Politically liberal science is bad science.

'Harm' isn't a word that only refers to humans, but to answer you question in the greater scheme of things, harming non-humans ultimately comes around to harm humans as well. Everything is connected.

The disconnect most people have with grasping how environmental harm affects humans is that their perspective on the future is limited by a relatively short horizon.

In reality, everything that has ever been done to the environment that is unsustainable has been building up cumulative effects, which if left unresolved, will escalate into the future.

It's like any disease whose symptoms gradually get worse until they culminate in a debilitating bout of sickness.

BTW, I just realized that you have continued discussing morality after complaining that science should be separated from morality. So which is it you really want to discuss, science or morality?

I'm having some difficulty determining why you have gotten so much pushback on this thread. My suspicions are:

1) You chose to initially focus on "politically liberal" science and in so doing put a burr under the saddle of some A2K liberals and/or
2) You personally are the burr under the saddle of many A2K members

Science that is driven to predetermined conclusions by any political ideology is "bad science"

Bad science that is used to confirm favored conclusions that satisfy one political ideology or another is "really bad science" and really bad politics.

Science that reaches predetermined conclusions for financial reward is "bad science" conducted by "bad scientists"

All of these things are true because scientists are human beings and not demi-gods.

The scientific method is pretty close to being divine, but then the monkeys in white coats start messing with it.

From a political standpoint, it is the case that the one side that constantly declares it worships SCIENCE is just as bad as the other in terms of picking and choosing what science it accepts.

I think we are in a period of time when science is subjected to the influence of politics almost as much as it once was under the thumb of religion. Heretical scientists are not being burned at the stake but their reputations and livelihoods are in jeopardy if they go against the politically correct grain.

IMO, one of the worst culprits is Bill Nye the laughable "Science Guy" He's not a scientist and yet he encourages everyone to think he is. In terms of "science", he is a classic demagogue. If anyone is getting their "science" from Nye it's because they are politically very liberal. There may be a similar fool who uses science to support conservative ideas, but I haven't run across him and that's probably due to the fact that the entertainment industry and the news media are overwhelmingly liberal.

I've no doubt that there are plenty of scientists who place science well above ideology, but most people do not...no matter what they may claim, and in the age of the internet they will always be able to find "scientific proof" that their particular ideological holy grail is confirmed. (e.g. GMOs are dangerous, fracking will destroy humanity, salt will kill you, climate change is a hoax, etc etc etc)

How many times do we see someone suggesting that because 1,000 or more "experts" agree with their "scientific" conclusion (or for that matter "legal") they must be right? It's utterly meaningless and yet we see it all of the time.

I find it difficult to believe anything that is told to me about Climate Change. Instead, I look to economics which is very often the revealer of truth.

Investors are still pouring billions of dollars into coastal development. These people are in it for the long term and they don't invest based on ideology. They also have access to all of the scientific research. Could they all be wrong? Of course, but people who have fortunes to lose if they are, usually are not.

Our government's budget, under Obama, allocated about 8% of all funds to mitigation. Most of the rest went to "research" and publicity. If they were so certain Climate Change was the real deal and such a threat, why did we need more research and why wouldn't we be investing in mitigation when any sane person had to know that responses like the Green New Deal would never fly? Might they have been motivated by politics rather than science? Absolutely. We should never minimize the influence of incompetence, self-interest, and idiocy.

Right now the frontrunner of the 2020 Dems is saying "We care about the truth, not facts" and the crowd went wild.

I don't consider science to be a political activity, even though it affects the economy and culture. My objection to the way this topic was presented is simply that it confuses "science" with "what scientists say when they're not doing science". The researchers who became aware of the effects of greenhouse gases on global temperature trends were not conducting "liberal science". But, as the likely outcome of consuming fossil fuels at the rate we've been doing (which is increasing) became more apparent those scientists became alarmed and felt they had a duty to announce their findings to the world and alert us to the likely consequences. Initially this was not considered to be "politically liberal science", but yes, it was scientists stepping out of the laboratory and onto a soapbox. But you don't do science from a soapbox.

Similarly, Michael Behe and Stephen Meyer may have been performing legitimate research as they developed their theories of "intelligent design". Their findings might have been explored and debated in the larger scientific community and their evidence or interpretations challenged by other scientists. But when the findings were presented to the public by religious conservatives as a refutation of Darwinian evolution the theories became politically charged. Once this happens it can be difficult to put the genie back in the bottle. The point is that the political debate, even if carried out by scientists, is not science.


