I don’t agree. I’ve been called to provide input, as an expert, into large decisions. Sometimes these decisions involved job losses for lots of people, or making a large investment in a country with serious human rights violations. I assure you, I twisted and turned and didn’t get any sleep whenever these things happened. I had one boss who told me I took it too personal and felt everybody was family, that we needed to be more unemotional. But I know he too had a hard time when we had to make a call. I think the people who sail through these events and don’t feel the impact are a bit psychopathic.
Comment on Ethics of climate expertise by Fernando Leanme (@FernandoLeanme)
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Comment on Ethics of climate expertise by mosomoso
Fernando, I haven’t been able to get an accurate breakdown. It does seem far fetched for desals on standby, and Melbourne’s desal is supposed to be costing much more again, an improbable $600,000 per day (also stand-by).
But it’s interesting that “our” ABC, an organ of the Posh Urban Left funded by the rest of us and inflicted on the rest of us, has indeed put the cost of Sydney’s horror at $500,000, quoting the managing director of Sydney Water. That’s PER DAY as availability charge, though no water has been needed or produced.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-09-27/nsw-desalination-plant-deal-costing-customers-10-billion/4985168
I agree with you that this seems incredible.
One more thing to infuriate: Melbourne could be harvesting water right now in a long-planned Mitchell River Dam. Instead, the water is flushed to the sea and maybe a quarter of a TRILLION dollars annually is flushed to…to where?
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Comment on Ethics of climate expertise by stevepostrel
As Judith and others have pointed out here a number of times, a “consensus” on Topic A based on the independent investigations of many qualified researchers (especially when derivative products and findings in areas B and C of unquestioned value have been generated by basing further work on the consensus belief) has credibility. The climate consensus fails these tests, however. It was consciously and artificially generated through political (e.g. IPCC) processes, creating correlated errors and biases, rather than arrived at by the independent findings of researchers whose errors would tend to cancel out. And there are no unquestionably useful or productive findings in other fields based on the consensus–not accurate regional forecasts, not a better understanding of past climate, etc.
So the critique of consciously sought consensus in science, which is completely valid, ought not to be confused with those who buck a consensus formed from independent investigations and yielding fruitful derivative products.
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Comment on Ethics of climate expertise by ordvic
Yeah, Robert Kennedy and his team brought down Oregon.
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Comment on Ethics of climate expertise by PA
The anti-vaccer thing is kind of interesting. But their “solutions” don’t have a significant effect on the presumed problems they purport that they have identified.
This means they are either identifying the wrong problems, or proposing the wrong solutions.
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Comment on Making (non)sense of climate denial by tomdesabla
Please just stop it Harry…you know you aren’t going anywhere. I for one think that Judith’s thinking is getting more and more clear
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Comment on Ethics of climate expertise by beththeserf
‘Expertice?’ ‘Amble reasons.’ )
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Comment on Ethics of climate expertise by Ron Graf
Jim D,
Did you see Elon Musk’s press release on the new home powerwall? The future is going to happen faster than you thought. And, it will not be driven by government. If government had regulated ecommerce Ebay may never have gotten off the ground. If Ebay never was, Paypal would never have been. If not for Paypal Elon Musk would be doing a 9-5 job now (maybe for the government, keeping his head down and out of trouble.)
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Comment on Ethics of climate expertise by stevepostrel
Without getting into areas where the consensus hasn’t yet backed down but probably should, off the top of my head we have:
Cholesterol dietary recommendations
Hair analysis in court
Bite-mark analysis in court
Recovered memories in court
Annual mammograms for young women
Banning of silicone-gel breast implants
as cases where the government appealed to false scientific consensuses to justify its policies. In each case, the popular perception of overwhelming evidence in favor of the policy turned out on closer examination to be misleading. In each case a small number of weak studies combined with strong bureaucratic interest exaggerated the clarity of what ought to be done in the light of the evidence. (I also left out of this cases where the science was OK but the policy conclusions from that science were overzealous, as in the banning of thalidomide and Accutane.)
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Comment on Ethics of climate expertise by PA
Peter Lang | May 1, 2015 at 7:59 pm |
PA,
Thank you for all that interesting information. Can you summarise it in a way to answers these questions:
1. The Powerwall system as I read their description is for UPSing your house and has nothing to do with cars. It leverages their expertise with batteries and inverters. It could also allow you to download power when it is cheap and use it when it is expensive (assuming the utility is charging different rates by time of day). Although you could charge your car a little bit – the 40KW-H to 60KW-H battery pack of a Tesla S dwarfs the 10KW-H Powerwall system.
In fact – if you had an inverter and a pair of jumper cables during blackouts you could use a fully charged Tesla S to run your house for a couple of days.
2. N/A
3. N/A
4. N/A
5. N/A
6. What important caveats would a buyer want to be aware of?
Don’t let your wife use a hair dryer or do laundry during a blackout.
If you were interested in the economics of a Tesla car or building a home solar recharging station for your car I could look at that.
The killer app add-on for a Tesla is a sunshield (those things that protect your dash) that plugs in to charge the battery. This could provide up to 10% of a full charge if you park your car right.
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Comment on Ethics of climate expertise by PA
<i>PA | May 1, 2015 at 9:50 pm |
The killer app add-on for a Tesla is a sunshield (those things that protect your dash) that plugs in to charge the battery. This could provide up to 10% of a full charge if you park your car right.</i>
There are about 5000-6000 W-H of solar per day available. LA for example averages 6140 W-H per day (6.14 KW-H/day), but at the current 25% efficiency for solar panels the best you would get is 2.5% of a full charge.
