Trump and the War on Science.

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freeride76 started the topic in Saturday, 28 Jan 2017 at 9:10pm

Can you muzzle your own scientists and make bad news go away?

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Gaz1799 Saturday, 28 Jan 2017 at 10:53pm

Do you have a specific example in mind freeride?

Here in SA we are regularly lied to by the government on pretty much everything be it marine parks, commercial fishing quotas, water supply, electricity etc. Shark numbers is another that springs to mind. Our scientists only seem to be as good as the politicians allow.

Obviously we've all seen how the climate change agenda changes with the government of the day and they choose whichever scientists make them look good.

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groundswell Sunday, 29 Jan 2017 at 5:42am
sypkan's picture
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sypkan Sunday, 29 Jan 2017 at 7:41am

Maybe the thread title should be 'science and the war on science'.

Because it seems science (and media) are the ones undermining their own credibility, with loads of examples as gaz1799 points out.

Again, Trump is the sympton rather than the problem. A sympton of a long running tendency to overstate everything while ignoring all that doesn't fit.

A science and media machine that has overplayed it's hand one time too many.

Unfortunate really, because I know there is some good science hidden under all that agenda

http://thefederalist.com/2017/01/27/new-york-times-our-readers-are-too-d...

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indo-dreaming Sunday, 29 Jan 2017 at 8:32am

FFS another Trump thread?

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freeride76 Sunday, 29 Jan 2017 at 8:47am

Kinda started half in jest Indo.

But yeah, agree with Gaz and Sypkan.

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blindboy Sunday, 29 Jan 2017 at 10:57am

Almost as concerning as his dismissal of climate change! How to massively increase your infant and early childhood mortality rate!

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-01-11/donald-trump-appoints-vaccine-scep...

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Sheepdog Sunday, 29 Jan 2017 at 11:58am

How about a Trump thread about Trump Threads....

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Sheepdog Sunday, 29 Jan 2017 at 12:23pm

From June last year;

Dawg - "Do you remember a time when we as humans had a psychological break from "war"? With the Orwellian invention of the war on "terror" (terror being a human emotion, so we've declared war on an emotion), there is no break..... No release of the pressure cooker.. The never ending hatred, which you own...... It's all you own........ People are breaking..... Some of us, you and me, probably take time out..... But the vast majority dont...... They are the ones imploding...."

I first brought this "war on terror" to light back in the post 9/11 days...... I argued about the ramifications of declaring a war on a human emotion..... "Terror" is an extreme form of fear, I argued...... The guys at radio shack thought I was mad lol....

Well........ here we are........ Wars are declared on everything now... As common place as putting the bin out the night before garbage truck day..
The war on science
The war on obesity
The war on drugs
The war on poverty
The war on men (toxic masculinity)
The war on guns
The war on welfare
The war on abortion
The war on Christmas
The war on weed
The war on crime
The war on democracy
The war on freedom of speech
The war on urban sprawl
The "media war"

It all amounts to war on peace of mind.........

AndyM's picture
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AndyM Sunday, 29 Jan 2017 at 2:41pm

"Donald Trump appoints vaccine sceptic".

Will be very interesting to see how the Byron Shire crowd reacts to this.
One of their fundamental social tenets has been usurped by their worst nightmare and bogeyman.

Now if only Trump will go gluten-free and start riding a longboard without a legrope...

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talkingturkey Sunday, 29 Jan 2017 at 3:04pm

Jeez Andy, being a Greens voter and all, I thought Trump's take on climate science and the environment in general would be a big deal for you. You & Sippy. The biggest. No?

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AndyM Sunday, 29 Jan 2017 at 3:10pm

Of course it's a big deal but no different to the political reception it's received in Australia.

A well-known Australian once sang, "who can stand in the way when there's dollar to be made".

Doesn't mean I can't find interesting parallels between Trump's use of "facts" and the cherry-picking of science undertaken by many Australians including those of my immediate family.

The power of social pressures...

