Scientific American's departing editor and the politicization of science

I wonder how much of this same kind of manipulation/distortion is going on when we are told to "trust the science" with regard to climate change? The pressure to ignore or minimise inconvenient facts would be overwhelming (career at stake situation).

what's the bellwether for climate change? Rising temperatures, rising CO2 concentrations?

There's strong evidence there actually isn't warming going on. The "warming trend" may be due to the temperature sensor locations. Originally the sensors were put in remote, rural, unpopulated and unused locations (ideally!). As communities grew... you understand that the sensors now are no longer rural, remote, unpopulated areas. What happens to the air in a city? If you're unsure, "urban heat island". This is extremely localized "weather" - the sort of thing that i've been yelled at "IS NOT CLIMATE".

I'm only going to link 1 thing here, because doing this sort of thing on my lifelong handle has never done me any favors:

> Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics, 23:105015 (20pp), 2023 October

> Challenges in the Detection and Attribution of Northern Hemisphere Surface Temperature Trends Since 1850

> https://doi.org/10.1088/1674-4527/acf18

Great example of what I was talking about!

I looked at the paper you referenced.

Interestingly, it does not say that the warming trend is not happening, rather they argue that the evidence is insufficient to say for sure if the warming is caused by human-driven causes or natural ones (e.g. volcanic activity or solar changes). They mention the heat island effect as one of the issues that may complicate the attribution of the contribution of different factors to the warming trend.

To quote from the paper:

“To summarize, by varying ST and/or TSI choice and/or the attribution approach used, it is possible to conclude anything from the long-term warming being "mostly natural" to "mostly anthropogenic" or anything in between. While each of us has our own scientific opinions on which of these choices are most realistic, we are concerned by the wide range of scientifically plausible, yet mutually contradictory, conclusions that can still be drawn from the data.”

Ok, arctic sea ice.

Ice exists at temperature below 0C or 32F at 1atm AND at system energy levels below the enthalpy of melting for liquid water, or latent heat for this first order phase change.

Thermodynamics uses temperature and pressure to explain system energy of molecules for liquid vapor solid phase systems. Latent heat is the esoteric part of this phenomenon because it requires a scientific education to understand calculus and work. Understandably, everyone can grasp temperature.

I think your comment is a perfect example of misdirection and people using “data driven methods” to attack a “first principles” explanation of physical phenomena.

Here’s a link because that gives my idea more weight.

https://earth.gsfc.nasa.gov/cryo/data/current-state-sea-ice-...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_sea_ice_decline

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05686-x

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adj8469

Computer people talk about scientific methods and their “home lab” stuff, ai and inherent structure of data then absolutely fall for the facebook-grade-misinformation arguments to not trust something that is too mainstream. Jfc

you mean the sea ice, that had the highest extent in 20 years this year? Or a different sea ice, perhaps the one they always trot out around January? you know, when it's summer in the southern hemisphere?

The sea ice data isn't 1:1 with the seasons, so "data scientists" and "climate scientists" pick the cutoff date that makes the best headline. Even this year they were saying the ice was lower than average, but they cutoff 3+ weeks early, the ice was above average a few weeks later.

https://usicecenter.gov/PressRelease/ArcticMaximum2024

Besides all this, i am unsure if you're supportive or not of what i said.

okay, and whats your point? The point is "97%" or "99%" of "climate scientists agree" that "anthropogenic causes" are the reason for climate change. But this study questions the foundations (and i mentioned i am only linking one, that i downloaded a few weeks ago to save, there are of course other papers that each chip away at the political and media narrative about the whole field). Please refer to the GP:

> I wonder how much of this same kind of manipulation/distortion is going on when we are told to "trust the science" with regard to climate change?

"climate science" is all models, this paper (among others) implies that the data fed in to the models may be influencing the output of the models in a way that isn't conducive to actually understanding the "climate". How can i make this assertion? I read the IPCC reports. both the pre-release and the official releases. I don't recommend it, unless you feel like being Cassandra.

This is cherry-picking. There is a raft of solid science from a large number of independent researchers looking at many different indicators that corroborate well with each other. The evidence is overwhelming, global warming is happening. Picking one thing that says we haven't always gotten it 100% right doesn't mean it isn't happening.

