Science Deniers are Everywhere

@maxdancona,

Do you remember back in the 70's when we hit peak oil?

Marion King Hubbert was an American geologist and geophysicist. He worked at the Shell research lab in Houston, Texas and he made several important contributions to geology, geophysics, and petroleum geology. Most notably was the Hubbert curve and Hubbert peak theory (a basic component of peak oil), with important political ramifications.

Hubbert's contributions to science have been summarized as follows:

1> Mathematical demonstration that rock in the earth's crust is plastic, and that the earth's crust deforms over time.

2> Prediction of migration paths of hydrocarbons.

3> Predictions of peak rates of oil and gas production, based on a consistent mathematical model which ties reserves, discovery rates, and production rates. His model remains highly influential, and has been widely applied to other finite resources.

All of this science was sound, had math to back it up and most of the scientific community agreed.

Do you think we hit peak oil in the 1970's? Science said we did.

2 Replies

@McGentrix,

The big flaws in Hubberts work was that we didnt really understand the complex issues of compressive fluids, and hydraulic conductivity.
The reason I say this is that we are now able to extract fluids and gas from fractured sandstone Formations . I have, in my collection of USGS isopach maps of Pennsylvania through Tennessee, statemenst contain deep well logs that state outright that the Marcellus Shale and the Brailler nd Utica shale (actully a sandstone unit that contains the gas and oil) could only serve as a formational "source rock< and the oil and gas will probably remained trapped forever and will never be economically available.

All that took was larning how to do accurate slant drilling and fracturing of the deep sandstones and the oil will come - burbling.

Weve only begun this exploration , and most of the worls hasnt even started looking at their own back 40.

Thats why Trumps call for coal is a dumass call based on MARKETS not some political belief.

Lotsa exploration and reservoir developing econ- geologists have already made secure the fortunes for their children AND grnd children.

1 Reply

@McGentrix,

I am not saying that scientists are never wrong. My points apply when we reach a scientific consensus. This is when an overwhelming percentage of scientists working actively in a field all agree that the evidence supports a conclusion. When there is scientific consensus, it almost always turns out to be correct.

In the area of Climate change we have reached the point of scientific consensus. All of the major scientific organizations have made statements in favor of the conclusion that human activity is the cause of climate change. The number of scientists in opposition is very small.

Scientific institutions don't reach this point on every issue, there are many issues that the scientific community has inconclusive evidence and admits as much.

I don't think that "peak oil" ever came close to scientific consensus. It isn't applicable to the points I am making.

Global Warming and Evolution have certainly reached the point that there is a clear scientific consensus. The scientific community is speaking very clearly on these issues.

If you can come up with an example in the past 100 years where all the preeminent scientific organizations put out statements in favor of a specific scientific fact... and then were proven wrong, I would be interested to hear it. It does happen, but Schrodinger was the last example I can think of.

3 Replies

@maxdancona,

Is this the only definition you'll use for this?

Quote:

All of the major scientific organizations have made statements in favor of the conclusion that human activity is the cause of climate change.

You've made too broad a case. That's like saying scientists agree that breathing keeps us alive.

I don't believe that is the argument being had between the global warming folks and their doomsday predictions and those that disagree with the modeling and procedures being used.

0 Replies

@farmerman,

farmerman wrote:

The big flaws in Hubberts work was that we didn't really understand the complex issues of compressive fluids, and hydraulic conductivity.
The reason I say this is that we are now able to extract fluids and gas from fractured sandstone Formations . I have, in my collection of USGS isopach maps of Pennsylvania through Tennessee, statements contain deep well logs that state outright that the Marcellus Shale and the Brailler and Utica shale (actually a sandstone unit that contains the gas and oil) could only serve as a formational "source rock< and the oil and gas will probably remained trapped forever and will never be economically available.

So your saying that technology changed and advances were made and now peak oil as we knew it in the 70's is no longer the threat it once was, right?

