[The Dark Wolf]

I wonder if that peer review article was peer reviewed?

[oompa]

Originally Posted by The Dark Wolf

I wonder if that peer review article was peer reviewed?

lmao

[The Dark Wolf]

BTW, it's an interesting read (which I did), and it makes some cogent points, but they themselves state -

Of course, no one should expect a perfect system, or condemn peer review as a whole for its occasional failures.

So, essentially, your argument boils down to 'baby-with-the-bathwater'.

[oompa]

you are right. i seem to think that most of the scientific proof for GW are flawless, but so is the criticism towards it. its getting harder to prove a point every day, and this point might be the most dangerous one to dismiss, still the most complicated and expensive one to pursue. its not like all the billions of $ needed worldwide to reduce co2 dumps couldnt save millions of lives in say.. africa to go classic, if we are wrong. im kinda keen on being sure of what we spend a fortune on, cus as we know (?) humans will survive, its about preserving nature or not.

but since i have no power to change other than maybe a protest here and there and keep sorting garbage, im just arguing for my personal conviction, and for that i kinda need.. a bathwater with no babies in it

oompa considers the possibility of JJ eating abstract potential babies in theories

[JBroll]

Well, you could try pushing for non-fossil-fuel-based energy sources and support the growing field of battery-powered city cars... regardless of whether or not GW is a threat, that's going to help so many other problems it almost shouldn't have to be said.

Jeff

[Abhorred]

Well, the climate change conference is over. The grand consensus is....

... they're going to talk about it some more.

CORRECTED-Bali breakthrough launches climate treaty talks - International Herald Tribune

I guess it's a step in the right direction, although I was sort of hoping for something a bit more concrete. But I'm naive like that.

[Jongpil Yun]

Peer review is probably flawed in some way, but it's still easily the best thing we've got. It works. The prestigious journals have hundreds of years of reputation on the line when they publish something. There's a reason why it's huge news when the New England Journal of Medicine makes a retraction. Because they almost always get everything right... even while taking unpopular or minority stances. There's a reason why when the Cochrane Review publishes a meta-analysis, people listen, even though meta-analyses have massive potential for dicking things up due to the compounding of problems in individual studies and complex statistical procedures. It's because they have such stringent rules and more than competent reviewers that they rarely fall into the traps that lesser meta-analysists do.

Granted, I'm talking about medicine, but given that I'm not a climatologist, the best thing I can do is extrapolate from my own field into another. But the point is, I know how exasperating it is when people who don't really know what they're talking about argue with me about vaccination causing autism or some such nonsense. It is very easy for me to have an opinion about a controversial subject outside of my field. It is a temptation that I do my best to resist. You may be smarter than me, you may be more educated than me, but the point is, I have an area of expertise, and I quite probably know more about it than you do by sheer virtue of the fact that I'm devoting my life to its study. I'm simply giving the climatological community the same professional courtesy I give to my plumber by not standing over his shoulder and saying, "no you've hooked that pipe up wrong" or by not suing my surgeon when he nicked my facial nerve.

All that being said, I have to agree with JBroll that the Kyoto agreement was worthless by sheer cost-benefit analysis, and that the money would have been much better spent launching a square kilometer of solar panels into space or something.

[bigheadood]

I have no idea what the truth is about GW.

I can tell you this: Something stinks on both sides of this issue. Everyone has an agenda, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to tell the fear-mongers from the...a.... other fear-mongers. The scientific community is taking a big hit when it comes to "trust of the people".

Gore has done something with this though. He has created a consumer market for this theory, and the economy is going to get interesting because of it. Great opportunities to be had, selling so-called solutions to gullible and guilt-ridden people across the world.

[JBroll]

The scientific community is making a big mistake by talking to people on both sides of the issue and letting them misrepresent their words and results for the sake of talking points.

Jeff

[Jongpil Yun]

Originally Posted by JBroll

The scientific community is making a big mistake by talking to people on both sides of the issue

You could have stopped there. The media makes this mistake all the time too. Sometimes there simply isn't another legitimate side, eg. evolution vs creationism, round earth vs flat earth, thermodynamics vs perpetual motion machines, paranormal vs simpler explanations.

And I mean come on, everyone has an agenda? Well yeah, and? The point is, given an open and free community, it doesn't matter. Get enough educated people arguing and ideas will begin to stand on their own merit, regardless of individual agendas.

And as for Gore creating a consumer market for global warming related things, what a foolish notion. There's money to be had in the energy market in every possible way, regardless of what he does. Besides, I simply don't see Gore as having had much of an impact. If anything, he's only famously connected to global warming because most people feel an inescapable urge to connect ideas to an individual, hence the creationist re-branding of evolution as "Darwinism".

People just need to abandon idiotic, inefficient "solutions" to carbon emission like Kyoto. The shit doesn't and wouldn't have worked. Work smarter, not harder, as the adage goes.