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Scientific American's departing editor and the politicization of science

(reason.com)
473 points Bostonian | 3 comments | 18 Nov 24 22:04 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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Crayfish3348 ◴[19 Nov 24 17:23 UTC] No.42185914[source]▶
A book came out in August 2024 called "Soda Science: Making the World Safe for Coca-Cola," by Susan Greenhalgh. She's a professor (emeritus) at Harvard. The book is a history. It shows how the Coca-Cola Company turned to "science" when the company was beset by the obesity crisis of the 1990s and health advocates were calling for, among other things, soda taxes.

Coca-Cola "mobilized allies in academia to create a soda-defense science that would protect profits by advocating exercise, not dietary restraint, as the priority solution to obesity." It was a successful campaign and did particularly well in the Far East. "In China, this distorted science has left its mark not just on national obesity policies but on the apparatus for managing chronic disease generally."

Point being, the science that Coca-Cola propagated is entirely legitimate. But that science itself does not tell the whole, obvious truth, which is that there is certainly a correlation in a society between obesity rates and overall sugar-soda consumption rates. "Coke’s research isn’t fake science, Greenhalgh argues; it was real science, conducted by real and eminent scientists, but distorted by its aim."

"Trust the science" can thus be a dangerous call to arms. Here's the book, if anybody's interested. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo221451...

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lazyeye ◴[19 Nov 24 18:25 UTC] No.42186598[source]▶
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).
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genewitch ◴[19 Nov 24 18:57 UTC] No.42186889[source]▶
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

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czzr ◴[19 Nov 24 19:19 UTC] No.42187077[source]▶
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.”

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genewitch ◴[19 Nov 24 19:57 UTC] No.42187441[source]▶
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.

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1. tomrod ◴[19 Nov 24 20:30 UTC] No.42187784[source]▶
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.

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2. genewitch ◴[20 Nov 24 00:18 UTC] No.42189517[source]▶
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?

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3. roughly ◴[21 Nov 24 03:39 UTC] No.42200867[source]▶
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.