Good point. We went onto global warming from the potential impact on local coastal housing markets but that’s something more gradual than a housing crash.
That is not the conclusion I got. The Sokal experiment points out correctly that some journal are pure trash which is a problem and the problem is getting bigger.
IT DOES NOT MEAN THE ENTIRE PEER-REVIEW PROCESS IS FAULTY.
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Agreed. The problem is often such quote get used to attack the science. Science by its very nature are nuanced and it’s often difficult to have a logical discussion with science illiterate people. However, how can one communicate effectively with the general pubic if they hedge everything in term of probability which is how real science express things?
Hey, welcome back to FWF duex!
yeah.
Also I gather that the most recent so called Sokal Squared hoax experiments were all in the gender, race, culture studies areas.
I really don’t think that hoaxing a identity politics journal is the same as hoaxing a hard science publication.
I suspect it may not be gradual when it happens – USGS updating the flood zones/maps or insurers raising rates or outright denying coverage for risky construction or mortgages could open the floodgates (ha!).
They key word is “could”, not “will”. We should not be relying on hope after decades of warnings and little action. There is a lot of promising research into carbon sequestration, but that does not mean we should stop moving towards clean energy, which can already be cheaper anyway.
It depend on the Journal. Increasingly, there are pay to publish journal that are just trash. Bloomberg have a good write up on of these that’s run out of India: There are also BS journal out there specifically targeting some populations like UFO/alien believers, etc…
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-08-29/medical-journals-have-a-fake-news-problem
Sometime, even publication with decent rep get taken with paper of questionable content.
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What ways are you thinking?
carbon capture & sequestration CCS is still very expensive versus just using clean alternatives. I haven’t heard of any other methods to reduce CO2 that are really effective or realistic.
But I do agree we should put some more effort into research in those areas. I’m optimistic that with more work technology will advance and CCS may become more practical.
Exactly what I meant when I said:
Agreed. There is plenty of private money going into green energy. No need to add on taxpayer money.
I don’t think the link between climate science and green energy can be dismissed so easily. Green energy is a gold mine as far as jobs are concerned if you are well qualified. I don’t think it’s wrong to question if some scientists are raising the alarm to prove their bona fides in order to get jobs, in addition to needing money to fund their studies.
I agree that some journals are pure trash, but that doesn’t mean that the “peer review process” in general isn’t faulty or that their aren’t trash science journals that would publish faked studies if they conformed to their pro-climate change views. I hope someone tries the same thing as Sokal Squared with scientific journals and medical journals and publishes their findings whether they are good or bad. Those of us outside academia don’t really know how rigorous these journals are in reviewing studies similar to what others have already gotten published.
“Could” works both ways. We “could” see the sea level rise enough that it would be hard to live in Miami Beach without expensive alterations to the city’s infrastructure. Or then again, Miami Beach could be fine for generations to come.
Cheaper than nuclear? Not by a long shot.
I am referring simply to adapting to whatever changes and not spending trillions in hopes that it might be reversed with no guarantee that we get anything in return.
Ftfy
This is harder to do for peer reviewed journals. To be honest, as someone reviewing and editing scientific literature, the junk journals are pretty well known to start with. When I was in academia (chemical physics), I’d never read toilet paper that was not peer-reviewed. There is WAY too much literature to read as it is to bother with non-peer reviewed letters from an obscure journal.
For reviews, I’d be contacted by an editor for a respected journal who knew my field based on my previous publications. Most often, I would have had been in contact with them previously for my own publications or at conferences. They’d send me articles 99% of the time by people whom I had already heard about, at least one of the co-authors (although names are not mentioned on review submission, you could often tell who it was). It’s a pretty small world. So it’s hard for someone out of the blue to publish in respected peer-reviewed journals. Names start coming up when grad students toil in research lab of a well-known faculty at a well-known scientific department of a regular university. Name of faculty is basically your first endorsement by someone who has published dozens of previously reviewed articles. Then you spend doc and post-doc building your own name brand. Eventually you rub shoulders at conferences with faculties that know your work. You start tenure track as assistant professor with like 50 peer-reviewed articles with your name on it.
Bottom line, in hard sciences at least, it’s pretty hard to come up with a wild theory out of nowhere without some name recognition. If you simply send your amazing new work/discovery to Nature, Science, etc… you’ll likely never even get a reply from them.
