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See also:
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/330a
In the U.S., as a non-government organization, if you’d like to modify the weather you need to fill out the NOAA form 17-4(a).
All weather modification projects that have been filed can be found here:
https://www.library.noaa.gov/Collections/Digital-Collections...
“Also expected[sic] from the requirement for reporting are religious activities or other ceremonies, rites and rituals intended to modify the weather.”
This just puts such a smile on my face in the middle of reading such otherwise bland government prose.
Well of course, you can't just have people doing unlicensed rain dances willy-nilly.
No no they meant "excepted", meaning the government isn't worried too much about your rain dances.
Ah, well that's disappointing (but in as more real sense, reassuring).
Keep in mind, that only holds as long as it's a religious practice, and it doesn't work.
Start getting a greater than 50% success rate, and I'll bet you see changes real quick. The Supreme Court case will be amazing.
My rain dance has a >50% success rate! It's part of my Seattle morning ritual.
_Daniel Howling Coyote has entered the chat_
If any super villain tries their weather machine without filling this out first expect the wrath of the US government.
But, but, my paperwork was in order!!!
Oh... Carry on, then.
Interesting, and this will sound very off-topic, but it's actually completely connected - there are any number of technical domains in which, if a given project is taken to an extreme in one particular circumstance or another, can feed back and cause havoc on many who aren't even involved with the project, or who have the slightest clue about it and therefore didn't have agency to internalize the risks involved. I'm going to list in no particular order:
• tetraethyl lead under Thomas Midgley Jr. and Charles Kettering
• chlorofluorocarbons (also Midgely and Kettering)
• Chernobyl (I would include other nuclear disasters in this bullet as well)
• [90% probability] 1977 Russian flu pandemic
• a [50%] probability research-related leak for the current pandemic (simply calling this 50% for this post's purposes because nobody knows and probabilities are difficult to weigh absent more data)
They all involve insufficient, blinkered, or mis- or overly-incentivized oversight of the activities at hand. At some level, they all employ an attitude of "prove the work is likely to cause harm" rather than "prove the work carries acceptable level of risk".
I don't necessarily know how to solve this without causing scientific and technical progress to slow to a crawl. But I think that stakeholder incentives to the green-lighting of any given project with a remotely global scope, and committees who could intervene to stop it in case of overwhelming safety concerns, should be mapped out in excruciating detail to ensure there isn't the faintest of COI (conflict of interest) that could influence decision-making however subtly.
So circling back to the parent comment, the idea that one can modify weather, presumably confined locally or temporally, seems innocuous enough - - it would be impossible for that to have global-scale consequences, right? Fact is, I really don't know, and this article is a good example of such an artificial climate-shifting project. What I would want to be assured of as a member of the public, though, is that the oversight for considering such a project wouldn't unduly benefit in some way - financially, career status, family nepotism, etc. that could cloud sober judgement on whether/how the project should be allowed to proceed.
To first-order, I'd like to see a problem-domain-agnostic approach to ensuring the human incentives across all aspects of approval couldn't possibly be operating out of the wrong place. I don't want to have to be able to understand the underlying respective technologies involved to feel assured that the risk-to-public-benefit reward trade-off has been undertaken through an irreproachably sober lens.
There is little value to slapping numbers on to probabilities that haven't been calculated, why not just say "seemingly likely" and "unknown probability" instead of "90%" and "50%, with an explanation that it isn't really 50%."
No you see it either is true or it isn’t true, so 50-50.
You should read about the CIA's study about words of estimative probability :
https://waf.cs.illinois.edu/visualizations/Perception-of-Pro...
Basically, when you use a term like "seemingly likely", you do have a number range in mind. Always. Be it 50%-70% or 40%-60%. It's impossible not to.
And it became a problem for CIA agents communicating with each other, because different people have different sense of what numbers fit a given term. It's better to be clear about what you mean by giving explicit numbers. It's understood in this sort of context anyway that your number is not calculated from anything, that it's only the rough middle of a range that sounds right to you.
> Basically, when you use a term like "seemingly likely", you do have a number range in mind. Always. Be it 50%-70% or 40%-60%. It's impossible not to.
I don't see how this is supported in the article. And the experiments they discussed -- asking people what probability they assign to certain expressions -- can't possibly support this statement. If you ask people to assign a number to an expression, they'll give you a number, but that doesn't mean they were originally thinking of one, or that the one they come up with is meaningful.