1 Reply

@Finn dAbuzz,

Why do you think US republicans and affiliated are so deeply doubtful of this particular scientific theory? It's not because they are all programmed to behave stupidly. It's because they have been manipulated, intoxicated by the deniers. On the receiving end of a disinformation machine. Eg FAUX news watchers tend to be grossly misinformed and disinformed. Such is your case as well. That's not difficult to see.

2 Replies

The Republican Party stands alone in climate denial

Amid internal calls for climate action, a study finds that Republicans are the only climate-denying conservative party in the world.

Dana Nuccitelli
Monday 5 October 2015

A paper published in the journal Politics and Policy by Sondre Båtstrand at the University of Bergen in Norway compared the climate positions of conservative political parties around the world. Båtstrand examined the platforms or manifestos of the conservative parties from the USA, UK, Norway, Sweden, Spain, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and Germany. He found that the US Republican Party stands alone in its rejection of the need to tackle climate change and efforts to become the party of climate supervillains.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2015/oct/05/the-republican-party-stands-alone-in-climate-denial

0 Replies

@maxdancona,

maxdancona wrote:

I am not saying that scientists are never wrong. My points apply when we reach a scientific consensus. This is when an overwhelming percentage of scientists working actively in a field all agree that the evidence supports a conclusion. When there is scientific consensus, it almost always turns out to be correct.

Correct as judged by what? The scientific consensus?

maxdancona wrote:

I don't think that "peak oil" ever came close to scientific consensus. It isn't applicable to the points I am making.

I remember discussing this point with you at length here, roughly 10--15 years ago. You sounded much more confident then. But our discussions then are relevant now because of the sources each of us relied on. You argued from the authority of certain scientists you trusted. I argued from the experience with the predictions of William Stanley Jevons, a 19th-century economist who confidently and wrongly claimed that the world would be running out of coal pretty soon. The analogy between of Jevons's "peak coal" theory and today's peak-oil theory was almost exact. Accordingly, I rejected the peak-oil theory on grounds of evidence about peak coal. As of today, my approach has panned out better than yours. And I say this with all due deference to the possibility that I might have to eat my words ten years from now.

maxdancona wrote:

If you can come up with an example in the past 100 years where all the preeminent scientific organizations put out statements in favor of a specific scientific fact... and then were proven wrong, I would be interested to hear it. It does happen, but Schrodinger was the last example I can think of.

In the early 1970s, when my father earned his PhD in biochemistry, all the textbooks he owned agreed it's impossible to crystallize membrane proteins (proteins embedded in cell membranes). In the late 70s and early 80s, Michael Deisenhofer and Hartmut Michel came along, tried it anyway, and succeeded. (They got the Nobel Prize in 1988 --- along with Robert Huber, Michel's boss. Huber's contribution to the project was to trust the scientific consensus, consider the project hopeless, and adamantly bar Michel from using his lab for it.)

It's not a terribly well-known story. I only know of it because it happened in the field I earned my own degree in. But it happened.

1 Reply

@maxdancona,

maxdancona wrote:

I am not saying that scientists are never wrong. My points apply when we reach a scientific consensus.

Let me ask you a question about that. Suppose you're talking to members of the general public who don't care for evidence and logic in their own right. Why would such people defer to the authority of a consensus of people who in turn derived their authority from evidence and logic? If the direct argument from evidence and logic doesn't work, why would the detour work better?

1 Reply

@Thomas,

Quote:

Let me ask you a question about that. Suppose you're talking to members of the general public who don't care for evidence and logic in their own right. Why would such people defer to the authority of a consensus of people who in turn derived their authority from evidence and logic? If the direct argument from evidence and logic doesn't work, why would the detour work better?

That is a very good question, Thomas. But the fact is the detour does work.

The great majority of people who believe in Climate Change do so based on the axiom "greenhouse gasses trap heat." This is an argument from authority. Go find your nearest non-scientist friend who believes that Climate change is real and ask them simple questions like ; "Why do global warming gasses trap heat?" or "What makes carbon dioxide a global warming gas while nitrogen is not?". They won't be able answer. Worse, the image that most people have about greenhouses give them a model of the atmosphere that is grossly incorrect (a glass skin over static air).