So when climate change goes around in good peer-reviewed journals, I’d consider them to be honest attempts at accurately describing observables. Interpretation can be faulty but someone else is bound to have an opposing view. As a peer you do not have a very specific incentive to validate or invalidate either way the work of someone else. For me, the only monetary incentive was to not look like a clown for supporting something that will be proven wrong by someone else. Since it’s a small world, reputation is much more important to continued funding (and publication) than temporarily agreeing to jump on every bangwagon even if said jumping somehow came with a sizable grant attached.
All that said, confirmation bias is alive and well. In the margins, you’re more likely to believe questionable data that supports your theory than trust data that goes against it. My policy was to always retake any data that did not agree clearly with what I was expecting. That’d usually take care of fluke instrumentation errors but not personal bias so then I’d ask someone else to retake that same data while giving them as little information as I could as to my own results. If all data from all sources agreed to disprove what I was expecting, then I’d start getting excited. Results which did not meet expectations were much more interesting IMO than those that confirmed them.
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- I am not in favor of subsidies for any industry.
- In what universe do you live where green energy is cheaper?
This is only true if you don’t believe 99.9% of scientists.
I only meant coal, forgot to specify. But now I wonder if the cost of nuclear energy includes the cost of waste cleanup and storage+maintenance for the next 10,000 years? How about the cost to human health and lives lost from regular disasters? (This is a rhetorical question, the answer is NO). I think besides generation and distribution, the utility bill only includes the cost of plant construction and plant decommission, not spent fuel storage.
I agree. As long as there are enough highly paid jobs it’s not going to correct much. This is similar to the countries suffering from the “resource curse”. All that the wealth does is drive up prices (inflation).
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They haven’t shown to be accurate with their predictions of doom and gloom, so you are right, when it comes to PREDICTING the fallout of climate change, I do not believe them.
It is a common misconception, but a misconception nonetheless that there is a necessary huge cost to waste cleanup, removal, and storage. Even worse is the misconception around adverse health effects and deaths. List of nuclear and radiation accidents by death toll - Wikipedia
At this point, nuclear power is so tainted in the American public’s mind (your comment is the perfect example), that it’s going to take some very popular celebrity (like Lady Gaga level popularity) that is known for supporting progressive causes to start tweeting about how awesome nuclear power is to actually get Americans to start thinking about it rationally. I am not betting on that any time soon. The best I can hope for is smart politicians that don’t care about their careers to start ramming through the repeal of the overly burdensome nuclear plant regulations.
(I hope Trump never touchs it because the half of the country that hates him will start relating the danger of nuclear power to white supremacy or something off the wall like that and we’ll never see a shift in opinion.)
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You must read the paragraphs below that list. The actual counts are in the hundreds of thousands of people whose lives were negatively affected, at least by Chernobyl (don’t know about others).
As it should be. But my comment is a bad example of the American public’s mind, because my opinion formed in 1986. It’s all fine and dandy until you are personally affected. I wasn’t, but I’m very empathetic.
I do think that nuclear is preferable to coal/oil/gas, but not to wind/solar/geothermal, at least not in the areas where such sources are viable. Only the short-term costs are known, the long-term costs are shrouded in government coverups / media blackouts (again, Chernobyl).
Anti-nuclear groups seized on the Chernobyl disaster in the late 80s as their main argument against it and overly exaggerated the negative effects. You believed them back then (as most Americans did sadly) and now we have higher energy costs because of it. Thanks Greenpeace! Ugh.
As the 2008 UN report notes,
“Based on 20 years of studies, it is possible to reconfirm
the conclusions of the Committee’s 2000 report. Essentially,
persons who were exposed as children to radioiodine
from the Chernobyl accident and the emergency and recovery
operation workers who received high doses of radiation
are at increased risk of radiation-induced effects. Most area
residents were exposed to low-level radiation comparable to
or a few times higher than the annual natural background
radiation levels and need not live in fear of serious health
consequences.”
The worst nuclear accident in the history of the world has resulted in a confirmed 45-79 deaths and 6,000+ cases of thyroid cancer. The increase in cancer is likely from drinking contaminated milk (a mistake that we wouldn’t make today).
If that’s your strongest argument against nuclear power, you haven’t convinced me. It is much more efficient than wind/solar/geothermal and very safe. I am willing to put my money where my mouth is as are millions of other people. It’s plenty easy to claim you are against it when you have no problem heating your home or paying your electric bill (which, unless you have solar panels on your roof, isn’t even primarily made up of wind/solar/geothermal power and its associated higher costs). Sorry, but I’m not interested in raising energy costs for the world in order to prevent an extremely unlikely disaster that doesn’t even match the effects of a natural disaster like a tsunami, which, by the way, isn’t able to increase its death toll when it hits a nuclear plant.
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