Japan's boffins: Global warming isn't man-made

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/25/jstor_climate_report_translation/

by laika4000 • 17 years ago

21 35 17 years ago

theregister.co.uk

Allocator20082• 17 years ago

What about Man-Bear-Pig? Man-Bear-Pig poses a huge threat to this planet. I'm serial, people. I'm totally serial!

Allocator20082• 17 years ago

Listen people, I'm serial. Man-Bear-Pig is a huge threat, and if you can't see that, and you continue to down vote this thread, I will demand a recount of your down votes. If I don't like that recount, I will appeal to the Imperial Senate and keep appealing until Palpatine gives me a count I like. I'm serial. I did not invent the internet for you just so you could ignore Man-Bear-Pig. You people are about to experience an inconvenient recount. This is serial people.

dejb8• 17 years ago

Some excerpts

> The report by Japan Society of Energy and Resources (JSER) is astonishing rebuke to international pressure...

> JSER is the academic society representing scientists from the energy and resource fields

I think in this case it is relevant to consider the source.

kingkongrevenge• 17 years ago

It's always relevant to consider the source. I like to keep in mind that the material arguing problematic anthropogenic warming all comes from public grant funded researchers, who would like to keep getting grants. "Impending Catastrophe" scares up money, I would think.

mkn• 17 years ago

Ah, the despicable grant-money trope rears its ugly head again. Fine and fair enough, we all agree that research takes money. But I would really like to see, from people who run this one up the flagpole, substantive evidence indicating that 1) Advocating falsehoods is a good way to get grant money, rather than to earn scientific ridicule and a sure death to one's research credibility, and/or 2) A significant number of theories have risen to acceptance within the scientific community based on the supposed ease they afforded in obtaining funding, and have later been dropped when the scandal was discovered.

Note that the above two, if supplied, would still not rise to the level of proof that any particular area of research was lethally contaminated by researchers' avarice. For that, you would actually have to show 1) That the research was flawed or came to an incorrect conclusion, and 2) That the researchers responsible were falsifying data or inventing specters with the intent of obtaining funding. To discredit research in this way, you would have to use the scientific method to convince scientists, and/or courtroom procedure to convince a jury in, say, a civil trial to recover fraudulently obtained research dollars.

The above should be enough to show why these accusations occur in online forums, editorial pages, and blogs, rather than in research journals or courts of law. Simply put, it cannot be done because these accusations are so patently absurd as to be rejected out of hand by people whose expertise is actually in finding things like this out. If it were otherwise, one could make an academic career out of showing it. If you are so sure of it, please do so. Get published in Nature, or another respected journal. Do such groundbreaking research that you get invited to give talks to academic audiences. Your service to mankind by debunking a flawed institution that claims (at this point legitimately, I might add) the mantle of being the best way that the human race has of gaining new knowledge will be immeasurable, even if you did not, in the same stroke, supply humankind with another and superior edifice. Until then, by perpetuating this silly vicious lie, you are merely pissing in the fountain of knowledge* for the purposes of self-aggrandizement.

Our current body of scientific knowledge has been made possible by the scientific method. This method is designed to ruthlessly root out falsehood. Look at cold fusion. I would imagine there would be no easier way to get funding than the promise of cheap, relatively low-tech, non-polluting, and abundant energy. Yet, Pons and Fleischman were immediately discredited and now stand as objects of ridicule to this day. Everything that you rely on to supply you with your modern lifestyle comes from this kind of scientific rigor. Medicine, transportation, hygiene, materials, manufacturing, computers, the list goes on.

Show a little bit of the proper respect due to the edifice that has done so much for you.

*"[P]issing in the fountain of knowledge" borrowed from YouTube user Thunderf00t's excellent videos on young earth creationism whackos. I highly recommend them, even if you think you're sick to death of that whole 'debate.'

dejb8• 17 years ago

I think it is probably most relevant to consider where the funding comes from - 'He who pays the piper calls the tune'. You really would have to involve those who fund the research in your little conspiracy theory for it to make sense. Publicly funded research money generally comes from the government. I don't really see enough incentive for the governments of the world to be paying for biased research in favour of global warming. In fact I would argue that the previous US administration demonstrated a significant bias against the global warming case.

In the case of private organisations the incentive to pay for biased research is obvious and it is an expected tactic.

