Abd ul-Rahman Lomax <[email protected]> wrote:
> I'm fully aware that "majority scientific opinion" can be defective -- > cold fusion demonstrates that, as did the fat/cholesterol hypothesis. If, > however, one looks closely at these issues, one can find what Jed proposed. > Those who actually were doing the research, and whose opinions were based > on that research, who were following the scientific method, were generally > correct, and those who didn't follow the scientific method were fooling > themselves. Bingo. My point exactly. The scientific method works quite well. It does catch errors. It weeds out mistakes. You should not bet against it without a compelling reason. As Damon Runyon said (quoting the Bible): "The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that's the way to bet." Science is an institution done by fallible human beings, so there is always a chance of a mistake. However, the bigger the mistake and the more people involved, the less likely it is to occur. This is true of most institutions, especially hard-science and engineering based ones. Take navigation on the Inland Sea in Japan: Minor shipwrecks and accidents occur every day. The other day ferryboat ran aground in my home away from home in Oshima, Yamaguchi Japan. The captain went on the wrong side of a channel marker. He was on temporary assignment and had not sailed this route. That happened even though ferryboats have been passing that spot four times a day for 100 years. Okay, mistakes happen. While it is too surprising that a captain made a small mistake, it would be astounding if he whacked into a rock and sank the ship, like the captain of the Costa Concordia did in the Mediterranean. That is a once-in-500-years event, given today's navigation technology. There are other large institutions in which unanticipated or catastrophic outcomes occur frequently. Examples include Wall Street and war. In these cases this happens because some people profit from catastrophe. In war, for example, the best way to win is to find a new strategy that causes your enemy to make a catastrophic mistake. Both sides strive to do that, by deception and various other methods. It has been pointed out that a deliberate catastrophic miscalculation in climate science might be inserted into journals because some people would profit from it, by trading CO2 futures or what-have-you. They would profit if we mistakenly spend billions of dollars trying to reduce CO2. That may be the case, but it is a dicey way to steal money. It is not likely to work; the Congress probably will not act, and the illicit profit will never come. You could spend years trying to pull that off, getting nowhere. If I were dishonest and in a position to pull strings, I would find an easier way to swindle the public, such as Medicare fraud. I would not try to do it with a bogus climate change scenario. - Jed
