Starting to write a longer, more technical posting, but for now, a few quick links:
- The film Particle Fever (for more about this, see here) may get made into a musical. With a little luck they’ll skip the nonsense about the multiverse that blemished the film.
- Tommaso Dorigo performs an experiment that the airline industry probably doesn’t want publicized.
- My big problem with discussions of climate change has always been that I’m not able to evaluate the science myself, so when told to “Trust the Science”, I get queasy, all too aware that in some parts of science I can evaluate, “Trust the Science” is a really bad idea. Luckily, there is someone with a track record I can trust, Sabine Hossenfelder, who has a new video about trusting scientists and climate change. She has carefully looked into this, and explains her conclusions: here you can trust the science, the problem is very real.
If you want to argue about climate change though, you’re going to have to find some place else.
Sabine does great video but please watch this example where she makes basic physics errors and is guilty of the overhyping of bad results she accuses others of:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foq4nVAwEao
Phil Halper,
I don’t think Sabine is infallible. She has a clear inclination and agenda to try and take challenges to conventional wisdom seriously, looking into them carefully rather than just dismissing them. This can get her into trouble, but it’s exactly what gives her a lot of credibility in this case, where she’s siding with conventional wisdom.
I feel like we keep going in circles. There’s a long tradition of physicists who say they don’t trust the science until they look into it for themselves: a decade ago, it was Richard Muller … https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/30/opinion/the-conversion-of-a-climate-change-skeptic.html
If you haven’t watched all of Sabine’s video, you might mistakenly guess she thinks climate scientists are
overestimating the severity of the climate crisis.
In case I wasn’t clear enough: she thinks climate scientists tend to understate the severity of the climate crisis, at least in their public pronouncements, and she gives a list of reasons for why they would.
I really wonder why the reliability of climate change science needs to be discussed continuously ? Of course it is good to discuss scientific results, and string theory sadly shows that “trust the scientist” is not a sufficient argument, but I doubt many theoretical physicist have studied in great details the data analysis that lead to the discovery of – say – the Higgs boson. I guess many physicist just blindly trust the colleagues from CERN. So why is climate change science always put in doubt ?
All,
Please, no more comments about climate science. The only point of my posting was
1. I personally have neither the time nor competence to evaluate the reliability of different climate models projecting the future climate.
2. “Just trust the mainstream science establishment” doesn’t work for me based on long experience in a different scientific field.
3. I’m grateful that in Sabine Hossenfelder we have a science communicator who doesn’t just tell us “trust scientists” and recommend the linked video.
Hello Peter,
thanks for the link! About radiation levels high up – I think that indeed for some of us a not insignificant part of our radiation dose comes from international flights. E.g. Gordon Watts just made the 2M miles mark with United, so presumably he’s been up for 3M counting other companies. This is about 5000 hours at high altitude, where a x20 radiation level makes it about as much of a dose as one gets in 25 years on the ground. Gordon flies a lot, but there is people who flies much more (apart from airline pilots and hostesses, of course)… And now with the “all you can fly” programs (e.g. wizzair) this can only worsen.
But I was indeed more concerned by observing the leaks from airport scanners!
Cheers,
T.
Bear McCreary is a phenomenal composer. If nothing else, the score to that musical will be well worth a listen.