Last month, after careful saving, I bought an xbox one. A luxury for sure but I bought it cash and I had saved up for it.
The next day I hit a pothole and destroyed two tyres on my car. With a six month old child - I don't dare buy anything but the best tyres.

Full set of new tyres was actually more expensive than the xbox one - which by South African standards costs about a quarter of my monthly income as a high earning programmer.

That was my savings gone... then I got sick. Thank bloody goodness we have sane medical insurance regulation system so I didn't need cash to go to the doctor and get medicine because really bad luck in the same month as a rare big purchase and then getting sick is something nobody could plan for - and even the relatively healthy can't control that.

The interesting thing is that I tend to think that that very political pressure is the only reason not to. NASA made raw radio telescope data available to the public and as a result at least one amateur programmer discovered some previously unknown exo planets with his home data parser. But there is no major political debates around astronomy.
It would be better if there wasn't around any science. The only valid debate around science is other science.
We have a massive cause/effect evidence set here with an effect we do not want. Politicians can and should debate which if any policies would best help alter the cause but they have no place in a debate about the validity of the theory. At least not unless they are prepared to do so scientifically.
Instead we have Republican senators declaring the science "dubious" while failing to offer a shred of scientific support for that declaration.
I don't blame scientists for getting annoyed by that. Nobody likes their field of professional expertise impugned by somebody who is utterly ignorant about it.

What he wanted was private communications among researchers not research relevant data.
He filed two suits one was thrown out of court because the grant was federal not state and so the state taxes weren't involved.
The other was thrown out since he failed to provide any just cause for suspecting that all that private communication might contain anything relevant to the validity of the research.
The case was a flagrant attempt by a rightwing politician to try and bully a university not to study something he dissaproved off and the courts agreed with my assessment.

Like when Cucinelli tried to sue Penn state because he didn't like the results of their science ?
Its not the scientists who are politicizing things - the politicians did that. Now the scientists have no choice in the matter.

>Then there's the "Hiding the decline" remark

No. There isn't. Quoting somebody out of context is a fallacy, a variation of the strawman fallacy, ignoring the context in which it was used means you are ignoring what it actually meant.

You don't KNOW what that context was do you ? You have no idea what sentence came before do you ? What came after ?

So how can you imagine you have the slightest idea what the sentence phrase meant ? You don't even know if that was the full sentence.
For all you know that sentence read
"Make sure you remember to input the data we got today or it's absence may hide the decline we're studying".

Now I'll leave finding just the paragraph that phrase is from as an exercise for the reader and I'm prepared to bet you won't do it.
Because you don't want to know. Because you know that three separate investigations - who DID know the context all exonerated them, so you KNOW that in context that sentence clearly did not mean anything bad - and you don't want to admit that.

No, I did not threaten anybody.
I merely made an analogy. I showed, by example, what actually happened to Michael Mann - and how I could confidently say that the same could be done to absolutely anybody, indeed I could confidently predict that it could be done to a stranger since nobody could possibly be immune from it.

What you just described never happened.

But since you deniers think you can dismiss the evidence we have, and claim the theory is false without presenting a shred of evidence yourselves, I suppose I shouldn't be surprised you also don't think you need evidence to accuse somebody of fraud.
If I steal all your email I bet I could find a few choice sentences to make you look like your guilty of quite a few crimes, especially if I can take those sentences out of context - any decent investigation will quickly clear you of wrongdoing (as no less than 3 investigations found Michael Mann innocent) - though of course, if I have a nice big PR budget and a lot of political clout and I shout those alegations loud enough from the rooftops I could certainly convince quite a lot of diehards of your guilt.

What would you like to be branded as ? Pedophile ? Child-murderer ? None would be hard, and you'll still find people thinking you had been guilty ten years later.

But by all means - keep doing unto others what you sure as fuck wouldn't want done to you.

So what you're saying is... you like when science gives you information but anybody who tries to use that information for anything useful shouldn't be taken seriously ?

I'm pretty sure that your ivory tower vision of science died with the ancient Greek empire.

I know you think those are counter-arguments but they really are not.
The greatest diversity tends to exist immediately AFTER mass extinctions - with all the competition dead the survivors rapidly mass diversify because practically anything can survive.
Soon as the actual numbers of INDIVIDUALS go up though, the number of species starts declining again because competition is restored.

No doubt the kind of climate change humans could bring about would lead to massive diversity of life - but only after killing of the vast majority of the lifeforms here right now - including, quite possibly, ourselves.

What survives mass extinctions is generally not (typical) evolutionary advantage but sheer dumb luck because evolution adapts creatures over a long time to a particular environment. Being able to survive in a radically different environment which arises (relatively) rapidly isn't a result of natural selection over the previous generations (which selected for the old environment) but of by sheer dumb luck *also* having some traits suitable for this new environment.
We have ZERO reason to believe that humans can survive in anything other than the temperate climate phase we evolved for, and even if we did - we certainly can't assume our kind of developed existence is possible in the aftermath - it may take thousands of years to build something comparable to our world again.

