Aliens Cause Global Warming

[Lucidvizion]

I thought this was a very good read on the politicization of science as well as the notion of "consensus science". It's a pretty long read but it is well written and flows smoothly

"Aliens Cause Global Warming"

A lecture by Michael Crichton
California Institute of Technology
Pasadena, CA
January 17, 2003



My topic today sounds humorous but unfortunately I am serious. I am going to argue that extraterrestrials lie behind global warming. Or to speak more precisely, I will argue that a belief in extraterrestrials has paved the way, in a progression of steps, to a belief in global warming. Charting this progression of belief will be my task today.

Let me say at once that I have no desire to discourage anyone from believing in either extraterrestrials or global warming. That would be quite impossible to do. Rather, I want to discuss the history of several widely-publicized beliefs and to point to what I consider an emerging crisis in the whole enterprise of science-namely the increasingly uneasy relationship between hard science and public policy.

I have a special interest in this because of my own upbringing. I was born in the midst of World War II, and passed my formative years at the height of the Cold War. In school drills, I dutifully crawled under my desk in preparation for a nuclear attack.

It was a time of widespread fear and uncertainty, but even as a child I believed that science represented the best and greatest hope for mankind. Even to a child, the contrast was clear between the world of politics-a world of hate and danger, of irrational beliefs and fears, of mass manipulation and disgraceful blots on human history. In contrast, science held different values-international in scope, forging friendships and working relationships across national boundaries and political systems, encouraging a dispassionate habit of thought, and ultimately leading to fresh knowledge and technology that would benefit all mankind. The world might not be avery good place, but science would make it better. And it did. In my lifetime, science has largely fulfilled its promise. Science has been the great intellectual adventure of our age, and a great hope for our troubled and restless world.

But I did not expect science merely to extend lifespan, feed the hungry, cure disease, and shrink the world with jets and cell phones. I also expected science to banish the evils of human thought---prejudice and superstition, irrational beliefs and false fears. I expected science to be, in Carl Sagan's memorable phrase, "a candle in a demon haunted world." And here, I am not so pleased with the impact of science. Rather than serving as a cleansing force, science has in some instances been seduced by the more ancient lures of politics and publicity. Some of the demons that haunt our world in recent years are invented by scientists. The world has not benefited from permitting these demons to escape free.

But let's look at how it came to pass.

Cast your minds back to 1960. John F. Kennedy is president, commercial jet airplanes are just appearing, the biggest university mainframes have 12K of memory. And in Green Bank, West Virginia at the new National Radio Astronomy Observatory, a young astrophysicist named Frank Drake runs a two week project called Ozma, to search for extraterrestrial signals. A signal is received, to great excitement. It turns out to be false, but the excitement remains. In 1960, Drake organizes the first SETI conference, and came up with the now-famous Drake equation:

N=N*fp ne fl fi fc fL

Where N is the number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy; fp is the fraction with planets; ne is the number of planets per star capable of supporting life; fl is the fraction of planets where life evolves; fi is the fraction where intelligent life evolves; and fc is the fraction that communicates; and fL is the fraction of the planet's life during which the communicating civilizations live.

This serious-looking equation gave SETI an serious footing as a legitimate intellectual inquiry. The problem, of course, is that none of the terms can be known, and most cannot even be estimated. The only way to work the equation is to fill in with guesses. And guesses-just so we're clear-are merely expressions of prejudice. Nor can there be "informed guesses." If you need to state how many planets with life choose to communicate, there is simply no way to make an informed guess. It's simply prejudice.


..much more..

http://www.michaelcrichton.net/speeches/speeches_quote04.html

Read it!

[Crinoline]

It is my opinion that aliens are also responsible for all the socks that "mysteriously" disappear from my dryer.

[JLB]

It is my opinion that aliens are also responsible for all the socks that "mysteriously" disappear from my dryer.

I'm missing 2 myself those bastards!!

[anEinherjer]

It's a mighty nice speech, jlb, good find. It's a pretty interesting bit of insight.

