Comment by bradley13
7 hours ago
Pretty clearly not. It would seem that beta amyloids correlate with Alzheimer's, but do not cause it.
The problem us "consensus science". You could get funding to research beta amyloids, but not to research any competing hypotheses.
It's much like climate science today: any dissent at all, even just questioning the predictions of catastrophe, immediately brands you as a heretic.
> It's much like climate science today: any dissent at all, even just questioning the predictions of catastrophe, immediately brands you as a heretic.
I'm not sure I understand this. We've added hundreds of gigatons of carbon to the atmosphere. There's no mystery here, it's basic physics and chemistry that this will change things, and it's accepted that we don't know exactly _how_ things will change. The alternative: "adding gigatons of carbon to the atmosphere will _not_ change anything" is simply non-sensical. It goes against the basic rules of physics and causality. I'm happy to be proved wrong here, I just legitimately can't see how an alternative position makes any sense.
Edit: I see you specifically pointed out "predictions of catastrophe", which if that is true (and not just the position of radicals on Twitter) is indeed unfortunate.
Yes I believe GP was focused on the catastrophe part. It's very likely correct that our CO2 emissions are warming the atmosphere ocean etc, but it's not clear that runaway warming is inevitable or that life or geology have feedback mechanisms that turn an exponential into an S curve. That is, after all, basically what natural selection tends to do. Turning the table again, even if there are corrective factors humans might have immense suffering before it stabilizes. So we don't know.
You didn't ask, but my opinion on it is that we'll probably stabilize on a cleaner energy source and find natural countermeasures when suffering ticks up. Any top down pressure to change things whole cloth seems doomed, no matter how benevolent. We're closed loop creatures.
> It's much like climate science today: any dissent at all, even just questioning the predictions of catastrophe, immediately brands you as a heretic.
I think this is not a great example, as there’s a huge group of people that, in fact, does not agree with the consensus and would happily fund research that (tries to) prove otherwise.
I fully agree with your point, though, just not the example.
That’s not true. If you want to have a job at a prestigious institution then the research committees are pretty consistent in their biases.
The comment you were replying to was talking about funding. If you could develop a scientifically plausible model to defend the "burning fossil fuels is not so bad, actually" thesis, your funders would include the oil companies and the greater petrochemical industry. There is a lot more money to fund projects there than... anywhere else in the world, really, by a wide margin.
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Expecting scientific rigor is not a bad bias: everyone who has been willing to do actual science agrees that climate change is real and significant. For example, Richard Muller was a climate skeptic who had a great job at one of the most prestigious universities in the world, got funding to establish a team to critically review climate science research … and concluded it was right:
“When we began our study, we felt that skeptics had raised legitimate issues, and we didn’t know what we’d find. Our results turned out to be close to those published by prior groups. We think that means that those groups had truly been very careful in their work, despite their inability to convince some skeptics of that.”
https://www.nas.org/blogs/article/after_climate_research_phy...
If you haven’t read up on both, it’s hard to appreciate how unlike climate science is from the beta amyloid theory. The latter has some evidence but there were always alternate theories by serious researchers because it involved multiple systems which scientists were still working to understand and basic questions around causation and correlation had significant debate.
In contrast, climate scientists reached consensus about climate change four decades ago and by now have established many separate lines of evidence which all support what has been the consensus position. More importantly, since the 1970s they have been making predictions which were subsequently upheld by measured data from multiple sources. The ongoing research is in fine-tuning predictions, estimating efficacy of proposed interventions, etc. but nobody is seriously questioning the basic idea.
Almost all of the people you hear dismissing climate change are funded by a handful of companies like Exxon, whose own internal research showing climate change was a significant threat produced a chart in 1982 which has proven accurate:
https://skepticalscience.com/pics/Exxonpredictions.png
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/16092015/exxons-own-resea...
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Over the past decades the group that are not happy with the AGW consensus in the hard earth sciences crowd have principally funded FUD via think tanks, ala the pro-tobacco lobby back in the day, rather than research.
The few examples of research driven from the skeptic PoV (eg: urban heat skewing, etc) have landed on the side of the AGW consensus.
And when they funded research, it confirmed the known science.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-...
If anything the current consensus on the scientific front lines is that the alarmism is understated, and the real orthodoxy is astroturfed denial of the facts.
The global fossil industry is worth around $11 trillion a year. It supports some of the worst regimes in the world.
Of course they're going to try to FUD away the science, with the usual copy-paste narratives about how it's really scientists and academics who are corrupt.
It's all about money, power, and entitlement. Not about truth or responsibility.
But no amount of PR nonsense, astroturfing, and false accusation is going to make the slightest difference to climate reality.
half the stuff currently in clinical trials is not targeting amyloids.
https://alz-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/trc...
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"Consensus science" is science.
Yes, though when the consensus doesn't work for predictions then it is a matter of time until it stops being science.
>> It's much like climate science today: any dissent at all, even just questioning the predictions of catastrophe, immediately brands you as a heretic.
Nonsense. It is actually quite unlike climate science, where the consensus of catastrophe and the evidence for it are both overwhelming. Dissenters are listened to only to the extent they can provide overwhelming evidence to the contrary, which they so far cannot.