And they have, very accurately. Some surprizes along the way but those didn't affect the over-all theory at all - they did however, like good scientists should, subsequently refine the theory to account for the surprises.
Theories are seldom born perfect, they get proposed working for "most" situations observed and then graudually refined by many scientists - often over many generations to work out why the exceptions are, in fact, exceptions.
Very, very rarely you find an exception that simply cannot be explained - that isn't just some variable previously unaccounted for - that is, in fact, evidence that the theory has a fundamental flaw - when that happens, we write a new theory partly from scratch to account for it (problems with Mercury's orbit was the unexplainable exception for Newton and directly lead to Relativity for example) - even THEN the original theories do not cease to be useful (because science isn't a true/false thing but a useful-for-understanding thing) we put a man on the moon using Newton many decades after we knew Newton's laws were flawed - they are more than accurate enough for hitting a target as big as the moon though and a lot simpler to calculate with than relativity.

>Hypothetically, what do you suggest for when the experts are untrustworthy? Or is this impossible in your worldview?

We don't trust the experts to begin with - hell they don't even trust each other ! We trust the scientific method - which is designed to protect humanity from many sources of bad faith, including, but not limited to - untrustworthy authorities.
Of course sometimes experts are untrustworthy, but when they are - the scientific method reveals them and they get ostracised from science - a recent high-profile case would be Andrew Wakefield, prior to committing fraud and ethics violations so he could get kickbacks from a lawfirm - the man was considered one of the greatest experts in his field. Subsequent to the discovery of his fraud - his career is utterly destroyed.

>Yes, we get it: people who doubt evolution are not of your tribe - they think badthought and no tolerance can be shown to other tribes.

See the resemblence ?
If you want to debate science - fine, but then give us science in response. Give us observations contradictory to what we have. Give us a better hypotheses to explain those observations or give us evidence that our hypotheses is wrong.
Those are you three options. Fuck-all else has meaning and the correct response to all other replies is, indeed, to tell you to shut the fuck up.

Well I was talking about creation myths in general and about what they usually have in common and why this leads people to conflate together three theories with completely different histories and status in science. Hell one is a biological theory expressed in words and another is a physics theory expressed in mathematical equations.

I wasn't particularly concerned about whether any specific creation story could be read in a way that is more accurate.

I'm also well aware that within Christianity genesis is an area of significant debate - the official Catholic faith has accepted the scientific view for a long time - so do many Calvinists as well while others cling to an extremely literal interpretation flat out contradicting scientific evidence.
The main difference seems to be in just how directly involved they believe God to be in every moment of their lives. The reason the "evolution was God's tool" interpretation is rejected by the fundamentalists is because it means God used a tool that does *not* require constant intervention.
Their God is a bureaucrat and the suggestion that he may not be editing every file at every moment (or at least, doesn't HAVE to be) is problematic to their definition of power.

>So... Turtles all the way down, then

Mmm, I hadn't thought about that but yes actually.

Of course, every good scientist who mentions this hypotheses also tells you that it's (currently at least) impossible to prove and shouldn't be taken as fact, it's possible but we don't know.That's perhaps the most important difference between science and religion: science is never afraid to admit ignorance.

It is also not abiogeneses theory.

Religious people tend to lump these together because most creation myths cover both Earth-origin (and Universe-origin mind you) as well as life-creation.
All of them assuming that life-creation basically got right to present-day creatures from the start (with a few rare stories where a particular new species is created in a myth in an almost evolution-life story).
In the case of the Christian creation myth in particular - no such exceptions exist, so for Christian creationists big-bang, solary-system formation and evolution are all intruding on something they explain with a single (unscientific) story.
Hence they tend to lump the science together as well.

Of course this is ironic and silly - abiogenesis at this stage has no firm answers or theories, it has a few ideas but none have any significant supporting evidence yet.
Evolution was hailed as a scientific breakthrough since first published and been validated with only minor corrections ever since.
The Big Bang (like black holes) on the other hand was despised by scientists when they first realized that Einstein's theories had it as a possibility, physicists do not like singularities and to them the Big Bang theory was little more than creationism ! The fact that popes had embraced it by the 1960's actually HARMED It's acceptance in science.
It wasn't until decades later as the evidence mounted that the big bang theory became mainstream science - something helped in no small part by the growing evidence for black holes (another hated singularity).
Indeed the hypotheses that black holes in one universe are the big bangs of another universe was first proposed because it would take a universe with two types of known singularities and at least reduce it to ONE singularity, and importantly - one we understand a lot more about !
If that hypotheses is true - then the "other side" of the big bang theory isn't a mystery - it's a black hole in another universe created by a supermassive star collapsing under it's own gravity.