Most people who believe in climate change don't know the difference between convection and radiation. Most people who believe in climate change have never read a peer reviewed paper. Yet here we are. For most people, who don't have the resources or inclination to actually understand the science of climate change, argument by authority is all you have.

Should someone who has never read a peer reviewed paper, or done any math on data themselves, have an opinion about climate change?

Let's talk about another phenomenon, people who are liberal politically (I understand my terminology here is very US centric, but bear with me... I think it scales).... People who who are liberal politically are far more likely to accept the science about global climate change. People who are conservative politically are far more likely to accept the science about GMOs. There are very few of them who ever do the work and study required to actually figure it out for themselves.

This suggests that human beings don't base opinions on logic and evidence, but rather on ideology and pre-existing beliefs. The institutions of science have tried to build in safeguards. They aren't perfect, but within science there is a far greater attempt for objective reasoning than we see in normal life.

This presents a problem; when scientists come up with a result that worries them (like global climate change), they have to do whatever they can to convince society at large that they are right... even though the society at large don't have the expertise or the patience to judge the science for themselves.

I don't have a good answer for this.

2 Replies

@McGentrix,

pretty much. The concept of peak oil was unique to him and a few of his students. Popular press picked it up an it became the "inconvenient truth" that really helped fire up the gas price rises of the ensuing decades. The market adjusted nicely to technology . We have a new generation of petroleum geologists who dont throw away those hard rock sedimentary logs.

I met Hubbert in my early grad school days and he was a real ornery ole fart, but he had the curiosity of a kid.
I recall one experiment he and one o his colleagues came up with to xplain "gravity glide" faults, (These are horizontal fault planes that can move for a hundred miles or so). He and his friend using a wet table top and an empty inverted beer can, showed how a wet "strut" formation can allow that formation to break and slide over the strut. We had great times emptying beer cans to demonstrate this.

He would often show up at Geology Conferences just to argue. His ideas were pretty sound , he just never availed himself of the concept of fracking in porous media.

0 Replies

@Thomas,

Thomas wrote:

I remember discussing this point with you at length here, roughly 10--15 years ago.

Forget I said that. I confused you with a user called "Steve (as 41oo)".

0 Replies

@maxdancona,

Quote:

This presents a problem; when scientists come up with a result that worries them (like global climate change), they have to do whatever they can to convince society at large that they are right... even though the society at large don't have the expertise or the patience to judge the science for themselves.

The society at large pays for that science, supposedly because it values good scientific advice and progress in understanding stuff, and prefers to farm that out to personel more qualified than most. Similarly, I pay a mechanic to fix my car because I can't fix it myself quite as well; and yet this car can kill me if it's not fixed well. We pay doctors to find what's wrong with our health because we'd rather have our health taken care of by a competent, well-trained professional than by a snake oil vendor. We trust other people with our lives all the time. What's so wrong with trusting scientists?

I always wonder, if astronomers would come to the conclusion that a particular asteroid is rushing towards earth and will impact it a couple of months from now, how many people on earth would even think of checking that calculation by themselves? How many lay persons would be able to redo their calculation competently? Do you think Gunga or Layman here would run around in circles with their hands over their ears, yelling "I can't hear you; I can't hear you", like they do with climate change? Do you think Trump would say, as he is saying now about climate change, that he needs more time to think about the problem and decide if yes or no the US should try and do anything about it?

1 Reply

@maxdancona,

maxdancona wrote:

The great majority of people who believe in Climate Change do so based on the axiom "greenhouse gasses trap heat." This is an argument from authority.

No it's not; it's an assertion. An assertion that can be tested by anyone with a spectrometer. Granted, it would have to be a spectrometer that reaches well into the infrared. But it's not super-sophisticated equipment. A good high-school chemistry lab is likely to have it.