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Gaz1799 Monday, 30 Jan 2017 at 10:19am

Haha AndyM I like your analogy of Trump being a gluten free no leggy mal rider. I bet he'd also be the type of surfer that paddles past the lineup on a crowded peak and sits way out the back catching every wave that comes past on a board the size of an aircraft carrier and barely leaving the scraps for everyone else. I imagine he would also spend his whole session frowning & abusing everyone else for not getting out of his way.

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AndyM Monday, 30 Jan 2017 at 11:36am

Yeah Gaz, Trump would be sitting way outside, gurning away like a maniac.

But I am curious to see if the crew up here drop the anti-vaxxer thing now that Trump has jumped on it.
I'll have to send my sister a link to the article above in case she missed it!

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talkingturkey Monday, 30 Jan 2017 at 3:33pm
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sypkan Tuesday, 31 Jan 2017 at 7:21am

Climate denial? Or just a request for some good old basic science accountability, you know with numbers and stuff

http://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2017/01/29/scientists_cr...

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trippergreenfeet Tuesday, 31 Jan 2017 at 10:32am

Sypkan ... before taking that article as gospel, you need to do some Real Clear Investigation into who is behind realclearinvestigations. Here is the first tip, it's one of 15 fronts for ...

I'm not having a dig mate, however if you want to pull a trump card (sorry, couldn't resist) then at least pull the card from a legit place.

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sypkan Tuesday, 31 Jan 2017 at 12:38pm

I don't take it all as gospel greenfeet, but I do think they make some fair points.

I don't have a clue who runs it greenfeet, and it seems conservative by nature, but I like that they give a range of views across their site

I'm no climate deniar, however, I think the idea has been overcooked a bit, and articles like this show how the media and scientists are political tools as much as objective experts

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talkingturkey Tuesday, 31 Jan 2017 at 12:41pm
Gaz1799's picture
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Gaz1799 Tuesday, 31 Jan 2017 at 2:35pm

sypkan I reckon the scientists/politicians damaged the message they were trying to sell when they started alternating terms between global warming & climate change. 15-20 years ago Global Warming was ALL the rage. Now they seem to jump between the two terms depending on the conditions.
Every heat wave seems to global warming. Every storm seems to be climate change.
To make matters worse a lot of these scientists seem to be constantly undermining each others work just for 5 seconds in the spotlight or to be the governments political lapdog.

I know this thread is an attempt to link Trump and a war on science but blind freddy can tell that a lot of these "scientists" are their own worst enemies.

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benski Tuesday, 31 Jan 2017 at 2:51pm

Best not derail these thought provoking threads Gaz but come on man. The IPCC has never been known as the IPGW and it's been around for 29 years. It's first report, published in 1990 was about climate change. It's true that global warming gets a run as a term but it's a symptom of climate change. Both terms have always been used by the scientific community and both continue to be used today, in very deliberate ways.

From the very beginning of the political response, the distinction was made. Here's Maggie Thatcher arguing in 1989 that we need to do something about "climate change" using the IPCC.
http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/107817

Don't conflate what you read in the media with what scientists and pollies are saying. I don't have time to linger but I sometimes I can't help myself.

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Gaz1799 Tuesday, 31 Jan 2017 at 3:24pm

No probs benski, I'm hearing your point but the case I'm making is the message is sold in a way that opens it up to ridicule. The two terms have been around for a while, yes, but global warming seemed to be the one that got all the air time, particularly through the 90s (at least in my opinion). The pollies have officially botched it so now the science is often ignored.

Couldn't agree more on the media, climate change articles are being treated the same way as ufo sightings in some of the rightwing rags

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sypkan Tuesday, 31 Jan 2017 at 4:03pm

They've worn it out.

The democrats have had a good 20 years at it and haven't got past talking turkey turkeyman so I just see more of the same unfortunately

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talkingturkey Tuesday, 31 Jan 2017 at 4:19pm

Trump is, as you put it, "more of the same"?! Hmmmm...

Keep sane, comrade...it'll be a bumpy ride.

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batfink Tuesday, 31 Jan 2017 at 4:21pm

Thanks for the links gents. Not really interested in partisan Trumpian paranoia stating that the Greens are the enemies of freedom. I would say the same about the neoliberals.

