From Climate Change to the Dangers of Smoking: How Powerful Interests 'Made Us Doubt Everything' (bbc.com) 349
BBC News reports:
In 1991, the trade body that represents electrical companies in the U.S., the Edison Electric Institute, created a campaign called the Information Council for the Environment which aimed to "Reposition global warming as theory (not fact)". Some details of the campaign were leaked to the New York Times. "They ran advertising campaigns designed to undermine public support, cherry picking the data to say, 'Well if the world is warming up, why is Kentucky getting colder?' They asked rhetorical questions designed to create confusion, to create doubt," argued Naomi Oreskes, professor of the history of science at Harvard University and co-author of Merchants of Doubt. But back in the 1990 there were many campaigns like this...
Most of the organisations opposing or denying climate change science were right-wing think tanks, who tended to be passionately anti-regulation. These groups made convenient allies for the oil industry, as they would argue against action on climate change on ideological grounds. Jerry Taylor spent 23 years with the Cato Institute — one of those right wing think tanks — latterly as vice president. Before he left in 2014, he would regularly appear on TV and radio, insisting that the science of climate change was uncertain and there was no need to act.
Now, he realises his arguments were based on a misinterpretation of the science, and he regrets the impact he's had on the debate.
Harvard historian Naomi Oreskes discovered leading climate-change skeptics had also been prominent skeptics on the dangers of cigarette smoking. "That was a Eureka moment," Oreskes tells BBC News. "We realised this was not a scientific debate." Decades before the energy industry tried to undermine the case for climate change, tobacco companies had used the same techniques to challenge the emerging links between smoking and lung cancer in the 1950s... As a later document by tobacco company Brown and Williamson summarised the approach: "Doubt is our product, since it is the best means of competing with the 'body of fact' that exists in the minds of the general public." Naomi Oreskes says this understanding of the power of doubt is vital. "They realise they can't win this battle by making a false claim that sooner or later would be exposed. But if they can create doubt, that would be sufficient — because if people are confused about the issue, there's a good chance they'll just keep smoking...."
Academics like David Michaels, author of The Triumph of Doubt, fear the use of uncertainty in the past to confuse the public and undermine science has contributed to a dangerous erosion of trust in facts and experts across the globe today, far beyond climate science or the dangers of tobacco. He cites public attitudes to modern issues like the safety of 5G, vaccinations — and coronavirus.
"By cynically manipulating and distorting scientific evidence, the manufacturers of doubt have seeded in much of the public a cynicism about science, making it far more difficult to convince people that science provides useful — in some cases, vitally important — information.
"There is no question that this distrust of science and scientists is making it more difficult to stem the coronavirus pandemic."
Most of the organisations opposing or denying climate change science were right-wing think tanks, who tended to be passionately anti-regulation. These groups made convenient allies for the oil industry, as they would argue against action on climate change on ideological grounds. Jerry Taylor spent 23 years with the Cato Institute — one of those right wing think tanks — latterly as vice president. Before he left in 2014, he would regularly appear on TV and radio, insisting that the science of climate change was uncertain and there was no need to act.
Now, he realises his arguments were based on a misinterpretation of the science, and he regrets the impact he's had on the debate.
Harvard historian Naomi Oreskes discovered leading climate-change skeptics had also been prominent skeptics on the dangers of cigarette smoking. "That was a Eureka moment," Oreskes tells BBC News. "We realised this was not a scientific debate." Decades before the energy industry tried to undermine the case for climate change, tobacco companies had used the same techniques to challenge the emerging links between smoking and lung cancer in the 1950s... As a later document by tobacco company Brown and Williamson summarised the approach: "Doubt is our product, since it is the best means of competing with the 'body of fact' that exists in the minds of the general public." Naomi Oreskes says this understanding of the power of doubt is vital. "They realise they can't win this battle by making a false claim that sooner or later would be exposed. But if they can create doubt, that would be sufficient — because if people are confused about the issue, there's a good chance they'll just keep smoking...."
Academics like David Michaels, author of The Triumph of Doubt, fear the use of uncertainty in the past to confuse the public and undermine science has contributed to a dangerous erosion of trust in facts and experts across the globe today, far beyond climate science or the dangers of tobacco. He cites public attitudes to modern issues like the safety of 5G, vaccinations — and coronavirus.
"By cynically manipulating and distorting scientific evidence, the manufacturers of doubt have seeded in much of the public a cynicism about science, making it far more difficult to convince people that science provides useful — in some cases, vitally important — information.
"There is no question that this distrust of science and scientists is making it more difficult to stem the coronavirus pandemic."
Understand the psychology of those who lie. (Score:5, Insightful)
An important example of someone who distorts evidence, from page 44 of a book by Mary L. Trump, Donald's niece:
"Donald's growing arrogance, in part a defense against his feelings of abandonment and an antidote to his lack of self-esteem, served as a protective cover for his deepening insecurities."
[Lines skipped.]
"Nonetheless, Donald's displays of confidence, his belief that society's rules didn't apply to him, and his exaggerated display of self-worth drew some people to him. A large minority of people still confuse his arrogance for strength, his false bravado for accomplishment, and his superficial interest in them for charisma."
Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man [amazon.com]
by Mary L. Trump, Donald Trump's niece and a clinical psychologist with a PhD.
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Re:Understand the psychology of those who lie. (Score:4, Informative)
The Goldwater rule [wikipedia.org] is something that was adopted by one private association of psychiatrists, has been rejected by other private associations of psychologists and psychiatrists, and is not a part of the professional rules of any state.
Nobody granted the APA a monopoly on ethics, and no ethical rule prohibits a family member from providing opinions on the conduct of another family member.
death of journalism (Score:5, Insightful)
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That happened over 20 years ago.
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That happened over 20 years ago.
No it didn't. The "golden age" of journalism never died because it never existed.
Journalism has always been lazy and biased. The main difference is that we now have alternative sources, biased in different directions, that report on each others flaws.
