JustAsking
Sexy Member
Ed,
Its really a shame that somehow GW has become a political issue, because after so many years of practice, there are some groups who have become very effective at dishonestly playing to the feelings of most Americans on issues where they want to effect public policy.
I admire your individualism and your willingness to not accept anything without questioning it. It turns out that scientists are very much more like you than not. They are cranky, opinionated, strong-willed individualists who don't take anything for granted without investigating it themselves.
I know this because I have a degree in Physics and one in Elect. Engineering and I put myself through school repairing research instruments and building experimental apparatus for hundreds of scientists at three different universities. I worked for chemists, physicists, and biologists of all kinds and their graduate students.
In college, we were taught to analyze everything from first principles and take nothing for granted except very well established theories that have produced useful results for hundreds of years. But even with those theories, we were taught that the real frontier of science, where you will find the most interesting problems are those little loose threads that other scientists might be ignoring around those theories.
From my education and from my experience I can tell you that scientists come to work everyday with it mind that they are going to find that overlooked loose thread, do a lot of experiments around it and end up publishing new and interesting findings, especially if it challenges the established theories. You don't win Nobel Prizes by proving that what people currently believe is true. You win them by proving that you actually know something better.
But even so, whatever you find and whatever you prove, it is worth nothing unless you work it up for publication to a professional scientific journal. In the article you have to show your work every step of the way and demonstrate why your revolutionary idea is correct. On doing that, many other scientists in the field will pounce on it and try to shoot it down, because any good idea has to be weeded out from all the bogus ones. If you are really on to something, though, other scientists will set up similar experiments and try to duplicate it and even improve on it.
When this happens, no matter how radical your idea is (as long as it is carefully laid out, and your conclusions are justified), your idea will suddenly be the thing that the whole community is working on. If it holds water, it will gain critical mass and soon dominate the field for a while. If it turns out that others can reproduce your results, and it turns out that the math is good, etc you are on your way to fame and lots more grants for your research institute or your university.
So keep that in mind how all this works, and compare it to what you were suggesting. That somehow all around the world scientists from all walks of life, from all different cultures, and from all different political regimes make up the global community of professional climatologists. What you are suggesting is that each one of them, for reasons unknown, wake up every morning, look at themselves in the mirror, and say to themselves in whatever language they speak, that they are going to go to work today and protect a lie.
If you thought it was a "liberal" agenda, for example, you would have to explain how American liberals have figured out how to influence the professional opinion of those scientists all around the world. Its not just Al Gore and a few guys on the take who have formed the scientific opinion, its people all around the world who have trained all their lives to be able to analyze and question anything anyone says about the climate. If GW scientists were being bought off by someone, who do you think has the deeper pockets, the oil companies or the huge and powerful windpower lobby? I think you see my point.
Those who want to affect public policy on science by denying the mainstream scientific consensus don't actually do research nor do the submit papers to the professional journals. What they do is publish stuff in the popular press to people who are not equipped to analyze it. And it is a common tactic to say that the entrenched scientific community is rejecting their ideas due to some hidden agenda. With the
This is a good example, though. There are a few guys who are making claims about Mars' and Earth's climate who are legitimate scientists. They are publishing their papers just fine in the professional journals, but their work is not quite standing up to careful analysis. This is not unsual for science. This is a daily kind of thing. Hit the links I put in this paragraph and see how climatologists and space scientists are all over the Mars polar cap changes. Don't let anyone talk you into thinking that all this information is being somehow suppressed or something.