I admit data collection is imperfect, especially looking back 200 years. But to attack a fairly sound hypothesis that is multi factorially demonstrated in physical geological behavior, I wholeheartedly disagree with.

Just because US weather stations in the 70’s were more rural than urban does not in itself gives credence to the idea that climate change/warming/ greenhouse gases is a nonissue or somehow a totally misunderstood non-warming phenomenon. Even a climate that tended to one mean value zero standard deviation throughout the year would be devastating coming from our current temporal and geographical distribution.

Your point about weather stations is a technical detail in data collection while there are several other corroborating methods indicating a warming ocean and atmosphere, albeit not geographically uniformly distributed. But you have this gotcha fact about weather stations ambient baseline temp vs some platonic ideal temp that reflects what’s going on in the abstract notion of a climate.

The sea ice has satellite photo analysis (area) dating to 70’s or 80’s with daily or weekly granularity.

I cannot convince a climate change denier or skeptic but am leaving that comment and this one hoping that observers don’t just take your initial counter-fact to be a valid falsifying argument.

As everyone says weather is not the climate, spurious yearly data do not nullify long form trends, and I’d just look at low pass filtered or line fit or yearly average of granular image data to argue that there is a time localize trend since the 80’s consistent with a warming ocean.

I disagree with you I think you used logical fallacies to misdirect and cause skepticism about something that is fairly corroborated and the debate needs to focus on mitigation or investment or policy changes.

I have yet to see a convincing motivation for doing something like that. There's more money to be made in denying climate change it seems, so what's the driving factor then?

> you mean the sea ice, that had the highest extent in 20 years this year?

Your link says it's "the seventh highest recorded since 2006 when this metric from IMS was first tracked consistently". Where are you getting "highest extent in 20 years"?

You're not sufficiently parsing causality versus predictivity. The global warming hypothesis matches the projections. So it's a food enough model. The causal attribution does take time, but recall we can estimate the global greenhouse emissions with reasonable accuracy and can compare to benchmarks in history.

Push all we want against the sun, it continues to shine regardless of our efforts.

Edit I shouldn’t have used word geological bit meant ‘worldwide’

I have grown grumpier as the last decade has gone on and it is probably me just getting older but there is a point where you say enough is enough. You are starting with the premise that researchers are manipulating things and ignoring things so you have already 'won' by bringing doubt where there isn't any. 'I wonder how much of horrible terrible evil conspiratorial thing x is happening...' isn't a discussion opener, it is a statement that a thing is happening and now we just need to find out how much of that thing is happening. This is a terrible 'discussion' point and it needs to be called out, and stopped.

Since climate change is a very popular topic, so popular that a person's belief or non belief in it will cause people on the other side to strike them down without hesitation... There's power, community, and social acceptance to drive people.

The downvotes to the above comment's parent comment prove my point.

That's completely correct and valid but also in order to see this as a problem one has to presume that that the belief in it, or anything else you might care to put in it's place, is itself flawed. I don't believe in climate change because it's beneficial or not beneficial: I have read numerous things on the subject, all of which paint a consistent, reproducible, and relatable-to-my-life situation which happens to be about a decades-long propaganda campaign on the part of the fossil fuel industry to downplay the harms their products were doing to our atmosphere since the goddamn 1950's, one that, as the parent says, happens to make them shitloads of money. Just like leaded gasoline did. Just like cigarettes did, which led the tobacco industry to do similar things previously until they were outlawed in the developed world, which has caused them to simply shift focus to developing countries where they're now poisoning a whole new generation of people.

I'm highly skeptical of folks who take issue with something like "trust the science" because, while I fully cosign that as a slogan it's lacking and one doesn't "trust" science so much as learn about it and see if it holds up, the sort of people who say things like that invariably follow up with something like questioning climate change, or questioning the handling of the COVID pandemic. And that's not to say that there weren't mistakes made, we made a shitload of them, but too many bad actors in that space will take legitimate problems with the response to COVID and use that to launch into things like saying vaccines cause autism or are a plot on the part of China to kill all the white people, or other such ridiculous fuckin nonsense.

And maybe that's wrong of me to assume, but also if you consistently find yourself on the same side of a debate as the worst people imaginable, maybe that's something you should sit with and figure out how you feel about it, and if it points to you possibly being skeptical about the wrong things.

