a.ashfield <[email protected]> wrote: > > I have been following the subject fairly closely. I'm not about to start > yet another discussion on AGW. I've written hundreds of posts on that > already. That the IPCC forecast has been falsified for the average of the > models and most of the individual models you can read about on Lucia's blog > at http://rankexploits.com/**musings/ <http://rankexploits.com/musings/>
Yeah, well, unless you happen to have a PdD in climatology or weather, or you have published a whole series of papers comparable to a PhD thesis, I am not inclined to pay much attention to your views. Sorry. "Following closely" is not like getting a PhD in a subject. One of the most important lessons of cold fusion is that experts who devote their lives to a subject are usually right, and people from outside the field who kibbitz are wrong. In the case of cold fusion, that includes nitwit amateur outsiders at Wikipedia, and plasma fusion physicists at MIT. The physicists and editors at Sci. Am. who attack cold fusion know nothing about the subject. They suffer from the illusion that they know something. They are unaware of their own ignorance. Here is a good example of someone who does not know what he does not know. In 1945, Adm. William Leahy famously told President Truman that the atomic bomb: ". . . is the biggest fool thing we have ever done...The bomb will never go off, and I speak as an expert in explosives." He may well have been an expert in conventional explosives, but he did not know much about fission. By 1945, most nuclear physicists in the world understood that a bomb was possible in principle. Japanese nuclear physicists had been cut off from U.S. and European journals for years, but when the bomb was dropped, they were not surprised. 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 thing is -- and this is terribly important! -- those people are *not actually experts*. They only imagine themselves to be. They are making a "Fallacious Appeal to Authority" logical fallacy. This is also called "Misuse of Authority" or "Questionable authority" error. In this case, these people themselves are the "questionable authorities," just as Leahy was. See: http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/appeal-to-authority.html I have spent weeks of my life with people like Martin Fleischmann and Robert Duncan listening to them talk about the ins and outs of electrochemistry and calorimetry. I admit I can barely keep up sometimes, but it is clear to me that these people know MUCH more about these subjects than every member of the peanut gallery tied together. Seriously, it is like comparing professional athletes at the peak of their performance to couch potatoes. It is like comparing a master violinist to some kid who has a few weeks of lessons. I do not know enough about climatology to place any bets, but based on what I know about cold fusion and many other difficult areas of science and technology, if I have to bet, I'll stick with the people who do this for a living and who have been looking at the data every day for decades. - Jed