Maxdancona wrote:

Should someone who has never read a peer reviewed paper, or done any math on data themselves, have an opinion about climate change?

Fine by me.

Maxdancona wrote:

This presents a problem; when scientists come up with a result that worries them (like global climate change), they have to do whatever they can to convince society at large that they are right... even though the society at large don't have the expertise or the patience to judge the science for themselves.

That's an easy one for me. I belive that in a democracy, the role of scientists is advisory --- not prescriptive, and certainly not propagandist. Let the scientist give the best advice they can give, and then We the People can take it or leave it. That's up to us.

3 Replies

@Olivier5,

Olivier5 wrote:

The society at large pays for that science, supposedly because it values good scientific advice and progress in understanding stuff, and prefers to farm that out to personnel more qualified than most. Similarly, I pay a mechanic to fix my car because I can't fix it myself quite as well; and yet this car can kill me if it's not fixed well. We pay doctors to find what's wrong with our health because we'd rather have our health taken care of by a competent, well-trained professional than by a snake oil vendor. We trust other people with our lives all the time. What's so wrong with trusting scientists?

I always wonder, if astronomers would come to the conclusion that a particular asteroid is rushing towards earth and will impact it a couple of months from now, how many people on earth would even think of checking that calculation by themselves? How many lay persons would be able to redo their calculation competently? Do you think Gunga or Layman here would run around in circles with their hands over their ears, yelling "I can't hear you; I can't hear you", like they do with climate change? Do you think Trump would say, as he is saying now about climate change, that he needs more time to think about the problem and decide if yes or no the US should try and do anything about it?

Nothing wrong with trusting scientists at all. We do it all the time with the food we eat, the cars we drive, the planes we fly in etc...

What you've done here is exaggerate a thing to comedic levels. Scientists and doomsday events do not have a stellar record.

1 Reply

@Thomas,

Quote:

the role of scientists is advisory

Remember the "several concentric circles of advice"? concept. At the outer circle lie the real decision makers and they must weigh everything from inner ( and probably more knowledgeable) circles of expertise.

0 Replies

@Olivier5,

Again, and so often, we see this stunning hypocrisy from folks like you, Olivier, and farmerman and Max and McGentrix and ..., pretending to be scientists, pretending to discuss science and what it is, pretending that you are of science, chastising others for their refusal to do science , when all the while there is so much voluminous evidence that you are all incredible science deniers in your own right.

You all have been programmed to behave stupidly, to flat out deny science and you are all doing so with a mighty vengeance.

0 Replies

@Thomas,

PS, where the hell ya been??

1 Reply

@farmerman,

Why do "scientists" refuse, in such a deliberate, studious fashion, to address science, farmerman? It's just so unbelievably unscientific.

0 Replies

@Thomas,

Quote:

An assertion that can be tested by anyone with a spectrometer. Granted, it would have to be a spectrometer that reaches well into the infrared. But it's not super-sophisticated equipment. A good high-school chemistry lab is likely to have it.

No that "greenhouse gasses trap heat" is not an assertion that anyone can test with a spectrometer.

You are forgetting the work you put into getting a science education. You studied Newtonian optics, and Blackbody radiation and Planck. I think it is fair to say that you had at least 12 years of work studying math and Physics.. . and that doesn't count your career.

You spent time staring at neon tubes and carefully measuring spectral lines. You sat through lectures on diffraction, and photons and electron energy states. And you spent countless hours working through problem sets. All of this knowledge and experience contribute to your understanding of what the spectrometer is doing (which is why we had you go through it).

It would be easy for you to test this assertion. But you take for granted the fact that you come with a huge amount of background knowledge and expertise that very few people have.

If your non-scientific neighbor had a spectrometer, she would have to rely quite a bit on your interpretation of the results. She would either have to trust your interpretation or she would have to go through 12 years of college to develop the special knowledge you take for granted.

Give a normal person a spectrometer, and it won't prove anything.

2 Replies

Science Deniers are Everywhere

Quick Links

My Account

able2know