I'd be suspicious of economics as a revealer of any truth other than if there's a buck to be made, even if only in the short term, full steam ahead.


For one thing, legislators in one of the main two main political parties loudly condemned the science behind the concern as a "hoax". Policy makers probably hoped that the continued accrual of evidence would serve to change public and political opinion, leading to support for (expensive) mitigation. But it was obvious that Congress, controlled by climate skeptics, would never authorize spending billions on what was being painted as a dastardly con devised by liberals.

I am just pointing out the hypocrisy of the scientific community. They call God fearing people judgmental bigots. At the same time they are trying to equate the lives of animals and humans (or maybe even elevate animals above humans), based on some value system that was established by some all knowing and all caring "laws of nature". Then that very same scientific community that established that God fearing people (especially Christians) are bigots has declared they are in touch with the "Almighty Laws of Nature", and together with Nature, they have determined that the environment some how managed to evolve to some state of Utopian perfection before the industrial revolution, and man has been destroying it ever since. So I guess science is saying there is no Godhead but the one they have appointed themselves to be by being the smartest people in the world to determine (with Nature of course) what is best.



Are you implying you are one of them?



I want to discuss both.

Is that possible to do in an objective way if one is to follow the biased rules put in place by the current crowd at the top of the scientific academia?

Global climate change caused by human activity is an example where liberals are backed by scientific fact. By any objective measure, the science supports this.

My point is that we should accept thr science... this includes when it supports a liberal narrative...

That's a rather fuzzy objection.

There are "scientists" who do "science" based on a soapbox premise. They may be a small segment or they may be legion, but they exist, and, unfortunately, their "science" is being used to shape public opinion.

As for economics, it is based on the motivation of very basic self-interest that rarely allows opinion to interfere. People can say what they will but when their fortunes are on the line they almost always go with what will make them more money, irrespective of whether or not it coincides with their political opinions. Check out Freakonomics.

As for the Obama Administration's pitiful investment in mitigation, it really is disingenuous to claim they felt the need to gather even more data to convince recalcitrant "climate deniers" who were never going to change their minds. Their job was to protect and preserve the nation, not to underline a popular notion about climate change. They had the opportunity for 8 years and did very little.

There are very few "scientific facts" and those that do exist don't necessarily point to overarching premises like "Humans are destroying the planet"

Nonsense Finn, our lives are filled with scientific facts that we depend on every time we use a computer to connect to the internet, or visit a doctor, or step onto an airplane. We know that the Earth rotates around the sun, and that germs cause disease etc. etc. Yes, science has developed a multitude of facts that our modern science depends upon.

Those that don't threaten your political ideology you accept without much thought.

The value of science is that it provides an objective way to answer questions based on evidence and data. These answers can be tested. And we have scientific institutions that provide peer review. If you decide to believe what you are going to believe no matter what the evidence says, then sure... science becomes unimportant.

This thread was addressed to liberals because liberals tend to be more likely to assume that science "agrees" with them. But to simply suggest that science is useless is a cop out from either side of the political fence.

Who has argued that science is "useless"

Every "scientific fact" is liable to someday be proven wrong. Most won't, none are absolutely sacrosanct...not if you are a fan of the scientific method.

Tell us oh enlightened one...what "scientific facts" do you fully accept even though they run counter to your political view?

Do you believe that glaciers and polar ice caps are not melting? Because plans are already underway to expand arctic drilling for petrochemicals and to use the newly ice-free seaways for expanded shipping. Isn't that an example of economics at work, exploiting new conditions as they develop in pursuit of more profitable business activity?

Science should be objective, and scientific literacy (at least) means that you evaluate scientific facts in away that is not dependent on your political ideology. Being a good scientist makes this imperative, and this is part of training to become a scientist.

I believe the following criteria are good (for scientifically literate non-scientists).

1) A scientific fact should be accepted by the mainstream scientific institutions (i.e. NASA, NIG, APS as well as universities). These are the keepers of scientific knowledge (and let's cut off this nonsense... none of these institutions said that tobacco was healthy). When there is a scientific consensus, it is supported by facts.

2) A scientific fact is supported by well-designed research and is subject to peer review. Good science is testable, transparent and reproducible.

Global Climate change meets these requirements. So does the claim that "genetically engineered food has no greater risks than no GM counterparts".

The scientific facts that you accept shouldn't have to anything to do with your political ideology.