> And it became a problem for CIA agents communicating with each other, because different people have different sense of what numbers fit a given term. It's better to be clear about what you mean by giving explicit numbers. It's understood in this sort of context anyway that your number is not calculated from anything, that it's only the rough middle of a range that sounds right to you.
My experience is with these sorts of number-like estimate things is that I should try to figure out what plain English phrase they are trying to over-specify. I mostly come to this conclusion by talking about current events with people (elections outcomes that they thing are sure things, for example), and comparing the numbers reported (by 538 for example) to odds that they are familiar with (D&D critical hits are a good one, as an event that is rare but memorably encountered). This tends to lower confidence, which indicates to me that people don't really have a feel for these numbers.
I don't really think 70% and 60% are different from an operational point of view anyway. They are both events where we think the outcome has some skew but must plan on seeing the less likely outcome pretty often.
All we need is some organization to stop things like the LHC because people think it may end the world.
http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1838947,0...
Thankfully, the LHC still hasn't ended our timeline yet, thanks to reverse causality.
http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1937370,0...
> a [50%] probability research-related leak for the current pandemic (simply calling this 50% for this post's purposes because nobody knows and probabilities are difficult to weigh absent more data)
Or when a certain country applies pressure to other countries to dismiss the idea as "racism" while destroying evidence for international neutral investigators to shed light on what really happened.
A frequentist is shown a coin and is asked what's the probability it will land on heads.
Frequentist: "How the hell should I know?"
The coin is then flipped 10000 times, and it lands on heads exactly 5000 times.
Frequentist: "_Definitely_ not 50%, the coin's gotta be biased".
A bayesian is shown a coin and is asked what's the probability it will land on heads.
Bayesian: "It's 50%!"
The coin is then flipped 10000 times, and it lands on heads exactly 5000 times.
Bayesian: "It's 50%!"
This two-strawmen thought experiment clearly demonstrates the superiority of the Bayesian approach in learning useful information from the real-world observations.
Let’s just table this one. It’s too hot for HN and peaceful discourse.
That's also the CCP's opinion!
Makes me envious, it must have been great living at a time where progress was good and megalomanic projects were seriously discussed. Now, everyone is so cynical about everything.
That sort of 'progress' made the Aral Sea vanish, I guess that's why people got a bit jaded about such large scale projects.
Also see the "Northern River Reversal" project which thankfully was abandondend eventually:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_river_reversal
> _why people got a bit jaded about such large scale projects_
China seems to be doing fine with large-scale projects. People didn't get jaded. Certain cultures did.
Well people _should_ better get jaded (and angry) about destruction of the environment their children will need to live in.
On the other hand, the grand canal is the archetypal megastructure, and it's got a strong claim to being _the_ defining feature of China.
If you look at the planet on google earth, you can see a lot of human structure. Mines, fields, tree farms, deforestation, waste-water runoff - these things are often vast. I don't know if giant engineering projects really move the needle that much; we're already engaged in a giant engineering project, it's just a completely blind one with no actual goal.
Cynical, or realistic because everyone has seen what the consequences of such projects can be?
Progress can still be good, just like it never was if it also means there are severe downsides and they are just ignored for the sake of progress.
The Suez Canal? The Panama canal? The various locks and dams that save hundreds of thousands of lives by preventing mass floodings, generate clean power, and allow deep continental shipping?
Nothing is perfect, but only the most delusional think these projects were not MAJOR improvements for humanity.
Hoover dam & Central Valley aqueducts come to mind…
Exactly. If anything, the opposite of what the parent says seems to be true: as each new shiny technology or development pops up (e.g., social media or the crypto space) there is an explosion of utopian idealism that is only later dampered when the reality of the downsides sink in. It would be a nice of change of pace if we actually seriously considered the potential downsides of the new cool thing (say, the privacy implications of the social media explosion before universal use).
Societies do that to a greater or lesser degree. The Amish are so famous for it that the neologism 'amistics' has been proposed to refer to a society's choices around adopting technology that is technically feasible.
What I think many people are lamenting is that their own society is not optimistic enough about novel technology for their liking. Given that many of the people on Hacker News are near the vanguard for technological innovation by global standards it would seem there's a desire for more permissive amistics than currently exist. If anyone knows where those kinds of subcultures could be found I'd be interested in knowing about it.
