Are you scientifically literate?

[palerider]

How about this policy statement from the American Chemical Society*...

Public Policy Statement 2007-2010
GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE
ACS POSITION

Careful and comprehensive scientific assessments have clearly demonstrated that the Earth’s climate system is changing rapidly in response to growing atmospheric burdens of greenhouse gases and absorbing aerosol particles (IPCC, 2007). There is very little room for doubt that observed climate trends are due to human activities. The threats are serious and action is urgently needed to mitigate the risks of climate change.

The reality of global warming, its current serious and potentially disastrous impacts on Earth system properties, and the key role emissions from human activities play in driving these phenomena have been recognized by earlier versions of this ACS policy statement (ACS, 2004), by other major scientific societies, including the American Geophysical Union (AGU, 2003), the American Meteorological Society (AMS, 2007) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS, 2007), and by the U. S. National Academies and ten other leading national academies of science (NA, 2005). This statement reviews key global climate change impacts and recommends actions required to mitigate or adapt to currently anticipated consequences.​

BTW, did you read that last paragraph?



*The American Chemical Society (ACS) is a learned society (professional association) based in the United States that supports scientific inquiry in the field of chemistry. Founded in 1876 at New York University, the ACS currently has more than 154,000 members at all degree-levels and in all fields of chemistry, chemical engineering, and related fields.

As I stated in the earlier post, a very small minority; a very very small minority of the membership agree with that statement. Look at the ipcc. A very small but well placed group making statements that the very vast majority of scientists who have done work for them disagree with. When I say the actual scientific community, I am talking about actual scientists, not political organizations. But thanks for attempting to prove my point that AGW is a hoax with a political agenda.

 

[palerider]

Since palerider is (purportedly) a biochemist, perhaps we should hear the opinion of the president of the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from his February 2010 message...

There are actually four sides [to the climate debate]: “denialists,” a group consisting of people with a right-wing political agenda who assert that the claim that global warming is caused by manmade emissions is a lie and is not based on sound science; “skeptics,” a group largely composed of scientists who argue that climate science, particularly large-scale modeling, is far too imperfect to form the basis of a consensus; “warners,” another group of scientists who believe that the best climate models accurately predict a looming planetary disaster and that human production of greenhouse gases is the primary cause; and “calamatists,” a collection of environmental activists whose agenda, like that of the denialists, is ideologically driven, but in the opposite direction: they have a neo-luddite view of industrialization and believe the denialists are evil. As Brand, a self-described warner, points out, understanding from which of these camps any given argument springs is useful in distinguishing propaganda from science and appeals to emotion from evidence-based assertions.

For decades, the denialists insisted that the Earth was not getting warmer. Short-term fluctuations were meaningless, they asserted. Climate modeling was worse than useless.

But after massive amounts of data were collected and analyzed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, it became clear, on the release of its report in 2007, that no sensible person could deny that a dramatic rise in the planet’s average temperature had been occurring for at least a century.​

Palerider, are you a part of this organization? Maybe you should reconsider your membership. Or write a letter to your president... you know... to set him straight.

And I repeat. The membership does not agree. What you have shown is that political organiztions agree.

I belong to this organization and I have written letters. A very large number of the membership have written letters and a large number of all three that you mention have left because of the unscientific position that the political head of the organizations have taken.

 

[palerider]

Re: A minor note, pale

some things you have quoted me as saying above, were actually said by CitizenZen. And there is also a posting of mine missing where I asked you how you explained existence of the fossil records of early hominids, since you do not believe in macro evolution.

Macro evolution requires one species making a leap to become another species. Various hominids are not an indication of macro evolution. We have ample evidence in the fossil record of micro evolution; that being changes within a species over time. Growing larger, smaller, more specialized, etc. But there are no examples of one species becoming another species.

 

[palerider]

Is the so called "big bang" really a theory, or merely an attempt to explain observations? It is based on the observation that the universe seems to be expanding, as evidenced by the red shift being more prominent the farther away an object is.

It is a theory in that it is still called a theory but to believe the theory requires a fantastic leap of faith and a willingness to suspend the physical laws of nature.

To me, a non scientist, the idea that all of the matter and energy in the universe was once in an infinitely small space, and just sort of sprang forth sounds a lot like "Let there be light" from Genesis. Maybe it's because I don't understand the big bang.

No one can understand the big bang any more than anyone could understand the mechanism of the creation as described in genesis. As I said, it requires a leap of faith, not understanding because so many physical laws must be put into suspension for the big bang to work. In short, in order to accept the big bang, one must accept miracles. I have made this explanation on other boards so if you don't mind, rather than type the whole thing out again, I am going to just cut and paste from one of the other boards.

