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Even a Scientist Can Be Wrong
I recently heard of a statement made by Neil deGrasse Tyson that I thought must have been a misquote. I looked into it and, sure enough, that wise man who’s quoted on tee shirts and coffee mugs said, “The good thing about science is that it’s true, whether or not you believe in it.”
Whoa. The list of superseded scientific pronouncements is a long one, but I seem to recall a couple of real bloopers from his own field of expertise. It was once thought – as late as the early 20th century – that our own galaxy was the extent of the universe. Lo and behold, it is now accepted that there may be 100 billion galaxies comprising the universe – and counting. Now that’s a major whiff.
Not to mention the fact that luminaries such as Einstein, Shapley, Hoyle, and Gold believed that the universe was static, that is until Hubble peered through the Mt. Wilson telescope and verified the findings of that crazy Catholic priest George Lemaitre who had been trying to tell them the universe was expanding, and had been since the explosion of the primal atom (I won’t say creation).
Stay tuned for more alterations in “settled science.” It’s the nature of things.
Published in General
I tend to accept the rebuttal that while this was certainly true for the changes in global temperature that occurred in the past over a geologic time scale, it does not appear to be the case for the post-industrial increase in global temperatures which seems to lag behind the increase in CO2.
I’m personally way more interested in the predicted effects of climate change rather than the causes of climate change. Those predictions seem to change on a fairly frequent basis. The icecaps will melt, New York City will be underwater, the northwest passage will be navigable year-round, hurricanes and tornadoes will be non-stop, global famine is inevitable because there’ll be too little precipitation or maybe because there’ll be too much precipitation, and it’ll all happen by 2010, ok maybe by 2020, ok maybe by 2030, certainly no later than 2100, and ok maybe it’ll actually be beneficial for many (if not most) of the folk on our planet but it’ll make life impossible for the Inuit and the people of Vanuatu, well ok maybe not impossible but certainly difficult, ok maybe not difficult but certainly different, and if their lives are different that means we’ve changed their culture and you can’t possibly think that’s fair, etc. etc. etc.
And then, as in comment #59, you get into whether these changes are actually BAD or not. There’s been some evidence that the Sun/Earth might be entering into a cooling phase, and without anthropogenic “warming” to offset at least some of that, we could be in a really bad place.
The Neil deGrasse Tyson of today is a totally different man than the guy who first appeared on our TV sets over a decade ago.
He has begin to believe that he is part of the answer. No matter how ludicrous the answer that he is being fed might happen to be.
Although Tyson’s name did not come up in the Columbia Journalism Review’s August issue detailing how many personalities, news outlets, magazines and TV and radio shows have been offered monies by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, it would not surprise me to find out that either he, or whatever TV network he is affiliated with, has gotten those
bribeser I mean, donations to help spread the “truths” the American people need to accept.Also Bill Gates is quite passionate on needs for big monied philanthropists like himself to enter the battle in which humanity conquers Global Climate Change.
To that end, Gates is implementing a vast scheme of launching fleets of planes to scatter tons of iron and other particles across the earth’s atmosphere. The theory behind this is that doing so will end up dimming the sun, with the iron reflecting the sunlight and other rays back out of our atmosphere.He presents this as a wonderful way in which he can use his monetary resources to help out in the environmental struggle which is now a hot and heavy goal inside the hearts and minds of every American Mao-ist.
I have to applaud his brilliance. After all, he is doing this just as the sun is inside a solar minimum, so that honestly conducted research will indeed show that over the end of this year and going on for several more years, the temps on the earth will be lower. (This temp lowering will occur whether Gates does or doesn’t scatter iron particulates across the earth’s atmosphere.)
Of course, most Americans will never figure out that what is really going on is that Gates will be spraying waste products like glyphosate that companies like Monsanto do not want to put into expensive containers and then pay budget altering monies to have those chemicals carted off to some Super Fund site.
The
Science isn’t a system of belief. It’s a way of thinking. “Science” as a belief is sometimes called “scientism”, and it has a bad reputation based on the tendency of its adherents to overreach concerning what can be known with science, an excessive belief in the power of scientific knowledge and techniques.
If someone says they believe science then they don’t know science at all.
Regarding deGrasse Tyson’s area of expertise, there are some large and obvious gaps in what can be known about the universe through science. That dark matter and dark energy, the natures of which are not known, makes up most of the stuff of the universe in the most widely accepted theories about it speaks to the fact that we really don’t know what’s going on. What existed before the Big Bang (if there was a “before” at all) and why it happened (if “why” is even a relevant question) are questions we can only speculate about and for which we have no way of knowing the answers.
That is because of the eggspert shortage our world has been facing.
No matter how many times these people came out with their latest study on the healthy or non-healthy consequences of eating of eggs, no one paid them enough to continue.
And there’s me thinking that was the good thing about the Gospel.