Absolutely! I've got a project to correct the Earth's axial tilt, and banish Winter forever to the benighted polar lands where it can be enjoyed by those who want it, without troubling the rest of us who have the sense to live in actually habitable climates. You would not _believe_ the trouble I've had submitting grant applications.
The main problem is that the planet when viewed as a whole is rather squishy. We're gonna have to apply a lot of energy with extraordinary gentleness somehow. Still working on that part.
Please double check your calculations this time, to avoid another faux-pas like the first attempt back in 1891.
I sometimes wonder if it was an effect of the war. Seeing all the normal rules and power structures of society suddenly vanish, to the point that you can blow a hole in a 1000-year-old cathedral just by saying to your specialist "I need a door here, can you make it happen?", must have had a certain impact on how people think.
I believe it's a consequence of the Cold War and the disinformation campaign that the Soviets and now the Russians engage in.
It takes only a small number of operatives to organize grass roots groups that spread hate, cynicism, and division. It's easy to take amplify and escalate nascent conflict to ensure that discourse fails and that conflicts flare up
I think the Vietnam war played a particularly strong role in damaging trust in government in the U.S., and we've never really come back from that.
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/05/17/public-trust...
Reading this chain, I'm reminded how we wonder, believe and think way more than _do_.
>I believe it's a consequence of the Cold War and the disinformation campaign that the Soviets and now the Russians engage in.
The Russians, the US government, the Chinese government, the British government, and most other governments around the world.
>It takes only a small number of operatives to organize grass roots groups that spread hate, cynicism, and division. It's easy to take amplify and escalate nascent conflict to ensure that discourse fails and that conflicts flare up
That's true. And when you have a huge number of operatives, like the CIA, it's even easier to escalate nascent conflict. Read up on Conintelpro and watch the Church Committee hearings to get an inkling of what we were (and are) engaged in on a global scale.
It is extraordinary how public health officials in the US were able to just add Fluoride to water and iodine to salt. If that were being proposed today, people would throw such a huge fit. We can't even build bike lanes on roads today without having meetings about it for a decade
They were added at a time when deadly diseases were a ubiquitous fact of life--imagine having ten kids and expecting four of them to die. Now that that isn't something people have to think about, we are rightly suspicious of the motivations of health bureaucrats.
Well this is the thing I find baffling about the most intense of the COVID vaccine and lockdown skeptics who go on about "new world order" type conspiracies.
We are coming out of one of the most lenient -- in terms of public health administration -- periods in the modern era. The mental health system up until the 70s, 80s, was frequently used to just "commit" people (even unruly "hysteric" housewives) without regard to liberty at all. Vaccination campaigns were done on a huge scale, and rationing was a part of life for many people in the west not just during the war but in post-war periods as well.
[Some] people may have lost sight of what it truly means to live in an (even mild) emergency and what kinds of decisions we need to make as a _collective_ to solve certain problems.
If you're going to look at it that way, then we have a mostly-white middle-class who is experiencing for the very first time the government wielded against it as a weapon. (They are less than thrilled.)
But I don't think that's exactly what's going on; I think it's a clumsy attempt at a rehash of Lyndon Johnson-Great Society-style governance. And it's obviously not working, so there's a rush to find the most plausible people to blame.
About every 25 years, the residents of Portland vote against fluoridation of the municipal water.
Do they vote for it in the intervening 24 years, or is that just how often it comes up?
I think I'd prefer cynical skepticism to megalomaniac. It may be a bit stifling at times, but it's also the result of sort of collectively rising a little bit above societal Dunning Kruger. We now realize that things are a lot more complex and that the balance in chaotic systems can be a lot more precarious and fragile.
It might be healthy for any large project to have a well informed skeptic in the room telling people it won't work. That person could be wrong, but figuring out how to deal with their projected outcomes can be the difference between success and failure. Or outright disaster.
> well informed skeptic
Ah, I found the problem. We have the skeptic, and they effectively stop major projects dead in their tracks, but rarely are they well-informed.
Yes, that's why I made that stipulation. There are some people that are simply resistant to any change. That can be almost as useful if they're nudged into giving their reasons, but only if they're not in a leadership/decision-making position.
An uninformed naysayer with decision making authority will kill just about any initiative.
Do you have any idea the insane amount of damage that was done in that period? That we are still paying the price for?
Well, Google and Amazon are megalomaniac in progress. I doubt one has to be cynical to be disgusted by where all of this going. But yeah people had dreams and those were exciting at the time (when one did not know all the consequences of course).
