Eric Walker <eric.wal...@gmail.com> wrote: I don't think anyone is arguing for giving climate scientists a free pass > for anything they want to do, anymore than we would argue here for giving > physicists a free pass to endlessly pour money into ITER or the National > Ignition Facility; certainly not me. I'm arguing for humility before > expertise gradually developed in understanding a wicked problem. >
Exactly! Plus, there are several experts in plasma fusion who question the wisdom of building ITER. Yes, there are also some climatologists who question global warming, but I think the consensus is stronger than it is for ITER. We should respect a consensus of experts. Granted, sometimes a small number of dissenting experts within a field are right, and the majority is wrong. A consensus is not magic, or automatically right. But an outsider should be wary about challenging it. There is a false consensus regarding cold fusion. That is, a consensus among people who are not experts, but who imagine themselves to be. That doesn't count. It resembles the consensus of opinion up until 1908 that flying machines are impossible. The problem here is knowing who is an expert and who isn't. That can be difficult to determine when you yourself are not an expert. This problem is discussed here: http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/appeal-to-authority.html But stepping in and saying that we (the general public) are in as good a > position to weigh the data as capable climate scientists is to lose a sense > of the proportion in the face of the amount of time and effort that must be > expended to discern signal from noise in a complex domain. > > Without such humility, we are prone to a little bit of unintentional > hubris. > We sure are! > > - Moore's law is not at all insurmountable. The electrical engineers > are simply failing to see that if you add in some refrigeration lines, the > temperature will be sufficiently decreased to allow a continued exponential > increase in circuit density. This is simple thermodynamics. > > This is probably what we sound like to people who have studied climate > science when we interject with our analyses without having spent years of > our lives trying to understand the nuances of the problem. > Good example! That is how people who critique cold fusion sound to me. They have some partially related knowledge which they mis-apply. They assume the cold fusion researchers have not thought through the problem, or that they do not know the ABCs of chemistry and electrochemistry. For example, in the assertions that Fleischmann may have overlooked the effects of recombination, or that he accidentally reinvented the palladium cigarette lighter. As if he, of all people, would not know about that lighter! - Jed