And so, in this elastic anything-goes world where science-or non-science-is the hand maiden of questionable public policy, we arrive at last at global warming. It is not my purpose here to rehash the details of this most magnificent of the demons haunting the world. I would just remind you of the now-familiar pattern by which these things are established. Evidentiary uncertainties are glossed over in the unseemly rush for an overarching policy, and for grants to support the policy by delivering findings that are desired by the patron. Next, the isolation of those scientists who won't get with the program, and the characterization of those scientists as outsiders and "skeptics" in quotation marks-suspect individuals with suspect motives, industry flunkies, reactionaries, or simply anti-environmental nutcases. In short order, debate ends, even though prominent scientists are uncomfortable about how things are being done.


As an aside, Richard Feynmann (quoted within) was a god among men.

[K-Gun]

Just throwing this out there as a classic American essay on science and truth from perhaps the greatest US philosopher ever.

Charles S. Peirce: The Fixation of Belief

Few persons care to study logic, because everybody conceives himself to be proficient enough in the art of reasoning already. But I observe that this satisfaction is limited to one's own ratiocination, and does not extend to that of other men.

We come to the full possession of our power of drawing inferences the last of all our faculties, for it is not so much a natural gift as a long and difficult art. The history of its practice would make a grand subject for a book. The medieval schoolman, following the Romans, made logic the earliest of a boy's studies after grammar, as being very easy. So it was as they understood it. Its fundamental principle, according to them, was that all knowledge rests on either authority or reason; but that whatever is deduced by reason depends ultimately on a premise derived from authority. Accordingly, as soon as a boy was perfect in the syllogistic procedure, his intellectual kit of tools was held to be complete.

To Roger Bacon, that remarkable mind who in the middle of the thirteenth century was almost a scientific man, the schoolmen's conception of reasoning appeared only an obstacle to truth. He saw that experience alone teaches anything-a proposition which to us seems easy to understand, because a distinct conception of experience has been handed down to us from former generations; which to him also seemed perfectly clear, because its difficulties had not yet unfolded themselves. Of all kinds of experience, the best, he thought, was interior illumination, which teaches many things about nature which the external senses could never discover, such as the transubstantiation of bread.

Four centuries later, the more celebrated Bacon, in the first book of his Novum Organum, gave his clear account of experience as something which must be opened to verification and re-examination. But, superior as Lord Bacon's conception is to earlier notions, a modern reader who is not in awe of his grandiloquence is chiefly struck by the inadequacy of his view of scientific procedure. That we have only to make some crude experiments, to draw up briefs of the results in certain blank forms, to go through these by rule, checking off everything disproved and setting down the alternatives, and that thus in a few years physical science would be finished up-what an idea! "He wrote on science like a Lord Chancellor," indeed, as Harvey, a genuine man of science, said.

The early scientists, Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Kepler, Galileo, Harvey, and Gilbert, had methods more like those of their modern brethren. Kepler undertook to draw a curve through the places of stars; and his greatest service to science was in impressing on men's minds that this was the thing to be done if they wished to improve astronomy; that they were not to content themselves with inquiring whether one system of epicycles was better than another but that they were to sit down by the figures and find out what the curve, in truth, was. He accomplished this by his incomparable energy and courage, blundering along in the most inconceivable way (to us), from one irrational hypothesis to another, until, after trying twenty-two of these, he fell, by the mere exhaustion of his invention, upon the orbit which a mind well furnished with the weapons of modern logic would have tried almost at the outset.

In the same way, every work of science great enough to be remembered for a few generations affords some exemplification of the defective state of the art of reasoning of the time when it was written; and each chief step in science has been a lesson in logic. It was so when Lavoisier and his contemporaries took up the study of Chemistry. The old chemist's maxim had been Lege, lege, lege, labora, ora, et relege. Lavoisier's method was not to read and pray, not to dream that some long and complicated chemical process would have a certain effect, to put it into practice with dull patience, after its inevitable failure to dream that with some modification it would have another result, and to end by publishing the last dream as a fact: his way was to carry his mind into his laboratory, and to make of his alembics and cucurbits instruments of thought, giving a new conception of reasoning as something which was to be done with one's eyes open, by manipulating real things instead of words and fancies.

