or hijacked) in an attempt to lend authority…
Which was kind of my point.
You get this, which is kind athoritative:
I remember from Sagan’s book “Science as a Candle in the Darkness” he talks quite a bit about how to recognize fallacies and one of the biggest is the attempt to bully an argument home by cloaking it in athority. He cites many examples of athoritative arguments and then in contrast he cites Albert Einstein introducing his paper on the theory of relativity, which, is espoused in the most understated, carefully hedged non-authoritative voice possible.
He goes on to say that this hedging, or the “error bar” that accompanies most scientific theories is the constant hallmark of good science. Good science is self-correcting, non-authorative and fully cognizant of its ability to fail and be incorrect and subject to revision. Good science does not make pronouncements, it describes probabilities.
Not kidding. If I were a subscriber I’d cite ther original transcript. I heard the complete comments enought after the fact though to be comfortable. Considering that he was admittedly off his meds during the congressional testimony, I think it was a legitimate question.
Scylla, if you’re interested in debating this honestly, you could do worse than to put forward the opponent’s position as you understand it and to ask for any corrections.
I wonder if you’d be willing to do that. Describe in your own words what you believe the argument is in favor of valuing a scientific consensus. If others come in to correct you, or to claim that the reason they value scientific consensus is different from what you describe, listen to them.
You can’t really take the daily number x 5 to equal the weekly number, can you? That would mean a person watching 5 days a week gets counted as 5 viewers. That’s not 5 viewers, that’s 1 viewer.
I would imagine the Rush number represents how many people listen to Rush at least once during a given week. As in, 13.5 million individual people heard the blowhard’s voice this past week. (I’m not a radio professional, so I may have this entirely wrong…)
Apply that method to Katie, and you’ll get a number bigger than 7.5, but nothing close to 37.5, actually I doubt you’d even get a doubling of the number.
It’s there for a number of things. Evolution, to give a second example. And it’s even more relevant there, when all the “teach the controversy” types show up, because, at least among scientists in the field, there is no controversy.
True. And then the moment comes when there’s a need to consider whether scientific knowledge should be turned into governmental action. At that point it becomes necessary to accurately describe what the state of play is among scientists in the field, in order for nonscientists to make good decisions. Error bar or no error bar, the right phrase would be “near-unanimous scholarly consensus.”
That isn’t bullying of scientists. That’s an accurate description to nonscientists of the state of play among scientists. Your Sagan quote is a red herring.
Which, interestingly enough, is exactly what the IPCC report does.
However, the problem is that there are some people who use this attribute of good science against it by saying, “Well, see, they so it is only ‘very likely’ that most of the warming in the last half century is due to man…so it hasn’t been proven.”
So, in fact, you can’t win with some people. If you use any hedge words of any sort, they argue that this means there is, heaven forbid, some uncertainty and we can’t do things that are going to cost money in the face of any uncertainty (unless they involve invading another country and causing the deaths of thousands of our soldiers and tens to hundreds of thousands of their citizens). And, if on the other hand, you point out that despite the remaining uncertainties, there is a robust consensus on many of the basic facts regarding AGW, you are told that you are stifling the debate. As RTFirefly points out (as I see in preview), this is a red herring anyway because noone is telling scientists that they can’t or shouldn’t continue to debate the various scientific issues; it is rather just informing the public and policymakers where the current state of the science is.