See also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantropa
Definitely more realistic than damming the Bering Strait. Of course, once the sea levels start rising, it would be worth doing it just to keep the level of the Mediterranean (and Black Sea) constant...
I have long wanted to dam up the Straits of Gibraltar and recover the initial conditions described in Julian May's Many Coloured^* Land.
If you've ever visited the Vasa [1] in Stockholm, you know that wooden ship was fairly well preserved after 300 years, because the Baltic is less salty than the ocean. Its connectivity with the North Sea is pretty limited, so over time that's what happened.
So, we don't have to totally _dry up_ the Med; just turn it into an almost-fresh-water lake! Randall, calculate how many thousands or millions of years that would take.
[1]
I think the idea is that you let in water from rivers and possibly also from the Atlantic and possibly even the Red Sea, in a controlled manner, have it run via turbines and keep the actual water level low via evaporation to keep the whole scheme working.
This will eventually result in salt and minerals from the water concentrating in whats left of Mediterranean - so basically the exact opposite effect.
I wasn't being serious, of course, but since you brought it up: why IS the Baltic less salty?
Good question! According to the Wikipedia article about the Baltic it is due to all the rivers & water from the North Sea actually not mixing with the Baltic very much in practice.
https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1190:_Time
That's amazing!
Sure this makes complete sense and everyone I know is all for it, but shouldn't we be concentrating on blowing up the moon first?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTJ3LIA5LmA
That's a link to a comedy show.
Here's a link about someone who actually seriously wanted to blow up the moon:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Abian
I remember the 'Weekly World News' writing about that under the headline 'Scientists Plan to Blow Up Moon', I remember it specifically because I worked with Alexander Abian's daughter at the time. We all found it amusing, but she was a little disappointed that after decades as a math professor his legacy was going to be that.
Let me guess...
He wanted to get rid of lunacy?
>his claim that blowing up the Moon would solve virtually every problem of human existence. He made this claim in 1991 in a campus newspaper,[4] stating that a Moonless Earth wouldn't wobble, eliminating both the seasons and its associated events like heat waves, snowstorms and hurricanes.
Nice...
Neal Stephenson wrote a book about that..
https://www.amazon.com/Seveneves-Novel-Neal-Stephenson/dp/00...
If you enjoy reading about mega projects then I would recommend Engineers' Dreams by Willy Ley. It’s an older book on large scale civil engineering proposals such as draining the Mediterranean sea, creating an inland sea in the Sahara, and irrigating the Jordan valley.
_creating an inland sea in the Sahara_
Could this be part of an answer to massive sea level rise?
Napkin math says about 343km^3/year of water to contend with, and the Panama canal work took 35 years to move about 0.2km^3 of earth, about 0.006km^3/year.
As a layperson it seems to me you'd need to channel a vast area already below sea level (3500km^2 at ~100m deep?) to put a dent in the rise.
Again, napkin math. Reuters claims "75.6 trillion gallons of water added to the ocean each year" and a Panama canal history page says the French dug 30M cubic yards and the Americans dug 238M.
Wouldn't the water just continously evaporate only to, with high probability, precipitate back to the "global" ocena system or its tributaries?
You could make the see less salty though, over a sufficiently long time and get a _WHOLE LOT_ of rock salt.
Sounds like a jr/software engineer's proposal without considering 2nd order effects. These are not as uncommon as you would hope.
Even in a senior role I've learned enough to ask "tell my why this is a bad idea" to ensure I get suitable feedback without people just shrugging their shoulders and saying "well, if he insists..."
Agreed, same. (I actually had 'software' in parens and switched it for 'jr/')
Or 50-75% of the nonsense that comes out of the mouths of politicians. The solution to a knotted ball of string is not to yank the tag end you see, but it's so very tempting.
Crazy fact: the Bering Strait is only 100 to 165 feet deep (~45m).
45m x 88km length = 4,000,000 m^2 times whatever thickness.
Makes sense the strait is shallow given the whole prehistoric migration, but in my mind it was much deeper, probably because of its proximity to the Pacific (max 30k+ ft) and the Bering Sea (max 12k ft).
It would have been fun to see illustrations or artist renderings.
If they believed that:
Proposed that the United States and Soviet Union build a gigantic dam across the Bering Strait and use nuclear power–driven propeller pumps to push the warm Pacific current into the Atlantic by way of the Arctic Sea. Arctic ice would melt, and the Siberian and North American frozen areas would become temperate and productive.
was a sound idea, then why are we being so confident about current ideas that are being forced into adoption worldwide?
