Comment by bradley13
2 days 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, there is overwhelming evidence of climate change. And that we are causing it.
However research into what we humans can do to ameliorate it is verboten. For example https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fertilizing-ocean... was an actual experiment that found a low cost way to both remove lots of CO2, and improve a fishery. But that line of research has been shut down.
Likewise research into the current impact is only allowed if it agrees with what is politically correct. For example many researchers have found that current severe California forest fires are mostly due to poor past policies, that have resulted in very dense forest, with a large fuel overload. But research that stresses the impact of climate change are easier to publish, and this shifts the apparent consensus on the causes of things like the major 2025 fires in the Los Angeles area.
From your link:
> Not geoengineering
> The project is also unlikely to bury much if any carbon dioxide for one simple reason: metabolism. As other iron fertilization experiments have shown, it is relatively easy to get plankton to bloom, but it is harder for that bloom to sink to the bottom of the ocean, where it takes CO2 with it.
This project is a net carbon emitter by design.
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Climate science is much more complicated - there are many things you could disagree with beyond will tons of carbon change things, yes or no.
Like are we doomed or will it just get a bit warmer before we switch to solar for example.
There are also money issues like with the alzheimer's situation. If climate change is dooming us then we should send more money to climate scientists.
> If climate change is dooming us then we should send more money to climate scientists.
Depends! If you're a large fossil fuel company, the obvious move might be to spend more money on advertising agencies scientists, or entire foundations who question climate science instead.
... which they did. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-013-1018-7
Meanwhile, the basics were known since the 19th century. https://www.rsc.org/images/Arrhenius1896_tcm18-173546.pdf
> There are also money issues like with the alzheimer's situation. (that is: If climate change is dooming us then we should send more money to climate scientists)
Absolutely, the issues are similar
And if this can upend the business model of some big companies we'll give some "incentives" to some "doubtful" scientists even if their doubts are unfounded (actually very well founded but you get the gist)
Which sucks because such work should be free of pressures and incentives
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I am baffled by the number of people on HN, presumably a website for and by technical people, who fail to consider secondary and tertiary effects when it fits their worldview to do so.
There is a yawning abyss of states in between extinction and 'boy sure is a few degrees warmer out here' and none of them are good.
Many organisms would benefit from a warmer climate, just not humans.
We rely on extremely narrow conditions for the fragile supply chains and power structures that keep us on the ragged edge of civilized to continue working. We had an extremely mild contagious disease outbreak, by historic standards, and our economy is still feeling the effects!
Imagine the impacts of something like wildly different rainfall patterns, increased rate of global infectious disease, shifted agricultural zones, changes to Jetstream patterns, large scale crop failures, loss of water supplies, temporary local ecosystem collapses etc. These changes are incredibly fast on the scale of what it takes to reach ecological equilibrium.
These of course mean nothing to biological life, writ large. Life will recover and adapt. To fragile human civilization they mean refugee crisis, resource wars, failed infrastructure, and ten thousand other existentially terrible things.
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> 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.
With any position, you have to distinguish between its thoughtful advocates and its thoughtless ones-every position has both
Any thoughtful “climate change sceptic” is going to say (a) of course the climate is changing-it always has and always will; (b) of course it is implausible than human activity has literally zero impact on that change. But that still doesn’t tell us: (i) the relative scale of anthropogenic versus natural causal factors; (ii) the validity of any specific predictions of future change; (iii) the likely socioeconomic impacts of any future changes that may occur. It is totally possible that a person may affirm (a) and (b) while questioning the “consensus” on (i) and (ii) and (iii)
Personally, I don’t have a strong opinion on the substantive issue - but I wonder about the extent to which mainstream discourse on the topic represents good epistemic hygiene. It is even possible that the sceptics are on the whole more wrong than right, but simultaneously the mainstream response to them is more irrational than rational.
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.
> but it's not clear
What better way to find out than to just try it and see if we end up with runaway warming? That surely can't cause any harm.
The analogy isn't a perfect one.
For Climate Change it's a question of opportunity costs. With expected inputs how much will temperature change? What are the effects of that change? How much effort to you put into changing the inputs? How much effort do you put into dealing with the effects?
The biggest difference is that Climate Change is a deeply political question with a bit of science tossed in. Alzheimer's is the mirror opposite - it's a scientific question with politics added to the same degree of most other things.
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> 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.
having worked in amyloid, and in an a-beta lab in the second half of the 2000s, we always said under our breath in group meetings that we were skeptical about the amyloid hypothesis, but our grant applications certainly did not say that (or if they did it was a quick throwaway sentence). And I think the lab that I landed in was one of the most honest scientific labs in biochemistry/chemical biology.
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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There are so many counterexamples proving that your statement is just not true. I'll give you just one example, the Berkeley physics professor Richard Muller that took funding from the Koch foundation to attempt to "prove" that the satellite temperature data was "miscalibrated" and estimates of actual warming were overblown. Started the project in 2010. First published in 2011 showing that in fact the warming was real and using more advanced calibration techniques actually showed the warming was worse than we thought.
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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> It's much like climate science today: any dissent at all, even just questioning the predictions of catastrophe, immediately brands you as a heretic.
The financial motivation for fraud is all on the side of climate-change denial. Literally trillions of dollars of motivation.
Hah! What do you call the cap and trade group? The whole trillion dollar "carbon credit market" is a farce built to profit from climate change catastrophism.
You are mistaking the beneficiaries here. Carbon credit scheme is indeed a greenwashing scam and it is pushed by the oil and gas (plus adjacent) industries. It is plainly obvious that shuffling emissions between jurisdictions does jack shit against reducing the actual real amount of emissions to the atmosphere. Basically the main proponents of the carbon credit fraud are the same people financially motivated to reject long term climate change consequences (aka anti-"catastrophists" in your lingo).
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Small change compared to global fossil fuels. Energy (which is still mostly fossil fuels) is 10% of the world GDP.
Climate-change denial is just like tobacco-cancer denial. It's the same banal "I win, you all lose" mechanism. Enormous resources are available (along with the useful idiots) to propagate falsehoods.
"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.
A degenerating research programme.
Not by my prefered definition. I like science being the study of nature through reason and experiment. Reality trumps consensus.
The problem is that the top researchers in the field have spent their lives devoted to amyloid beta. They may well have helped direct hundreds of millions in grants to this line of research.
The idea that they have blocked the treatment of Alzheimer's rather than helping it, is very, very painful. This is perfect for creating cognitive dissonance.
And so, no matter what the evidence, they remain committed to the conclusion.
As a result, the latest Alzheimer's drug to enter stage 3 FDA trials is Trontinemab. (It is currently in stage 3.) It targets the amyloid target.
A relative drop in the bucket is going to, say, the infection hypothesis. This despite the fact that the only intervention that has been shown to reduce the incidence of Alzheimer's, is the shingles vaccine.
>> 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.