The miracles you must accept in order to accept the big bang. As you are suirely aware, modern science theorizes that the universe as we see it is the debris of a fabulous explosion with the fragments of that explosion still flying away in every direction.

On the surface, like many terribly flawed theories (AGW) it makes sense and it is very easy to see how so many could be drawn into it. Lift up the corner and look underneath (so to speak) and there are some terrible problems with the big bang theory that no one in the scientific community (to my knowledge) even wants to begin to try to answer. In fact, in many scientific circles, if you ask questions about these problems, you will be immediately dismissed as a heretic and no further discussion is possible.

Imagine that we are seeing the universe as it exists today as a film. A film that we can run in reverse. Alright, lets reverse it way back to just a few frames after the big bang happened. As we ran the film back, we saw all of the fragments of the big bang moving back together. Closer and closer until all that is visible is a very bright light. The "big bang".

OK. Start the film backwards again. The light gets smaller and smaller until we reach the birth frame of the big bang. Stop the film. Here, according to modern science, even though we don't see it, there is a very small something in front of us. It is an infinitely hot, and infinitely small (zero diameter) and infinitely curved (round) pointlike dimension and it contains all of the matter and energy in the universe. In fact, it is the universe. This is what we are told by modern science. Rember that word infinitely. It is important.

Here we have an infinitely small (zero diameter) spherical point and the big bang takes place. If that point expands a trillion bazillion times, what would it's diameter be? Watch closely because the first miracle is coming up soon to be followed by others. What is a trillion bazillion times zero? The answer is zero no matter how many times you figure it. If the temperature of that infinitely small, infinitely hot point were to drop by a trillion billion times, what would the temperature be? Infinity divided by anything is still infinity so no matter how much you cooled it off, it would still be infinitely hot.

Do you see a trend here? If the universe ever existed as the scientists say, "infinitely small", "infinitely round", "infinitely hot", it isn't getting any bigger and isn't getting any cooler no matter how many frames we move forward. Now. This is where a giant leap of faith, and the belief in miracles enters the big bang. Lets look at the birth frame of the big bang again. Now ask to see the frame of the film that is just before that one. As soon as you ask to see that frame or that what it is be described to you, the conversation is over and a veritable army of the faithful will come to the defense of their theory.

I have recieved responses that suggest that the question has no meaning. It has been suggested that questions about what was going on just before the big bang are like asking who lives a few miles east or west of the equator. I have heard talk of singularities that involve incredibly large amounts of mass that come from something like a black hole…but not. A "place" where the rules of light and energy don’t exist and a thing like time has no meaning. I have been told flatly, with a straight face that in an environment that has no passage of time, a word like before has no meaning.

To that, any thinking person should immediately reply that if there is no passage of time, and words like before have no meaning, exactly how can words like after have any meaning either? You can’t have it both ways. Either there is the passage of time and there was a before, or there is no passage of time in which case, there can be no after.

If, as modern science tells us that everything is energy, and energy is mass, and everything was compressed into an infinitely small point, then you would have nothing but a single black hole, a singularity, and science tells us most authoritatively that you can not big bang your way out of a black hole. If time can’t move, then we would find ourselves completely unable to run our film in either direction; and if the energy = mass equation didn’t apply then, it stands to reason that there could be no black hole and in that case, one couldn’t claim the time suspension rules and the word before would have just as much meaning as the word after.

This being said, the big bang happening would have been as big a miracle as God saying “let there be light”.

As our instruments grow more sensitive, we can see more, and see further than we have ever been able to before and the more we see, the less likely the big bang becomes.

We have known for some time about the existence of background radiation in the universe. It is uniform in all directions. Some scientists at the Bell laboratories got a Nobel Prize for discovering that this background radiation was absolutely uniform in every direction. No matter which direction one looks in space, there it was and it was exactly the same. A dead flat, constant 3 degree Kelvin cold. They told us, and the big bang faithful agreed, that the fact that it was uniform in every direction was the final nail in the creationist coffin. It was proof of the big bang.

Some years later, as technology improved, some super detectors that we placed in orbit that were more sensitive than those used by the Bell laboratory scientists by orders of magnitude found that the flat background radiation wasn’t really flat at all but had some significant undulations and unevenness. It was then determined, and reported by the faithful, that the fact that the radiation was uneven and variable was the final nail in the creationist coffin and was the ultimate proof of the big bang. An unfalsifiable theory. (sound familiar?)

In 1995, or maybe 1996 some findings were made with the Hubble telescope that if they are accepted as being correct, deal a major blow to the big bang theory. The poor state of the big bang scientific community was pretty well summed up in a single paragraph from the report.

“The basic theory of cosmology,that the universe burst forth in a big bang from a tiny volume long ago remains intact. But the details must be revised, or explanations of stallar physics changed, to get stars older than the universe”

In short, with the Hubble telescope, the astronomers were finding 16 billion year old globular clusters in an 8 billion year old universe. Miraculous is it not?