How was damming the Bering straights going to help Pacific water get into the Arctic Sea? It sounds like it would have the opposite effect, which fits with the Dutch guy's proposal.
That's where the nuclear powered propellers/pumps come in they sit on the dam and force the water from the pacific into the Arctic Ocean. Then it can only really flow out through the Atlantic.
Space mirrors would probably be more economical.
I can imagine this being done by redirecting equatorial sunlight to the poles so the net power incidence remains constant.
We need something like this to stop global warming!
no, that proposed project wasn't done with any environmental considerations at all and likely would have pretty devastating environmental effects through various effects.
We need a huge collaboration of countries.
We don't need a mega project which creation will cause tons of CO2 (building stuff produces CO2 equivalent emissions) have devastating environmental damage, and massive security risks.
Assuming we can fix climate change by mega project is just the wrong approach.
We need a very (very very) high number on mostly smaller changes (and probably some larger law changes).
So that even if some of them fail it doesn't matter in the grater picture, and so that there is actually a realistic chance to pull it of (which for such a hypothetical mega construction is very small for various reasons).
> huge collaboration of countries
So what you're saying is we need a _committee_ of countries.
I suspect the days of doing major engineering work are mostly behind us. For better or worse.
Maybe we just need a new Logo, ours looks dated.
> We need a huge collaboration of countries.
Go ahead we are listening. Who would you go about coordinating and enforcing 'huge collaboration of countries'?
All i remember is world leaders coming together, year after year - shake hands, thump their chest expressing how sorrowful they feel, give great speeches how everything will change - and then nothing changes.
Except that isn't how it has gone - we had 4 years where the US did not sit down and agree, and actually went backwards on climate agreements. This year, the world leadership has come back together for the first time in years.
I don't want to go down a political rabbit hole here, but we should at least get the facts straight.
To both points, how would the political risk that looms on the horizon every 4 years be mitigated? It’s tough to see a long term solution that isn’t constantly at risk of being reversed when a new camp rides into town. Maybe some govt orgs like NASA who’ve been dealing with this for decades can shed some light
In the US at least, a fully ratified international treaty would be a fairly effective mitigation. Those have force of law second only to the Constitution. Any single President could somewhat obstruct implementing such a treaty but wouldn't be able to stop it completely.
Constitutional amendments come to mind, but I feel like that would be difficult to pull off at this point
There being a need for something and it happening are two fundamental different thinks.
Just because it doesn't happen doesn't mean there is not need for it.
The Bering Strait Dam btw. would have required a higher degree of collaboration then is needed to limit climate change. Sure a few less countries would be involved be the involved countries still would need a much deeper level of collaboration which given that it's effect would have been rather negative for many of the cost countries it would have been rather hard to archive any agreement.
It may slow down for a maybe short while the emission of greenhouse gases originated by permafrost thawing.
But that won't solve that we keep adding big amounts of fossil carbon to the atmosphere, nor the amount of fossil carbon that we managed to add to the cycle so far that is what is driving climate change now.
To stop global warming net zero plus massive carbon capture is needed, moving pieces in a mostly closed (or at least with stable enough inputs) system won't do the trick.
Perhaps cultivation of reclaimed land could capture some carbon? And it says something about re-greening the Sahara too..
Carbon capture from re-greening the Sahara would be countered by de-greening the Amazon, since the latter is fertilized by the former as winds blow dust over the Atlantic. These systems are complex, and just doing what intuitively feels right can just as easily be counterproductive.
Hmm, but why does the Amazon need to be constantly re-fertilised? Where does it lose that phosphorus?
EDIT: ah, rain seems to leach it away from the amazon basin over time. Still wonder where it all goes though, into the sea?
Forest ecosystem soil is fragile, because the soil is very loose due to animals, vegetation, insects, mushrooms. A large, old forest only produces on the order of a foot of topsoil in 50 years. It is possible to produce more artificially with rainwater mitigation and drainage paths that are engineered rather than left to chaos.
As a side effect, growing in the Sahara would also potentially drastically reduce Atlantic hurricanes. So we have to decide what's more important, trees (move them to Sahara! Or at least replant equal numbers in Sahara and elsewhere) or human lives and infra.
Redistributing heat across an object does not make the object as a whole any cooler.