The Darwinian controversy is, in large part, a question of logic. Mr. Darwin proposed to apply the statistical method to biology. The same thing has been done in a widely different branch of science, the theory of gases. Though unable to say what the movement of any particular molecule of gas would be on a certain hypothesis regarding the constitution of this class of bodies, Clausius and Maxwell were yet able, by the application of the doctrine of probabilities, to predict that in the long run such and such a proportion of the molecules would, under given circumstances, acquire such and such velocities; that there would take place, every second, such and such a number of collisions, etc.; and from these oppositions they were able to deduce certain properties of gases, especially in regard to their heat-relations. In like manner, Darwin, while unable to say what the operation of variation and natural selection in every individual case will be, demonstrates that in the long run they will adapt animals to their circumstances. Whether or not existing animal forms are due to such action, or what position the theory ought to take, forms the subject of a discussion in which questions of fact and questions of logic are curiously interlaced.

more

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/peirce.html

[г]

http://www.nntk.net/music/artwork/thomas_dolby/aliens_ate_my_buick.jpg

[K-Gun]

http://www.nntk.net/music/artwork/thomas_dolby/aliens_ate_my_buick.jpg

The Lost Toy People is classic.

[Bsmith26]

It is my opinion that aliens are also responsible for all the socks that "mysteriously" disappear from my dryer.

That's the sock gnomes. Step 1. Steal socks - Step 2. ?? - Step 3. Make money.

[anEinherjer]

In the same way, every work of science great enough to be remembered for a few generations affords some exemplification of the defective state of the art of reasoning of the time when it was written

So... The "state of the art" in current climate research is to rely entirely on predictive computer models. It's the "accepted way" of settling the debate on global warming. But does it make sense? Seems to me JK's guy here is arguing that to really push the state of the art forward, we need someone to show up who thinks in entirely the "wrong" way...

[K-Gun]

So... The "state of the art" in current climate research is to rely entirely on predictive computer models. It's the "accepted way" of settling the debate on global warming. But does it make sense? Seems to me JK's guy here is arguing that to really push the state of the art forward, we need someone to show up who thinks in entirely the "wrong" way...

cough cough, 1 Democritus, 2 John Dalton, 3 Ernest Rutherford, 4 Niels Bohr, 5 Albert Einstein, 6 string theory.

1. The first guy to think up atoms.

2. The first scientist to attempt to define the atom in physical terms, based on the study of guy #1.

3. The guy who came up with the classic model of the atom to better explain what guy #2 was doing. Proved guy 2 wrong.

4. The guy who came up with quantum theory to better explain what guy #3 was doing. Proved guy 3 wrong after his model was accepted as the standard.

5. The guy who came up with a "new realatity" based upon the quantum theory that guy #4 came up with. New paradim changes the way every one believes the universe to be. Could be totally wrong. see #6.

6. Looks to replace the curved space model of realtivity with string theory. Not quite finished yet. When finished, could make much more sense than #5, but still be wrong.

Fact is, we don't know shit yet. We're good at making things work in practicle settings because were good at measuring things that can be measured.

The things that can't be measured, yet, must be thought up by some genius in such a way to provide us the means to measure them.

But it's usually the case that the genius didn't get it exactly, or else physcis would be unified.

[anEinherjer]

Fact is, we don't know shit yet.

Not if you talk to the global warming crowd - the debate is over, remember?

[Al Davis]

I think its very possible that the government has made contact with aliens a long time ago...shared technology in exchange for permission to sparingly abduct, and expierment with humans and cattle and such.

This technology was kept secret after they decided that humans aren't spiritually evolved enough to handle our own technology...which is true.

Aliens also wanted us to get rid of nucular weapons...but we didn't.

These ideas come from William Cooper, who was in Naval Intelligence, and spent alot of his time reading Gov documents. After he was out, he dedicated the rest of his life to telling people about it. Sent his family out of the county for safety, and lived alone writing...that is untill the police, probably Swat killed him.

""'The Illuminati are extremely powerful, very wealthy men. They believe
that they are the guardians of the secrets of the ages. They believe
that the vast majority of people would not know what to do with the
real knowledge and the real truth and the real science -- and would, in
fact, misuse them all. They further believe that everything that they
do is for the ultimate betterment and survival of humankind -- even if
it means killing two billion people to reach their goal...'"
-Coop

This is why I am laughed at everyday in my school, and cant say anything without someone saying "its all a conspiracy right?" It quickly turned into a stereotype.