In order to maintain the big bang theory, "some" scientists who are heavily invested in the big bang theorized inflation. They claim that if they could ignore the laws of physics for a millionth of a millionth, of a millionth of a second (I am not kidding) right after the incredibly hot and incredibly dense big bang went off and you allow the explosion to expand at 10 to the 25 times the speed of light and some suggest as much as 10 to the 50 times the speed of light, there will be enough velocity to achieve the distribution and organization of matter to put the stars and galaxys in the positions in which we see them today. By ignoring the laws of physics for that wee bit of time, atomic ratios once again make sense, and some of the questions about anti-matter. And most importantly, one is excused from answering questions about what the universe looked like in that frame just before the birth frame since all of the echoes of it would have been lost. (just like if you ignore the fact that additional CO2 in the atmosphere can't cause warming)

Another miracle. Imagine that.. Now we have the scientific community claiming at least two miracles in the process of the big bang. First, a small dense hot point that came from nowhere and started everything in motion, and in order to explain it, a magical suspension of the laws of physics for “just a little while” so that everything can expand at a speed they themselves have found to be impossible. I am all for science, but the claim of two physical miracles and a couple of mathematical miracles is just to many for any scientific theory to hold water with me.

 

[citizenzen]

Pew Research Poll, July 9, 2009...

The Origin and Development of Life
Nearly all scientists (97%) say humans and other living things have evolved over time – 87% say evolution is due to natural processes, such as natural selection. The dominant position among scientists – that living things have evolved due to natural processes – is shared by only about third (32%) of the public. ​

Climate Change
84% of scientists say the earth is warming because of human activity. Scientists also are far more likely than the public to regard global warming as a very serious problem: 70% express this view, compared with 47% of the public. Public attitudes about whether global warming represents a serious problem have changed little in recent years.​

A CNN report on a University of Illinois study, January 20, 2009...

(CNN) -- Human-induced global warming is real, according to a recent U.S. survey based on the opinions of 3,146 scientists. However there remains divisions between climatologists and scientists from other areas of earth sciences as to the extent of human responsibility.

Two questions were key: Have mean global temperatures risen compared to pre-1800s levels, and has human activity been a significant factor in changing mean global temperatures?

About 90 percent of the scientists agreed with the first question and 82 percent the second.​

 

[citizenzen]

My point has never been that polls or policy statements from scientific organization prove anything... except perhaps that palerider's assertion that no scientist believes in climate change is laughable.

My position has always been that the issue requires further study. How can that be wrong? What area in science couldn't benefit from further investigation? That in my mind is what science is all about: constantly looking for more proof and deeper understanding.

When you think you know all the answers, then you no longer are a scientist, you are an evangelist, a politician or a salesman.

 

[palerider]

Pew Research Poll, July 9, 2009...

The Origin and Development of Life
Nearly all scientists (97%) say humans and other living things have evolved over time – 87% say evolution is due to natural processes, such as natural selection. The dominant position among scientists – that living things have evolved due to natural processes – is shared by only about third (32%) of the public. ​

Climate Change
84% of scientists say the earth is warming because of human activity. Scientists also are far more likely than the public to regard global warming as a very serious problem: 70% express this view, compared with 47% of the public. Public attitudes about whether global warming represents a serious problem have changed little in recent years.​

A CNN report on a University of Illinois study, January 20, 2009...

(CNN) -- Human-induced global warming is real, according to a recent U.S. survey based on the opinions of 3,146 scientists. However there remains divisions between climatologists and scientists from other areas of earth sciences as to the extent of human responsibility.

Two questions were key: Have mean global temperatures risen compared to pre-1800s levels, and has human activity been a significant factor in changing mean global temperatures?

About 90 percent of the scientists agreed with the first question and 82 percent the second.​

31,846 scientists including 9,029 have signed this petition denying that increased CO2 results in global warming.

http://www.petitionproject.org/

Over 4000 scientists have signed this one including a fair sprinkling of nobel prize winners.

http://sepp.org/policy declarations/heidelberg_appeal.html

I stand by my statement that the science community in general does not support AGW theory.

By the way, your pew research poll asked a total of 2300 AAAS members (not necessarily all scientists) and from that they get that 84% of scientists buy into AGW theory. I am laughing.

 

[PLC1]

31,846 scientists including 9,029 have signed this petition denying that increased CO2 results in global warming.

http://www.petitionproject.org/

Over 4000 scientists have signed this one including a fair sprinkling of nobel prize winners.

http://sepp.org/policy declarations/heidelberg_appeal.html

I stand by my statement that the science community in general does not support AGW theory.