Back in the day of Walter Conkrite, nobody pointed out the flaws, but they were certainly there. The mainstream media completely failed the country by misreporting the Tonkin Gulf Incident. Reporting on the Civil Rights movement was extremely biased. Waterg
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The golden age was 40 years ago and it was a golden age because there was money and there was a considerable amount of journalism which was critical of the powers that be. You can't just flatten things out and call it all the same. There are significant differences. Relative to what we have now it was a golden age. Now we have areas which have no reporting at all.
It is true that now you can often actually find out the truth behind the news but it is hard, and even then it is often mainstream which
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And we have lots of alternative facts for those affirmative sources.
Re:death of journalism (Score:5, Insightful)
There is plenty of real journalism about, the problem is it doesn't sell as well as hyper partisan clickbait editorials and when something important is found it is attacked as fake news by people who really really wish it wasn't true.
Today (Score:5, Interesting)
It used to be that to publish and distribute something there was some level of vetting. Nowadays any articulate and expressive jackass with zero qualifications, or a financial agenda/vendetta, can spout off an opinion (ideally laced with some science sounding words) and it's perceived by the masses on the same level as someone with an unbiased PhD who has studied a particular topic and understands it thoroughly.
This is because human tendency is to assume someone who is makes us feel good and entertained is going to be truthful. Especially dangerous when they embed a lie between a bunch of "truths". It's also possible to lie with the truth. For example if you wanted people to be afraid of a particular race, you can just list every terrible crime committed by someone of that race. I mean, there are 15,000 homicides every year in the US but if I wanted you to fear iridescent rainbow haired people .. let's assume they did 5% of those. That's 750 murders .. that's like 3 per day imagine if I kept bringing up incidents:
January 1st 2020 -- iridescent rainbow haired person X walks into Y and does crime Z .. you guess it .. iridescent rainbow B
January 1st 2020 -- Innocent person A, who was an awesome person who fed homeless etc. was brutally assaulted by
etc.
This is while ignoring that there are 14,250 other crimes occuring. And maybe the overall trend has been reduction in crimes.
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Is that so? Well, I'll have you know that I have a dozen scientific papers right here on my desk, cross-examined by at least fifty other specialists, that proves you are a living specimen of the homo sapiens species.
Re:Today (Score:5, Insightful)
It's worse than that, we are in the post-truth age. The very concept of truth doesn't matter any more.
Take Trump as an example. He lies. A lot. People don't care. They know he lies but they just assume all politicians lie all the time, the media lies, everyone on the internet lies, lies don't matter any more because there is no truth. There's only a choice of which lies you prefer.
Has he done what he promised? Irrelevant. Can he trusted? Who cares, none of them are trustworthy. That's why you see this false equivalence narrative all the time; R and D are the same, Trump and Biden are the same, X website is as bad as Y website, leftist terrorism is as bad as far right terrorism. It's important that people don't go back to believing in the truth again, that one side might be slightly more reliable than the other, or the whole thing falls apart.
Re: Today (Score:4, Interesting)
I would be willing to bet that if you know some who says R and D are the same, Tump and Biden are the same, they are a Trump supporter trying to spare your feelings.
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There are a lot of Trump supporters on Slashdot who claim they are the same. Mostly as a cover for the stuff Trump gets up to.
Re: Today (Score:5, Insightful)
There are a lot of us in the middle that claim that both (R) and (D) - mostly at the federal level - are the same. Maybe the statement that a lot of the (D) supporters on Slashdot that claim that somehow the (D)s are different are the ones with their heads in the sand, then?
Spins the narrative to suit their ideology? Check, both (R) and (D). Takes a significant amount of money from special interests? Check, both (R) and (D). Unable to compromise on issues to "promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty" or to even agree what those issues are? Check, both (R) and (D).
Those of us in the middle don't care who did what to whom first. Babbling about historical congressional or presidential intransigence as an argument is a non-starter. As far as we are concerned most of those that currently hold federal office need to be kicked out and replaced with people that are actually capable of acting as good representatives acting in good faith for the common good of the entire US.
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Unable to compromise on issues to "promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty" or to even agree what those issues are? Check, both (R) and (D).
You've got to be kidding me. The republicans literally swore not to compromise with the Obama administration [washingtonpost.com], while Obama made concession after concession in the ACA [usatoday.com] (which republicans still voted against).
Where are the republican concessions? Where's the democratic pledge to block Trump on all issues? Even during the impeachment, democrats were still letting the country be governed.
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As you are the biggest opponent of truth on this site, I would say you bemoaning Trump lies is ironic.
Re:Today (Score:5, Informative)
https://www.snopes.com/fact-ch... [snopes.com]
If you believe that lie you have to start considering how wrong the rest of your beliefs are.
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This. This right here is why I consider you to be a vile and disgusting person. You do not argue in good faith.
hairyfeet says:
... and smashed her phones with a hammer ...
and you respond with a link to snopes.com which has this to say:
One of Hillary Clinton's aides told the FBI that on two occasions he disposed of her unwanted mobile devices by breaking or hammering them.
Does it really make a difference to the argument hairyfeet is putting forth whether or not her or her aides smashed the phones? The point was that evidence was destroyed, but you "neatly" sidestep that issue and all of the other issues by focusing on the technicalities of his statement. And you were modded up for this b
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Look - if you're going to yell about stuff at least have correct numbers.
The flu was the cause of death for 34,200 US citizens in 2018/2019: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/... [cdc.gov]
It's usually between 12,000 and 56,000: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/... [cdc.gov]
For the 2018/2019 season 35.5 million people got the flu ( https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/... [cdc.gov] ), which provides a morbidity rate of about 0.1%.
There have been 6.7 million cases of COVID19 so far, and 199,000 deaths ( https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-da... [cdc.gov] ). That provi
Rush Limbaugh (Score:5, Insightful)
1990 to 2019, frequently touted smoking "as safe as drinking carrot juice" to millions of listeners to his radio show.