New York Times article interesting. Seems to quote scientists in meteorology/earth sciences, don't appear to be crocks, and if his claim that the hottest year on record is only hottest within the error rate, then I have to say that I haven't heard that before. Nor that the actual temp records are coming in at the very bottom of projections. "As Judith Curry has been pointing out, recent temperatures are actually at or below the bottom range for all of the global warming predictions."

In the spirit of TT's link to Carl Sagan's sceptical thinking, has anyone got reasonable refutation of that? NYT might not be completely impartial, I can't quite keep track of the US media, but it does have a reputation built over a lot of years.

Should I ask, is it a Murdoch paper?

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sypkan Thursday, 9 Feb 2017 at 10:10am

The daily mail is probably a murdoch paper, I try not to know such things, as it tends to turn you into a reading snob, deeply insulated inside your social media bubble, and that hasn't gone so well.

Not to mention that the trustworthy reputable sources just don't seem to be cutting it anymore...and haven't been, for quite some time, so one needs to look wider for 'the truth'....so daily mail it is...for today...

science doesn't need trump to undermine their credibility, these highly competent individuals are more than capable of doing that all by themselves. It's like they want trump to win.

Who would've thought those fine upstanding citizens, the guardians of all things objectivie, and rigour of methods, would just substitute one data set for another more facillitating data set, then just not talk about it.

...The sea dataset used by Thomas Karl and his colleagues – known as Extended Reconstructed Sea Surface Temperatures version 4, or ERSSTv4, tripled the warming trend over the sea during the years 2000 to 2014 from just 0.036C per decade – as stated in version 3 – to 0.099C per decade.

....Dr Bates said: ‘How ironic it is that there is now this idea that Trump is going to trash climate data, when key decisions were earlier taken by someone whose responsibility it was to maintain its integrity – and failed.’

Imagine if the whole thing has been computers showing scientists exactly what they wanted to find? ....wrongly.

I'm not there yet, but this whole thing gets smokier by the day, and I have little trust left for these propoganda merchants

I'll even take a nyt refute

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-4192182/World-leaders-dup...

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blindboy Thursday, 9 Feb 2017 at 11:00am

I will post more on this when I have time. For now the link is a hysterical over reaction to a disagreement over the correct interpretation of a data set. Yes it happens all the time in all areas of science. No Murdoch paper can be considered an unbiased view on anything, if there was a dollar in it. Google Milly Dowler and find out what scum you are quoting.

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sypkan Thursday, 9 Feb 2017 at 11:26am

So you don't think it was misleading to use a less reliable (conveniently warmer) data set from the bows of boats, over more reliable (inconveniently colder) data sets from ocean buoys and satellites?

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A Salty Dog Thursday, 9 Feb 2017 at 12:24pm

Sypkan,

The Daily Mail and David Rose are notorious for their biased view and Rose in particular for his inability to understand even the basics of anomalies and baselines etc and pretty much anything to do with science, particularly Climate Science.

Basically the Karl paper found a difference in sea surface temperatures of 0.12c when comparing data from Argo buoys to that from ship cooling water intakes. Given that the Argo Buoys are a relatively new (they started using them in the early 2000’s), if you want to establish a long term record of Sea Surface Temperatures you can either adjust the Argo data up by 0.12C or adjust the ship intake data down by 0.12C: the end result is the same. Please note that the Karl paper has been independently verified.

As for Bates, he has been reported as saying:

"Bates said in an interview Monday with The Associated Press that he was most concerned about the way data was handled, documented and stored, raising issues of transparency and availability. He said Karl didn't follow the more than 20 crucial data storage and handling steps that Bates created for NOAA. He said it looked like the June 2015 study was pushed out to influence the December 2015 climate treaty negotiations in Paris

However Bates, who acknowledges that Earth is warming from man-made carbon dioxide emissions, said in the interview that there was "no data tampering, no data changing, nothing malicious."