No but if it affects albedo it has an effect on the incoming radiation. I.e more ice - higher albedo - radiation is not absorbed at the surface.
Is there any irony in observing the fickle preferences of man in regards to geoengineering? Perhaps our understanding is more limited than some are willing to admit.
63 years ago, there was a push to warm the arctic. In 1978, doomsayers predicted a new ice age. For all of the predictions of apocalypse, none have materialized. However, throughout history fear has been a powerful tool for motivating and manipulating the public.
"Ice Age 1978 Leonard Nimoy" -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tAYXQPWdC0
"List of dates predicted for apocalyptic events" -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dates_predicted_for_ap...
None of them had anywhere the level "scientific consensus" on the topic as climate change has.
In difference to that, we now have a scientific consensus and while there is a lot discussion about many details there is pretty much an agreement on:
- it's a lot of warming
- it's coming way to fast
- it's man made
- it already started
- the consequences if we don't change the current trajectory will be bad, very very bad
Doesn't mean it's an apocalypse and maybe the thread to the survival of humanity was larger during the cold war (not that ware aren't somewhat at the beginning of a new cold war), but then the a cold war can be resolved by everyone agreeing to not do anything. Climate change needs everyone to do something (change their power production and potential even living style). Which is bad, because people are better at not acting then they are at acting when it comes to hard decisions.
Yes, that's one of the possibilities here. However the point of the comment and what the article illustrates in my view, is that these grand projects can turnout to be horribly misguided in retrospect. And you may say to that, "but this time is different, because..."
>None of them had anywhere the level "scientific consensus" on the topic as climate change has.
Which is fine as far as that goes. However, consensuses have been wrong before, even when dressed in the pretenses of science. Cannabis prohibition would be a good example where research was exclusively funded to show the harms of cannabis. Today CBD is presented as a cure all. A common thread would be the underlying financial and political incentives for prohibition. Incentives matter. Another parallel might exist in the fear based promotion of prohibition.
>Climate change needs everyone to do something...
Yes, and as we examine the proposed solutions most of them revolve around new taxes and supranational bodies issuing currency in the form of "carbon indulgences" or "carbon credits". We are supposed to believe that those horrible oil companies have every incentive to distort the facts about the climate. Yet simultaneously we should also believe there are no malign incentives for or distortions surrounding the inverse. We should unquestioningly believe there are no ulterior motives for those who would appoint themselves to issue carbon credits, permission slips to consume energy needed by every human on Earth.
That's a bit of a stretch, but it is possible. It is also possible that just like the proposed project in 1958, which was imagined as a boon for the Siberian region, future geoengineering projects will also have unanticipated dangers. It looked good at the time, just like the drug war looked good at one time. Today the climate agenda and geoengineering looks appealing to many.
Maybe not. Maybe we don't know as much as we think we know?
> is that these grand projects can turnout to be horribly misguided
This is why instead of grand projects we should have many smaller projects which combined still have a large effect.
Also luckily many of the changes which are good for the climate are (at least in their idea) also good even without climate change. Like going way from coal power plants, which are not just bad for the climate but also bad for the environment. (Through in practice there might be drawbacks in whatever replaces it.)
> just like the drug war looked good at one time.
I get your point, but I'm not sure that this is a good example, the war on drugs looked from the get to go like it was overly targeting certain communities while even back then it was known that it's unlikely to work due to e.g. previous experiences with fighting alcohol during the prohibition period...
My theory is that companies that manufacture soil amendments are the prime mover behind all of the room and gloom of climate change, specifically the need to reduce atmospheric carbon.
Plants used to be heavier and squatter, and usable material would have been greater, back when the atmosphere was closer to 2000ppm CO2. That is, realistically, and actually, plants get all of their food from the air, and soil amendments make it easier for the plants to grow tall/wide enough to get more usable sun and surface area to get their food out of the air.
Ask anyone who's ever tried CO2 with plants what happens to their fertilizer budget. It goes down, because plants are carbohydrate factories, and more carbon means more carbohydrates.
I'm off in the weeds, but cui Bono is something I ask of nearly everything and other than the carbon credit companies and all the people employed therein, who benefits from less CO2 financially? The Bayer/Monsanto and Dow of the world. Not me or you, not the oil companies, not a Rockefeller or whoever.
https://www.factcheck.org/2019/05/manipulated-time-cover-on-...