2020 -- diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer, subsequently given a presidential medal of freedom for encouraging people to smoke and get lung cancer.
https://www.cigaraficionado.co... [cigaraficionado.com]
https://www.cigaraficionado.co... [cigaraficionado.com]
https://news.iheart.com/featur... [iheart.com]
https://www.denverpost.com/202... [denverpost.com]
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1990 to 2019, frequently touted smoking "as safe as drinking carrot juice"
He may be right. Carrot juice is not so healthy.
Toxicity of carrot juice [livestrong.com]
Re:Rush Limbaugh (Score:5, Insightful)
Then it's an even worse deception, because most people think carrot juice is healthy (which it is btw, by far when compared to tobacco smoke). You can't compare orange skin and elevated blood sugar (if you drink extreme amounts) versus lung cancer?
Re:Rush Limbaugh (Score:5, Insightful)
Probably unintentional but this is a classic bit of misdirection from the post-truth crowd. When extremely bad advice is called out they defend it with something like "but he was right, carrot juice is bad for you! It's not his fault if people misunderstood what he was saying!"
We saw it with Trump's COVID advice. He didn't actually directly say "drink bleach" but plenty of people got that impression, so obviously it's their fault for being idiots and not his for giving unclear messages from his position of immense power and responsibility.
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What is it worth right identifying people being fucking morons on this thread? The first line in the article is that it's healthy in moderation.
Water will kill you if you drink too much, that doesn't make it as bad as tobacco smo...
Actually you know what it does! Water is poison! I recommend you avoid it off at all possible and have as many cigs as you can. Encourage your friends to do the same. Also don't wear mask because coronavirus is a hoax but drink a tipple of bleach just in case, or swallow a UV lam
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There is no source of him saying "as safe as drinking carrot juice" like you wrote.
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He stopped smoking cigarettes ages ago, and switched to cigars instead. Cigars are more likely to cause mouth cancer:
https://www.pihhealth.org/well... [pihhealth.org]
It's quite possible that Limbaugh's cigarette-smoking in the past was his strongest risk factor for lung cancer. Just because you quit, doesn't mean you can escape the effects of what you've done in the past.
Two sides of a coin (Score:2)
Meanwhile, we didn't doubt Ancel Keys enough.
So, how do fight doubt ? (Score:4, Interesting)
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At the moment the only solution seems to be humiliation and suffering. It's extremely unfortunate and tends to hurt others as much as them, but it's the only method that's been demonstrated to work.
That happened in Germany after WW2, and is still happening. They understand that it's important to keep teaching people about the mistakes of their ancestors, and to make it very clear that it was the fault of many ordinary German people who went along with it even if they didn't participate directly. They have t
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For every question, there is an answer that is simple, concise and wrong. People don't want to deal with complexity and often, complexity itself means the problem is many people demanding they're right and the evidence is wrong. People want to believe the simple answers: It means there is a specific reason for the problem and they can exert control over it.
Their legitimacy came from Bush junior demanding that the lies of climate deniers get equal broadcast time. That wasn't enough propaganda so the GOP
An excess of marketing. (Score:2)
These days, to communicate any message to the public, marketing communication techniques are used. These techniques are designed to be maximally effective, but in my view, are increasingly seen as manipulative and potentially deceptive, detracting from the perceived truth of the message.
Turn The Problem Round (Score:5, Insightful)
“Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.”
Implicit in his observation is the duality of the scenario: on one side you have a group trying to "do the right thing" (the developers, we hope) and on the other you have a less well defined force trying to be disruptive (the universe).
When I try to look at the "Powerful Interests Problem", it seems that the problem is actually notthe "Powerful Interests", or their lobbying groups, dark money, Q-Anon or corners-of-the-interweb rumor factories.
Rather, the problem is the society of which I am part. The society which, despite claims to the contrary, continues to see deteriorating standards in education. In using the word "education", I'm not talking specifically about SATs or GPAs or the ultimate qualifications that an individual may earn in their lifetime. Rather, I'm thinking of it in terms of the purpose of education.
When we start out as students, we seem to adopt the idea that education is there to teach us facts. We learn about math, science, history, language and so on. But at a deeper level, education is there to teach us how to learn. It is there to teach us how to identify gaps in our knowledge and where to go in order to fill them. We learn how to correlate possible facts from multiple sources. We learn how to use discriminatory principles such as the "process of elimination".
As we grow as individuals and as students, we learn that answers can't always be absolute. I vividly remember being sat in a classroom and learning about the Newton-Raphson method of approximation (for approximating the roots of polynomial equation). This might seem like an odd place to find a revelation, but here was a lesson in which I was being shown that the "most absolute" subject I studied (Math), a subject in which there could only ever be one right answer, had to deal with uncertainty and approximation. What I liked about the NRM was that it showed I could "continued to work at the problem" until the answer I obtained was accurate enough for my needs.
Bit of a stretch, but it becomes possible to translate that mind-set in to a more skeptical worldview and a temptation to challenge information presented until corroborating facts [from different sources] can be found.
The challenges outlined by the OP and the referenced article could be defeated [or at least significantly degraded] if the audience to whom these lies were being peddled were educated to be more skeptical.
That mindset isn't just going to help decide if "global warming is real" or "smoking is harmful to health", it's going to help you understand a great deal of the basic arguments we see put forward every day, for example:-
- Tariffs against goods for China have to be paid by China. [ No, tariffs are charged at the point of *import* - i.e. in the United States - to a local distributor, who passes on the costs to US citizens. The perceived benefit of tariffs is to encourage or protect a domestic market. But if no domestic market exists to meet local demand, tariffs don't work.]
- Amazon is destroying the USPS. [No, Amazon actually gives significant business to the USPS. By helping keep postal volumes healthy, they allow the USPS to invest in the infrastructure that brings down the per-item cost of delivering mail.]
