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| coppice:
--- Quote from: tom66 on January 07, 2020, 03:54:56 pm --- --- Quote from: coppice on January 07, 2020, 12:34:38 pm ---In practice these days science is about keeping the grants flowing. Everything else is just papers produced to keep up the cross-citations, to keep the grants flowing. Nothing can be trusted in the modern world. Nothing could ever be trusted until it was extensively replicated, but replication studies are a rarity these days because they are systematically suppressed. --- End quote --- This is just wrong. And frankly people on this forum should know better. You all benefit from the outcomes of science and engineering; it is not just a circle jerk for grant money. --- End quote --- This is just wrong. And frankly people on this forum should know better. You all benefit from the outcomes of science and engineering, so its important to stop their descent into just being a circle jerk for grant money. People on this forum know academics. They talk with them. The primary goal of any organisation is to survive. There's nothing wrong with what the scientists do, apart from a few real frauds. The problem is the bizarreness of the funding games they have to play. Even those who don't know any academics can see things like Peter Higgs' talk in relation to his Nobel prize, where he talks of how his seminal paper couldn't happen today. It took him 5 years to produce. Today he'd quickly be thrown out if he didn't publish papers frequently, or didn't get enough citations in an impact analysis. These things are gamed. Find an academic the other side of the world. Agree to put their name on your next paper, and your name on theirs. Now you've both upped your paper count, as extra names don't count against you, unless you add too many. Then you agree to somehow cite each other's work, and your impact assessment rating goes up. --- Quote from: tom66 on January 07, 2020, 03:54:56 pm ---Science is continuously replicating and testing existing as well as new hypotheses. --- End quote --- Really? There term "replication crisis" gets lots of responses in a search, and they aren't all about the iffier of the sciences. Something like cold fusion was so cheap and easy to replicate that lots of people tried, and failed, and the whole thing was quickly shot down. Once the cost of replication requires applying for a grant it rarely happens. |
| thm_w:
--- Quote from: Mechatrommer on January 07, 2020, 07:10:58 pm ---quite convincing the way he spoke but... i dont find the logic. he said "CO2 is food for life, if we stop using fossil fuel today, plants and trees will die in 2 years" it sounds bollock to me as before automobile and industrial age, plants and trees grow, not die, it is us (and natural disasters) who cut them down. :-// --- End quote --- Total bullshit to claim that. As you say we've cut down a lot of trees, so somehow two years now is a bigger deal than 2 years when there were more trees a few hundred years ago? --- Quote from: nctnico on January 07, 2020, 08:16:42 pm ---Well... before the industrial revolution the CO2 levels where trending downwards to levels which would threaten plant life. According to this article low CO2 levels in the past nearly got 'us' killed too: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/06/30/life-on-earth-was-nearly-doomed-by-too-little-co2/ --- End quote --- An interesting article with good information, but points like this are absurd: --- Quote ---There’s little danger to humans of too much CO2 in the air they breathe. Even the Environmental Protection Agency says 1000 ppm is the safe limit for lifetime human exposure. Space shuttle CO2 alarms are set at 5,000 ppm, and the alarm in nuclear submarines is set at 8,000 ppm! --- End quote --- So whats the safe level of smoke in a room before a smoke alarm goes off, 500+ug/m3? Do you think living in an environment even half of that level is safe? Hell no. Its incredibly bad for your health. Similar has been shown with CO2, once you go over about 1,500 or so, you start getting "dumber" and reaction times drop off. Anyway, I think the main issue is not the absolute CO2 level, but hitting a tipping point where climate changes become much more drastic: https://www.businessinsider.com/hothouse-earth-climate-change-tipping-point-2018-8 |
| StillTrying:
--- Quote from: Zero999 on January 07, 2020, 10:08:32 pm ---The weight of modern scientific evidence suggests that doubling CO2 levels does cause an increase in global temperatures and there are positive feedback effects, such as snow melting, leaving bare dark rocks and ocean which soak up more heat from the sun and ice which contains dissolved greenhouse gasses to melt. --- End quote --- If you go back far enough C02 was 1500ppm. --- Quote ---What other things, which are currently backed up by modern science, do you think are BS? --- End quote --- Well AGW isn't proved (to my satisfaction :o), only a few decades ago we were all preparing for the coming ice age, how did they manage to miss the previous 150 years of global warming. --- Quote ---or similar bollocks? Perhaps electrons are little fairies? --- End quote --- If you know what electrons are let us know! At school I sat next to someone who was absolutley convinced electrons where little green balls, I asked a few times how he knew they were green. :D |
| coppice:
--- Quote from: thm_w on January 07, 2020, 10:25:34 pm ---Similar has been shown with CO2, once you go over about 1,500 ppm or so, you start getting "dumber" and reaction times drop off. --- End quote --- More specifically, CO2 is a powerful narcotic. If people are trapped in an airtight place most dramas depict them desperately gasping for breath as the oxygen runs out. In reality you'd probably be in a horrible state of panic for a while, but as the CO2 rises you'll fall asleep, and eventually die in your sleep. |
| tom66:
--- Quote from: nctnico on January 07, 2020, 05:26:27 pm --- --- Quote from: tom66 on January 07, 2020, 03:54:56 pm ---- While global warming may not actually directly CAUSE the fires, it can increase the LIKELIHOOD of them. --- End quote --- Emphasis on the word CAN. Throughout history climate has been changing. I'm not denying climate change and my own observations also say it does get warmer but pinning every natural dissaster on CO2 levels is just too far fetched. That is just fear mongering (FUD). --- End quote --- Well sure. But it's like smoking or asbestos. There's a chance you won't be injured by either. Right now we're running a test tube experiment on the Earth. We're turning up the Bunsen burner and seeing what happens. I don't believe every element of climate science - for instance I think models looking into 2100 are far fetched and optimistic. So much can change in that time. And even the 1.5C predictions that say things like, we need to emit less than 600GtCO2e to stay within temperature limits have significant error bars on them. But I know a few things with relative certainty. The first issue is that fossil fuels are just unsustainable on a finite planet with finite resources. We extract the lovely black goo, refine it and burn it in our cars, when we could surely do so much more with it. That kind of natural resource is precious. The second issue is there are documented air pollution issues. You only need to look at say New Delhi or Beijing in peak summer when all the cars are idling and all the factories are spewing crap into the air, it becomes toxic to humans and is bad for the climate (NOx and related exhaust gases are far more potent than CO2 and are often released by poor combustion). Thirdly if you take our current commitments we are looking at something like 3.5'C warming by 2050; we're already at 1'C and *possibly* noticing effects, most climatologists believe 1.5-2C is survivable (with basic adaptations), and 2.5C+ is where things start getting pretty bad for a lot of people. The climate hasn't been that warm in thousands of years, but it's *never* (outside of cataclysmic events such as meteor impact) warmed that quickly, so quickly that very little can adapt to the changing weather. Of course to deny what fossil fuels have done for humanity would be foolish. We would not be at our level of technical advancement without the energy they provided. So we will almost certainly have to continue burning fossil fuels (e.g. for aviation), but in other areas we can look at more sustainable ways to power cars, the electricity grid, and perhaps buy a bit less crap every Christmas that ends up in the ewaste pile next year. Knowing all that we know, and knowing we *probably* introduce (on a preponderance of the evidence) dangerous warming into the climate, it doesn't seem like it's worth the risk. There are error bars on everything, but I'd err more on the side of caution given this is the only planet we have, and there's very little data that points towards climate change being good for us. And knowing that climate change makes seasons drier, reducing rainfall and increasing temperature, in an arid-desert climate like most of Australia, then I think we can say "this increases the risk" with reasonable confidence, and that's not a good thing. Just like smoking cigarettes may not give you lung cancer, but it increases the risk by ~50%. |
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