When proposing a conspiracy theory such as the one you are with respect to global warming it can help to point to a previous examples of where a similar thing has occurred. As an counter conspiracy theory example I'll put up the debate over smoking. Although public research started to show signs of health problems, the smoking industry fought with their own paid 'research'. Millions of lives have probably been lost as a result of the delays in changes to public policy because of the FUD spread by the smoking lobby. To me the incentives with global warming seem to be the same as with smoking was and I see every reason to believe the situation is the same.

alecco• 17 years ago

Japan: ... and those whales are going to suicide at the beach anyway, so we... Ehm, study them and prevent contamination of beaches with decaying whale corpses.

panda88• 17 years ago

If you research this issue even as a layman you will come to the same conclusion. Global warming caused by man made CO2 emissions is a total farce.

Here is some scientific proof for you to start your research..

http://www.discovery.org/v/30

joubert• 17 years ago

http://www.climatesciencewatch.org/index.php/csw/details/mac... ?

blackguardx• 17 years ago

Is that a joke? The discovery institute is in no way a reliable source. They advocate creationism!

Tichy4• 17 years ago

I suspect they came to that conclusion by studying the guts of whales.

patio11• 17 years ago

This is about as knee-slappingly insightful as a Japanese person saying "Trust Paul Graham on startups? Pfft. What would Americans ever accomplish with a startup, invading somebody?"

Tichy4• 17 years ago

They are from maritime research, and they compared computer modeling of climate changes to astrology, so the step to reading guts of whales doesn't seem so far fetched to me. Japan is famous for needing whales for scientific research, so I just put 2+2 together.

I must admit I missed all pages of the article after the first, though (bloody pagination). Now reading, I can at least sympathize with the notion that man made global warming is only a hypothesis. However, that holds for anything science says, doesn't it? There are still varying degrees of belief based on the known evidence.

Overall the whole article did not have much content, or did it? The only content is basically that there are 3 japanese scientists who don't believe in global warming and 2 who do (or something like that - in any case the real information content is close to zero).

TweedHeads• 17 years ago

An honest question: how do we know we are not in the opposite of an ice age? So temperatures will get warmer and warmer till they reach a peak and then start dropping till we get to the next ice age?

How do we determine that peak and when was the last one?

Tichy4• 17 years ago

Climatologists know about the ice age cycles. The talk is about deviations from the expected temperature changes.

jibiki• 17 years ago

It would be nice if more people acknowledged that we should be seriously addressing the problem of natural climate change as well as man made climate change.

jwesley• 17 years ago

This is an idea that's given rise to many conspiracy theories about the politicizing of science, many of which make a lot of sense when you look at them objectively. I recommend reading Michael Crichton's essay on second hand smoking and some of the content on Green Agenda to get some background information:

http://veritasvincitprolibertate.wordpress.com/2008/06/21/mi... http://www.green-agenda.com/

It's scary to think that powerful people might justify using science as a political tool, just because they believe the ends justify the means. If you're willing to manipulate the truth for what you perceive is good, it opens the door for many dystopian scenarios.

jsdalton• 17 years ago

Boffin: "...scientists, engineers, and other people who are stereotypically seen as engaged in technical or scientific research. American equivalent is 'egghead.'"

Just in case anyone had no idea what a "boffin" was and figured it was some kind of flightless bird or something.

Not that this happened to me or anything like that.

Spyckie• 17 years ago

From what I understand, these scientists are merely saying that there is not enough evidence yet to instantiate the hypothesis of man-made global warming into fact. And by evidence, these guys are looking accurately descriptions of several known phenomena that affect our climate that are not yet well understood.

The scientists bring up 2 good points for science's sake - first is that scientific models need to be 'tuned' because its impossible to deal with all of the complexities of nature - this makes them susceptible to selective tuning to make them support the hypothesis. They also imply that this hypothesis is unscoped, meaning that solar, aerosel, or other factors haven't been adequately taken into account. If you want to prove the link between carbon and temperature change, prove that that observed effect isn't caused by anything else.

I also think this title is completely link-bait, because they aren't suggesting that Global warming isn't man-made. They are merely saying that the scientific evidence is not conclusive, and won't hold up in a scientific forum if there was no humanitarian agenda attached. I think its healthy for the scientific community, frankly.

Japan's boffins: Global warming isn't man-made

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