There are endless examples out there, but these are relatively easy to verify. What we need to be doing is teaching kids to be skeptics and to enjoy the search for truth. Finding answers is a source of wonder that hasn't left me; it helps me keep the discipline of lifelong learning. If we can change our baseline education and think more about how to prepare children for their future lives, this sort of premise should be self-evident.
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The best part about this thread (Score:2, Informative)
How? (Score:2, Informative)
Half of us have an IQ of under 100.
Oh shit (Score:4)
Cato is not "Right wing" (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Cato is not "Right wing" (Score:4, Interesting)
They're saying that "these guys are consistently anti-regulation" as if that explains everything they've ever said, while failing to note that the scientists/organizations on the other side of the same debates are consistently pro-regulation...
Re:Cato is not "Right wing" (Score:5, Insightful)
Their claim that there is "ample time" to develop responses seems inconsistent with the fact that we're already losing immense amounts of life and property to the current amount of climate change.
Wait, do we really doubt everything? (Score:3)
I'm not sure. Someone on facebook said maybe we don't doubt *enough* things, and I'm too lazy to go read the actual research, so what if I just assume this isn't really a problem?
Skepticism is good (Score:3)
As I see it, the problem was that the doubting side had always seemed more rational. The classic responses from the global warming side tended to be ad hominem attacks. Whenever someone raised what seemed like a scientifically valid point against global warming or a calculation error, it wasn't their point that was addressed but instead their character or qualifications were attacked. For any rational person, that made the global warming side feel in the wrong.
Being skeptical is a good trait. There are a lot of problems with scientific research. Quite a bit of classic scientific research is discovered to be flawed, or even forged. It's a good idea to demand a lot of evidence for any theory. It's a good idea to make data available to everyone so they can test it and find holes in it.
Fight skepticism with evidence.
Fear tactics aren't doing any good either. In 1989 the UN said (I quote an article): "entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000." Then, as time passes, the deadline gets postponed, but people already get the idea that it's the boy who cried wolf.
That's the problem. No matter how valid something is, if what you mainly throw about are emotional arguments, your point feels week.
That doesn't mean that what you say isn't true or even that what people did because of it didn't help. Take for example the Y2K bug. Mass warnings, and little happened. Why? Because many many people worked on it (I was one of them). So it felt like anticlimax, but if it wasn't dealt with, it would have been a real problem.
Still, when you try to frighten people over time, in an exaggerated way, that ends up devaluing your position.
Re:Environmentalists keep getting it wrong... (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember environmentalists harping that we are all going to die by global COOLING?
I don't remember anyone saying we were all going to die by global cooling. In the 50s (as the global temperature was dropping) there was an awareness that another ice age was coming (and it still is), but it was correctly understood by scientists to be a thousand years away, if not longer.
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Ewing and Dunn worried about the next Ice Age.
Brr... https://harpers.org/archive/19... [harpers.org]
Brrrr.... http://www.denisdutton.com/new... [denisdutton.com]
Brrrrrr.. https://archive.org/details/ea... [archive.org]
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Global cooling debunked (Score:5, Informative)
But I see that troll Tolvar [slashdot.org] has successfully managed to completely derail the entire discussion thread with it. Good work, troll. You are an EXAMPLE of exactly what the article we're discussing is talking about. [bbc.com]
Debunked:
https://physicstoday.scitation... [scitation.org]
https://www.factcheck.org/2015... [factcheck.org]
https://www.scientificamerican... [scientificamerican.com]
http://www.realclimate.org/ind... [realclimate.org]
Misleading Times [Re:Global cooling debunked] (Score:5, Informative)
The story that in the 1970s scientists were worried about global cooling has been well debunked [ametsoc.org]
It was literally on the cover on magazines: https://flashbak.com/wp-conten... [flashbak.com]
Nope. Where do you get your information? That 1973 Time magazine cover you posted is Archie Bunker, from the TV show "All in the Family". The "Big Freeze" headline was... a story about the energy crisis of 1973 (it's one of the All in the Family Trivia [imdb.com] questions.)
The 1979 "The Cooling of America" cover story was about energy conservation and the energy crisis, too.
(The energy crisis is what people were really worried about in the 1970s).
More here https://climatecrocks.com/2013... [climatecrocks.com]
and here https://www.snopes.com/fact-ch... [snopes.com]
When you see some blogger post magazine covers to make a point, always be a little suspicious when they post the cover but not the article.
Re:Environmentalists keep getting it wrong... (Score:5, Insightful)
You aren't getting this. He's not comparing anything. He's interrupting the debate by getting a comment in early which takes us away from the subject of the actual corporations doing this. This is a thing which was long ago debunked and identified as a distractor [skepticalscience.com]. They just know it's a good thing to get people off the topic. Post the sceptical science links and move on. At this very moment there's an election going on in the US and he cares about getting the candidate which has the most backing from the biggest coal supporting corporations and will do nothing to save us.
Re:Environmentalists keep getting it wrong... (Score:5, Insightful)
Ewing and Dunn worried about the next Ice Age.
Brr... https://harpers.org/archive/19... [harpers.org]
Brrrr.... http://www.denisdutton.com/new... [denisdutton.com]
Brrrrrr.. https://archive.org/details/ea... [archive.org]
Even if that were true, are you truly comparing the hypothesis of a couple of scientist versus the overall global consensus that has been gathering over the years? Do you even know how science works?
That is a talking point taken directly from a pro-corporate conservative playbook and those guys are often very religious. In their world the answer to any question you can ask can be found in a combination of blind faith, scripture, a theologian's interpretation there of and the intervention of supernatural beings. Their ability to explain everything that way results in them struggling to deal with science where the answer is frequently 'We don't know how that phenomenon works but we are trying to find out, here are the various hypotheses that have been suggested to explain the phenomenon'. In their world you can just open a Bible, find a passage that sounds right to you, rip it out of context and there's your irrefutable explanation. I know it's frustrating but it's just part and parcel of sharing a planet with people who rely on blind faith, ancient scripture, interpretations of ancient scripture and the invocation supernatural beings rather than rational thought and logic and data to explain their environment.