Fair point, but assuming you are right (and I have no reason to think you are not) that won't convince me of anything other than that the ice is melting. It doesn't follow that the seas will rise to swallow Florida, NYC and every other American coastal town and city, or that the interior of the nation will become a scorched desert.

BTW, I don't buy into all of the rhetoric of so-called Climate Change deniers.

You didn't answer my questions

Which questions am I not answering?

I already listed (several times) scientific facts that I accept that contradict a liberal narrative and others that contradict a conservative narrative. You and Izzy seem to disagree about whether I am really liberal or a conservative (you guys can figure it out for yourselves because I have stopped caring).

I accept the consensus view of scientific institutions based on research and evidence as understood by the experts in the relevant field. I do this consistently no matter which ideological side is squawking. Why isn't this the correct thing to do?

The alternative is to base your understanding on political ideology and the politicians who push it. Trusting scientists over politicians when it comes to scientific questions seems reasonable to me.

The water has to go somewhere, and as you know, it will seek its own level. Many coastal regions on the East coast are already being affected by small increases in the level of high tides and storm surges. As more ice melts (glaciers and snowpack, not sea ice) the water level will continue to rise.

I don't know if this is the case or not. But I am pretty certain that there will be significant changes to weather patterns. Why? Because more water and higher temperatures means more water vapor in the atmosphere. More clouds and more rain — but I can't predict how these effects will be distributed.

Commendable.

Water has multiple functions:
1) it causes weathering and erosion.

The energy with which it evaporates is returned when it precipitates/falls. So the strength of storms, floods, etc. must be a reflection of the amount of heat absorbed during evaporation.

Basically, what goes up must come down.

2) H2O vapor blankets heat because it is a greenhouse gas.

If I understand water's greenhouse gas behavior, correctly, it lets more infrared penetrate as its opacity decreases. So thick cloud cover blankets more heat than clear skies. This is why clear nights/days are often colder/cooler than cloudy/foggy ones. If fog/mist congeals overnight due to high levels of atmospheric humidity settling, less heat can radiate away as infrared, and so morning temperatures will start higher than they would if the night sky was clearer.

3) When water condenses and precipitates, it lowers atmospheric pressure.

A hurricane is a storm system in which a low pressure center is initiated by condensation/precipitation, and then warm humid air keeps flowing into the eye to fuel/maintain the condensation process and thus low-pressure.

So the more warm, humid air has built up in the atmosphere through the summer, the more fuel is available for hurricanes to grow.

It is not so dissimilar to dead wood building up in a forest to fuel forest fire. Trump may have been onto something about raking forests to reduce the potential for fire, but the only way to rake the atmosphere for water vapor is to build more/higher mountain ranges, and the only way to do that is to leave energetic geological processes alone so the tectonic plates can shift in the ways that result in new mountain ranges over slow geological time.

You could try to build up mountains using energy mined up from underground, e.g. fossil fuels and nuclear, but then you would be robbing Peter to pay Paul, so to speak, because that same energy left underground fuels the natural processes that build up mountains in a robust way that resists weathering/erosion for multiple millennia, unlike structures made of concrete and metal, which break down and rust over the course of a few centuries, if they even make it that long.

We oppose government funding for such studies because we believe that they are the very sort of politically-biased bad science that Max is complaining about, and letting them have government funding would give their bogus claims an undeserved appearance of legitimacy.

Whether we are correct to believe this would be wildly off topic for this thread. Suffice it to say that we believe this.

If we were confident that CDC studies on guns would actually result in quality science, we would be much less opposed to the studies.

Who has argued science is useless?

I don't care what izzy thinks about anything. I know you are a liberal and so do you. It doesn't make you a bad person, just wrong most of the time (but not in this thread...in general)

You do seem to like to pick fights though...even with people who are supporting you.

Yes, the seas will rise as polar ice melts. I don't know this to be a fact but I assume this has happened in the past...more than once.

The question is how high?

The weather has "changed" quite a lot just since I was born. Sometimes for the good of humans and sometimes not. I'm not worried about it.

The usefulness in science is its independence. If you have a set of scientific facts accepted by political liberals, and a different set of scientific facts accepted by conservatives then what's the point?

Science is only useful if it is accepted as an objective source of facts based on evidence. The scientific community should be seen by society as an authority, the scientists are the people with the expertise and experience... and scientists are doing the research.

Science can determine objective scientific facts that are independent of political ideology. That is its usefulness. If science only supports what you already believe, then you don't need it.