Robert McKay <[email protected]> wrote: > > I will grant that in some cases, experts are blinded by their own >> professional knowledge and by the bias of the field as a whole. That >> is why many physicists do not believe in cold fusion. But the key >> > > That's pretty much exactly the problem with climatologists- they only > believe in global warming (sorry "climate change") because that's what they > do.. as you say the field as a whole is biased. >
I have never heard of an entire field of physical science being biased with regard to the topic of that field itself. Plasma fusion scientists are biased against cold fusion because they know nothing about it. Many top physicists were biased against the maser and laser, and they tried to stop Townes from developing it, but again, that was because they had not studied the problem and they knew nothing about it. People in a given field are sometimes biased against new ideas proposed by outsiders. That is not because they are mistaken about their own ideas. Their own ideas are valid, but the outsider's ideas are an improvement. They oppose the ideas because -- again as I said -- they know nothing about them. I think the scientific method ensures that when a large group of people study physical phenomena for a long time, most of their data will be good, and their conclusions correct. If that were not true, the scientific method would fail. Our textbooks and technology would be far less reliable than they actually are. I am sure that climatologists and weather forecasters are good at what they do because weather forecasts are remarkably accurate these days. I realize that short term weather forecasting is different from long term climate studies, but they are both based on deep knowledge of the atmosphere. This knowledge is manifestly correct in many ways. It is not perfect or complete. Nothing in science ever is. I am talking about physics, chemistry and other hard science. It may be that historians or psychologists stick to nonsensical notions. Before the discovery of DNA, there were a small number of biologists trying to explain cellular reproduction with theories that turned out to be nonsense. Again they thought they were experts, but spinning a theory does not make you an expert unless you have experimental proof, and these people had none. > IMO you don't need to know anything about climate science to understand > global warming - it's all about politics and banking (imagine a global > economy underpinned by financial products where the only underlaying > deliverable . . . Frankly, that's silly. That reminds me of assertions that oil companies are suppressing cold fusion. Or the counter-assertions by opponents that cold fusion researchers are only in it for the grant money. Believe me, there is no grant money in cold fusion! I know enough climatologists to know they are not living high on the hog. They do not rake in the dollars. They work long hours on tedious, demanding, boring science. Life is not a conspiracy or a potboiler made-for-TV movie. - Jed
