Ejnar Fjerdingstad wrote:Andinistaloco wrote:mrh wrote:Andinistaloco wrote:mrh wrote:Andinistaloco wrote:Ejnar Fjerdingstad wrote:Selecting the data that prove what you want to find - a mortal sin in science.
That's very true. I bet only one side of the debate does it, too...
Probably true since the other side is largely locked out of publishing.
It's entirely possible to select only data which prove what you want to find, without publishing anything whatsoever.
Certainly. But then you are largely working from the outside and people will dismiss you with comments like, "but he isn't in a peer reviewed journal" and ignore you whether you were a good scientist or did something curious with the data.
I see the point you're making, but don't quite agree. I doubt that whether or not someone's research is accepted matters to you - your opinion isn't going to change based on that, nor will most other peoples'.
I'm even fairly certain that certain people - many on this site
- couldn't care less if 99% of the scientists in the world were in favor of global warming - they've made up your minds and that's that. Likewise, there are certainly people who couldn't care less if the reverse was true and all educated opinion was that global warming didn't exist.
The beauty of partisanship, as I see it, is that there's no need to research and form your own opinion on anything; there's a ready-made set of opinions out there waiting for you.
You are being quite naive here. What about Climategate? Whoever leaked these E-mails certainly didn't invent their content. Unfortunately for you, that was done by the 'peer-reviewed scientists' supporting AGW (and we know how much those peer reviews stink). How can you possibly overlook that? And why did they invent the completely unfounded "The Himalayan Glaciers are Melting" scare (based on a few
unpublished (anecdotal?) results), why did the IPCC accept such tripe? These are facts that simply cannot be explained away. Even if all opponents of AGW were proved to be paid by Exxon, those questions will still remain. For the AGW side in effect dug their own grave, we are just pointing it out.
Ejnar, it's good to be excercising my sleepy brain against your clever (but generally word-twisting) arguments once again. How are ya?
If you read my entire posts, instead of just reading parts of them, you'll see I made no judgment on "Climategate"; nor have I weighed in on the issue in any manner which would lead you to assume such events are "unfortunate" for me or that I "overlooked" anything.
The point I made, first, is that both sides of the debate look first at what they want to see and then try to make data fit into it - this is elementary and it would be very silly indeed for you to assume that it's only happening on one side. The reason you crow about it of course is because you favor the other side. But it's tantamount to screaming that all republican politicians are corrupt - because obviously politicians on both sides of the aisle are corrupt.
The point I made second is that most folks - such as yourself - already have their minds made up and the evidence at this point hardly matters to such people... insofar as you will continue to ignore anything that disagrees with your view and trumpet that which agrees with it.
Those were my points. I imagine it would be more difficult to disprove them than it would be to invent an opinion I did not express and then argue against
that.