IMO, it's 33% of a roughly 3x larger pie.

Because climatologists have never thought of looking at climate history...

The ignorance and arrogance in your poster is awe-inspiring. It's as if you have no fucking idea what climatologists base their theories on, and yet have decided they are wrong.

There wasn't a learned man in Europe who believed the Earth was flat. It may have persisted much longer in China, but in Europe and among Arab geographers, there was no one who seriously believed in the flat Earth. The Greeks had figured that out nearly 2000 years before Columbus ever accidentally ran into the Americas on his way to China.

Picking the "20 years of no warming" is simply cherry picking, and ignoring a time period 15 times longer that does show warming.

Ah yes, when your ideology runs up against science, invent cabals of evil scientists trying to fuck you over.

How are you any different than a Creationist?

And yet no one believes in phlogiston anymore. Science did what it was supposed to do.

I can think of plenty of examples of the old guard trying to hang on to discredited ideas. The Out of Africa theory of human origins, when it first came out, flew in the face of a general view among European experts that modern humanity had evolved in Eurasia. The old guard, to some extent, were more informed by racial biases (the very 16th-19th century idea that sub-Saharan Africans were somehow lower on the evolutionary chain), and indeed there were a few angry bastards, notably on the Continent, that clung to the idea of a Eurasian origin of H. sapiens even into the 1980s, when finally enough molecular data had been gained both from extant human populations and from the remains of ancient humans (including Neanderthals) that it became irrefutable that modern H. sapiens had a very recent origin (sometime between 200,000 and 150,000 years ago) in Africa.

And again, on the same general topic, for a long time the idea that modern humans and Neanderthals had interbred was viewed as completely invalid. mtDNA studies were flung in the faces of researchers who insisted that modern humans and Neanderthals had interbred in Eurasia. Those that insisted that the interbreeding had happened were tut-tutted, in some cases viewed almost as hippies. Indeed, even into the 1990s, the "consensus" view was that any interbreeding was so rare as to have had no impact on the genetic makeup of modern human populations.

Well, lo and behold, by the 21st century, better techniques for DNA extraction and genome mapping revealed that virtually all human populations outside of sub-Saharan Africa did have nuclear genes that came from Neanderthals.

So it strikes me that this, and numerous other examples, consensus that does not fit the evidence is always ultimately discarded. But that some consensus views are wrong does not mean all consensus views are wrong.

But you can't just simply ignore a whole body of work and go your own way. Despite the romantic notion that science is a series of bold new discoveries toppling old paradigms is largely bullshit. Yes, it may have happened on occasion, but for the most part, science is the steady building of knowledge, not the wholesale throwing out of old ideas. Take a truly revolutionary theory like General Relativity. Even Einstein was building on a body of knowledge developed by people like Maxwell and Lorentz, and he would have been the first to admit the debts he owed to his predecessors. In much the same way, quantum mechanics owes a great debt to Einstein, via his work on the photoelectric effect.

Providing it is understood, and I have to talk to a scientist who didn't believe this, that consensus is provisional, how is consensus bad?

First of all, I think you're just playing a hyperbolic game here. I don't know of any researcher who says "we need more authoritarianism".

But let's play a little game. Let's just say AGW is real, and there is time to reduce emissions sufficiently that some of the worst effects could be eliminated, or at least reduced. How would you go about reducing emissions?

I'll be very clear here, because I think this needs constant restating. Nature doesn't care about your ideology. The laws of physics cannot be altered because your philosophical, ideological and political beliefs run counter to them. If CO2, methane and other greenhouse gas emissions are increasing temperatures and altering the climate in a very short (geological) period of time, then it's happening, regardless of what your political slant would suggest.

The whole idea that science should be evaluated on anyone's ideology is madness.

An appeal to authority is not necessarily fallacious (that would be fallacious reasoning itself). If the authorities in question are generally recognized as actual authorities, then surely it does not follow that accepting, even provisionally, what they say is fallacious.

Look at it this way. The number of people that can actually work in physics, particularly in areas like QM and General Relativity, is by and large very small. Most people simply do not have the training in mathematics and theory to be able to understand anything but a laymans' approximations of the science.

So when you have an expert in the field who makes a statement about, say, the Inflationary Epoch of Big Bang cosmology, and that statement is in general accord with what other experts in the field say, then I'd say you're probably getting a statement that is a reflection of the science as it is at the time. It is not 100% reliable, but the whole nature of science as a discipline has the notion that 100% reliability is not achievable, so there is still plenty of room for new ideas.

I think that's far too narrow a definition of science, one that seems far too ideal to be useful.

