David Roberson <dlrober...@aol.com> wrote:
> Jed, it makes little difference whether or not you believe me. We each > have our opinions that differ. > Yes, but my opinion is shared by nearly every expert, so it carries more weight than yours. And by the way this is NOT a Fallacious Appeal to Authority. See: http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/appeal-to-authority.html A fallacious appeal to authority would be pointing to Richard Garwin or the editors of Scientific American as experts in cold fusion. They are not qualified to address the issue. > I have given you a name to follow up upon of a scientist that does have > hand's on experience that I lack and who is well respected. > I can give you the name of an expert electrochemist who has looked carefully at the cold fusion results and yet who says that every positive experiment is a mistake: Dieter Britz. You can ALWAYS find a small number of academic experts who dissent from the majority evaluation. I know hundreds of other electrochemists who disagree with Britz. He is, in fact, the only electrochemist I know who has read more than 1 or 2 papers on cold fusion and yet who is not convinced. He is an outlier, in short. I expect Henrick Svensmark is also an outlier. He probably has no credibility among climate experts. That does not mean he is wrong, but that would be a safe bet. People often think that lesson of cold fusion is that experts cannot be trusted and people from outside conventional science with wild ideas are more credible than experts. That is a romantic notion, but the real lesson of cold fusion is exactly the opposite of that. As Fleischmann said "we are painfully conventional people." Of course history does show that sometimes untrained outsiders with wild ideas are sometimes correct, and the experts are all wrong. That can happen. It did not happen in the case of cold fusion, and I expect it has not happened in the case of climatology. - Jed
