France's Top Weatherman Suspended Over 'Wrong' Views on Climate Change
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Because of "Mayer's Law"... a corollary to Murphy's Law... "If the theory is not supported by the facts, they will be disregarded."
So what do you think of this?
- By 1978 Exxon’s senior scientists were telling top management that climate change was real, caused by man, and would raise global temperatures by 2-3C this century, which was pretty much spot-on.
- By the early 1980s they’d validated these findings with shipborne measurements of CO2 (they outfitted a giant tanker with carbon sensors for a research voyage) and with computer models that showed precisely what was coming. As the head of one key lab at Exxon Research wrote to his superiors, there was “unanimous agreement in the scientific community that a temperature increase of this magnitude would bring about significant changes in the earth’s climate, including rainfall distribution and alterations in the biosphere”.
- And by the early 1990s their researchers studying the possibility for new exploration in the Arctic were well aware that human-induced climate change was melting the poles. Indeed, they used that knowledge to plan their strategy, reporting that soon the Beaufort Sea would be ice-free as much as five months a year instead of the historic two. Greenhouse gases are rising “due to the burning of fossil fuels,” a key Exxon researcher told an audience of engineers at a conference in 1991. “Nobody disputes this fact.”
They helped organise campaigns designed to instil doubt, borrowing tactics and personnel from the tobacco industry’s similar fight. They funded “institutes” devoted to outright climate denial. And at the highest levels they did all they could to spread their lies.
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jul/08/exxon-climate-change-1981-climate-denier-funding
This is an easy question to answer. You do bad science when you let politics, public opinion and polls influence your conclusions. Good science is best done in isolation from the media and politics. Good science has nothing to do with opinion polls, and good scientists ignore them in drawing scientific conclusions.
Scientific questions can't be answered by opinion polls. Scientific matters my be truly settled, but there is no way for us scientists to know whether they are in the sense that a single observation that goes counter to even a long established and unanimously accepted proposition or theory is enough to call that proposition or theory into question. Any inconsistent observation must be satisfactorily explained, or the theory and its underlying hypotheses must be modified or rejected.
The AGW climate issue is in its infancy as far as scientific understanding is concerned; yet most people, including many scientists working on the periphery of climate science, are convinced that man made CO2 is having a significant warming effect on the Earth's mean temperature. Among those actually involved in the research, however, there is a roughly 60/40 split on the question of AGW. Yet to listen to the media, politicians, and many popular web blogs, one gets the impression that it's a settled issue. It isn't. So long as their is even a handful of qualified scientist experts that are unsure, the issue will remain unsettled in the scientific sense. It is a much more difficult scientific problem than either the question of a link between smoking and lung cancer, or the question of why the ozone layer was being depleted. These latter issues are not comparable in difficulty to the AGW issue.
Gold medals in figure skating are settled by consensus via a combination of objective and subjective criteria. Scientific issues are settled by objective criteria only.
There are striking parallels between the circus atmosphere surrounding the AGW question and both the Lysenko affair and the Eugenics movement. That is where you should look for comparisons. The Lysenko and the Eugenics hypotheses were once accepted as correct and settled issues by the media and politicians, and were even accepted as correct by a substantial number of scientists working on the periphery. Nevertheless, neither was scientifically correct nor accepted as so by some scientists because these hypotheses were at odds with observation; just as the AGW hypothesis remains at odds with some observations today.. This non-agreement between the AGW hypothesis and observations must be satisfactorily explained in the opinion of virtually 100% of expert scientists before the hypothesis can be accepted as correct. In the meantime, as long as there remains a single repeatable and verifiable unexplained observation that is inconsistent with a the AGW hypothesis, the AGW hypothesis must be regarded as likely wrong. This is the nature of science.
Here below I give you a link to Judith Curry's July 26th blog -- less than three month ago-- it is about James Hansen's current approach to science as much as anything. There is no better example that I could come up with of bad science than what Hansen is doing now!!! I hate to say this, because he was at one time well respected, but clearly he his losing respect and maybe his mind. Very sad to see it.
http://judithcurry.com/2015/07/26/hansens-backfire/
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I would have to add "Funding" If you want a grant to study the wetland habits of Great Blue Heron in North America you might not get the money. If your grant proposal states you are studying the habits of North American Great Blue Heron in relation to AGW you stand a much better chance of being funded. Too many academics looking for a free ride on Government Grants use AGW as their ticket. It's their rice bowl to keep the money flowing.
There is without any doubt in my mind a modicum of truth in what you say. Science, like automobile styles, music, art and underwear, and most of all trading and investing, tends to be faddish. Sometimes this works out well and sometimes not. Overall I suppose it is a wash.
I remember as if it were yesterday when certain nano-cheerleading rotators got in control of NSF and the decision was made to promote nano this and nano that. It was quite a joke until we all realized that we had better insert the word "nano" somewhere in either our grant application title or the abstract if we wanted to improve our chances of grabbing some funding. I served on NIH study groups for quite a few years and there were fads their too, but not quite so evident as with NSF. Let me also add that both these agencies tend to attract very high quality personnel and we should all be very proud of the accomplishments of NSF and NIH funded basic research. Particularly NIH! It is an absolutely first rate institution in every respect.