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Comment by pastel8739

20 hours ago

You’re clearly referring to something specific, what is it?

One example is that whenever patents expire on some refrigerants or related process somehow magically at that same exact moment Dupont or other chemical IP behemoth magically find a new one safe for the ozone, the science magically all aligns at that moment, and congress/EPA finds the time to change the law before one iota of generic industry can squeeze out.

I think the generic idea of the science and global warming is real but there is a whole industry around gaming the conclusions and gamifying what concern pops up when to magically align with whatever the guy with the most influence and self-dealing is hawking at that time.

  • The problem you're describing is non-scientific interests putting their thumb on the scale of scientific questions. The solution to that problem is more science, not more politicized control of science.

    Elsewhere in this comment section you're defending politicians as customers of scientists demanding politically convenient science. But that's exactly what produces the non-scientific conclusions you're talking about in this post. What you really should want is for science to be held to a gold standard of fidelity to the facts, and for politicians who push them in other directions should be voted out of office.

    • >The problem you're describing is non-scientific interests putting their thumb on the scale of scientific questions. The solution to that problem is more science, not more politicized control of science.

      You won't likely "more science" your way into thumbs off the scale, that is going to have to be achieved from largely non-scientific means.

      >Elsewhere in this comment section you're defending politicians as customers of scientists demanding politically convenient science.

      This is a cleverly packed lie, one attempted to paint me as a hypocrite, that you not only not quote but also chose to not address directly. The reason why is obvious -- flood the zone with indirect pointers to supposed lies to wear down the counterparty. But just this once I'll entertain it, though I know this deceit doesn't stop once engaged.

      > defending politicians as customers of scientists

      I am stating the politicians are the customers of the government-employed scientists. What I am "defending" is not living in a fantasy. Of course you can wax philosophical about "we the people" or whatever but at the end of the day the summation of congress+executive has constructive possession of the purse and executive management of scientific employ.

      > ... demanding politically convenient science.

      and I used the verbatim word 'retarded' alluding to what I thought of it ... a very strong defense of that particular customer, after which I suggest they might get a new one.

      > ut that's exactly what produces the non-scientific conclusions you're talking about in this post.

      There's a genius amount of terse deception to unpack here. The slight of hand is you use 'customers of scientist demanding politically convenient science' but then claim 'exactly what produces' these conclusions are ... the non-scientific output of work of scientists rather than the output of politicians who are customers. If they are producing non-science they are not acting in capacity of scientists yet somehow they escape your damnation here despite being the very people producing it by reading of your statement. Your sentence is one tightly packed logical contradiction that simultaneously guards scientists as providers of facts while simultaneously claiming the scientists themselves are producing non-scientific conclusions by chaining that as the output of the work. If they are scientists of fidelity acting in capacity of such then practically by definition they aren't to be blamed for non-scientific conclusions and are not the "producers" of such regardless of whom their customer is.

      > What you really should want is for science to be held to a gold standard of fidelity to the facts

      The scientist who depends on a salary to survive who wants fidelity of facts should look for customers demanding that. Expecting to produce fidelity from someone demanding infidelity means you end up broke or you become corrupted. The demand from government is infidelity. In fact what I'm "defending" is looking elsewhere away from politicians at this time because your aspiration of "should be voted" is at odds with the current reality of "they were not."

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  • Ozone is an interesting topic. CFCs seem to be very potent climate gases. But I haven't checked any calculations about them, yet. I'd love to see a good analysis of the absorption-spectrum. Adding something new to the atmosphere has a lot of warming potential - but the question always is how fast it reaches a level of saturation. For ozone and CFCs years of media coverage haven't brought any insight. Having 3 different updated versions of Dupont-products in the atmosphere could be good or bad - most likely people haven't bothered to check, yet... But they're all full of furious knowledge. People "know" that banning CFCs "cured" the ozone hole - but they don't ask why it shrunk too early, and why the situation hasn't changed at all for decades now...

    I think most likely the banning was good - but the reasons don't really make sense.

    • > most likely people haven't bothered to check

      Searching "cfc concentration in atmosphere" on scholar.google.com returns 60000 papers. Cruising the first few pages, most of them easily qualify as "bothering to check." Your estimation of the scientific community is five orders of magnitude off.

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This will go too far, but if you want to understand things, maybe HITRAN Database is interesting for you. There've been detailed calculations what is going on with absorption. How the absorption spectrums of relevant gases look like is a start. The next question is to check how much potential a gas has (how much energy is available in that spectrum?). HITRAN is an extensive database for the relevant lines. The results are interesting and a bit surprising...

But all this has been explained and cancelled again and again... It's no good topic in any religious environment where nobody has bothered to get basic knowledge about the physics before.

  • make the argument explicitly. Here, I'll do it for you: doubling co2 levels should only lead to a 1c increase in temperature (~3w/m2 extra forcing).

    That ignores all the other things that happen besides co2 forcing alone.

    • Your numbers most likely aren't exact. But most interesting is what you mean with "other things" and how much this is expressed in numbers. And have you looked up any numbers about methane?

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  • the experimental framework for finding out absorption spectra goes back like 100 years and is basically high school level science. not only that, we have quantum chemistry models that predict empirical results from atomic configurations that are 20+ years old and match that empirical data to a very high level of accurany. there is plenty of ambiguity to attack in climate modeling, but you chose the most settled and fundamental thing to poke at.