Re:Environmentalists keep getting it wrong... (Score:5, Insightful)
, and what is thought of as a scientific fact today can easily be disproven as false tomorrow.
So tomorrow we might find the earth is not broadly spherical?
You really need to read Asimov's "reactivity of wrong".
You also need to stop confusing sensationalist reporting with science.
Re:Environmentalists keep getting it wrong... (Score:5, Interesting)
You really need to read Asimov's "reactivity of wrong".
Thanks for that - hadn't read it before. It's actually "The Relativity of Wrong" [tufts.edu] and as you can see it's available online. Really nice essay.
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Sigh autocorrect..gives the weirdest typos. Glad you liked the article.
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Re:Environmentalists keep getting it wrong... (Score:5, Informative)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
On January 11, 1970, the Washington Post reported that "Colder Winters Held Dawn of New Ice Age"
I remember being in school in the 5th grade (1973/74) and a science teacher giving a lesson plan on global cooling. By high school this taught me that science is not sure, and what is thought of as a scientific fact today can easily be disproven as false tomorrow.
That's the whole point of science, it evolves as new data and new work increases our understanding. Anybody who wants unchanging certainty should become a religious fundamentalist. There are many hypotheses about where the current trend of global warming will end. One of them is a hothouse like the one that led to the great Permian extinction, another suggests global warming may lead to a change in, or the interruption of parts of the global oceanic thermohaline circulation leading to a massive cold snap. One thing is for sure, every time this kind of rapid warming happened this quickly in the past, life on earth had a hard time and there is no reason to believe it will be different this time. Finally, a fun fact: The rate of CO2 injection in late Permian was very similar to the anthropogenic rate of injection of CO2 now.
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That's the whole point of science, it evolves as new data and new work increases our understanding.
How dare you bring reality to the debate!
Whatever someone thought in the past will always be correct, as it supports my personal point of view. That's how science works.
Atoms are like plum puddings, and are the indivisible unit of matter. Nuclear power is not possible and splitting the atom is a deep state conspiracy. Don't be fooled!! Wake up sheeple!!1!! (But don't actually wake up the Sheeple, we all know how that ends.)
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Another fun fact, the CO2 injection in the late Permian lead to an explosion in large forests and green plant growth, so much so, what eventually became human brains evolved quickly from an abundance of food.
We simply don't know is a good answer. We do know it's not "Trump's fault for not accepting mother earth is angry" as Nancy Pelosi claims, we know it's not regulation as those things have significantly hampered our ability to reduce our CO2 emissions (eg. nuclear power regulations). There are those that
Re:Environmentalists keep getting it wrong... (Score:5, Interesting)
Another fun fact, the CO2 injection in the late Permian lead to an explosion in large forests and green plant growth, so much so, what eventually became human brains evolved quickly from an abundance of food.
Another fun fact: Some 90 percent of the planet's terrestrial species becoming extinct and 95% percent of the marine species became extinct. No land animal over about 10 kg survived the PT event. It took the Early Triassic terrestrial ecosystem around 10 million years to recover, the marine ecosystem around 2 million years to recover. Now I don't know about you but I'm not enthusiastic about unnecessarily doing damage to the planet's ecosystem and then taking up life as a Tusken tribesman for a few million years while the planet recovers.
We simply don't know is a good answer. We do know it's not "Trump's fault for not accepting mother earth is angry" as Nancy Pelosi claims, we know it's not regulation as those things have significantly hampered our ability to reduce our CO2 emissions (eg. nuclear power regulations). There are those that claim we should go back to living as 'natives' and 'only take from nature' without realizing this means burning wood and dung for heat and food which is one of the biggest portion of CO2 emissions in developing countries across the world. Every solution is bad, it either involves killing large swathes of people or increasing emissions by relying on less stable and compact fuel sources.
Case in point: solar and wind - you'd need to clear cut significant areas of forest in the US to provide the entire US with sufficient wind and solar, and then you need significant mining to develop battery tech. Then we haven't talked about pollution from lead and arsenic and heavy metals and plastics in those products.
Firstly, I don't really take anything seriously that Donald Trump or Nancy Pelosi say about technology since neither of them has any real idea what they are talking about on that topic. Secondly, the rest of your comment is a steaming load of crap. Given the current state of solar technology and the fact that the US consumes about 4000 terawatt hours of energy the solar panels needed to generate that energy would occupy about 21.250 square miles out of the 3.797.000 square miles of the USA's land surface and there is plenty of land available across the US for that amount of solar capacity without cutting down a single tree. This capacity would be distributed over the entire country of course and would probably be somewhat less since in the north electricity would largely be generated with Wind energy which is a bit more space efficient. Finally both Solar and Wind energy generators are constantly becoming more space efficient as technology and efficiency improves meaning that it will be possible to harvest more energy per unit of area as time passes and technology advances. Face it, the world is moving out of the 19th century world of oil and coal and into wind and solar and Wall Street money is going with it, the market has spoken.
Panels and batteries (Score:3)
...Also you know you can put solar panels in the desert, right? I hear having a large amount of sun may be a useful thing.
And also, you can put solar arrays in grasslands used for grazing. Turns out solar arrays don't cover 100% of the ground; you can have both grass and solar panels
Fortunately when it comes to batteries, sodium and sulphur are widely available and easy to extract. In fact the world's largest battery station uses that tech,
Somebody mod that informative!! Yes, the sodium-sulfur battery is a great solution for large (multi-megawatt) power storage, and it's a tech people tend to have forgotten, although it's well proven.
but they don't have the world's largest reality distortion field so everyone thinks it's Tesla's lithium battery when it isn't.