I think spreading iron particles is to fertilize the oceans so that they take up more carbon dioxide, not to block sunlight.
This kind of geo-engineering is intended to make drastic, economy-killing cuts to carbon dioxide unnecessary.
So Bill Gates is being the good guy again.
Except he wants to do that stuff, AND the economy-killing stuff.
I can’t think of a time when he was ever a good guy.
Gates foray into education reform revealed a lack of knowledge of statistics. He saw a study showing a higher rate of national merit scholars at small high schools (IIRC) and therefore tried to fund a large increase in the number of smaller high schools. After $2 billion, it was dropped. All he showed is small sample sizes are likely to produced skewed results. Then he switched to LARGER sized classes- again a no go. Then $1 billion on improving teachers- probably had a negative effect (https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-melinda-gates-foundation-education-initiative-failure-2018-6)
I hope his foray into climate change doesn’t end so poorly.
On the plus side, I suspect the planet and the sun are more powerful than even Bill Gates.
No such thing. Virtually every scientist will believe in love, beauty, compassion, happiness and a host of other non-scientific states and conditions. There are things in the realm of science, in the realm of philosophy, and religion.
However, that view is called scientism, and some people do believe it.
No, and the word “technically” has no meaning here. Science is a process to gain information about what can be observed in the physical world. The amount of what can be observed increases daily.
I disagree- you should be right but, in fact, are not- therein lies the problem. Many public scientists practice, what is effectively, scientism. Worse, many pseudo-scientists due as well.
Yeah, all the “love,” “beauty,” “compassion,” and “happiness” are just a bunch of chemical neurotransmitters doing their thing in your brain.
People who believe science explains everything don’t “believe” in any “supernatural” truth. We’re all just meat puppets at the whim of our biochemistry.
But once they have all the biochemistry figured out, they’ll know what strings to pull to make all those puppets (us) do what they want.
I enjoyed reading your take on this.
There was a scientist of stature who posited, back in 1898, that every thing that physicists could determine had already been determined.
Famous last words.
I will grant that Dennett’s consciousnesses maybe an illusion- but mine isn’t. Goes back to the basic problem with materialist explanations of the mind- if it is an accident then why do you listen to it & why does it comport to existing reality?
I’m pretty sure Dennett is a reductionist. An eliminativist would say it’s an illusion. A reductionist says mind is made of matter.
But some things we are conscious of are illusions according to Dennett–assuming I can understand him.
The proof of the ability of the iron particles to “fertilize the oceans” so they uptake more carbon dioxide is found exactly where? Do you have a scientific study or two to show me? (Even studies based on models?)
More importantly, there is no way at all to assess whether or not what exactly it is that his planes will spray & whether those items are what he tells us they are spraying, or any number of toxic items Big Industry needs to get rid of.
Bill Gates & his “philanthropic quests” to help out the people of the world have caused Civil Actions and Criminal Actions to be taken against him, from nations in Africa to Italy to India. So if our own government was not a criminal enterprise, the same thing would be happening here.
@caroljoy — See the long Wikipedia article on “Iron fertilization”.
Instead of simply tipping barrels of waste into a river flowing into the ocean, or simply into the ocean directly, the diabolical Gates will spend billions of dollars on a vast fleet of long distance spray planes?
Wildly bizarre to conceive of Third World regimes as less corrupt than the U.S.
The last time you accused Gates of being charged with crimes overseas, it turned out to be an urban myth.
First of all Gates and the crimes he has been accused of are not urban myths.
Except for people willing to believe what the bought and paid for “fact checkers” offer up in defense of the man who is paying them. Did you see my early Sept article here re: “Columbia Journalism Review,” and how their reporters found Bill Gates holds as hostages dozens of well respected media outlets, including the BBC, and even the once critically acclaimed media watchedog “Media Matters.”
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Here is a list of the most prominent key players in the vaccine mayhem forced upon people across the globe:
The World Health Organization
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
PATH (Program for Appropriate Technology in Health, funded by the Gates’ foundation), and
GAVI (Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization, also funded by the Gates’ foundation)
All four of these organizations will now be expected to explain themselves due to a writ of petition originally submitted to the Supreme Court of India in 2012, by Kalpana Mehta, Nalini Bhanot, and Dr. Rukmini Rao, which has finally been heard by the courts.
The petitioners as reported in the “Economic Times”stated:
“BMGF, PATH and WHO were criminally negligent trialling the vaccines on a vulnerable, uneducated and under-informed population school administrators, students and their parents who were not provided informed consent or advised of potential adverse effects or required to be monitored post-vaccination.”
The Economic Times further reported:
“The SAMA report also said there had been cases of early onset of menstruation following the HPV vaccination program with the program resulting in heavy bleeding and severe menstrual cramps among many students. The standing committee pulled up the relevant state governments for the shoddy investigation into these deaths.