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Comment on Ethics of climate expertise by Geoff Sherrington
It is difficult to generalise about scientists and their motivations when there are different classes of scientists, for example ‘hard’ scientists (more observation-based, often, like chemistry and physics) and ‘soft’ scientists (more into beliefs and predictions, like the messenger before the message, the message before the data, like much psychology).
Many bloggers above are limiting their words to climate ‘science’, a category that some of us harder scientists are concerned about, because its deviations from good science seem to exceed its conformity to good science. Of course, there are good climate scientists and poor climate scientists, but the general view over the past decade is that the latter spend too much time trying to discredit the former, which is not at all scientific, but more the material of weekly pulp/gossip magazines.
In essence, some methods like data mining and data snooping are seldom seen in my old science of geochemistry (which is commonly combined with geology and geophysics for the large field of mineral exploration and evaluation).
This is because there is only negative value from methods that cherry pick or distort the picture, when one does exploration work. Indeed, that negative value extends to serious breaches of law, when the occasional cowboy is discovered – as they tend to be, rapidly, in their lifetimes. More fundamentally, however, those in the hard sciences have long realised that an ‘imaginary’ discovery does not exist, so there is no point in favouring data treatments that include make-believe. One does not even try to wish a new ore deposit into existence. The rarity of new ore bodies is assumed, then steps are taken to turn rarity into discovery.
The hard sciences are less prone to produce hockey stick type reconstructions, because they seem inherently excluded from studies of examples of how Nature presents us with clues. Hard sciences would rarely, if ever, invert data responses like Finnish sediments. Hard sciences would rarely conduct multivariate analyses (except to learn about limitations) with as many uncontrollable or loose variables as found in tree rings to calculate historic temperatures.
In short, the mind set of the hard scientist is rather different to that of the climate scientist as might be derived from reading years of blogging on relevant topics.
Please do not believe that all science is on a journey to the LCD set by popular climate science. However, please be warned of the long-term danger of including too much of the poor philosophy and ethics of pop climate science in education of our young.
That said, much of the ethical stance of a scientist develops from the ethics shown by cohorts. Climate science ethics lack a huge component, that being punitive outcomes for those who group around and watch bad things happen, instead of enforcing ethical standards. It’s still cowboys and the wild west for most climate science, but unfortunately many cowboys do not know this. Their cohorts are not listened to as much as they should be. Metaphorically, they are shot instead.
Thank you Judith.
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Comment on Ethics of climate expertise by PA
Well…
I’m still waiting for some AGWer to explain/defend their core beliefs (I listed above what appear to be their core beliefs).
Since no one is defending their core beliefs, apparently they know their core beliefs are wrong.
Since I’m a rational person I really don’t understand how people can act on core beliefs they know are wrong.
I disagree with your analysis a little bit. When people do things, that sensible people who have “pulled their head out” don’t do, generally it is due to money or politics, or perhaps they have just not “pulled their head out”.
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Comment on Ethics of climate expertise by Ron Graf
The problem is when these high profile unethical statements are made and are found to have been baseless it harms entire fields and our society as a whole. It even is geopolitical toxic. One must think about the poor, uneducated masses in the third world having it become ingrained in their culture that all bad weather is the result of careless and selfish westerners. It is not repaired by explaining later than when we had promised the trillions in aid it was back before we learned we were mistaken about our theories.
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Comment on Ethics of climate expertise by thomaswfuller2
But the CAGW hypothesis is the one that needs to provide the extraordinary evidence, as it is an extraordinary claim.
WG2 and 3 have produced grey literature, error and obfuscation.
There isn’t much fighting about WG1. Curry, Lindzen, Dyson, Springer, Spencer, Christy, Happer, Soon and many more (including non-scientists such as myself) cheerfully accept that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, that greenhouse gases warm, that our contributions are significant and have contributed to the current warming period.
What lukewarmers and skeptics contest and with reason is the fuzzy thinking that goes into attribution, impacts and desired policy responses.
However, the Konsensus says because we raise questions about WG2 and WG3 issues, we are denying the physics. In other words, the Konsensus lies about the opposition.
Not much of a surprise, but it does lead to repetitive discussions.
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Comment on Ethics of climate expertise by Peter Davies
The difference between the practice of hard science and soft science does not necessarily arise from the subject matter under study or the general field of enquiry, but resides mainly in the quality of the individual scientist and the degree of detachment shown toward the end results of his or her work.
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Comment on Ethics of climate expertise by jim2
I’ve got to amble on.
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Comment on Ethics of climate expertise by Peter Lang
How effective is the sunshield when the car is parked in a basement or multi level parking station, as most cars used for computing to work are during the day? :)
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Comment on Ethics of climate expertise by Ragnaar
Joshua:
“Is there a network of anti-vaccers (AVers) bringing down public health experts?”
The AVers do not connect so much with the Vaccinator network. The end up in their own AV network. The Vaccinator network is probably trying to help everyone but the fact that they have many experts and fair government support has not convinced a material portion of the people. I think with this issue there is a knowledge deficit about all the effects of vaccines even amongst the experts. From the AVers there may be some information that does flow to the Vaccinators. They have various talents beyond concocting conspiracy theories. Do we recall this movie: Lorenzo’s Oil ? With vaccination there once was a strong network. There was also a lack of information and a trust of the Vaccinators. With more sources of information, the internet, they lost their monopoly on information, and granted some of it has lower value. So the job of the experts became more difficult. If the Vaccinators engaged the AVers effectively, there’s a better chance they’d accomplish their goals.
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Comment on Ethics of climate expertise by Joshua
How about if you get into the areas where the “consensus” was correct?
You’d generate a list that is probably longer by many orders of magnitude.
So what does that tell you about any particular issue?
Absolutely nothing. The best you can do is assess any particular issue on the evidence available.
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