Lithium ion batteries are great if you want (1) lightweight, and (2) operate around room temperature-- excellent for Tesla's application, cars.
Na/S b
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Re:Environmentalists keep getting it wrong... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes I understand, you can't tell the difference between sensationalist reporting and science and instead of examining your own failings, you blame science.
I get it, I really do, but now you know you ought to stop.
But we both know that won't happen because you are now emotionally infuse invested in your position, which is why you post things counter to easily established facts (like the lack of predictions you claim, ignoring the 1990 IPCC report). The question is, why are you so emotionally invested in something you don't understand well?
I like your whataboutism: it's not the scientists job to prepare you for your failures when you refuse to listen to reason. Their job is to do science. What you do with answers any the world is up to you.
Re: Environmentalists keep getting it wrong... (Score:5, Funny)
So if I save you from freezing, I'm free to burn you on a stake a few weeks later because "warming you up is a good thing"?
"In Search of" is NOT scientific (Score:5, Informative)
1978 documentary about the coming ice age narrated by Leonard Nimoy
Specifically , Season 2, Episode 23 of "In Search of" [wikipedia.org].
If you think that that's a "documentary", note that other episodes included, "Bigfoot", "Atlantis", "Martians", "ESP", "Dracula", "Ghosts", "The Bermuda Triangle", "Voodoo", "The Magic of Stonehenge", "Astrology", "The Swamp Monster", "UFO Captives" and "Noah's Flood".
Trolls keep getting it wrong... (Score:4, Insightful)
This was scientifically hip in the 70s when it was feared that a global ice age was IMMINENT and would be brought on by the use of aerosols.
Debunked [ametsoc.org].
more references:
https://physicstoday.scitation... [scitation.org]
https://www.factcheck.org/2015... [factcheck.org]
https://www.scientificamerican... [scientificamerican.com]
http://www.realclimate.org/ind... [realclimate.org]
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Except it wasn't really "scientifically hip", it was a bit of journalistic hyperbole based off of a paper published in the early 1970s. In the meantime, we've known the properties of CO2 since the 19th century, and we've known about thermodynamics just as long.
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Those weren't environmentalists, those were oil company executives.
I don't believe you that you were confused about that. You're not nearly old enough for that.
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Those weren't environmentalists, those were oil company executives.
So nothing changed. [thegrayzone.com]
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"tlhIngan sep HIchaw' jIH. HISlaH, jIHvaD pumqu' 'e' vIHar."
(Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, prepare to die)
Re:Environmentalists keep getting it wrong... (Score:5, Informative)
Remember environmentalists harping that we are all going to die by global COOLING?
Actually, I do. In fact from about 1940 to about 1980 the world did get colder because aerosol pollution reflected solar energy out into space. But in the 1960s and 1970s, the emergence of computing made it possible to model the processes by which climate changes was happening, and those models successfully predicted a shift in balance from aerosol cooling to CO2-mediated warming before it actually happened.
That's the way science works. It doesn't pretend to have some kind of oracle that tells it the truth; it deals in *balance of evidence*, which changes all the time as new things are discovered. It is this very ability to change in the face of the *balance* of evidence that makes science the most reliable guide to policy, particularly in complex situations which tend to generate contradictory evidence.
Re:Environmentalists keep getting it wrong... (Score:5, Interesting)
There are many cases of such, try looking up Climate gate.
Climate gate [skepticalscience.com]? That would be the slander of a bunch of scientists [wikipedia.org] which had an actual house of commons investigation and academic investigations and "found absolutely no evidence of impropriety whatsoever" [archive.org] wouldn't it. Why would you bring that up? Anybody might think you'd be trying to "Make Us Doubt Everything".
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You just posted the same link I posted trying to prove I hadn't done my research. I mean. WTF. It goes beyond "deliberately lying", probably far beyond "incapable of thought" and way into the "no attachment to reality whatsoever".
AleRunner, anon for obvious reasons, like not increasing the level of visible idiocy in the world.
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Climate gate shows that scientist are/were involved in behind the scenes effort to prove their previous statements despite them not working out.
Quite the opposite. It shows no sign of misconduct.
Re: Environmentalists keep getting it wrong... (Score:5, Interesting)
Science says there is only two genders,
Two sexes. A sex has to do with reproductive characteristics. All species known have one or two sexes. Humanity has two.
As for genders, that's a different function. We know of several species that have three genders, and if I'm not mistaken even four. While retaining two sexes.
The actually scientific questions is whether humanity is one of those two sex species with more than two genders. There's strong neurological evidence it is. It isn't clear what causes it though.
And this has nothing to do with the politization of the topic, from either side of the political spectrum.
that a baby in the womb is a human being from conception
A set of human cells at conception. "Human being" is a less clear concept, because if we try to be precise, at the point of conception, that is, at the embryo stage, the embryo can be consided as anything from zero to infinitely many human beings, given how splitting it gives rise to two embryos who each develop into two independent human beings, or to four if you split each again, or to eight if you split those again, or to sixteen if you split those again, and so on and so forth.
Besides, stem cell research is reaching a point in which any body cell from the human body can be turned back into an embryo-like infinitely-many-human-beings-producing cell pack, so from that perspective every clearly-labeled human being is also infinitely many human beings.
All of which make the notion of a human being quite fuzzy, and thus a not very useful concept in contemporaneous scientific discourse. It's usage is more useful in other domains, such as law.
Re: Environmentalists keep getting it wrong... (Score:2)
Correction: fetuses, not embryos. My English-fu failed me there.
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Your sex is not subjective but absolute in scientific terms it is defined by chromosomes. If you want to go outside of humans I am no expert on every species but I was mainly referring to humans.
The science of biological sex is much more fun and interesting than that - I think you'd enjoy the variety if you really dug into the science.
We know that chromosomes aren't the full story because people can be chimeras, made up of fraternal twins which blended in the womb. They've got both XX and XY chromosomes.