Is string theory science? After all, there's virtually no way to test it with any technology we currently possess, and it may be decades before we possess the equipment necessary to actually test its predictions.

I'd say the answer is yes, it is science. It may be wrongheaded and may ultimately end up being wrong (though the mathematics that have had to be produced to explain string theory have had some benefits in others areas of research, so in science, even failures lead to advances). Even the most ardent string theorists will admit, when pushed, that at the moment, strings remain a theory without experimental evidence, so it's not like they're deluding themselves into believing they have TRUTH.

In fact, that, to my mind, is what makes science more than any other philosophical statement; and that is that there is no TRUTH with a capital T, but rather provisional facts that are open to change at any time. Some theories may have sufficient explanatory power and evidence backing them that they might as well be considered true (ie. biological evolution, general relativity), but even in such cases, there's usually aspects that are incomplete, so even within well-established theories, there's always room for improvement. In some cases, such theories may ultimately be subsumed into larger theories (as happened with Newtonian Mechanics). I fully expect that Relativity and Quantum Mechanics will themselves ultimately be unified as part of a larger theory (maybe it will even be string theory, so one hopes that those researchers keep going, even if by the Chrichton formula, they're apparently not doing science at all).

I ended up in the United States of America because back then the U. S. of A. was the epitome of liberty, freedom and democracy (at least to a Chinese refugee)

Every place looks like the epitome of good things to a newcomer, since they haven't been around long enough to catch a glimpse of the grinning skull behind the happy smile. US marketed itself as beacon of freedom but was willing to use morally bankrupt tactics in its fight with the Soviet Union; it was inevitable that the national security apparatus built for that fight would eventually turn against its host. Institutions don't just quietly vanish after their job is done, nor does the spirituality - the mess of justifications, excuses, cynicism and outright delusions - that allowed them to replace democratically elected governments with dictators "for freedom".

That's something to remember as we watch the US plummet into the abyss: it's reaping what it sowed. Karma can be a bitch.

400 kilobytes? For 30 seconds of video? That's barely a hundred kilobits per second. Are you sure that wasn't a reference movie to content at a different URL? Because that's not likely to be anything approaching what most people would call "full quality" unless the content started out as a postage-stamp-sized cell phone video....

Which is an argument ethically akin to car companies knowing they have a potentially fatal defect but weighing up the cost of actually fixing it and saving lives vs. the expected cost of compensation lawsuits and not fixing it if the latter is lower.

The solution, of course, is to structure the law and/or regulate the industry so that the cost of screwing people unreasonably is always substantially greater than the cost of behaving more appropriately. Passenger suffered unreasonable discomfort on any flight? Automatic 100% refund, with a presumption in favour of the passenger if your provision is significantly below the industry average (or minimum regulated standards if the industry colludes to reduce the average).

I would have a lot more sympathy if budget airlines didn't keep pulling so many obviously shady moves to try to look cheap yet acceptable quality while actually charging more that customers expected and not always offering the experience people thought they were buying. This has become so bad that we literally have new consumer protection laws taking effect in Europe around now precisely to make a bunch of the tricks that some of these airlines pull explicitly illegal.

It should have been a reasonable and simple solution to offer transparent pricing and mid-range options, but I think that ship sailed^W^Wplane departed already. Now the industry, particularly on the budget end, needs to clean up its act or face increasing levels of customer dissatisfaction at a time when people are already looking to alternatives where viable ones exist.

You know what? The vast majority of people just don't care. Some even support it.

People care, they just don't think they can change it. It's learned helplessness, a reign of terror that keeps people bound in delusions of powerlessness. Some identify with the oppressor - an entity which ultimately exists only in our collective imagination - either because it lets them pretend they're not chained, or gives gives them material privilege, or often both. Some cover in fear from the horrible thing slithering in their midst, hoping they will be devoured last, and some are "just doing their jobs", since someone else will do it otherwise, treating mere cultural norms as unchangeable constants of nature. And so the monster we've created continues its scorched-earth march through time, claiming new host bodies through acclimatization into twisted cultural values and oppressive social expectations and casting them aside when they're used up. It's like a real-world zombie apocalypse, and like one the real threat is fear, panic and hopelessness before the sheer mass of accumulated evil.

Or, as a dude called John once put it: "Who is like the Beast, and who can fight against it?" This has been going on for a long time, possibly since the dawn of civilization. Which also nicely explains some of the weirder theologies that keep coming from the Religious Right: they're attempts to overlook the fact that their holy book is talking about them, and not in the role of heroes.