I would also put forward that something I've observed as we've gotten further and further into the social media age is the conflation between skepticism and ignorance, which are different things, and people who are doing the second thing will reliably say they are doing the former. To be skeptical is not a bad thing, even an uninformed skeptic like a member of the general public is fully capable of being at least somewhat informed, vetting sources, and coming to reasonably accurate conclusions without a formal education, however, it is also extremely, trivially easy for a layman to find stuff that corroborates whatever they think is already the truth, stated in professional-looking formats, that looks like science but just isn't credible or worthy of being taken seriously, and then go "look, see, I found this thing. I'm right!" If you find one, single academic, who has an entire rest-of-their-discipline shouting at them about how wrong they are, which is more likely: that you found one truth teller in a sea of liars, or that you found one liar?

If you publish new evidence in favour of a popular theory, your paper gets published – sometimes in a prestigious journal. Whereas if you demonstrate compelling evidence overturning a high-profile scientific dogma of international import, you… *checks notes* win the Nobel Prize in Physics. Hm.

Maybe the Nobel Committee is in on… no, that'd only affect whether they awarded the prize, not whether people expect them to. They must be suppressing the evidence at the source: the instruments themselves. … No, they'd have to alter everything, and there's no way they got to my weather station. Maybe there's some way to remotely manipulate all the weather station reading at once? Think, what do all the weather stations have in common?

I've got it! They're doing something to the atmosphere, to make it seem like there's anthropogenic climate change, and trick all the scientists into publishing studies showing that it's real and happening, but actually it's just people altering the chemical composition of the atmosphere en-masse for unspecified nefarious reasons, likely personal profit. Or, maybe it's a byproduct of some industrial process, that they don't want us to know about. I bet that's what chemtrails are.

>If you publish new evidence in favour of a popular theory, your paper gets published – sometimes in a prestigious journal. Whereas if you demonstrate compelling evidence overturning a high-profile scientific dogma of international import, you… checks notes win the Nobel Prize in Physics. Hm.

The last time a Nobel Prize was awarded to someone overturning a long-held charged dogma was in 2005 when Barry J. Marshall and J. Robin Warren won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. They demonstrated that Helicobacter pylori bacteria, not stress or excess stomach acid, were the primary cause of peptic ulcers.

Whereas the inverse--suppression of findings that invalidated long-held scientific dogmas--are numerous throughout the last 150 years. Stegener faced ridicule and suppression for continental drift. So did Semmelweiss for germ theory. And Mendelian inheritance. And Lemaître's expanding universe. And Prusiner's prion theory. And Margulis's endosymbiotic theory. And horizontal gene transfer.

Beyond Marshall and Warren, Prusiner was the only one to receive a Nobel for their findings and that was fifteen years after consensus had emerged from below.

And in the case of Marshall and Warren, the findings of a bacterial origin of ulcers had been published in 1906, 1913, 1919, 1925, 1939, 1951, 1955, 1958, 1964, 1971, 1982, and 1983. With this 1983 paper being authored by... Marshall and Warren. They will not receive a Nobel Prize for their findings for another 22 years.

Science is moved forward in spite of dogmatic consensus, not because of it.

To the downvoters (and ToucanLoucan), I never claimed what I believed in, and you don't have enough information to know anything about it. I'll continue to neither confirm nor deny my stance, for the point Im making is IMO an important one. Can you walk away from this conversation with your eye opened to how your belief is driving you to strike? [0]

Here's a near-equivalent real world example: Alzheimer's research has been led in the wrong direction for decades, due to people chasing after power. [1]

[0] >And maybe that's wrong of me to assume, but also if you consistently find yourself on the same side of a debate as the worst people imaginable, maybe that's something you should sit with and figure out how you feel about it, and if it points to you possibly being skeptical about the wrong things.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliezer_Masliah

Here, let me drop this mic for you

And a fun addendum: In the mid-1990s the patents expired on the vast majority of acid-reducing drugs which were, as you can probably guess, the first line "treatment" for PUD over antibiotics.

That's a good point. I tend to stay away from negative thinking about hot topics like this for that very reason. Even though I have my doubts about something, I tend to keep it to myself because I don't want to bring people down and anyway someone might come up with a way to look at, or take action in a positive light.