By the way, your pew research poll asked a total of 2300 AAAS members (not necessarily all scientists) and from that they get that 84% of scientists buy into AGW theory. I am laughing.

The link shows that a significant number of scientists do not believe that AGW is going to be a disaster for humankind, not that climates aren't changing, nor that greenhouse gasses aren't accelerating the process. Since there is no conclusive proof that it will be an overall negative for humans, that is not surprising.

The Origin and Development of Life
Nearly all scientists (97%) say humans and other living things have evolved over time – 87% say evolution is due to natural processes, such as natural selection. The dominant position among scientists – that living things have evolved due to natural processes – is shared by only about third (32%) of the public.

Which would indicate that about 32% of the population is scientifically literate. That sounds about right, based on the opinions and debates I've read on scientific theories in general.

84% of scientists say the earth is warming because of human activity. Scientists also are far more likely than the public to regard global warming as a very serious problem: 70% express this view, compared with 47% of the public. Public attitudes about whether global warming represents a serious problem have changed little in recent years.

Which fits nicely with Palerider's post above: Most scientists believe that global warming is happening due to human activities, but about 30% don't think that it is going to be catastrophic.

The settled science says that the average temperature of the Earth is increasing, and that it is likely that human introduced greenhouse gasses are accelerating the process.

But enough of AGW theory. We've had a zillion threads already, mostly spouting misinformation.

 

[citizenzen]

31,846 scientists including 9,029 have signed this petition denying that increased CO2 results in global warming.

So, there is disagreement within the scientific community. How is it that when confronted with disagreement as to whether a phenomenon exists or doesn't, your solution is to stop looking?

Again, that doesn't sound very scientific to me.

 

[palerider]

Which fits nicely with Palerider's post above: Most scientists believe that global warming is happening due to human activities, but about 30% don't think that it is going to be catastrophic.

Actually I said, and stand by the statement that most actual scientists (chemists, physicists, geologists, etc.) do not buy into AGW theory. There is no doubt that the climate is changing as it has been changing since the world began, but the hard evidence and physical laws are against AGW theory having any merit and actual scientists who don't depend on grant money to buy their daily bread know this and state as much.

The settled science says that the average temperature of the Earth is increasing, and that it is likely that human introduced greenhouse gasses are accelerating the process.

Sorry, but the politically correct science says that. The settled science states that there is no physical mechanism for CO2 to increase the temperature as it reached its saturation point a very long time ago.

 

[palerider]

So, there is disagreement within the scientific community. How is it that when confronted with disagreement as to whether a phenomenon exists or doesn't, your solution is to stop looking?

Again, that doesn't sound very scientific to me.

I didn't stop looking. I looked for facts. The fact is that there is no mechanism for CO2 to increase the global temperature. That is fact.

I ask again, which physical law do you point to as support for AGW? If you are unsure, tell me which physical law climate "scientists" point to as support or a predictor for their theory?

 

[PLC1]

I didn't stop looking. I looked for facts. The fact is that there is no mechanism for CO2 to increase the global temperature. That is fact.

I ask again, which physical law do you point to as support for AGW? If you are unsure, tell me which physical law climate "scientists" point to as support or a predictor for their theory?

I believe it's called the greenhouse effect.

Back to the subject:

How does an airplane fly? Do you know?

 

[palerider]

I believe it's called the greenhouse effect.

Back to the subject:

How does an airplane fly? Do you know?

Sorry, but the greenhouse effect is not a physical law. It depends upon physical laws. Those laws support what happens in a glass house but do not support the claims of AGW'ers.

How isn't the relevant question. Whether or not physical laws support the theory of flight is, and yes, physical laws do support flight. Now again, which physical law supports AGW theory?

 

[The Scotsman]

How does an airplane fly? Do you know?

Getting the things in the air is the easy bit its the keeping them there and the getting them down in one bit that is the cheeky part! The science of failure or "tombstone technology" as its refered can be much more demanding.

Then there's the "controlled flight into terrain" thing that defeats some schmucks.............trashing a perfectly good bit of kit.

 

[PLC1]

Sorry, but the greenhouse effect is not a physical law. It depends upon physical laws. Those laws support what happens in a glass house but do not support the claims of AGW'ers.

How isn't the relevant question. Whether or not physical laws support the theory of flight is, and yes, physical laws do support flight. Now again, which physical law supports AGW theory?

Of course physical laws support the theory of flight, as well as the greenhouse effect. We see both in everyday life all of the time.

the greenhouse effect has to do with the speed of light in a denser medium, the same principle that makes a prism work. It's really just high school physics, which is why I asked how many are scientifically literate.

Oh, and the airplane thing has to do with Bernoulii's principle.

So, how does an internal combustion engine work? We all use them, but do we know how they produce power?