We know that chromosomes aren't the full story because chromosomes are primarily a trigger for a cascade of developmental pathways which can be redirected in multiple ways by other parts of the
Re: Environmentalists keep getting it wrong... (Score:5, Interesting)
Strong neurological evidence of what?
Brain differences. Male and female human brains have measurable differences in terms of volumes and neuronal density in certain regions, so that it's reasonably easy to determine whether a brain is male or female without doing DNA analysis. Transgendered individuals, however, have theirs switched, so that the body is make but the brain developed with female proportions or the other way around. This is quite uncommon, only 1 in 20,000 newborns, but in a world with several billion people it amounts to a large number. And one of the effects is that the brain physically expects and maps a body that isn't how it should be, or the other way around.
This medical condition has only two solutions. One is to change the brain via microsurgery to conform to the body. The other is to change the body to conform to the brain. Microneurosurgery on this level isn't something currently feasible, so changing the body, even if imperfectly, is currently the less worse, mostly palliative, alternative to lessen the symptoms of the condition while our knowledge of the brain doesn't advance enough to allow for a more definite fix.
Gender in this case is a made up word, as Gender in English is the gender you belong to which would be your sex.
Actually, gender is a grammatical category, which is why English has the neutral gender "it", and other languages, such as German, attribute male and female genders to inanimate objects which, evidently, have no sex.
It just so happens that science is wont to adopt non-scientific terms that are close enough to a more specific observed phenomena and give them a domain-specific meaning. This happens all the time. For example, in common usage tomatoes aren't fruits, cereals aren't vegetables, and dolphins most definitely are fish, but in scientific usage these words are all slightly redefined to conforme to more specific things which don't quite align with the common usage. And that's what happens with the word "gender". It refers, in biology, to something connected to sex but not exactly the same as it.
Your sex is not subjective but absolute in scientific terms it is defined by chromosomes.
Kinda. The association of phenotypical sex differences with the XX and XY chromosomial pairs is an earl discovery in the field, from 1905 in fact. In the 115 years since then it's been shown to be an oversimplification, as things are much more complex than that. For example, there are cases in which someone who is XY is born with female body. They're sterile, as they have no womb, but their bodies have a vagina, not a pÃnis. And there are more combinations than XX and XY, although those are usually connected to illnesses.
Still the fact is correct an Embro is a human being. A fetus or embro is an alive human being, this is not just science but logic.
Yes, but so are HeLa cell cultures used in cancer research, which have developed into their own species by now (they fit all the criteria) even though their DNA is fully human. Things in this field can be quite fuzzy.
Re: Environmentalists keep getting it wrong... (Score:3)
The Wikipedia article Causes of transsexuality [wikipedia.org] lists dozens of papers on the biology of human transexuality, which has advanced a lot over the last 20 years. The links are in the References section.
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Um
Fellow travelers?
Are you serious?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re:Scientific skepticism or... (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a big difference between legitimate scepticism and deliberately spreading FUD.
Science benefits from scepticism based on science, it does not benefit from those trying to quash it, because it doesn't suit their political and/or economic agenda.
Re:Scientific skepticism or... (Score:5, Interesting)
There's a big difference between legitimate scepticism and deliberately spreading FUD.
Science benefits from scepticism based on science, it does not benefit from those trying to quash it, because it doesn't suit their political and/or economic agenda.
Very specifically, when a scientist argues against someone they are expected to give the best version of that person's argument. If they see a slight flaw in their opponent's reasoning they should try to correct that themselves and propose a way their opponent could strengthen their argument, then argue against that stronger version. By doing this they make both arguments stronger and advance the science in every way. There's a great essay about that in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! [wikipedia.org].
The "AGW skeptics" use a series of lies and attacks [skepticalscience.com] slipping from one to another without any attempt to have an honest debate. They make claims against climate scientists but when those claims turn out to be false they just get other people to repeat them. Their entire leadership is fundamentally dishonest and so impossible to engage with on a scientific level.
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The "AGW skeptics" use a series of lies and attacks [skepticalscience.com] slipping from one to another without any attempt to have an honest debate. They make claims against climate scientists but when those claims turn out to be false they just get other people to repeat them. Their entire leadership is fundamentally dishonest and so impossible to engage with on a scientific level.
I do agree that misinformation and false arguments are used by (extreme) AGW sceptics. And the same happens on the other end of the spectrum (example: the US has a prominent congress member who argues that The World will end if we don't address climate change before that - this is clearly false and not supported by any science whatsoever).
We should IMO of course fix AGW. But the question is how and at what rate. As we speak we are damaging the Earth by our pollution. But the costs (both in human lives and m
Wegner [Re:Scientific skepticism or...] (Score:5, Insightful)
True, but where's that line? For instance, plate tectonics was once mocked.
No. Plate tectonics hadn't been invented yet when the continental drift hypothesis was disbelieved. The Wegner continental drift theory didn't know about mantle convection; it said that the continents plowed their way through bedrock driven by some mechanism which made no sense.
And still... the hypothesis wasn't discarded. It was kept on the back burner as, "here are some things that this hypothesis would explain, but the mechanism makes no sense."
It went against established science-inspired dogma, so it and the scientist who came up with it was mocked.
Wegner (and the others who advocated continental drift) wasn't mocked. He was considered a credible scientist, and made well-considered contributions to Arctic science. Not having your theories accepted doesn't always mean being mocked.
When it comes to highly complex concepts that you can't prove outright to anyone NOT in the field, isn't it fair to be skeptical of them?
The key observation that supported continental drift was the discovery of sea-floor spreading at the mid-oceanic ridges. Once this key piece of evidence was published, and hence an actual mechanism was discovered, continental drift went from "unproven hypothesis" to "the accepted theory of geology" nearly instantly.
But: the evidence was needed.
(Wegner was also off by two orders of magnitude in the speed of continental drift).