But I still feel its important for people to act from their own values, right or wrong, and not from a "hey trust the science" mentality which reminds me of majority thinking. Just because a lot of people have come to the conclusion that the science is sound, it doesn't make them right. There are plenty of situations where decided by majority viewpoints have been wrong.

> To the downvoters (and ToucanLoucan), I never claimed what I believed in, and you don't have enough information to know anything about it.

I didn't say anything about your beliefs. I said other people who say similar things believe these things, and when people say things like them, I tend to assume they're about to drop anti-vax nonsense. That's not an accusation, it's the statement of an observed correlation.

> I'll continue to neither confirm nor deny my stance, for the point Im making is IMO an important one.

I mean, again, I wasn't referencing your specific beliefs so I don't really care if you confirm them or not. But I would also say, again as a statement of a correlation not an accusation against you, that the people who espouse the anti-science sentiments I've been discussing also will refuse to lay down specific confirmations of their beliefs, as part of a larger "just asking questions" fallacious argument, in which they take the position of an unconvinced centrist but consistently espouse "questions" that favor one side of it.

Again, to be clear, not accusing, merely observing. You may indeed be someone who is genuinely just asking questions, the problem is a whole lot of shitty people out there corroborate that position to advance bunk. And assuming you're being truthful, which I have no reason to assume you aren't, for that you have my sympathies.

> ere's a near-equivalent real world example: Alzheimer's research has been led in the wrong direction for decades, due to people chasing after power. [1]

Well sure. Science isn't perfect, it's only as good as the people who are doing it. It's the same way that basically every anti-vax sentiment, measure, study, etc. that you can find leads in one way or another back to former-doctor Andrew Wakefield and his junk study about vaccines and autism from back in the 90's. There are still medical practitioners who believe he was correct, there are multiple organizations that are built off of his research who oppose vaccines, we've had numerous outbreaks of various preventable diseases because of vaccine hesitancy. This shit has real consequences.

However, it's worth noting that both that story and the one you're referencing are notable because on the whole, most of the time, science does get it right, and more importantly, if it gets it wrong but it is being done honestly, it is also self correcting.

Science done well is distrustful of its own results. The key is to trust science practiced by trustworthy institutions and individuals and reported on in an accurate and informative way. Similar to good journalism, trust should be earned and verified at every level. Not every time, that isn't reasonable, but enough that you aren't surprised at what you find when you do additional checking. Check sources. Look for conflicts of interest. Survey the field. These are all basic things that people think they do but often don't.

I'll also say that that 'I don't trust science' implies that the scientific method is somehow corrupt. The scientific method is a thing that can be used well or badly. 'I don't trust science' is like saying 'I don't trust statistics'. The wrong person can use out of context science, done well, to imply totally absurd things.

Yep, and they're using numbers from February, cute, isn't it? If you go look at the actual numbers, it was higher in 2002, but the 20 year period 2003-2023, the arctic sea ice extent in 2024 was higher than all those years. Now, i'd love to do all the work for you, but the government makes it difficult on cursory inspection to get this data in bulk, when i did this myself 2 months ago, i assure you the graph is higher this year than all the other years.

in fact, go google "sea ice extent 2024" and see how many different figures you get and check the dates! February 2024 they were claiming we were in dire straits because it was at 15.01mm sqkm. what you have to do, as a reasonable person, is get the actual data, as granular as you can. 2024's ice extent was above 1995s, even. and approached 1990s. it was way higher than 2014-2020:

https://scied.ucar.edu/sites/default/files/documents/sea-ice...

https://i.imgur.com/ZIopSoI.png

My point is just repeating ad nauseam tripe like "the ice is melting" and "hottest year ever" isn't convincing anyone of anything. I'm also tired after doing this reading and research and talking about it and arguing about it for 23 years now, already. I can't be the only one who looks at the actual data, can i?

global warming hypothesis! Have you seen the temperature graph for earth's history? Judd et al., Science 385, 1316 (2024)

It's actually remarkably cold on earth, colder than it's been in over 450mm years. but if you look at the graph, it's not a diagonal or straight line, it goes up and down over millions of years.

so, with these two facts: Will it get warmer or colder?