It said it was disturbed to find that ‘all the seven deaths were summarily dismissed as unrelated to vaccinations without in-depth investigations …’ the speculative causes were suicides, accidental drowning in well (why not suicide?), malaria, viral infections, subarachnoid hemorrhage (without autopsy) etc.”
Although the deaths were therefore not allowed to be part of the court case, the fact is that a petition was allowed to proceed to court, & then was heard by the Indian Supreme Court, hardly a minor matter. (Except maybe to you.)
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You are the only person I know of who posts here on ricochet who believes any part of the idea that CO2, which a is a very small and insignificant part of the earth’s atmosphere, has gone and wreaked catastrophic weather changes on the planet.
But let’s say for the sake of argument that CO2 is responsible for affecting the global climate.
Again, since the era we are heading into has two factors that make it totally unnecessary to worry about whether or not carbon is or is not “being uptaked,” those two factors being one: the massive amounts of volcanoes now active across the world, and causing the very cold winter many people are now experiencing, as well as factor two: the sun going into this solar minimum, Gates’ efforts to help out mankind are very suspect – especially to those of us who don’t see the proper strategies undertaken, while the flashier strategies which are more widely supported by the very media that Gates controls, will be employed to do exactly what.
We do not need the damn CO2 reduced. Of course, the program Gates is touting is going ahead, as those of us who resist his methods have little ay in any of this. And then as I stated before, in several years, he will cleverly declare that the scientists and researchers are announcing a nice drop in temperatures, all because of his wonderful efforts to “fertilize the oceans” with iron.
Nothing like setting up your own self-fulfilling prophecy. Or, your own non-falsifiable claim to savior-hood.
So here is some criticism of the notion that carbon sinking by spraying particles of iron across the skies of earth’s atmosphere, in order to fertilize the oceans with plankton:
1 Scientists also don’t know how long any carbon dioxide that is captured by the phytoplankton would be stored. While the ocean has the ability to stockpile millions of tons of the gas for a century or more, there’s a catch: It must sink below the surface if CO2 stays in solid form.
But it doesn’t necessarily do that. It is possible the end result will be the release of methane, which would only worsen the situation. (Plus what to make of needing jet planes to do this, which means the fleets of planes will be creating a lot of pollution leading to the very release of the CO2 that the public is told must not be created by any means for any reason.
2 As you might suspect, adding iron to the oceans could do more than just reduce carbon dioxide levels. Changing the structure of the food web by infusing the ocean with iron and promoting phytoplankton growth could drastically change the concentrations of other gases in both the air and the sea, potentially negating any positive effects of reduced carbon dioxide levels [source: Liss]. For example, some computer models predict that adding iron could increase levels of nitrous oxide and methane, two greenhouse gases [source: Haiken]. Scientist Mark Lawrence also points out that blooms of phytoplankton produce chemicals called methyl halides, which erode the ozone layer [source: Wright].
3 How will this affect the marine life such as whales dolphins and fish that humanity uses for food? They would be eating plankton that is altered by iron levels neither the fish, dolphins or whales would be used to absorbing. Too much iron is not a good thing.
@caroljoy — “You are the only person I know of who posts here on ricochet who believes any part of the idea that CO2, which a is a very small and insignificant part of the earth’s atmosphere, has gone and wreaked catastrophic weather changes on the planet.”
This one sentence appears to commit two (2) logical fallacies: the straw man argument (“catastrophic weather changes”) and the argument from authority (“the only person”).
Did I mention anything about “catastrophic” changes? I generally agree with Bjorn Lomborg, who argues in his new book, False Alarm, that global warming is real but not catastrophic. This is the position of scientific critics of the so-called consensus, like Prof. Richard Lindzen of M.I.T. and Prof. Roy Spencer of the University of Alabama (whose Global Warming Skepticism for Busy People is on my nightstand). N.B.: They don’t for an instant deny that CO2 has had a large impact on the Earth’s climate in past epochs, and may again in the future. They just argue that it isn’t doing so now.
And while Ricochet does have its complement of Young Earth Creationists, Never Trumpers, and Anti-vaxxers, the majority are sensible people, I think.
Young earth creationists can’t be sensible people?
And I think it’s possible to figure that maybe several dozen vaccinations before a child enters first grade – many of them simultaneous – may not be a great idea, without applying the epithet “anti-vaxxer.”
@caroljoy — “Of course, the program Gates is touting is going ahead …” No it isn’t!
The enviros and the media that pander to them hate, hate, hate geo-engineering. According to them, the only permissible solution to global warming is reduction of CO2 emissions. PERIOD. They feel about geo-engineering the way advocates of nuclear disarmament felt about Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative: it must be stopped.
“ … as those of us who resist his methods have little say in any of this. And then as I stated before, in several years, he will cleverly declare that the scientists and researchers are announcing a nice drop in temperatures, all because of his wonderful efforts to ‘fertilize the oceans’ with iron.” Given that your premise is completely wrong, there’s no reason to say more about your conclusions.