Aliens Cause Global Warming: A Caltech Lecture

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Wed, 06 Jul 2011 13:04:31 GMT  <== Politics ==> 

Michael Crichton at s8int.com - a 2003 talk that blows the globular warming consensus science hoax out of the water. SETI, nuclear winter, second-hand smoke, and now global warming. All based on consensus, with little or no basis in scientific fact.

I want to pause here and talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called consensus science. I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had.

Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world.

In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period.

...

To an outsider, the most significant innovation in the global warming controversy is the overt reliance that is being placed on models. Back in the days of nuclear winter, computer models were invoked to add weight to a conclusion: "These results are derived with the help of a computer model."

But now, large-scale computer models are seen as generating data in themselves. No longer are models judged by how well they reproduce data from the real world-increasingly, models provide the data.

As if they were themselves a reality. And indeed they are, when we are projecting forward. There can be no observational data about the year 2100. There are only model runs. This fascination with computer models is something I understand very well.

Richard Feynmann called it a disease. I fear he is right. Because only if you spend a lot of time looking at a computer screen can you arrive at the complex point where the global warming debate now stands. Nobody believes a weather prediction twelve hours ahead. Now we're asked to believe a prediction that goes out 100 years into the future?

And make financial investments based on that prediction? Has everybody lost their minds?

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Thank you

Submitted by Jeremy Weiland on Sat, 09 Jul 2011 14:14:25 GMT

This lecture says a lot of what I've been wanting to say about modern institutional science for some time. It seems like all the really foundational and barrier-busting science was done more by "entrepreneurs" - individuals who wanted to test their radical theories - than "research organizations" - institutions that wanted to secure their budget for the next year. I'm agnostic on global warming, but the emphasis on "most scientists agree" bullying has always bothered me.

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