How come it's OK to have a thread called GEORGE BUSH, madman or idiot but my thread DAVID SUZUKI, madman or idiot got deleted? Just because a moderator is a Suzuki fanboy is no justification to have my thread deleted, for the same reason that people would rightly complain if the Bush thread got deleted by a Bush fanboy moderator!!
These environmentalists are promoting bad science to justify their claims. Take a look at the great essay Michael Crichton wrote, Aliens Cause Global Warming. What prompted me to begin the Suzuki bashing is that as a result of lobbying and propaganda that his cronies put forward, such as this one, and the whole website iter.ca, is a large part of the reason that Canada withdrew in December from the ITER project to build a working fusion reactor. The US, European Union, Japan, Russian Federation, and China at least remain in the project, as they seem to have more sense than to listen to crétin extaordinaire David Suzuki.
Not to suggest that crichton's paper is entirely without merit but it seems to me this paragraph undercuts his credibility as someone who understands the nature of science, regardless of whatever credentials he may have.
"That is why it is so important for the future of science that the line between what science can say with certainty, and what it cannot, be drawn clearly-and defended."
My feeble understanding of things is that certainty is available only within the domains of religion and purely formal systems.* All other forms of knowledge are contextual. The context of science is, at least for now, open ended. Thus if it's certain it aint science, and if it's science it ain't certain.
Global warming (anthropogenic or otherwise) is a hypothesis**. Given the nature of the scientific method it is quite unlikely that it could be elevated to the level of a theory before its consequences (if the hypothesis is correct ) were catastrophic. Certainly consensus has no palace within the domain science, nor has it ever been given one. But because of the nature of certainty, hypothesis and theory in science decisions both personal and political must sometimes be based on imperfect knowledge. If you are having chest pains and nine doctors are telling you to loose 100 lbs or die and one is saying "Not to worry, it's only indigestion." is it reasonable to flip a coin to decided which opinion you are going to follow? (Note that this is not the same problem as determining which opinion is scientifically correct.)
*(and this has nothing to do with quantum uncertainty)
** We can say with 'some' certainty that the temperature of the world is increasing--there is a good deal of quatifyable evidence of diverse kinds to support this. But, by how much and whether this is weather or climate is somewhat uncertain.
"That is why it is so important for the future of science that the line between what science can say with certainty, and what it cannot, be drawn clearly-and defended."
My feeble understanding of things is that certainty is available only within the domains of religion and purely formal systems.* All other forms of knowledge are contextual. The context of science is, at least for now, open ended. Thus if it's certain it aint science, and if it's science it ain't certain.
Global warming (anthropogenic or otherwise) is a hypothesis**. Given the nature of the scientific method it is quite unlikely that it could be elevated to the level of a theory before its consequences (if the hypothesis is correct ) were catastrophic. Certainly consensus has no palace within the domain science, nor has it ever been given one. But because of the nature of certainty, hypothesis and theory in science decisions both personal and political must sometimes be based on imperfect knowledge. If you are having chest pains and nine doctors are telling you to loose 100 lbs or die and one is saying "Not to worry, it's only indigestion." is it reasonable to flip a coin to decided which opinion you are going to follow? (Note that this is not the same problem as determining which opinion is scientifically correct.)
*(and this has nothing to do with quantum uncertainty)
** We can say with 'some' certainty that the temperature of the world is increasing--there is a good deal of quatifyable evidence of diverse kinds to support this. But, by how much and whether this is weather or climate is somewhat uncertain.
Prune said:
"Let's think back to people in 1900 in, say, New York. If they worried about
people in 2000, what would they worry about? Probably: Where would people
get enough horses? And what would they do about all the horse****? Horse
pollution was bad in 1900, think how much worse it would be a century later,
with so many more people riding horses?"
Yeah SETI is a little strange and the equation for Extraterresrial life is cr*p, I knew that long ago. And yes there is no evidence for Extraterrestrial life that Crichton or most people have. And when I think about it there is no evidence I have that my mother is infact my mother, other than she looks like me. I "believe" the formation of life is a physical process like any other. Doesn't occcur one time and by accident. Therefore, life occured on other planet and it occured in the same manner, more or less. There's nothng special about life if it can happen here, it can happen elsewhere, just like everything else physical we can observe. And there will also be humanoid people on some of them, esspecially the smarter ones will find a way to travel faster than the speed of light. And they will come here. So it is safe for me to say there are many species of ET's here now and have been here for a long time. Although I personally have no evidence. But I don't have any evidence about my mother either. But hell it looks like it to me that she is my biological mother.
You cannot clearly define what is science anyway, even more so than Crichton's claims. I constantly find questionable beliefs in sociology is the worse, than psychology, this extends to people considered great minds as Einstein and Steven Hawking. There's scientists and people that are so smart that not even the scientific community can understand there theories or generally what they speak of. That's why it's not unheard of for a man with an IQ of 180 to work as a janitor. Also IQ tests are misleading, don't have room/time to go into it. The scientists that Crichton talks about were just pointing out the obvious, but people can't even see the obvious.
It has to do with politics like he was saying, but politics has to do with the pseudo-sciences of pschology and sociology. I'm actually a fan of both, but not people believing them blindly, like anything.
You either have to be "smart" or a lot of clear evidence and even if you are smart you still need evidence to convince the scientists, convincing normal people is easy. A tragedy isn't that there 10,000 einsteins plowing fields somewhere, as I heard some one say. A tragedy is that there are and were people much smarter than him around, but they have no one to tell there ideas to, cause no one will understand them. Prehaps some human thought of the concepts behind the theory of relativity centuries ago, but how would she/he explain it to others.
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