Scientific American's departing editor and the politicization of science

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...

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

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.

> 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"?

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?

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...