Bart,

Please look up ad hominem before you use it, otherwise you look quite foolish. Belief in ID means that someone is completely non-scientific, or at least as scientific as your neighborhood astrologer or $cientologist. The company you keep, eh?

Plenty of people have called James Hansen a “liar” in public. They have called Michael Mann a liar for his bogus hockey stick. Lots of AGW purveyors have been called “Liars.” And they bend over and take it! Every last one of them.

Not a single one of them has sued anyone for defamation. Not one! They put their craven tails between their legs and pretend they don’t hear what people are calling them — in public.

When someone is called a liar in public, and they refuse to go to court to clear their own name and reputation… you can be pretty certain the name-calling is accurate.

Oh, and about that globaloney warming:

http://www.nationalpost.com/893554.bin

And indeed there is a conspiracy of environmental activists to keep this lie afloat that only crackpots question the “consensus”.

The global warming conspiracy was started more than 100 years ago by the likes of Fourier and Arrhenius. They realized they could create opportunities for research grants in 100 years time with their scam. This is the longest running, as well as the biggest, conspiracy of all time.

I don’t know. Your 4 pillars of science seem more like pillars of the political of AGW, propped up by science. This is how each of your numbered items look to me:

1. What most people believe to be true is a pillar of science.

2. If you disagree with what most people believe, you are stupid, evil, or the pawn of corporate interest.

3. New data collection to bolster the ‘truth’ is thwarted by the evil corporate interests mentioned in #3. (some documented examples would be nice here.)

4. Any evidence that is contrary to the ‘truth’ must be biased, corrupt, or twisted because the ‘truth’ has been established by #1. To understand the motives of those people (the deniers), see #2.

These are the same arguments that I hear over and over again, stated in one form or another. They are charaterised by distain and contempt for anyone that has an oppossing viewpoint. Every single one of your pillars contains a personal or collective attack at the people with whom you disagree.

This what I was talking about in my post above. There is some weird mixture of science and politics to this whole discussion, that makes it really difficult to consider either side objectively.

On a lighter note, you thankfully left out the argument that is the favorite, or the trump card if you will, of my liberal friends (mostly educated in the social sciences). Their final word on AGW is that it must be true because, “what else could it be”?

Your comments on the “pillars of science” are simply wrong.

Peer review is not now and never has been a primary pillar of science. Placing before or equal to replication is crazy. Peer reviewed articles are the primary pillar of a tenure application. They are a way of measuring the career progress of a post-doc, assistant and associate professor. They are an opportunity for a tenured professor to get a pay raise.

Undergraduates were taught in my day (about 20 years ago) that peer review simply meant that an editorial board had read the document and not found any major mistakes. Peer review has very little or nothing to do with validating the results. Reviewers do not try and replicate. They just make sure that the results are not insanely implausible. Indeed, I think AGW is not insanely implausible just pretty implausible.

The cornerstone of science is reproducible experiment. Why do I believe the earth is round? Reproducible experiment. Why do I believe in evolution? Reproducible experiment. Why do I think Lamarck was wrong and Darwin right? Reproducible experiment. Why do I believe quantum mechanics, relativity, Maxwell’s equations..? Reproducible experiment. Notice how utterly independent of peer-review the term “reproducible experiment” is. Marvel at how completely separated from motive, politics and religion “reproducible experiment” is.

I say “reproducible experiment” and I am done. Nothing else is required of science.

If a “consensus” of “scientists” decided one of the above were not true it would have very little effect on me without a presentation of the experimental evidence. If they made it hard to reproduce their results by – say – requiring FOIA requests to see their data, I would be even less inclined to believe them.

Your complaint about data collection being hindered because of (presumably FOIA) requests from people who are looking to reproduce results speaks directly to this point. People like Hansen, seem to resent others attempting to reproduce their experiments. They’ve made it hard to do so. They’ve hidden procedures in obscure code that they had to be forced to release. They do the opposite of what should be regarded as science.

That is a true attack on science.

Without the reproduction of results, the results are meaningless.

No matter what official newsletter of whatever professional society they appeared in.

But when one school consists of members of one political ideology, and the opposite school consists of members of the opposing political ideology, none of it is science anymore, it’s politics. Or religion, the difference between the two, (politics and religion) frequently being indistinguishable.

Ad hominem always works as a distraction when it is revealed you have no idea what you are talking about.

1. peer review and replication (which denialists have attacked. for years their trope was that peer review was broken or farcical because it did not reinforce their paid or ideological programs). It’s slightly more important, actually, to keep bad research and data from being included than it is to build …

2. a consensus on what past data, observations and experimental results meant. A consensus is the only way to establish at any point what a science says about any subject. Denialists like Tipler are the most absurd and anti-scientific of all, because it’s only when a consensus emerges that something even becomes part of science. It also directs where you look for …

3. the collection of new data. Denialists have tried to thwart this, both by harrassing data collectors (even those collecting data for other purposes, c.f. the Daddy’s Polaroid shows there’s no global warming project by anthony watts) and worse, by trying to cut off funding for data gathering, claiming scientists use the money for their personal needs or for advocacy. Worse still, they mask the fact that the corporations won’t continue to fund research that doesn’t match their profitable pre-set conclusions by pretending that research scientists who aren’t corporately funded are in it for the money – money they’re actually spending on research, data, observation and experimental results, all of which they’re trying to overwhelm, because they realize science is trying for …

4. Unbiased results without severe conflicts of interest, and in particular, with targets driven by successful past results and not pet theories or stealth agendas, not cherry-picked, statistically mangled, or worst of all, “corrected” by eliminating noise or error in one, prejudicial, desired direction. Denialists, of course, want to do all that and still slap “science” on it to steal the prestige and trust science has accumulated over centuries of progress.

When we say there is a war on science, we mean on all of it. Peer review. A consensus on results. Data gathering. Research integrity.

People like Tipler are allowed by their academic faculties to be cheats, frauds, charlatans and enemies of the scientific process in any area other than their own specialty without penalty. If he tried to pull this same crap in mathematical physics, even with its current lack of connection to data and experiment, his reputation would be mud, he’d never go to another conference, he’d get no students, no funding, and eventually either suffer or be driven out.

As a check of my work here, feel free to call Tulane, find whatever’s closest to climate science there, and ask them if they agree with Tipler. I guarantee the answer will be no, ESPECIALLY if you bring up this completely Young Earth Creationist trope about “consensus not being science.”