> We’ll again refer to the 2008 study published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society that found there was not a scientific consensus in the 1970s on the cooling idea. The authors, by surveying the peer-reviewed literature between 1965 and 1979, found quite the opposite.
Fact check sites like the one you listed will increase their stature when they acknowledge that science is not a process of consensus. I look forward to reading a "fact check" site which "debunks" this ridiculous turn of phrase. Even if we accepted this misnomer in your quote, we can easily observe that "scientific consensus" has shifted throughout history.
>(00:12:30) The climatic record in these deep sea cores tells us that there have been eight ice ages in the last 700,000 years. It also tells us when they have occurred. This provides us with a test of various theories of the ice ages. We now have a theory that tells us that changes in the shape of the Earth's orbit act as a pacemaker for the ice age succession. Since this theory can precisely predict when ice ages occured in the past, it also can predict when ice ages will occur in the future. From this theory we can say with confidence that we are currently heading towards another ice age.
Dr. James D. Hays
https://websites.pmc.ucsc.edu/~pkoch/EART_206/09-0303/Hays%2...
> Fact check sites like the one you listed will increase their stature when they acknowledge that science is not a process of consensus.
Science is _absolutely_ about consensus. Being right is entirely meaningless if you can't produce enough evidence to convince others of your rightness.
There's a very significant difference between "basically everyone in the field agrees there's enough evidence for X" and "one guy advocates X".
I'd describe a consensus as a political event, not a scientific one.
Shouldn’t consensus in policy be led by science rather than rigid dogma?
“When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” -Keynes
Science is about understanding the facts that inform policy.
The question frames a false alternative in 'rigid dogma'. In a generous interpretation, I'd say that this line of reasoning quickly devolves into a chicken and egg scenario.
1) I changed my mind about the facts.
2) I declare that the facts have changed.
3) You must also change your mind or else I'll accuse you of adhering to dogma.
4) My view is now more popular. It is the prevailing dogma. You're against the consensus if you disagree with my "facts".
The word "Facts" does heavy lifting here. Ultimately, facts can't make any assertions, only humans can. At the core of Scientism, there's always a presumptuous attempt to lay claim to objective truth. Science becomes a dogma and belief rather than a method of investigation.
>_My view is now more popular. It is the prevailing dogma._
I think you are misinterpreting the word “dogma”. It does not mean “consensus understanding” but rather “incontrovertibly true”. The former can change, the latter cannot; wordsmithing a false equivalence doesn’t turn real science into dogma.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dogma
1 usually disapproving : a belief or set of beliefs that is accepted by the members of a group without being questioned or doubted
_These new findings challenge the current dogma in the field._
_political dogma_
2: a belief or set of beliefs that is taught by a religious organization
1a: something held as an established opinion
especially : a definite authoritative tenet
b: a code of such tenets
pedagogical dogma
c: a point of view or tenet put forth as authoritative without adequate grounds
2: a doctrine or body of doctrines concerning faith or morals formally stated and authoritatively proclaimed by a church
>_without being questioned or doubted_
This is not congruent of science.
>_doctrine or body of doctrines concerning faith_
Again, “faith” is antithetical to science. Faith requires no evidence, science does.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines dogma as:
“a principle or set of principles laid down by an authority as incontrovertibly true.”
I.e., dogma cannot be disputed. Science is meant to be disputed.
It seems you are confusing political opinion for science.
There are plenty of soft sciences (and even some hard) where the sum-total of know facts still have different interpretations.
Yes, but that cannot be called a consensus. I’d claim that just means there is too much uncertainty to make a determination. (And less anyone misunderstands, consensus is not synonymous with unanimous)
Hmm, yet many forge on ahead. If lack of consensus was lethal I'm not sure much of what we "know" about history would be accepted.
Accepted isn’t necessarily the problem. Being willing to accept without acknowledging remaining uncertainty is the problem. Science is often about narrowing in on the answer, while being humble enough to acknowledge it may not be “the” answer.
Most new ideas that occur at the margins of that uncertainty won’t initially be accepted, but as more data comes in that uncertainty is reduced
Sure, and if you get enough of a consensus for that definition change, that'll be meaningful.
https://websites.pmc.ucsc.edu/~pkoch/EART_206/09-0303/Hays%2...
Somehow, your link was missing a hyphen.
Thank you.
Of "man"? Your language is as outmoded as your disbelief in anthropogenic climate change.
I don't think parent is blaming women