You can read the whole thing here:

https://phys.org/news/2017-02-major-global-defended.html

It has also be alleged there are some personal issues between Bates and Karl which may have something to do with Bates comments now that he has retired.

You can always access both sides of the story on the net: just understand where the authors of these articles sit. You can read blogs like Watts Up With That, Jo Nova or read stuff by Monckton, Delingpole or even Bolt and you will see you are dealing with a bunch of ultra right wing nut jobs. Even Delingpole claimed in an interview with Sir Paul Nurse some years ago that his job was”an interpreter of interpretations”. For the other view you can on many occasions access the original scientific reports on the net, but like me you may find the finer points of the science and statistical analysis beyond you. In that case you could read sites like Skeptical Science, Real Climate, Climate Crocks etc etc for an explanation we can understand.

What I have found, however, is while empirical data shows warming, looking for the physical evidence also helps. For example, the ICCC has always said warming will be felt in the Arctic first and a study of Sea Ice Records and the change in area/extent confirms that. There has been photographic evidence of receding glaciers in the Himalaya and verifiable reports of a sharp increase in the formation of Glacial Lakes there. Also, hot weather records vastly outnumber cold weather records over the last 30 years or so.

As for the “pause”, it always relied on the 1998 Super El Nino as a starting point. If you wish to look at long term trends take the longest period possible: short term data reveals nothing about long term trends.

Ultimately you can believe what you want. Whatever you or I believe will make no difference to what this world will be like in 2050.

Cheers

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talkingturkey Thursday, 9 Feb 2017 at 2:12pm

"The daily mail is probably a murdoch paper, I try not to know such things, as it tends to turn you into a reading snob, deeply insulated inside your social media bubble, and that hasn't gone so well."

By that comment Sippy, alas, your faculties look like they have terminally rotted. Devil's advocate or Satan! Satan! Satan! (apologies to the Butthole Surfers)?!

As an aside, The Daily Mail has even been rejected by Wikipedia as a reliable/reputable source of late!

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sypkan Thursday, 9 Feb 2017 at 3:22pm

It really is best not to judge turkeyman, you should know that. Besides you can usually tell in the first two paragraphs where its going.

I don't dispute the wider science salty dog, but there seems to be a bit of rattling in the ranks of late. They seem a little too desperate to explain away this pause. If there's a pause, there's a pause, deal with it. The whole thing just speaks to me how flakey and manipulatable these models are.

I'm no flat out denier, but my confidence certainly isn't building with these little scandals and ommisions

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A Salty Dog Thursday, 9 Feb 2017 at 4:31pm

Fair enough sypkan, but from my perspective the "pause" as proclaimed by the denialati is based solely around the 1998 Super El Nino. If you want to determine trends look at the long term data not the last 20 years. And given the course CO2 emissions have taken over the years, the models have done quite well in projecting temperature increases, taking into account they cannot predict the ENSO cycle.

Again with the Bates/Karl thing, there are no ommisions or cover ups. Bates has stated that the data and the report are correct. His complaint is to do with the manner in which the data has been archived. He wanted the Rolls Royce standard when the plain old Holden version was adequate.

Also it would appear to me that all those involved in Climate Science research have paid little attention to the denialiti over the years believing their work would speak for them With the rise of Trump and the like, the Scientists are now playing catch up and will have to explain their work in a way the ordinary man can understand.

Finally I would never believe anything the Heartland Institute says on any topic given their statements over the years that asbestos is not harmful and smoking does not cause lung cancer. And that goes for fakes like Monckton as well.

Remember the "scandals" are being created by the denialti to cast doubt in the minds of the general public.

Cheers

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tonybarber Thursday, 9 Feb 2017 at 5:39pm

Yes, absolutely scientists do need to play catch up. Some the science spokesmen have presented their work in a manner that the mere plebs cannot possibly contradict, understand, debate. Prof Flannery tends to come to mind. Dr Karl is arguably another but at least he try's to uses 'plain language'.
Maybe there should be more like Prof Michelle Simmons to help straighten the key points. Regardless, the debate is now about solutions and energy strategy. Was the Paris agreement the answer ?