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Comment by gavanwoolery | Hacker News Reader

I am a climate expert either, but I can easily identify a fallacy or bad experiment when I see one. I think hugh3 has written one of the most rational posts I have ever seen on HN. I think it is everybody else who is unclear on the scientific process. Being peer-reviewed DOES NOT constitute to the scientific process. Remember when every person and their peer believed that the earth was flat and it was the center of the universe? Guess what, it turns out popular assumptions are often wrong. Being peer-reviewed does very little when your peers are so eager to approve your work.

The scientific process is as follows:

1. Ask a Question 2. Do Background Research 3. Construct a Hypothesis 4. Test Your Hypothesis by Doing an Experiment 5. Analyze Your Data and Draw a Conclusion <-- this is where people are messing up; insufficient data, jumping to conclusions, fallacies, etc. 6. Communicate Your Results

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Just a historical note: common Western belief in a flat earth is a nineteenth-century myth popularized by Washington Irving and Antoine-Jean Letronne. Since Pythagoras, to my knowledge only Lactantius (c. 245–325) and Cosmas Indicopleustes (first half of the sixth century) publicly argued that the earth is flat. Lactantius was considered a heretic for his Manichaean worldview and Cosmas did not intend his model, which was sharply criticized by his contemporary John Philoponus, to be taken literally.

Remember when every person and their peer believed that the earth was flat and it was the center of the universe?

This is simply not true. It was a popular position at one stage, but it wasn't "everyone thought it so".

Also, your scientific process does not allow for fields such as taxonomy or anatomy - you don't construct a hypothesis nor test it in fields like this.

Science is about rigorous observation. Peer-review provides a strong part of that rigor.

> I can easily identify a fallacy or bad experiment

Please give an example of a bad experiment or logical fallacy by a climate scientist.

Remember the hockey stick graph? The graph that the entire AGW community rallied around for years? Yeah, it was wrong:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11646-climate-myths-th...

I can give you more examples if you wish, but I think that alone speaks pretty strongly about how inconclusive/false some research is.

That's pretty funny. That article is about climate myths. The article is saying the opposite of what you think it says. The hockey stick graph has not been proven wrong.

Haha, that will teach me to throw in links late at night ;)

Here is a better link: http://www.john-daly.com/hockey/hockey.htm

That argument reduces to:

* The medieval warm period was warmed than today, which is false; thus * Solar activity might be the cause of large climate changes, which is doubtful, more so because the premise is wrong.

Not enough to explain ocean acidity, why climate change is global, why there's a hole in the Antarctic's atmosphere...

Not to mention the melting of the permafrost, glacial retreat and the fact that Arctic ice levels are (yet again) reaching historic lows:

http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2011/09/12/arctic-ice-levels-hit-h...

Theories of anthropogenic global warming pre-dated and predicted all of these developments.

Antarctica is also losing ice mass (http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/20100108_Is_Antarc...). Articles suggesting it is gaining ice use selective measurements of sea ice rather than ice mass as a whole.

Funny, I think it depends on what propaganda you are swallowing ;)

According to many studies, polar ice is actually increasing.

http://news.slashdot.org/story/09/04/18/2059204/Antarctic-Ic... and http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=13...

You must have me confused with someone who doesn't know the difference between the Arctic and Antarctic.

The raw data on Arctic ice thickness comes from the Canadian Ice Service, Norwegian Meteorological Service daily satellite images: Arctic Mosaic of the LANCE-MODIS System, University of Bremen archive of sea ice concentration maps, ECMWF weather forecasts and radar images of Greenland from the Danish Meteorological Institute. So satellite photos basically, and you are right that I don't consider them propaganda.

http://sites.google.com/site/arcticseaicegraphs/

I haven't looked at the data behind the articles you cite since they aren't available as best I can find, and even the summaries merely claim that Antarctica is at best a wash with gains in one metric in one region possibly compensating for significant losses elsewhere. Thanks for playing though.

"the medieval warm period was warme[r] than today, which is false"

Why is that false?

There are many possible explanations for the latter anomalies - our CO2 output likely is part of influence, but hardly the only. Global temperatures, ocean acidity, and the ozone layer have all fluctuated dramatically over time, even long before humans existed. In fact, in the Archaean period and earlier, earth did not even have an ozone layer.

While I've seen arguments about the robustness of the hockey stick graph under different data analysis assumptions regarding bristlecone pine core samples from California, I've also seen retorts that say that the hockey stick remains. I don't know what to think about this anymore.

But I do know that it can't be called an obvious "fallacy or bad experiment", so I don't know why you named it as an example. Even if it happens to be wrong, it's not an example of a bad experiment or scientific fallacy. It's an example of a screwup that you certainly could NOT have identified at a glance.

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