Re:Scientific skepticism or... (Score:5, Insightful)
So continued skepticism of the globe earth is fine?
Intentionally misrepresenting things isn't part of the scientific process, and so skepticism based on that also isn't part of the scientific process. And neither is ongoing skepticism for well established things.
At this point of you are still skeptical of the lung cancer-smoking link then the overwhelming probability is you're not being a skeptical scientists, you're being a willfully ignorant contrarian. It's been established beyond any doubt that mere armchair skepticism could overturn. And so has global warning.
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Skepticism involves understanding the science and the data and making valid criticisms of the science involved. If you say you don't believe a paper that says GMOs show no increase in cancer that is not skepticism. If you read the paper and look at the methods and point out that the rats used are not good human analogues for the type of cancer being tested or that their statistical analysis has x and y flaws that would be valid.
If you think my approach to parameter estimation and error modeling are wrong yo
Re:Congratulations, assholes (Score:5, Informative)
You killed the human race and the planet.
All hail the imaginary monetary system!
You'd have thought that people would have evolved for survival but that doesn't work in a situation like this. Corporations are new [thecorporation.com] and they enable people to profit from destroying other people's lives [naomiklein.org]. This is from 1894 [quoteinvestigator.com]:
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Feel free to go to any other country and accept their standard of living in exchange for the low carbon emissions.
Need technology [Re: Congratulations, assholes] (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately, the only solution to escape the US's greenhouse gas emissions is to go to another planet.
No, the solution to escape the US's greenhouse gas emissions is to develop better technologies that emit less greenhouse gas.
This approach is being implemented... slowly.
We need to speed it up. We're geeks: stop arguing, and get to work on solving the problem. And if you can't contribute to the solution, get out of the way.
Re:Need technology [Re: Congratulations, assholes] (Score:4, Interesting)
Unfortunately, the only solution to escape the US's greenhouse gas emissions is to go to another planet.
No, the solution to escape the US's greenhouse gas emissions is to develop better technologies that emit less greenhouse gas.
The basic technologies needed - wind and solar power + molten salt and compressed air storage + battery grid frequency stabilization already exist and produce a reliable enough electricity supply almost as cheaply as coal and much more cheaply than nuclear. What is needed is hyper scale investment, or more specifically stable guarantees of grid access for these power sources and no undermining of this by the oil and nuclear lobbies so that the companies interested in building renewable power can do so. That is a political, not technical, problem.
Re: Need technology [Re: Congratulations, assholes (Score:4, Informative)
Your number is completely wrong [forbes.com] - out by almost two orders of magnitude. If your facts are so completely wrong then your conclusions will be even worse.
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Simple solutions. Stop buying so much stuff. Stop zooming about in cars and planes.
Re:Congratulations, assholes (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah sure, everyone knows that Soviet Russia and Communist China were carbon-free.
Binary thinking, much? Is there nothing between the extremes? Perhaps even another direction altogether?
(isn't it nice when you are both the regulation authority and producer?).
Oh, you mean the system we have now where the government to a large extent acts at the behest of the corporations that pay for the elections of its officials? The one in which corporations are taking over more and more of what were traditionally government-run operations, for example prisons? Yes, I'm sure it IS nice when you can buy your way into a position wherein you are the 'regulation authority' for the goods you produce or the services you offer.
Re:Congratulations, assholes (Score:5, Insightful)
The primate brain is extremely well evolved for proximate threat. We are basically programmed for "tiger in the tall grass" forms of risk assessment. The more removed in time a threat is, the less reliable regular cognition is. It takes a trained mind to recognize and formulate plans for long term threats, and also leaves many vulnerable to manipulation; via pre existing biases, compartmentalization and so forth.
The fact is there's nothing really extraordinary or controversial about AGW. We've known about CO2's radiation absorption and remission properties since the 19th century. Thermodynamics makes increased capture of radiation, mainly in the form of heat, an inevitability. The universe always balances its books.
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Nuclear power remains flawed until both the enormous scales of failures and the waste disposal problem are solved. Right now, nuclear power is too expensive to build and operate even in countries which view nuclear power positively. It might look cheap on paper, but as soon as you have to create the whole supply and disposal chain, it gets expensive.
If molten salt/Thorium reactors
Re:The experts did it to themselfs. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Anti smoking and "pro" global warming... It's almost like the truth is its own reward and doesn't need big, moneyed interests to be for it especially when the opposite is harmful. Of course you know this, but what's funny is you lumped the democrats in with that too. I think you're trying to tell us something, but are afraid to. Blink twice if you need assistance.
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More kind of prescient. The paper finding the loss of the Greenland Ice Sheet was irreversible was published 3 years and 6 weeks later [nature.com].
Re:Smoking and carbon aren't the same (Score:5, Informative)
With climate change, there's only one data point--the global climate.
That's a lot of data points. The aggregate data are collected from many continuously reporting fixed stations at the Earth's surface and represent the input of approximately 6000 temperature stations, 7500 precipitation stations and 2000 pressure stations. [wikipedia.org]
But also, there's satellite measurements of the energy imbalance. There's satellite measurements of atmospheric temperature. There's satellite measurements of ice sheet mass. There' altimetry measurements of ice sheet height. There's species range data. There's sea level guages and satellite altimetry. There's the changes in timing of spring events, the change in migration patterns, and even migration at all, and changing precipitation patterns are all data.
And that's only the real-time measurements. Climate science is supported by reconstructions from ice cores, and from tens of temperature proxies, and is investigated by modeling from first principles with optics and thermodynamics.
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There almost certainly are over 2000. Cigarette tar is basically a mishmash of pyrolized crap so you get a bunch of organic fragments joined together randomly, giving lots of nice, juicy polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. The number which can be formed is determined by combinatorics so it is very very very very very large.
Many hundreds of just PHAs have been identified positively https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/b... [nih.gov], which is something hard to do when they were mixed in in tiny quantities with many very very