Knowing that, why do i have to listen to this claptrap?

all the models that they use as evidence use the temperature sensor data so i am not sure what you're trying to convince me of. Also: Judd et al., Science 385, 1316 (2024)

see my links at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42189475 if you like, it adds to the fact that sea ice this year was higher than the prior 20 years; because 2002 was higher. Furthermore, sea ice in that detail only goes back to 1979, and we're talking about a literal ~6% decrease in that period (at least prior to 2024!) - which, 6% in 40 years, we don't really know enough about it, considering that ice has been there for, oh, let's ballpark at a million years as it is today, actually it's been growing probably for 20 million years, but that's irrelevant.

The atlantic was colder this year than normal. I know a lot of media people were saying "hot as bathwater" and "perfect fixins for storms and climate issues" but also this year they said that the AMOC may be ending and northern europe will be igloo central. Guess how long we've been studying that? 20 years. TWENTY.

call me old fashioned, but "models" made in the last few decades on data we've only been realistically collecting in a "rigorous" fashion for 20-40 years don't impress me, especially with stuff like Judd et al., Science 385, 1316 (2024) coming out in the past couple months showing that the global temps over the last 485mm years mean all this "anthropogenic climate change" stuff is hilariously wrong-headed.

Now, hear me out for one second. I am environmentally conscious, i try not to pollute. i rarely drive, i never fly, i tried solar but it didn't work very well in my location. I care about people not damaging the planet we live on. What i can't abide is pointing at models (what's the M in LLM stand for? does SD have models? how about the music generation stuff, those models?) and extracting currency from everyone to solve a problem that moves when you stare at it.

i don't expect to convince anyone here. It's not my calling in life to go debate this in public. Do what you want. Just don't tell me i have to do something else because "the model says so", alright?

there's a joke "apparently the police have been beating up black people like hotcakes" that was unknown until consumer camcorders and cameras were widespread. We now have billions and billions of sensors on this planet, and we can all do our duty to VERIFY that what the model says is accurate, and what the model was fed was accurate. You ever researched when the first "accurate" thermometer was developed/patented?

If you want to deny climate change you have to deny basic physics and chemistry, that's the problem with what you are saying.

Either you need to somehow show we've gotten the molecular properties of Carbon Dioxide wrong so that it doesn't absorb the wavelengths of light we think it does, or you need to show that we've gotten basic chemistry wrong, and that the reactions involving hydrocarbons and oxygen do not produce carbon dioxide.

These are all very basic things and have been known for about two hundred years. It was even possible, well over a century ago, to reason from these basic principles and conclude that mass burning of fossil fuels would result in a global temperature rise.

It just basic science, and if you want to deny it, you have to deny almost all of modern physics.

You're looking at data for confirmation of your bias. Sea Ice volume has been pretty steadily decreasing even as the coverage can increase.

https://www.polarportal.dk/en/sea-ice-and-icebergs/sea-ice-t...

All I can conclude from your posts in this thread is that you are in an unfortunate bubble, are desperately trying not to see reality, or simply want others to doubt it for whatever reason.

ok https://www.polarportal.dk/fileadmin/polarportal/sea/SICE_cu...

That seems to show all of last six years as being in the lowest quartile of measurements from 1981 to 2010.

Or is there something else I'm supposed to be seeing?

I am so confused how their corroborating charts indicate that sea ice is receding, yet they interpret it as a reversal and proof that warming / climate change is a myth.

The core of the concern about climate change is what it’s going to do to human society. Nobody gives a shit what the climate looked like a million years ago - complex human society reliant on large scale agriculture didn’t exist a million years ago, and that’s all we care about. We worry about droughts because they affect our crops and cause famines, we worry about heat waves because they kill our people and livestock, we worry about sea level rise because it damages our cities, we worry about hurricanes of increasing intensity because they kill people and damage our cities. We don’t give a shit if we’re in a relatively cool period in earth’s history or if the whole thing will shift in a hundred thousand years because that’s totally fucking irrelevant to what’s going to happen in the next hundred years and how we’re going to adapt our cities, crops, and cultures to it, because that’s what actually matters to us, because we’re actual living people in a complex society and we’d like to stay that way on both counts.